Month: November 2017

Charles Manson died this past week at the age of eighty-three.

He was the leader of a cult called the Manson family in California during the latter half of the 1960’s.

On August 9th and 10th in 1969, he and some of his followers slaughtered seven innocent people in two homes in Los Angeles.

The ostensible reason Manson gave for the murders was to provoke a race war from which his “family” would survive and lead the victorious African-Americans because they would be unable to govern themselves.

All of the participants were convicted of the murders they committed and were sentenced to death.

When California did away with the death penalty the sentences were changed to life imprisonment and they became parole eligible.

Manson was denied parole a dozen times and died in prison.

As the news of Manson’s impending death was reported, I hoped that he would not be the subject of an extensive obituary by the New York Times.

I am a daily reader of the Times. I view it as America’s newspaper of record and trust the accuracy of the facts it reports.

My feeling was and is that while the news of his death merited being reported, an extensive recounting of his life in an obituary did not.

Bruce Weber, who retired from the New York Times last year, described the process for how a New York Times obituary is decided and written.

He reported that the decision whether to write an obituary was an editorial one made at the highest level of the newspaper.

The decision, the research and writing often occur long before the subject’s death.

Sometimes, the subject of the future obituary is contacted for an interview about their life and it has led to the occasional inquiry by the subject about whether an obituary is being prepared.

Weber reported that often, when family and friends are contacted after a death, they perceive that an obituary in the New York Times is a kind of honor and “is going to give validity to the person they lost.”

In the course of his eight year stint writing obituaries, Weber reported that only a dozen of his may have ran on the front page.

Thus the placement on the front page of the New York Times is an additional “honor” above and beyond the obituary itself.

I therefore, was singularly disappointed to pick up the Thursday, November 21st edition of the New York Times and see a front page obituary of Charles Manson.

The author of the piece was Margalit Fox, whose biography disclosed she was under the age of ten when Manson and his fellow murderers went on their homicidal rampage.

Perhaps because she was too young to have appreciated the gruesome horror of the crimes and what was revealed in the trials that followed, she went in search of meaning in Manson’s life.

She posited Manson as an “enigma,” wondering whether he was “a paranoid schizophrenic,” or a “sociopath devoid of human feeling” or “a charismatic guru as his followers once believed and his fans still do?”

To be fair, she also offered whether “…was he simply flotsam, a man whose life, The New York Times wrote in 1970 stands as a monument to parental neglect and the future of the public correctional system?”

Ms. Fox credited him with actually “espousing a philosophy that was idiosyncratic mix of scientology, hippie anti-authoritarianism, Beatles lyrics, the Book of Revelation and the writings of Hitler.”

Anyone who has ever watched or listened to the ravings of Charles Manson during an interview, knows that Ms. Fox owes an apology to philosophers everywhere.

Additional space was allotted to describing Manson’s musical talent in singing and songwriting despite the fact that the scene of the first night’s murders was chosen because the record producer, Terry Melcher, who had found Manson’s talent lacking, lived there.

The New York Times has memorialized many deserving figures in death through its penetrating and detailed recounting of their lives.

Almost all of them have made significant contributions to the world in whatever field they endeavored.

I can’t help but feel that devoting almost two full pages, beginning on the front page, to Charles Manson by portraying him as some kind of cultural icon, cheapens that recognition.

If the Times felt compelled to sum up Manson’s passing rather than simply report his death, they could have done it in five short words.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

It’s time that we discussed Roy Moore.

Moore is the Republican candidate for a United States Senate seat, formerly held by Attorney-General Jeff Sessions that will be filled in a special election on December twelfth.

Moore came by the nomination by defeating the Republican appointee in the republican primary, named Luther Strange.

I have to say that the loss of a “Senator Strange” was something of a disappointment for me.

The only consolation was that Roy Moore was even stranger.

Moore was elected twice and removed twice as the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.

The first time he was removed in2003 was due to his refusal to remove a 5,280 pound granite sculpture of the Ten Commandments that he had placed in the lobby of the rotunda at the Alabama Supreme Court.

Moore sought the Republican nomination for Governor in the Republican primaries in 2006 and 2010 but was defeated both times.

He was elected Chief Justice again in 2013 but was suspended in May 2016 for ordering state probate justices not to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges upholding their right to marry.

He resigned from the Court in April 2017 in order to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Sessions.
Moore is avowedly anti-Muslim, anti-Gay and has ties to neo-Confederate and white nationalist groups.

He was a proponent of the “birther” movement that President Obama was not born in this country.

He espouses the belief that Christianity supersedes public laws.

His Democratic opponent is former United States Attorney, Doug Jones, who successfully prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan members that committed the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four little girls were murdered, almost forty years after the crime was committed.

While the wisdom in making a choice in this race would seem readily apparent, until this week, Moore was winning.

That came to a halt when a woman disclosed that Moore molested her when she was fourteen and he was a thirty-four year old assistant district attorney.

Her disclosure was corroborated by family and friends to whom she confided at the time it occurred.

Several other women also disclosed that Moore tried to establish a relationship with them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties.

Moore denies all of the allegations and claims it is a “political hit job” designed by the Clintons, the Washington Post and the Washington, D.C. establishment.

The reaction to these disclosures is, to say the least, interesting.

A number of Moore’s fellow evangelicals have compared Moore’s interests in teenage girls to Joseph and Mary.

What they seem to forget is that Jesus was the product of a virgin birth not pedophilia.

Moreover, I can’t recall anyone comparing Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to Joseph and Mary.

Which leads us, to the issue of whether this is a political hit job orchestrated by the Clintons.

I want to say right up front that, as the father of two daughters, I have never defended, justified or tried to explain or rationalize Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct.

Call me naïve, but it would seem to me that the last thing the Clintons would want to devise is a political hit job scenario involving a public official and a young girl that would dredge up the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal again.

Nor do I see what gain there is in the Clinton’s trying to discredit Roy Moore since both are out of office and unlikely to seek office again.

The other reaction is thee repeated refrain from Moore and his defenders of “Why now?”

You would have to be living in a cave to have missed the titanic wave of accusations and disclosures about inappropriate sexual conduct, beginning with Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and, now, Al Franken, that have rocked Hollywood, Washington, D.C. and a multitude of state capitals.

As each woman has found the courage to come forward and disclose this abuse, it has clearly empowered other victims to do the same.

Roy Moore’s victims are no different.

The other observation that I can offer, after almost two decades sitting on a criminal court bench, is that women don’t fabricate these experiences.

Roy Moore’s conduct fits the same pattern as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and a certain public official whose boasts were caught on an Access Hollywood tape.

Moore has a prototype for his victims and a pattern of victimizing them that amounts to serial abuse.

Almost a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an article in the American Educator entitled “Defining Deviance Down” in which he assailed the redefining of behavior, formerly considered abnormal to acceptable.

I have been heartened by the outrage almost universally expressed at the conduct of Weinstein, Cosby and their ilk but I also offer this sobering observation.

If Roy Moore is elected to the United States Senate, after we have learned what he has done, than we haven’t hit bottom yet.

This past Tuesday was Election Day.

While it was an “off year” election, one which had no Presidential or Congressional races, the offices being filled were nevertheless important.

Syracuse chose its fifty-fourth Mayor from a field of four candidates.

It also selected three new members to the nine member Common Council. Two were the result of term limits and the other because the incumbent declined to seek re-election.

Despite the importance of these offices to city residents, only thirty-five percent of city voters eligible to vote exercised their franchise.

It was the second worst turnout in the City’s history.

In 2013 the turnout was a measly twenty-four percent but, to be fair to voters, it should be noted that there was no Republican candidate on the ballot.

During the Democratic primary election to choose the candidate for Mayor only twenty-one percent of the Democratic voters turned out despite a field of three possible choices.

This was significantly lower than the forty-one percent that voted in the 1993 Democratic primary in which I was a candidate for Mayor.

I am proud to have been a candidate that achieved that turnout –even if I was disappointed at the result.

The 24,174 votes cast in this general election is far cry from the 97,000 votes cast in the mayoral race in 1949, the year I was born.

There are a multitude of reasons for this low turnout.

At the outset, it has to be noted that the population of Syracuse has shrunk.

In 1950, Syracuse ranked forty-seventh in size with a population of 220,583 people.

Today, it ranks one-hundred and eighty-third with a population of 143,378.

Some of this decline is attributable to the suburban sprawl that central New York experienced.

The manufacturing and industrial decline that hit the region as large employers closed and moved their operations to other parts of the country and overseas is another factor.

Another factor, although difficult to measure, is how city residents get their news.

In 1949 and earlier there were two newspapers and even more at the turn of that century.

These newspapers published several times per day and there was always fresh information in each succeeding edition.

The current newspaper, the Syracuse-Post Standard, is delivered to subscribers on only three days per week.

The Syracuse.com website is free but one can only speculate whether the poor and the elderly have computers and internet access.

One can also purchase a daily edition but the price is one dollar and twenty-five cents and the Sunday edition is three dollars.

It seems doubtful that people living in poverty or on fixed incomes will build that weekly expense into their budget.

That leaves a fully informed city electorate wanting.

There are, of course, other reasons that people don’t turn out to vote.

We just elected a President of the United States that spent over a year proclaiming that the system is “rigged.”

Although he hasn’t made that claim since he won, the message lives on.

The United States Supreme Court has turned the electoral process into a cesspool with its idiotic ruling that unlimited amounts of money can be spent because it amounts to “Free Speech.”

Add to that, the tax laws allow for the creation of entities that not only can spend unlimited amounts of money but can also shroud the donors in secrecy, and it’s not hard to see why voters are turned off and don’t trust the system.

We also don’t make it easy to vote.

Some states engage in outright voter suppression by limiting or eliminating early voting.

Others impose onerous identification requirements that hit the poor particularly hard.

Even our own state has fairly stringent residency requirements that must be met which discourage student voting and the transient population at the lower end of the economic ladder.

Contrast that with Oregon, which allows voting by mail and has a participation level in the eightieth percentile.

Finally, there are a significant number of people, especially here in New York, who believe it doesn’t make any difference who they vote for, that all politicians are corrupt and reform is impossible.

When one considers the number of public officials at the state and local level that are convicted of felonies related to their office, it’s hard to dispel the corruption notion.

The best evidence of the public’s cynicism was displayed in the election results this past week.

A proposition that would require public officials to forfeit their pensions if convicted of a felony related to their office was on the ballot.

Never mind the fact that it was a watered down version which contained plenty of exceptions and wiggle room that would allow these convicted felon to collect their pensions while in prison.

It passed overwhelmingly.

At the same time a measure that would have called for a constitutional convention, at which many reform measures could have been proposed, failed miserably.

The reason?

Voters believed that the delegates to the constitutional convention would be the same officials that are already in office.

Unless we find a way to address the issues that breed this public cynicism and despair, we can look forward to seeing an ever increasing shrinkage in voter turnout and participation.

That would be a shame because we are, after all, as Abraham Lincoln said in the dark days of the Civil War, “the last best hope on earth.”

This past week, State Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, reported in a mid-fiscal year update that tax collections are three-hundred seventy-one million dollars below the expected personal income tax collections projected by the State Budget Division.

DiNapoli predicts that if this trend continues, the four billion dollar state budget shortfall currently projected will grow.

Add to this, potential reductions in federal funding for various state programs and the state could be facing catastrophe.

Whenever we get this news, I cannot help but re-examine the wisdom of our state officials and the decisions they make when times appear to be flush.

In 2015, New York received 714 million dollars from a class action brought against the largest tobacco companies.

Earlier this year, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported that New York State, in recent years, had been the recipient of over nine billion dollars in settlement money from Wall Street settlements with twenty-two different entities.

One would have thought those funds would have been held in reserve to meet whatever budget crisis that might materialize.

And if one didn’t materialize?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, New York has a debt amounting to $ 137, 369, 089, 000 amounting to $ 6,956.00 per person.

We rank second in indebtedness only behind the State of California.

Faced with this sea of red ink, our state leaders decide to spend the settlement windfalls and kick the can of debt down the road for future legislators and generations to deal with.

As I once heard an official in Albany describe it, “it doesn’t make any difference if you drown in six inches of water or six feet of water, so you might as well go in deep.”

So, what did our state officials spend these latest windfalls on?

Well, some of the tobacco settlement money went towards a $ 700,000 sprinkler system at a public golf course in Niagara County.

Another $ 24,000,000 was used to build a new county jail and office building.

Despite the fact that the tobacco settlement would have provided 206 billion dollars over twenty-five years to the states that were part of the class action, New York, because its officials were anxious to use the money, was one of the states that issued bonds against its future payments.

This money grab means the state traded its future payments for immediate payment for pennies on the dollar.

Moreover, the bonds they issued are capital appreciation bonds which defer all interest payments for fifty years when the interest and principal come due together.

The nine states and three other entities issued 22.6 billion dollars in bonds in exchange for payment in the amount of 573.2 million dollars. When the bonds mature they will owe 67.1 billion to the bond holders.

Talk about kicking the can down the road.

The most recent ten billion dollar settlements are being used for one time state budget relief rather than capital improvements according to DiNapoli.

Funds are also being committed to Cuomo’s vaunted “buffalo Billion.”

A cynic would be tempted to ask whether the program has produced more jobs or indictments?

In western New York, the preferred developer, L.P. Ciminelli is under indictment charged with bribery, bid rigging and assorted other crimes in connection with the projects touted to boost the economy there.

Here, in central New York, COR, the preferred developer finds itself in the same situation.

Other defendants include the former founder and President of SUNY Polytech Institute in Albany which was to oversee the projects and the Governor’s closest confidante, once described as “Mario Cuomo’s third son” by the Governor.

Despite Cuomo’s claim that the “buffalo Billion” was a national success story, economically the region lags behind the nation and the rest of the state in job growth, downtown office vacancies rose last year and the poverty rate in both Buffalo and Rochester is climbing.

Locally, we have a fifteen million dollar film hub that sits empty while COR and SUNY Polytech fight over unpaid rent in court.

One of the criticisms the State Comptroller leveled was that if these windfall were going to be utilized, it could best used to fund public infrastructure projects.

Locally, we have a water system that was constructed almost one-hundred and twenty-five years ago.

Water began flowing through it in 1894.

It consists of nineteen miles of thirty inch pipe flowing from Skaneateles lake to Woodland Reservoir on the City’s west side and into five-hundred miles of water mains throughout the city.

Due to its age, the system suffers hundreds of leaks and breaks each year.

Repairing the pipes would have provided the kind of infrastructure project that would have insured long term employment for many central New York residents and stanched the loss of thousands of gallons of water each year.

Two years ago Cuomo was asked whether spending fifty million dollars at the State Fair might not be better spent on repairing Syracuse’s water system.

In response, he told us, “Fix your own pipes.”

Ten days ago, Cuomo announced that he was using one million dollars from Empire State Clean Water Fund to buy water filtration systems.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the filtration systems are for Puerto Rico.

Now there is a wise use of state taxpayer dollars.

And I thought he was starting to see the light.