NON-PROFIT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM GROUP DOCUMENTS THE WORST FAILURES OF THE LAST EIGHT YEARS

Recently the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative journalism group, set out to document “just how off-track things have gone,” during the reign of King George, the younger. To this end, the group assigned thirteen investigative reporters to the massive task of documenting the worst failures of the last eight years. The result of this was a list of 250 Bush administration failures and screwups, perhaps a record for any American president. Of this list, more than 100 have had a major impact on the lives of ordinary American citizens.

Among the more troubling of these fall under the heading of what the Bush administration and conservatives in general like to refer to as “entitlements,” conservative speak for any program that benefits any group of people or individuals other than themselves and their rich benefactors.

Topping off this list of so-called “entitlements” was the 806,000 American Veterans who had the gall to file disability claims, and then raise hell when these claims fell into an administration black hole where they remain to this day, unprocessed.

The irony here was that most of the men and women who qualified for these payments did so as a result of injuries sustained fighting in George Bush’s ‘war for oil’ in Iraq, a fact which you would think would guarantee them the care and benefits that their situations demanded. You would think…

But the sad fact was that the Bush administration apparently felt no loyalty to these men and women. If they had, this situation never would have existed. Apparently in the administration’s warped way of thinking, the injuries sustained by these brave men and women were their problem, as should be the solution.

This attitude of callous indifference carried over as well to the 760,000 American citizens who had filed Social Security disability claims in recent months, only to find their claims ignored. Here too, as in the case of the Vets, the administration felt no responsibilty to help these people obtain the benefits that were due them. The fact that they were taxpayers, and in most cases had paid into the Social Security system for many years, and desperately needed the money, was apparently meaningless to the administration.

Now there was no rational reason in a rich, educated county like this for either of these situations to exist. No reason that is other than politics and misfuided conservative ideology, which as I mentioned earlier, only believes in financially rewarding the richest among us. Sadly, neither the disabled vets nor those who applied for Social Security benefits were in this select group.

Moving ahead, we come to an area outlined by the Center for Public Integrity that had more to do with money spent foolishly, than that which was withheld, callously. In most of these situations the cash in question made its way to administration supporters and friends in the defense and defense related industries for projects that were either unnecessary, not completed, or which failed to do what they were supposed to when they were completed.

Topping this list was the $12.5 billion taxpayer dollars foolishly squandered on the joint civilian-military weather satellite system, which while it enriched it’s developers and the companies selected to build it, as of this writing is still incomplete and non functioning.

Then there was the $300 billion additional dollars squandered by the Defense Department in recent years, over and above the amount budgeted by Congress, to acquire weapons to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Then of course, who could forget the $4 billion taxpayer dollars already wasted on the National Security Administration computer system, a system which has never operated the way it was designed to do, and will require further expenditures, unless of course the project is abandoned the way the $100 million dollar attempt by the FBI to create a new system of internal information sharing in the wake of 9/11 was.

When the Bush administration wasn’t handing out blank checks to corporate loyalists for harebrained ventures that were either not completed or which failed miserably, it was dismantling laws that their friends in corporate America considered burdensome, even if those laws protected American citizens from harm.

One of the areas to suffer most from this policy was the environment. Now you should know that respect for the environment is right up there with entitlements for conservatives on the list of things they would like to eliminate, as it stands in the way of unchecked profit. For this reason it was not that surprising to see a two-thirds drop-off in the cleanup of toxic waste sites during the Bush years. Nor was it to learn that unchecked pollution is now known to be responsible for on average 20,000 deaths a year while placing as many as 60,000 newborns at risk for pollution related neurological problems.

Additionally, this hands-off attitude toward the corporations and the way that they do business has resulted in over 2.5 million toxic toys being recalled to date, most of them for lead or chemical content higher than is permissable by law. Now in most instances, these products would have been caught prior to distribution, that is if the Bush administration had not done away with most of the product safety inspectors.

- - LIB

BY TRYING TO PREVENT PRESIDENT ELECT OBAMA FROM TAKING OFFICE, THEY MAY BE COMMITTING TREASON

There is a group of right wing Republicans that do not believe in America, although they profess to be the true patriots. They do not accept the notion that we, the people, have the native intelligence to be able to choose our own leaders. They claim that they know best who should be in charge of our government and what that government should be permitted to do.

In the Presidential election of 2000, they prevented the man who should have been President from taking office by challenging ballots, preventing African Americans from getting to the polls in Florida and manipulating the justice system of our country. In 2004, they did it by messing with the computers that ran the voting machines in several states, arranging for too few machines to be placed in primarily Democratic precincts in Ohio and through voter nullification, the arcane practice of, among other things, telling prospective Black voters that they would be arrested if they showed up at the polls.

They would have had trouble doing these things in 2008 because the country was so sick and tired of them and their politics, that it might actually have been impossible for the Democratic candidate, no matter who that person was, to be defeated. So, what’s a Fascist to do?

The answer, while frightening, is just another example of who these people really are. They are trying to prevent President Elect Obama from taking office by claiming that he is not a natural citizen of the United States.

First, let me explain their rationale.

Article II, Section 1 of our constitution states:

“No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

Essentially, that means that if you weren’t born here, you can never become President (sorry Ahnold!). To counter the will of the people, a group of right wingers has taken it upon themselves to “prove” that Barack Obama was not born in this country.

The available government records seem to indicate that Senator Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, two years after it became a state. Even if he were to have been born there prior to Hawaii becoming a state, he would still have been considered a natural born citizen.

That would be fine for most folks, but for right wing nut jobs like radio personality, Alan Keyes, it isn’t good enough. These folks have opined that since the President Elect’s father was a Nigerian citizen, he might actually be Nigerian. Or, since his step father was an Indonesian, who took his family to live in his native country for a few years when he was a child, Obama is Indonesian. Or Saudi. Or a “Como se llama.” Or in the immortal words of Shania Twain, “Whatever?”

And, of course, who is helping them along in their legal battle to prove the unprovable? If you had guessed Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, you would have been right.

Yessiree Bob, who else but the two most self hating African Americans in history, Keyes and Thomas would be trying to unseat the first President of African descent? These guys are an embarrassment to their race and their country. Thomas, a man who became what he is by virtue of affirmative action, has never found a cause favoring of Black people that he could support, and Keyes is nothing more or less than the African American Pat Buchanan. These guys are racists, but the race they seem to hate most is their own. They are White Republican wannabes who don’t get the notion that no matter how they try to kowtow to the party leadership, in the back rooms at the Republican convention they will still be thought of as unequal.

There are some people that I have never understood being Republican. Not Republicans like Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. No, those were Republicans who loved their country and did what they perceived to be right for America. Today’s Republicans, the Bush Republicans, are not of that ilk. They are haters. They are neither compassionate nor conservative. And, yet, some folks who are hated by the vast majority of those Republicans try to be a part of that party, thinking that if they espouse conservative view, they will be accepted.

These include gay people like the Log Cabin Republicans, women, Hispanics and African Americans like Keyes and Thomas. In the Republican Party they see the people they aspire to be, at the top of society’s hierarchy and never the subject of discriminatory actions. The problem is that the prevailing sentiment of most rank and file Republicans is that we will put up with you as long as you don’t move next door. They are the people that Phil Ochs described in his folk song, “Love Me, I’m A Liberal,” except they aren’t liberal in any way shape or form.

These are the people Keyes and Thomas would like most to become, but they won’t. To the Republican Party, each will always be what the number two guy in al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri called an abeed al bayit, a house servant, always obedient and polite to the master but never quite rising to the level of equality. Al-Zawahri used it as a slur against our incoming President, but, in reality, it really does provide a good descriptive of the mentality of Keyes and Thomas. That would be better described by “Yes sir. No sir. You’re so right sir. Black is White sir.” (from the song “Perspective” from the musical She Loves Me lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and music by Jerry Bock)

Certainly, both of these men have achieved great success, far above that of average citizens. Yet, in the smoke filled rooms of Republican caucuses, I would be willing to bet that they are regarded as less than equal, along with Secretary of State Rice and General Powell. In those rooms, each is still a house servant who will do as they are told when they are told. In the cases of Rice and Powell, that may have been proven wrong. I’m not so certain about Thomas and Keyes.

And they, Keyes and Thomas, are willing to attempt acts bordering on treason to undo the will of the American people. They, like the Swift Boaters of a previous election do not get it. They all seem to think that the Republicans are defending their country, but the reality is that they are doing anything but. The reality is that they are not helping anyone to succeed at anything, and they are doing everything within their power to prevent those who have earned equality and who or are entitled to certain benefits as veterans from receiving what is justly theirs. That is today’s definition of Republican leadership. They are not American patriots. They are American Fascists.

And that is the leadership that has give Keyes and Thomas their marching orders, either spoken or tacit, to overturn this election, to prevent the elected President from taking office and to throw our country into turmoil.

Both Thomas and Keyes are supposed to be smart men.

I somehow doubt that they are as smart as they think they are. If they were. they would not allow themselves to be the puppets of those who hate them as much as they hate themselves.

They will lose in their quest, and they will be shamed for trying to destroy our country. They should also be brought to trial for treason, but they won’t. We are, we believe, better than that.

Perhaps, we shouldn’t be!

HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT

THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM IS BROKEN AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED

In the weeks leading up to the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, there is a date we should all think about, March 4. For those of you who either don’t know much about history or are simply too young to remember, that was the day on which the President took office until, in 1936, it was moved to January 20.

The reasons this happened were quite simple. The country was in the throes of a depression. When Roosevelt took office for his first term, on March 4, 1933, people believed that, had he been able to assume command earlier, the changes needed to end the depression would be put into place immediately and happy days would, in fact, be here again. The outgoing President, Herbert Hoover, had been thought to be so incompetent that the country would have been thrilled if he had left office the day after the election. That wasn’t to be.

When our country was founded the first date for a Presidential inauguration was April 30, 1789. Four years later, it was moved to March 4. The reason for the long wait between the election and the inauguration was largely based on the lack of speedy transportation between the states. By the time horseback riders got around their states collecting the ballots to give to the electors of the Electoral College, those electors cast their ballots and the riders then brought the total to the capital, weeks or even months had passed. In FDR’s era, the 48 states voted and managed to get the Electoral College vote taken far more rapidly.

And so, the need for change in which the people of that era could believe needed to be accelerated. There was no time to do it during the transition from Hoover to FDR, but, certainly, it was accomplished over the course of the following 4 years, giving us our current inauguration date of January 20, but even that date is nearly three months after the ballots were cast.

There are changes needed in our system of transition from one administration to the next, and the first of those changes needs to be the moving of the Presidential inauguration closer to the date of the election. This would, among other things, lessen the impact that a lame duck President might have on the future.

But that is just the beginning.

The power of the outgoing President to issue a myriad of pardons just as he or she leaves office must be curtailed. While the current President has been remarkably stingy, thus far, there is no guarantee that on he won’t be pardoning every good Republican in sight on January 19. Think of the potential list. It would, of necessity, include Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzalez, Wolfowitz and every other thief and scoundrel who was involved in taking our country into an illegal war, in not protecting our country from the attacks of al Qaida and in turning us into the antithesis of everything we believe by torturing our prisoners of war.

We also need to end the power of the President to issue signing statements on legislation passed by the Congress. If the President is uncomfortable with legislation, it can be vetoed. Signing statements that say that the President is approving a bill but only has to enforce the new law when and if he feels like it must be eliminated. Such statements are probably unconstitutional, and, even if they are not, they go against the spirit that is imbued in that Constitution which makes up the backbone of our American society.

There are tons more, but I will only touch on two, the Electoral College, itself and the system of Presidential primaries.

When our country was formed out of the amalgamation of 13 distinct colonies, it was believed that a large percentage of the population was simply not bright enough to be entrusted with choosing a leader. It was, further, believed that if popular vote, alone, were to decide the Presidency, then, the small states would always be under the thumbs of the larger states. The result was an Electoral College that was charged with actually electing the President. Each state was to be represented by electors equal to the total number of Senators and Representatives for that state in the Congress. That meant that even the smallest of states had at least three electors. Today, with 50 states, there are many more small states than large ones. That means that, in theory, and actually a couple of times in fact, a person could be elected President with a smaller number of popular votes than the loser. That’s not good, and it needs to be fixed. We need to elect the President by a strictly popular vote. It wouldn’t have changed the results this year, but it might have in 2000, particularly if all of the votes had honestly been counted.

Which takes me to the system used to nominate candidates in the first place.

By the time the political parties hold their quadrennial conventions, they already know who their candidates will be. The problem is that the primaries that get them to that point are run in such a haphazard manner that hey are, or at least they should be, meaningless. One state has a caucus. Another state has a primary. Yet another state had both. Some states award proportional delegate. Other states have winner take all primaries. And there are a gazillion different dates on which the primaries are held, giving little states like Iowa and New Hampshire disproportionate power simply by virtue of the fact that they hold their primaries early.

The parties need to have a single set of rules that for all primaries. This must include allowing only members of a party from voting in its primary. There cannot and should not ever be crossover voting in a primary. It give the opposing party the opportunity to force the nomination of a weaker candidate on the party holding the primary.

And the primaries need to be held on one day. That will give the voters a chance to choose their candidates based on their perception of the needs of their party, not on the decisions made by the folks of Iowa and New Hampshire.

The electoral system is broken and needs to be fixed, and these are just a few ideas that could help.

This is more than change we can believe in. This is change we need.

HENRY A HONIG – THE PUNDIT

REGULATIONS SEEN AS A GOING AWAY GIFT TO SUPPORTERS

President-elect Obama’s ability to hit the ground running on January 20th has been hampered, somewhat, by the Bush administration’s recent enactment of a rash of last minute regulations aimed at rewarding party loyalists in both the social conservative and big business communities.

Among these regulations is a particularly onerous one which would grant medical professionals, and those in their employ, carte blanc to opt out of performing, or participating in, any procedure, or providing any service, that they personally find offensive, or which violates their so-called moral principles. This little piece of legislative skullduggery is clearly aimed at making an end run around Roe v. Wade by making it more difficult for women, particularly poor women, to obtain reproductive services, including abortions and oral contraceptives.

Also feeling the sting of the administrations regulatory pen in this latest attack are American workers, a frequent Bush administration target. No less than twenty last minute, pro-big business regulations have been announced in recent weeks aimed at eliminating those remaining worker protections that corporate America considers unnecessary and too expensive to continue to comply with.

Included in this group are regulations which would make government regulation of workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals more difficult, one which would allow power plants to be built closer to parks and wildlife preserves, and perhaps the most distressing to environmentalists, a regulation that would severely limit the role of environmental and animal experts in determining where major infrastructure projects may be carried out in the future.

Neither the Labor Department nor the Bush administration has cited any extraordinary circumstances to attempt to justify these regulations.

Now the good news here is that President-elect Obama on taking office can ultimately remove these regulations. But it is a difficult and time-consuming process, and one that will clearly take his attention away from other pressing matters.

Now wouldn’t a nice easy impeachment solve this problem and stop George Bush dead in his tracks? It wouldn’t really matter all that much if the bastard was convicted or not, only that he was stopped from issuing regulations and from pardoning the felons and thugs, which have made up his administration these past eight years.

- - Lib

IN SHORT, DR. AL-ZAWAHIRI’S USE OF THE WORD, “ABEED,” WASN’T MEANT AS A COMPLEMENT

There are certain words or phrases that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. More often than not, these have racist over tones.

During the course of our recent elections, I would, from time to time, hear some idiot refer to our new President Elect using the dreaded “N” word. When a group of skin heads were recently arrested for threatening President Elect Obama’s life, that word was bandied about as if it were proper to use. It’s not. It never is.

Recently, Dr. Ayman Muhammad Rabaie al-Zawahiri, the second in command to al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden decided to make his pronouncement on the incoming President of the United States. After listening to his statement, I was equally offended. Al-Zawahiri used the Arabic idiom, “abeed al bayit,” in describing Senator Obama. Literally, this translates to house servant. Figuratively, it says much more. In fact, it speaks volumes about the alleged freedom fighters of Islamic terrorism more than it does about us and our electoral process.

Over the course of my career, I have had many business relationships with people of Middle Eastern heritage. Mostly, these people have had light skin. They were both Muslim and Jewish. Uniformly, they used the word, “abeed,” in referring to people of African descent.

Since I am not an Arabic speaker, I took my acquaintances word in their defining “abeed” as being the Arabic equivalent to our “N” word. In short, it wasn’t a complement. When Dr. al-Zawahiri issued his recent statement, I decided to delve a little deeper into the words he uttered. I learned that the idiomatic meaning of abeed al bayit, is just as I described, but there is more.

Some African Americans use the phrase, “Uncle Tom” to describe members of their race who have grown close to Caucasian colleagues and friends. The term comes from the Civil War novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which describes the kowtowing ways of house slaves during one of our country’s most shameful periods as opposed to the belligerent and more independent attitude of field workers, who were often subjected to far harsher treatment than those who worked directly for the slave owners.

In using the idiom that translates to “house servant,” Dr. al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician, was describing the President Elect as being subservient to his White masters. I believe Dr. al-Zawahiri and his master, bin-Laden, will receive a rude surprise when our new leader assumes his new position. I believe that, unlike the current occupant of the White House, President Obama will prove to have a strong back bone and will do what is necessary to defend and protect our country and its way of life. That doesn’t make him a house servant. It makes him the competent man that we elected. That makes him a man who will seek out our enemies, our real enemies, and destroy them, once and for all. He will do this for the good of our country, and he will also do it for the good of all humanity. It is something President Bush was incapable of doing. It is something that I fully expect will be successfully accomplished by President Obama.

It would seem that Dr. al-Zawahiri made his statement more to demean Senator Obama in the Third World than to defame him in his own country. However, by all accounts, the doctor’s statement may have backfired, causing many Muslims in Africa to reconsider their support of a radical Arab leader who defames a man of their people who has risen to the position of Leader of the Free World.

Sorry, doc, you still may be good at inspiring insane folks like the monsters that attacked Mumbai this week, but normal people, no matter what religion they practice, see you for what you are, an even bigger monster than the terrorists who do your bidding. And when the President that you have incorrectly called an “abeed al bayit” brings you and your cohort bin Laden to your ignominious ends, as you die, you will understand that the alleged house servant is really your true master.

HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT

GORDON GECKO WAS WRONG

The notion of our government bailing out private industry is not new. In the 1970s, when Chrysler Corporation was about to go belly up, our government put up the money to get them over the hump, and, under the highly professional leadership of Lee Iacocca, they got back on their feet.

And branches of government bailing out other branches of government is hardly a new concept either. It happened here in New York when, under Mayor Abe Beame, the city was about to go bankrupt. The result was that the state jumped in, took over several of the city’s functions and brought fiscal stability back to the Big Apple

The problem here is that we have never done a bailout as large as the ongoing 700 BILLION dollar bailout currently being foisted upon us by Congress and the Bush Administration.

I was not in love with the bailout right from the beginning, but I believed that something had to be done. I saw that the imminent collapse of banks and other financial institutions could drag us into a depression deeper than the 1929 crash.

Then, everyone else wanted their piece of the pie.

Municipalities on the verge of fiscal collapse want their piece.

The Big Three Automakers want theirs.

The airlines are saying, hey, what about us.

Meanwhile, average folks are losing their jobs and their homes because of their bad financial planning, and they want theirs too.

Let’s look at each of these situations.

New York learned a long time ago that you simply can’t continue to spend money you don’t have in government, if there is no reasonable chance that you will ever get that money. Governments issue bonds to do projects that pay tax exempt interest. The problem is that the interest must be paid out of tax revenues, and those revenues are lessened by the tax exempt status of the bonds. It’s sort of like a giant Ponzi scheme.

The automakers started crying that they couldn’t sell enough cars to complete with their Japanese counterparts. Of course, when gas was expected to reach 4 or even 5 dollars a gallon, the U.S, car companies continued to push gas guzzling SUVs into the marketplace. When those didn’t sell, or lost their resale value because of the gas crunch, what did the Big Three do? They ended their leasing programs.

Leasing, as a rule, is based on the expected resale value at the termination of the lease. Since our automakers were pushing vehicles with severely diminished resale values, they were getting hung for big bucks at lease termination time. Should I feel sorry for them? Not really. They knew what was on the horizon and chose to keep selling Expeditions and Hummers. The Japanese companies, on the other hand, began turning out more and more hybrids, including hybrid SUVs that sold well and retained their value, making them excellent for leasing.

It was sort of a self fulfilling prophesy. If the auto companies make vehicles that don’t sell well, then they won’t sell enough vehicles. Then, they can abandon their lease programs, which will increase the monthly cost of their cars, thus causing them to sell fewer vehicles. Wowee Zowee! What a novel concept. It guess the heads of GM, Chrysler and Ford missed that class in Economics 101.

Which takes me to the airlines that also want a piece of this action. You see, their convoluted logic is that since people aren’t flying as much as they used to they should charge them for things that once were included in the price of a ticket. That includes a guaranteed seat, luggage checking and a can of soda. Yes sir, that same economics professor would have been proud of folks who think that if customers aren’t buying your product, the way to get them back is to charge them more. That goes double in a bad economy.

As far as those folks losing their homes go, I do feel sad for them, but . . . . You see, nobody forced them into buying homes they couldn’t afford with adjustable mortgages that would eventually lead them into to foreclosure. Sure I understand that some of these folks were unsophisticated, but didn’t they have lawyers at their closings? And why should we bail these folks out? What about the people who pay their mortgages on time every month? Shouldn’t they get something? What about renters, folks who realized that they couldn’t afford those adjustable mortgages? Shouldn’t the government be doing something for them too?

I mean, really, there’s 700 Billion dollars in Hank Paulson’s bank account. Couldn’t I get just a little piece of that? I own a business. Can’t Mr. Paulson put a couple of mil in my company’s bank account? And what about subsidizing my rent? I’m a nice guy, shouldn’t I get my piece of the pie?

Of course, the answer is no, but the notion of people being bailed out by the government because their own greed and foolishness put them in a bad way sort of irks me. In fact, it pisses me off. It really pisses me off.

Now, I understand that the Democrats and the Republicans have both taken part in this elaborate shell game, and I do not know that partisan arguing will solve any of the problems that exist in our country. However, I have come to believe that all of these companies need to go into some form of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, have new management installed, and learn how to do business in a fiscally responsible manner. As for the old management teams, they need to be kicked out on their collective butts with no golden parachutes of any kind. In fact, perhaps, some of them need to go to jail for malfeasance or be sued by their shareholders for the loss of those shareholders’ investments. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

And, yes, I understand that those poor folks in danger of losing their homes need to have something done for them. The country simply cannot afford to have that many vacant homes and possibly homeless people. That aid, however, should be in the form of lower fixed interest rates and extended term mortgages, not in the lowering of the principals of their loans.

This recession, depression, or whatever it is, will eventually end. They always do. We need to then get back to having our economy on sound footing and to operating our country and our businesses in fiscally sound manners. When that happens, it is important that we come to also must understand that we cannot go back to our old, profligate ways when things get good again, or we will end up in the same old place that we are in today.

Gordon Gecko was wrong.

Greed is not good.

HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT

IF THIS IS WHAT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS BECOME IN SUFFOLK COUNTY, THEN, PERHAPS IT HASN’T SHIFTED AWAY FROM ITS REPUBLICAN ROOTS, AFTER ALL

I have not had the time to write as often as I would like, but I am trying to have something to say here at the Lib at least once a week. So, as the week drew to a close, and I considered what I wanted to pundificate about, I began assessing the various issues of the week.

I could have written about the last Veterans’ Day of the Chicken Hawks’ term of office. As a veteran, I have been disgusted, year in and year out, by the swagger of Bush and Cheney given that the former was AWOL most of his time in the National Guard, and the latter had better things to do than serve. Yet, when it came time to wage a war in which they actually didn’t have to fight, they had no problem sending young men and women off to die.

Then, I could have written about gay marriage. That thought crossed my mind as I spent two hours in a New York City bus being delayed by a protest against the vote banning gay marriage in California. After all, I thought, during my long ride, why should religious groups have any say over the civil act of marriage, and why should anyone have the right to vote on anything that would limit someone else’s life choices?

Or I could have written about the latest pronouncements by Sarah Palin who has yet to figure out that she in now in the 16th minute of her 15 minutes of fame.

Yes, I could have written about those two things, important as they are, but I chose, instead, to write about racism. I made this choice because of an ongoing story happening in Suffolk County in New York.

Suffolk County is a microcosm of America, with residents of all races, religions and ethnicities. It has light industry, corporate headquarters, the very rich and the very poor. It has, for years, been run by Republicans but, recently, has shifted to become a Democratic county. It also has a police department noted for its brutality and alleged racial bias and a Democratic Country Executive, Steve Levy, who many believe to be biased against Hispanic people, in general, and immigrants in particular.

That belief comes out of the issue of immigrant day laborers who go to “shape ups” on street corners looking for ways to make some money. They do this in the hope that they will be hired for cash by gardeners and construction companies. They are paid well below the minimum wage and pay no taxes. They have become a real issue in a suburban county long the bastion of conservative politics.

Levy won his last bid for reelection after being crossed endorsed by the Republican Party. He received an astounding 96% of the vote. Much of his platform and public persona involve the ending of “shape ups” and the closing of illegal group homes which are often occupied by large numbers of illegal immigrants, both of which most of the voting public consider to be nuisances that should be eliminated.

The problem that has come from this action is that Suffolk County has developed the reputation of being anti Hispanic. So, when an Ecuadorian immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, was killed by a gang looking to “get a Hispanic” last week, Levy, in his typical brash style, took the low road. When asked about the large amount of coverage the story was getting, he said that if the killing had taken place in neighboring Nassau County, it would have been a “one day story”. Levy has since apologized for his statement, but the issue of racism in his county isn’t going to die soon.

To be sure, the “shape ups” are a difficult problem with which the county must deal. However, Levy and his policies have exacerbated an already unpleasant situation. Beyond that, the low lives that perpetrated this horrible crime were teenagers who live in an area that has a culture in which adults regularly complain about the Hispanic day laborers presence in their little piece of paradise.

I understand the situation. I spent nearly half of my life living a couple of miles from Farmingville, one of the towns most often adversely affected by the day laborers’ presence on their streets during the morning “shape ups”. But the problem there isn’t just the laborers. It is the circumstances that surround the issue.

The people that have come to this country looking for a better life often find there are no real jobs for them here. Because many are illegal immigrants, they work in the underground economy. They are paid less than minimum wage and pay no taxes. That’s not good for them or for us. However, harassing and deporting these hard working people is not the answer to this complex question. Yes, better control of our borders would help, but that should only come as part of providing those already here with a safe and simple way to permanent residence, good housing and legal and fair employment with wages and taxation meeting the standards set by our legal system.

And if the death of Marcelo Lucero were all that was happening in Suffolk County, it would have been bad enough, but it wasn’t. In Islip Terrace, a town bordering on predominantly Black and Hispanic Central Islip, KKK flyers are appearing on people’s lawns and windshields. And in Mastic, an integrated community close to Patchogue where Lucero lived and died, hate messages against minorities and calls to kill the President-Elect have been spray painted on cars. There is a systemic problem in Suffolk County that needs to be addressed, and the way it is being handled is scandalous.

We may have thought that the election of a President with dark skin, a first generation American on one side of his family, would have taken the sting out of racism. It hasn’t. Racism is alive and well and living in Suffolk County, New York, and that’s not the only place it can be found. It is in your town and my city. It is directed not only against Hispanics, but also against African Americans, Muslims, Jews and countless others who are different from the White Anglo Saxon Protestants that make up the majority of our population. It has been fostered by the outgoing Federal Republican administration in many ways, as they have taught us to be wary of those who are not exactly like us. Some of those fears were justified. Most weren’t, but, taken to their logical ends, they became extremely dangerous. In New York and other cities, members of the Sikh faith have been attacked because they wear turbans, and in Suffolk County, the anti Hispanic message delivered by some parents and the County Executive may have led to the killing of an innocent man, one who lived a productive life in this country for 16 years and regularly sent money home to his family in Ecuador.

If Steve Levy and his actions are what the Democratic Party has become in Suffolk County, New York, then, perhaps that county hasn’t shifted away from its racist Republican roots after all.

We may now have a President-Elect who is a man of color, but, apparently, that hasn’t made us color blind.

HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT

WHAT, EXACTLY, DID OUR COUNTRY DESERVE?

Ralph Nader is 74, and he has definitely proved himself to be unsafe at any speed.

Once again, this year, Mr. Nader mounted an unsuccessful third party run for the Presidency. This time, only about one half of one percent of the voting public cast their ballots for him. This time, he did no damage.

Sadly, that was not the case 8 years ago when Nader’s votes may have shifted the win in a couple of states from Gore to Bush. Had those states gone Democratic, then Florida would not have mattered.

When asked to comment on the potential of a Bush Presidency in the event a scenario like the one I described occurred, Nader said that the country would then get exactly what it deserves. The question arises; what, exactly, did OUR COUNTRY deserve?

Did the country deserve the second worst economic disaster in its history?

Did over 4,000 Americans deserve to die in a war that is being fought purely for profit?

Did the survivors of September 11 and their families deserve to have their loved ones’ memories besmirched by an inability to capture the person responsible for those deaths?

Did our children deserve an unfunded educational mandate that relies more on teaching for the test than on educating?

Did veterans, poor children and the elderly deserve to have their benefits gutted?

No, nobody deserved what the Bush Administration did to this country. That would be obvious to anyone but Ralph Nader. To him, it was just fodder to feed his massive ego. To him it was justification for a run for the White House that he could not possibly win.

Long ago, Ralph Nader was a hero. Now, he is a fool. The time has come for him to retire back to Michigan, or wherever else he might want to go. The time has come for Ralph Nader to never speak in public again. Too much was at stake this year to risk another incident of this egomaniac causing the country to install a new Republican administration in Washington. Fortunately, this time that didn’t happen, but it could have.

Go away, Ralph. Your time has passed, and we would be far better off as a country if you came to understand that and left us alone.

HENRY A. HONIG – THE PUNDIT

ON THE WAY OUT THE DOOR, THE BUSH ADMINISTRTION LAUNCHES ANOTHER BROADSIDE AGAINST THE ENVIRONMENT

Not content to shuffle gently into retirement, the Bush administration has announced that it is putting the finishing touches on a series of environmental policy changes intended to reward Corporate America for their loyalty by relaxing numerous critical environmental restrictions that Bush loyalists have identified as standing in the way of their plundering what remains of our precious natural resources.

The so-called “midnight regulations,” named for the way that they are enacted by an administration as it scurries out the door include: rolling back protections under the Endangered Species Act; allowing power plants to operate near national parks; loosening regulations for factory farm waste, and making it easier for mountaintop coal-mining operations to destroy mountains and pollute nearby lakes and streams.

What sucks about the new restrictions is that if the Bush administration passes them in a timely fashion - - and there is no indication that they will do otherwise - - it will be hard for President Obama to do anything about them without a major investment of time and political capitol.

Now you would think in light of the way things turned out on Election Day that George Bush would be too concerned about his own potential for criminal prosecution on a wide range of issues to fuck with the American people any further.

But this is not the case. Perhaps this is a suicidal wish? Or maybe the son of a bitch has such total disregard for the American people that he just doesn’t give a damn and by these actions is challenging the American people to go after his ass?

Either way the bad news is that we have not yet seen the end of George Bush.

Now if only I could blink my eyes and it be the afternoon of January 20th, 2009.

- Denis