Republican Decision 2010

The interesting primary this September 14 is the GOP's race between Rick Lazio and Carl Paladino even though Democratic candidate-designate Andrew Cuomo leads both.  A September 11 Siena poll finds that Lazio leads Paladino by one percent, 43 to 42. Paladino leads with 53 percent among Upstate New Yorkers while Lazio leads with a similar margin downstate.  Paladino leads among Tea Partiers 47 to 42 percent.  This slim margin suggests that the appellation Tea Party is amorphous. The Tea Party is neither small government- nor Rockefeller- Republican.  For while Paladino advocates a twenty percent cut in New York's budget, Lazio's record does not put him in the small government camp.

Carl Paladino

 Paladino is a Buffalo-based real estate developer who attended St. Bonaventure University and Syracuse Law.  He is a tough, inspiring speaker who befriends but challenges his audience.

Paladino built a real estate empire from scratch. His current net worth is about $150 million.  While overseeing 15 office buildings is not an executive responsibility with as much latitude as the governor's, Paladino has had more at risk personally than any governor. As a result, he has developed management skills that would be more likely to benefit the public than those of a lifelong politician.

Paladino is accused of forwarding racist and sexist e-mails to friends. The New York Times has endorsed Rick Lazio over Paladino saying that the e-mails alone are grounds for rejecting Paladino. However, writing of Jesse Jackson's having called New York City "Hymietown", Times reporter Jodi Kantor implied on May 22, 2008 that Jews should not hold the epithet against Jackson because he has apologized.  Although Paladino has similarly apologized for forwarding e-mails the Times applies a different standard to him. 

Like Lazio, Paladino opposes construction of the Ground Zero mosque.  He has run advertisements saying that as governor he would use eminent domain to foreclose the mosque.  I questioned him on this point because many conservatives oppose eminent domain.  At an Ulster County Republican appearance in late August Paladino insisted that he is opposed to private use eminent domain and that he would like to see less use of eminent domain more generally.

Paladino is running on a specific platform of 20 percent budget cuts.  Although Lazio also states that he would like to reduce government, his promises are not so specific.  The chief targets for Paladino's cuts are welfare and Medicaid, whose per capita costs in New York are double those in California.  There are in fact many areas where Medicaid and other aspects of New York's budget could be cut without loss in public welfare.

Rick Lazio 

Lazio grew up in West Islip on Long Island.  He attended Vassar College and American University Law School.  He worked as a Suffolk County prosecutor. He was elected to the Suffolk County legislature in 1989 and to Congress in 1992. He resigned his congressional post to oppose Hillary Clinton for Senate in 2000.  His website states that he expanded public housing for seniors and the disabled.  He also boasts of having increased the number of welfare-related Section 8 housing vouchers. In other words, Lazio's track record includes winning votes by expanding welfare benefits. He also has endorsements from the Sierra Club.

According to his Website Lazio favors three chief positions. The first, "getting our financial house in order," involves a property tax cap of 2.5% and instituting regional control of Medicaid. Also, Lazio aims to reduce public sector pension benefits for new employees and to reform Medicaid.  Second, Lazio aims at job creation. He favors lower taxes, but unlike Paladino does not offer a specific target for tax or budget relief. Nor does he offer targets for Medicaid cuts. Lazio's third position is improvement of ethics in government.

This last position is puzzling given evidence that the Village Voice has uncovered about Lazio's dealings at JPMorgan, for whom Lazio has worked as a lobbyist. During his eight-year congressional tenure Lazio collected more in contributions from financial service firms than any other Congressman. He was chair of the House housing subcommittee and through Louis Ranieri, his campaign manager, linked to the real estate bubble of the Bush administration.  On March, 18 2008, six months prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the New York Times reported that JPMorgan’s stock had increased ten percent, roughly equal to a $12 billion handout it had received in part from the Federal Reserve Bank. JP Morgan also received $25 billion in TARP funds during the crisis, which it repaid in 2009.   The Albany Times Union reported that Lazio's 2008 JPMorgan Chase salary was $325,000, with a bonus of $1.3 million.

According to the Village Voice, both Congressman Lazio and Democrat Andrew Cuomo as head of HUD worked on rules that legalized bonuses paid to real estate brokers who steered customers to more expensive real estate and higher-end mortgages.  This marked the inception of the sub-prime crisis.  The Voice also reports that in 2007 Lazio used his influence with Charles Millard, head of the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, to secure a $900 million PBGC investment in JPMorgan's real estate management division.  The PBGC insures private pension plans. The untimely 2008 investment led to significant losses.  Moreover, in dealing with Millard, Lazio violated laws concerning communication during the bid process.  The PBGC's Inspector General has investigated the case and has referred it to a prosecutor.

Analysis

Liberals dislike Paladino's style, which I would describe as Jacksonian.  Andrew Jackson was a people's candidate who infuriated upper class Whigs, the 1820s' and 1830s' equivalent of today's Rockefeller Republicans and Soros Democrats.  Jackson, like today's libertarians, advocated elimination of the biggest government program of then and now: the central bank. Like Lazio, Jackson's opponent, Henry Clay, supported big government and was friendly to banking interests.  Jackson was an unabashed racist who was responsible for the Trail of Tears and whose Supreme Court appointee, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, wrote the Dred Scott decision.  But unlike the Jackson of 1828 and like the Jackson of 1984, Paladino has apologized for forwarding the e-mails.

Paladino's opponent, Rick Lazio, has been involved in marginally illegal activity in his role as JPMorgan lobbyist, and was very much associated with the bailout. Yet, he aims to get the state's fiscal house in order and clean up the state ethically.  Paladino appeals to non-racist Jacksonians in the Tea Party who are righteously indignant about the Bush and Obama administrations' massive transfer of wealth to Wall Street.  What is most puzzling about Lazio is his appeal to self-described Tea Party activists.

Mitchell Langbert is associate professor, Brooklyn College and is a member of the Ulster County Republican Committee. This essay was presented to the Kingston-Rhinebeck Tea Party on September 12, 2010.

Leo Strauss, American Ethical Decline and Aristotle's Highest Hope

I was just reading Leo Strauss's magnificent Natural Right and History.  Strauss is a first rate thinker, on a par with the great libertarians, yet I disagree with a large chunk of his perspective.  I must say that the early chapter on Max Weber is of tremendous importance to the work I have been doing on business schools' teaching of justice as the core management competency and the Aristotelian and Nietzschean traditions in mangement theory.  Strauss's arguments in favor of natural right and law are profound and explicate a core insight at which I arrived in my undergraduate years. That is, that the justification of ethics is inherent in the socio-biology of humanity.  Natural right and natural law are socio-biological constructs.  Conventionalism, the notion that ethics is arbitrary, can be disproved empirically.  Strauss makes invaluable arguments along those lines.  As well, Strauss outlines the very concept I have been thinking about and am working toward: the crucial importance of decentralization to the development of the virtuous and liberal state.  I am glad I am reading Strauss now after I have outlined the project in my mind.  Although the idea is my own independent of Strauss, Strauss must be given major credit for conceptualizing the project in 1953.

I do not agree with Strauss in a number of ways. Most important among these is his emphasis on human differentials with respect to the prospects of attaining virtue.  Strauss's emphasis on this aspect of Plato and Aristotle leads to elitism which I do not share.  This elitism is very much in the Progressive and Marxist traditions.  I do not agree that there are people who have a special claim to virtue.  Anyone who thinks so can try to fix their own plumbing or their own cars.  Just because someone can go to Harvard does not make them more valuable than a plumber.  When my pipes go, I care about a plumber, not a philosopher or a politician. Sorry, Ayn Rand. What I want is a virtuous plumber.  And a virtuous plumber will not go home, drink a 12-pack of beer, and wash his hands of what has happened to the nation.  Rather, America has declined because of the elitism inherent in Progressivism.

Coincidentally Jim Crum sent me Andrew Malcolm's LA Times article that suggests that America is indeed in serious moral decline due to the Progressive and socialist policies that the Democratic and Republican Parties advocate.  The article finds that 41 Obama appointees have not paid their taxes.  As well, federal employees in general owe a billion dollars in unpaid taxes, and 638 workers on capitol hill owe $9.3 million in unpaid taxes. As Treasury Secretary, who is in charge of collecting taxes, Obama appointee Timothy Geithner owes $43,000 in unpaid taxes.  As well, within the department of homeland security  "4,856 people owe $37,012,174."

Aristotle argued that the role of the city state is to educate moral citizens.  Clearly American society has failed in this elementary task. The problem is not just with dysfunctional schools which systematically fail to teach the three 'rs along with basic morals; nor with the decaying family, harmed by the Wall Street economy that has destroyed job opportunities in general but especially for men and has fractured the family by forcing women to return to work at an early age.   It is also due to the miasma of bad ethics that imbues the casino economy; the get-rich-quick psychology of Federal Reserve Bank-financed Wall Street speculation and the carry trade; the mentality that one gets rich by sucking at the tit of the state rather than working hard.  All of this is nothing new.  For decades the Progressive state structure has systematically rewarded fast-talking corporate types with smooth interpersonal but limited productive skills and penalized those who take legitimate risks. The Federal Reserve Bank churns out easy credit made available to speculators in stocks and real estate but the government taxes work (through the income tax) and thereby inhibits small scale capital accumulation, creating a bank-dominated economy that is inherently corrupt.  All of this tends to manipulation of paper and cheating, at which Republicans like Rick Lazio as well as Democrats like Timothy Geithner excel.

A nation which allows cheats like Lazio and Geithner to attain high office has failed Aristotle's highest hope for the city state.  The nation is failing morally and the fault is Progressivism. Moral failure will lead to collapse. The Founding Fathers knew Aristotle and they were aware of this point.  So were the Mugwumps of the Gilded Age.  Because of its fascist economy, the nation has foresaken its moral foundations.

Cost of Living in a Fascist America

The dissonance between the news one receives from Democratic and Republican sources, that is from the Wall Street/government based media, reminds me of the stories I used to hear about communist eastern Europe when I was a youngster.  Everyone knew that government statistics were nonsense and that the broadcasts from the state-dominated media were propaganda.  So it is today in "Progressive" America.


One of the chief areas where government has manipulated information is with respect to prices. The Poughkeepsie Journal featured an article on September 6 describing how costs in Dutchess County have increased more than wages partially because the wages in New York City have declined and there is a sizable commuter element.  One point that the article omits is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics excluded house prices from cost of living calculations in the early 1980s. Thus, inflation has been understated for nearly three decades.  In response to declines in house prices over the past two years, the federal government has intervened aggressively to prop them up. This has had the effect of exacerbating the cost of living increases to a far greater degree than is revealed in government numbers.  When talking about house prices, the fascist media treats their inflation as essential to economic well being.

Recent graduates face earnings profiles that start at maybe 4 times what they were in the 1970s but house prices have gone up much more than that.   If you start work earning $40,000 but houses cost $200,000, then you are put in the position of becoming a debtor to banks at heretofore unknown levels.
I worked as a doorman at a posh New York City apartment building on 54th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues during the summer of 1974.  The apartments were selling for $55,000 or so, while doormen were making ten or $11,000.  In other words, given the calculus of the today's housing market, I as a college-aged doorman could have afforded an apartment in the exclusive building where I worked.   Looking at it another way, the apartments in that building now probably sell for $1.5 million, a twenty-fold increase.  But doormen's wages have increased four fold.  Yet, the enormous escalation in the cost of housing due to government policies is omitted from consumer price increase calcluations (the Federal Reserve Bank and the banking system are the only reason for these price increases, not some other exogenous explosion in housing demand).


The belief that price increases are due to forces other than government policy is superstitious.  Yet, that kind of superstition is provided in the American media and from universities.  Rather than discuss price increases in terms of government decisions to allocate wealth to banking and real estate interests, the Poughkeepsie Journal considers cost of living increases to be an unfortunate but uncontrollable and spontaneous phenomenon.

Think Global, Act Local

I mailed about 650 Town of Olive Republican newsletters. As I mailed the newsletter, which announces a Town Republican Committee meeting, I have increasing concerns about the future of my involvement with the GOP, especially with respect to state-level and national-level candidates, i.e., for Senate, Governor and President.  I have been happy to support NY 22nd CD George Phillips, who is having a very nice $500 per plate fund raising dinner the same night as our Town meeting. 

I took myself off blog impresario Larwyn's mailing list, telling Larwyn that I do not want to associate further with GOP activists. I do not think that the GOP is different from the Democratic Party, and the American public continues to resist transformation of either or creation of a third and fourth party. 

I also told Raquel Okyay that I would not support her projected candidacy for state assembly further.  Besides being a Lazio supporter Okyay continues to support the policies of George W. Bush.  I consider Bush to be a fascist and a crook, and Lazio is no better.  Hence, I do not see the point of supporting Okyay in her strategizing about a candidacy.  I suggested that Okyay familiarize herself with basic books on freedom such as John Locke and Friedrich Hayek, but unsurprisingly she took no interest in doing so.  Rather she wrote the following response to my e-mail, which comes after hers:

 

Raquel: Mitchell -- You want to put all your eggs in the Paladino basket - go for it - You are no friend of mine.  You watched a man you don't know give two speeches and you are prepared to not just throw our friendship under the bus, but also do damage to my carreer!  What the f*ck is wrong with you Mitchell?  Wake up out of your dream - you just lost one of the best allies you had.    

Me: Sorry, Raquel.  I do not support Progressives.  I've already let Mike Marnell know my opinion that the Lincoln Eagle ought to oppose you if you run for office in this district.  George Bush is sc*m.  I cannot support someone who likes him, which you do.  You're a nice person, but that does not change the underlying issues.   George Bush has done tremendous harm to this country, and I put his supporters in the same category as Obama's supporters.  To me, you are equivalent to Rahm Emanuel. That you do not see the difference between Paladino and Lazio only adds further support for my assessment that your political views are opposed to freedom.  If you don't know what I'm talking about you need to do some reading, because you are not educated about freedom.  And I don't mean the New York Times, which agrees with you about Lazio.  I mean John Locke, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Bertrand de Jouvenal and the Federalist Papers.

Raquel: Mitchell I'm shocked!! We can disagree in a primary race, can't we?  Why does Paladino do this to people, I don't get it?  Did we even support the same GOP candidate for President in 08, Mitchell?  Did it matter?  You may have saw Paladino speak a couple of times, but you know me for years.  I expect this from amateurs, not from old friends like you.

Me: I have heard Carl speak twice and he has emphasized the following issues: excessive welfare spending and cutting the state budget by 20%. No Republican has such a focus, certainly not Rick Lazio who was involved in the biggest expansion of government in the past 25 years, the corrupt bailout of Wall Street conceptualized by the Republican Party and George W. Bush.

I think it is clear, Raquel, that we have little common ground. You continue to support big government advocates like George Bush and Rick Lazio and, like your fellow Progressives in the Republican Party, are troubled by Mr. Paladino's focus on 20% budget cuts, which you attempt to deflect with an out of context quote about welfare recipients in jail. Afraid of going to jail, are you? In any case, please do not consider me a supporter of anything you have in mind for the future. I do not like Progressives.