Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New York’s newspapers:
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The New York Daily News on Mayor Bill de Blasio and property taxes
May 1
Mayor de Blasio says he strives to make this the “fairest big city in America.” After stalling for four expensive years on doing anything about property taxes imposed with little rhyme or reason, now’s his chance to prove it - or shelve the slogan.
For the coming year, de Blasio is counting on nearly $28 billion in property taxes to sustain a record $89 billion budget, a share of the load that’s ever growing. Rising real estate values make possible the overall increase, but the burden is not being borne anything close to equally.
Homeowners are in court suing both city and state, arguing that the rules are rigged against those who aren’t white, charging majority-minority neighborhoods more.
Without passing judgment on validity of the lawsuit: They’re right that collections are skewed.
A well-intentioned state law slows annual increases in trendy areas like Park Slope - where the mayor and First Lady own two properties - leaving them with lower tax bills on expensive homes than far less valuable properties in modest neighborhoods like Wakefield or Jamaica.
Another layer of inequity: The system charges homeowners and co-op and condo owners at lower rates than apartment building landlords, who get socked with bills - increasing at more than 6% annually - that ultimately hit renters.
More than a year ago, de Blasio promised a task force to fix the problem with economic smarts and political courage. Then, crickets.
The dusty to-do list is a long one. To attack the equity problem, he must fine-tune assessments, alter the formulas used to calculate them and urge Albany to update broken laws. While he’s at it, he and the Council should curb the ever-rising growth in everyone’s bills - which they can do on their own through budget discipline.
Had the mayor acted sooner instead of playing chicken, he wouldn’t be facing the queasy prospect of having a judge set complicated fiscal policy - or suffering the embarrassment of having city lawyers defend a likely unjust system.
Instead, he’s spent every penny on his precious priorities, capitalizing on a system he decries.
Online: https://nydn.us/2JMu0KW
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The Adirondack Daily Enterprise on finance regulations
April 30
Wells Fargo has agreed to pay a record fine of $1 billion to federal regulators to settle a variety of charges of misconduct.
The banking giant has been in the news since 2016 for a dizzying variety of misbehavior. It has included requiring car loan borrowers to pay for insurance they did not want or need, forcing some to get so far behind on payments that their vehicles were repossessed. In addition, Wells Fargo admitted to improperly charging customers fees to lock in interest rates on pending mortgage loans.
But this is not the first time Wells Fargo has been in the hot seat. Previously, the company has paid fines for other improper business practices, including $187 million for opening as many as 3.5 million bank and credit card accounts that had not been authorized by customers.
Why, one may be tempted to wonder, did Wells Fargo get away with creating 3.5 million fraudulent accounts before anyone in Washington noticed?
Closing the barn door after all the livestock have departed is not a genuine safeguard, as some might put it.
Small financial institutions without the resources of giants such as Wells Fargo complain frequently about the cost of complying with federal regulations. That cost often has to be passed on to consumers.
Meanwhile, the Wells Fargos of the world are taken to task only after they have done great harm.
Some politicians want more regulations, but for a long time, Wells Fargo got away with misdeeds existing rules were supposed to prevent. Perhaps more attention ought to be given to enforcing regulations already in place rather than creating new ones.
Online: https://bit.ly/2FAMFqS
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The Times Herald-Record on corruption in state legislature
April 30
Just how crooked do you have to be to be a crook in Albany?
That’s the question that a court will start trying to answer this week as Sheldon Silver, once one of the most powerful men in the state, goes back on trial on charges that he made lots of money by trading public favors for private profit.
The facts of the case are not in doubt. They were so blatant that jurors quickly and unanimously found him guilty on all counts only to have their judgment reversed because of rulings in other courts.
The standard for official corruption now is clear. If someone offers a public official a bribe and calls it a bribe and the official accepts the bribe and acknowledges that it is a bribe and if there is a paper trail showing bribe money flowing to the bribee and public money flowing to the briber, then a conviction is likely.
Other than that, it’s easy for corrupt officials to get away with a similar exchange and call it either a business deal or friendship. Both have succeeded in keeping officials out of jail in recent years.
The poster child for this new clarity on bribery is the former governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, a Republican. He got a reprieve when the courts decided that what you and I might consider official acts done by a public official in exchange for donations and gifts were not really public acts at all. The latest member of the club is Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat, who had the advantage of the rulings in the McDonnell case and was able to get away with calling the flow of funds and favors merely an exchange between friends, one of whom was in office and one who needed official favors.
When it comes to bribery, New York also is bipartisan with Democrat Silver first in line for a retrial, just as he was for the original trial, and Republican Dean Skelos, former leader of the Senate majority, still awaiting his second turn.
The embarrassing spectacle of two of the most powerful people in the state being so easily convicted, following an earlier and just as easy conviction of another Albany powerbroker, Republican Joe Bruno who preceded Skelos in the Senate job and was exonerated in a retrial following the updated, more convoluted reasoning on corruption, has had no effect on state legislators.
If anything, they care less about corruption than they used to. They used to talk about reform and then ignore it. Now, they don’t even talk about it.
If the New York courts follow the examples from the Bruno, McDonnell and Menendez trials, Silver and eventually Skelos will likely be set free and continue to collect their generous state pensions.
So while New Yorkers are not likely to find that they can count on courts to punish corruption, they do have a chance to make a difference in this election year. They can ask those running for re-election not what they think about ethics reform but what they have done about it, then vote for those who have done something.
Online: https://bit.ly/2joRz1q
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The New York Times on Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iran
May 1
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has long employed visual aids to drive home the dangers of Iran and the nuclear deal, even if those dangers are sometimes imagined.
In February, Mr. Netanyahu brandished part of a downed Iranian drone at a European security conference as a prop for his argument that Tehran and its proxies should not test his country’s resolve. In a 2012 speech to the United Nations, he used a much-ridiculed cartoon of a bomb to measure Iran’s nuclear capability, which, while advancing at the time, never reached the stage of producing a weapon.
So far, these theatrical displays have failed to stop the nuclear deal that the Israeli leader despises. But Mr. Netanyahu’s latest show and tell may have greater effect.
In a televised appearance on Monday, he presented images of thousands of nuclear-related documents stolen from Iran by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, along with a giant poster proclaiming “Iran lied.” He argued that the documents proved Iranian leaders were deceptive when they insisted their nuclear program was for peaceful purposes.
It didn’t matter that the data simply reinforced what the world has long known: Iran lied about its program and hid it for years. In fact, Mr. Netanyahu confirmed what American intelligence agencies revealed in 2007: Iran had suspended the active portion of a nuclear weapons program in 2003.
That program, along with related activities that continued after 2003, is a major reason the nuclear deal was struck in the first place and why its verification provisions are the most intrusive of any arms control agreement. It also explains why those provisions need to be retained, not jettisoned.
Mr. Netanyahu did not provide any evidence that Iran had violated the deal since it took effect in early 2016. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors the deal, has repeatedly judged Iran to be in compliance with its commitments, as have top American security officials. Many of Israel’s past and present military and intelligence leaders also say the deal is effective and should be kept in force.
But Mr. Netanyahu remains intent on killing it. President Trump is widely expected to try to do just that on May 12 by not waiving sanctions as the deal requires. Mr. Netanyahu was not leaving such an outcome to chance, however.
Mr. Netanyahu made his televised plea - in a style and format that Mr. Trump seems to prefer - days after Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, made separate visits to Washington to implore Mr. Trump to adhere to the deal negotiated with Iran by Russia, China, Britain, the United States, France and Germany.
The goal seemed to be threefold: emphasize Iranian perfidies in an effort to get Mr. Trump, with Congress’s support, to scuttle the nuclear deal; signal to Tehran’s government Israel’s ability to penetrate its deepest secrets; and flaunt a major intelligence feat by Mossad.
No matter how disingenuous it was, Mr. Netanyahu’s data dump created the illusion of fresh incrimination, which the Trump White House indulged by issuing a statement that said Iran “has a robust clandestine nuclear weapons program.” Only later did the White House correct that to read “had” a weapons program.
Israel, the United States and gulf Arab states are right to be concerned about Iran’s growing role in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and other regional hot spots. Some Iranian leaders have called for Israel’s destruction, and the two adversaries have traded blows via proxies, cyber attacks and assassination squads since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The dangers of rising tensions in the Middle East were reaffirmed on Sunday when Israeli jets reportedly again struck Iranian targets in Syria, killing at least 16 people.
Those alarm bells make maintaining the nuclear deal even more important. Mr. Trump could work with the Europeans on a plan to address such concerns as constraining Tehran’s ballistic missile program, expanding inspections of nuclear facilities and curbing Iran’s regional adventurism. Iran isn’t the region’s only destabilizing force. Withdrawing from the nuclear deal, thus freeing Iran to resume its nuclear activities and possibly provoking other countries to follow suit, would only make things worse.
Online: https://nyti.ms/2I7VoG8
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The Times Union on the Waffle House shooting
April 30
Congress remains all but silent on the glaring gaps in gun laws and the availability of assault weapons.
By all accounts, Travis Reinking should not have had a gun. Yet he did, and so four people are dead.
It would be easy to shrug off the April 22 shooting in a Nashville, Tennessee, Waffle House by repeating the vague, tired mantra of the National Rifle Association and many a politician - you know, that the answer to gun violence in America is to “do something about mental illness.” A closer look, however, shows this latest episode is not only about mental illness, but also about glaring loopholes in gun laws and the ready availability of assault weapons.
Yes, Mr. Reinking is so apparently dangerously mentally ill that, at the FBI’s request, Illinois police revoked his state firearms card and confiscated his guns. That was after his arrest last July for entering a restricted area of the White House and refusing to leave, saying he wanted to meet the president. A year earlier, he told Illinois deputies that superstar musician Taylor Swift was stalking him and that his family was involved.
Yet Mr. Reinking, 29, got his guns back, including the AR-15 he used in the Waffle House. His father - to whom deputies entrusted the guns on the promise he would keep them out of his son’s possession - returned them, Nashville police say. Records show it was the third time he had done so.
Then, just over a week ago, Mr. Reinking, clad in only a jacket, went to the Waffle House and killed four people and wounded several others, police say. When he paused to reload, a patron, 29-year-old James Shaw Jr. - who had himself sustained a minor bullet wound - wrested the assault weapon away from him. Mr. Reinking fled but was arrested the next day.
Where to begin? Let’s start with unregulated private transfers of long guns with no background check. Would Mr. Reinking’s father have handed those guns over to his son if he knew it clearly violated the law and put his own right to possess weapons in jeopardy?
Let’s talk, too, about the guns themselves - about the efficiency and deadliness of assault weapons, and about how, fortunately, the shooter didn’t have the kind of higher-capacity magazines that are all too readily available. Why is that? Why do civilians need military-style firearms?
And let’s talk about that good guy without a gun. The NRA doesn’t seem to want to, nor does President Donald Trump, who claims we’d be better off with more people shooting back and forth. There was not a single tweet from the president on this shooting - no thoughts and prayers for the dead, even, no praise for the unarmed hero. As for the Republicans who control Congress, they’re focused not on universal background checks or an assault weapons ban or on “red flag” laws to take guns away from dangerous people, but instead on the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would allow as many people as possible to carry concealed weapons wherever they feel like it.
Yes, we need to “do something about mental illness,” but we need to do something, too, about the insanity of laws, or the lack of them, that put such a deadly weapon into the hands of someone who, by any measure, should not have had one.
Online: https://bit.ly/2HJIgn9
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