6 October 2004
Spectator
Giambra screws Erie county, Naples stooges for DeLay, Bush scrounges for bad science and pulls strings in Iraq
Time for a County Control Board
County Executive Joel Giambra spent huge amounts of political capital arranging for the City of Buffalo to be placed under the thumb of a financial control board. The City's sin was, supposedly, living beyond its means. Ignored by the Governor and conveniently overlooked by Giambra was the fact that Albany plays an extraordinary role in imposing rules and restrictions on Buffalo that put 75% of the city's total budget beyond the control of the Mayor and the Common Council. Think of that for a minute. We elect a mayor and we elect legislators. We pay them a salary. We expect (fantasize?) about them acting in the common interest. But when it comes time to spend money, a bunch of unelected, anonymous people sitting in remote locations make decisions about how the money gets spent. The Spectator speaks, of course, about the nameless, faceless arbitrators who routinely impose tax increases on the people of Buffalo and all largest New York's cities by forcing those cities to pay raises to police and fire fighters. Talk about your unfunded mandates! So when Giambra plotted to get the city merged into the county, the first step was to get his friend George Pataki to screw his "friend" Tony Masiello. It really wasn't hard. All the governor had to do was withhold the annual "extraordinary" state aid that was sent to Buffalo every year. Then, Giambra and Pataki could empanel a "control board" to point out the imagined excesses of the City as a first step toward marshalling support for metro government. The case could be made that the city couldn't really govern itself and needed the beneficent hand of the county to see it through. Forget for a moment, that Buffalo was the only city in New York State not to share in the extra sales tax levy that generated more than a billion dollars for the county. Forget, too, those nasty mandates that were actually taxation for city residents without representation. The picture Giambra and Pataki painted was one of a city unable and unwilling to help itself.Things were going great until the county ship of state started taking on water. In very short order, Giambra squandered a budget surplus, spent down the tobacco settlement money the county was holding, and pissed away reserve funds to avoid property tax increases to curry political favor. Faced with a $130 million shortfall, Giambra does what every shrewd politician does. He blames someone else. This time it's Medicaid. Giambra is going on television in the midst of the political silly season to tell people to write to their state legislators and demand Medicaid relief. He's telling county taxpayers that there needn't be a property tax, except for that unfunded mandate - Medicaid. In other words, he's telling people the City of Buffalo created their own fiscal problems but that Giambra is a victim of circumstances. In the last gubernatorial election, Giambra was told - we were all told - by Tom Golisano that Medicaid was going to rise. We were told in no uncertain terms that the deals Pataki was cutting were going to hit us in the wallet. Giambra ignored those warnings to support his buddy Pataki. Now he's whining like a sissy that the fiscal house of cards he built on the sand of the Republican mantra of tax cuts is falling down. To bail out his administration, Giambra wants another one cent increase in the sales tax - an increase that won't be shared with any city, town, village or school district.
Giambra is telling people to write to their state legislators. The Spectator is in complete agreement. We should all write and tell Paul Tokasz and Dale Volkert and everyone else drawing a paycheck in the state legislature that it's high time the state stepped in with a control board to review the county's financial performance. In an administration wracked by scandal, someone needs to step in and see what's wrong with county finances and how they are being spent. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
When Buffalo sought a new revenue stream that should have been available through a sharing of the extra one per cent of the sales tax, it was told NO! by the state legislators who represent more county residents than city folk. It was told NO! by the financial control board. It was told NO WAY! by three successive county executives. Why should anyone say Yes to Joel Giambra?
Nancy Naples is Independent? Yeah, and Joel Giambra is a Rhodes Scholar!
The Spectator has to chuckle every time he hears Nancy Naples called an independent. Of course, we only hear that on her commercials. The simple factor of the matter is that no matter what she is now, she will be a stooge for the DeLay, Hastert, Frist Cabal in Washington if the voters are suckers enough to send her there.If being an independent mattered, this election wouldn't be contested. Jack Quinn would be running and the point would be moot. Quinn got forced out of Congress by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, plain and simple. He's a good soldier now and is offering his nominal support to Naples but Quinn is not a happy camper. The way he announced his plans to retire from Congress tell you that. He was seen as an outsider by his own party - a moderate voice in a sea of doctrinaire conservatives. DeLay suffered his moderation as long as he could but finally couldn't stop being DeLay and he stripped Quinn of the few perks the South Buffalo Republican had.
So if anyone thinks Nancy Naples is going to Congress to teach the good ole boys about waste and fiscal responsibility, they also believe we'll see a new Peace Bridge built in our lifetime.
On the subject of that campaign, the Spectator has lived too long when a candidate is running for a congressional seat in Buffalo and talking about her "Wall Street experience." Wall Street? That place of golden parachutes and corporate thievery? That place of exorbitant salaries as rewards for corporate downsizing? That Wall Street? Wow, I can hardly wait for someone with that kind of experience to take a seat in the House.
New York Times Report Disproves Foundation of Bush Claims
George W. likes to say that John Kerry had the same intelligence the president did and voted to go to war. Let's, for the moment, ignore the obvious oxymoron in the president having intelligence. The recent 10,000-word article in the New York Times ("How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence," 3 October 2004) regarding the intelligence reports on the aluminum tubes the White House claimed loud and often were a clear indication of Iraq intent to start a nuclear arms program should put to rout that theory. The Times article says clearly that the Bush Administration wrapped itself around the CIA evaluation that said the tubes could be used to in the centrifuges needed for weapons grade material. At the same time, the Bushites rejected the more expert opinion from the Department of Energy experts that said clearly and often and definitively that the aluminum rods were not suited for the purposes indicated by the CIA. The people who built, used and observed centrifuges for a living were ignored while the CIA, which missed the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, was embraced. The implication is clear. If the White House only circulated the CIA evaluation, Congress was in no way given the "same intelligence" as the White House. They were given the intelligence that would lead them to believe what Bush wanted them to believe, not what was true. Bush lied and people died. Anything else?Can You Still See the Strings? Bush Doesn't Want You To
The Spectator is one of those skeptics who sees such troubling parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. Perhaps the most troubling is the specious notion that we have handed over authority to the Iraqi ruling council. Right - and Thieu was actually the elected president of Vietnam, right?George W. made various mentions of the brave and honorable folks on the council. While the Spectator would not deign to question "brave" or "honorable," he does have some problem with the notion they are "ruling." Consider the developments with the British subject who was kidnaped and is now under threat of beheading. The bastards holding him said they would release him if "all the Muslim women in American prisons" were released. At last count, there were two such women being held. Both had been assigned cutesy (if erroneous) nicknames by the Americans, on the order of Anthrax Annie and Germ Warfare Jenny. The Iraqis had long determined that the role of these women in Saddam's war machine were vastly overrated. They had already made a determination to release the women anyway, so they agreed to the demand to save the life of the Brit. Case closed, right? Not exactly. The Americans intervened, saying the Iraqis had "misspoke." They said the women would not be released and the Brit's head went back on the chopping block. Now, what was that about the "ruling council" again?
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