The patrician Erastus Corning, bound to the O’Connells through a  shared passion for the blood sports of cock fighting and politics, served as Mayor of Albany for some forty years, taking time out only for military service in World War II.   Since Corning’s death in 1983, the Democrats have retained their grasp on power.

The Corning/O’Connell Machine was replaced in 1993, by Jerry Jennings, a Democrat  Education Bureaucrat, who demonstrated The Who’s perceptiveness when they sang, “meet the new boss/same as the old boss.  According to Wikipedia, “Democratic Party enrollment in the city is 38,862 compared to Republican enrollment of 3,487.”  Albany is a one-party state as surely as Stalin’s USSR.

However, there are factors at work that may make this year a positive one for Republicans.
Corey Ellis, a City Counsel member and an early supporter of then-Sen. Obama, is running against Mayor Jennings, using a scandal over parking meter enforcement and issues with a rapidly-filling city dump as a fulcrum.  Although he mentioned high property taxes as an issue when he announced his candidacy, he mentioned no concrete solutions.

Mr. Ellis has a compelling life story. He has great notoriety in the city, due to his leadership of the Obama Campaign in Albany.  He seems, however, the type to launch a third-party effort in the likely event he does not get the nomination.   Additionally, Common Council President Shawn Morris is also running for mayor.

While all of this happens, the 2008 Equalization Rate for the City of Albany is 101.3%, according to the NYS Office of Real Property Services. ( http://www.orps.state.ny.us/cfapps/MuniPro/muni_theme/muni/ratehistory.cfm?swis=010100&dom_sw=010100)  This implies that the real property in the City (residential and commercial) is assessed at more than its full market value, which is an unconstitutional level of assessment under the NYS Constitution.

While all of this happens, Albany is home to Crips, Bloods and Surenos 13 (among the few national businesses to open an Albany office in the last few decades, other than some yuppie casual dinning and bar chains downtown) and such local gangs as the Original Gangster Killas, Jungle Junkies, and Yard Boys. These are among the city’s few recent start-up businesses.

While all this happens, the city’s public schools manage to distinguish themselves neither for safety nor for effectiveness.  As in most one-party cities, the teachers and bureaucrats are, however, well paid.

So I make this modest proposal:

—While the Democrats tear themselves up in a vituperative primary battle, why don’t the Republicans find a decent candidate: a woman or man who is from Albany; who has a record of success in the professions or business; and who wants to return something to the City and its people?

—Why doesn’t this candidate go up to Arbor Hill and the Ida Yarbrough Projects and the South End and talk to people in their Churches and their Community Centers about how vouchers could get their children a shot at a better education and a better life and how much safer their streets would be with CompStat methods, like Mayor Guiliani used in New York City to locate and control crime?

—Why doesn’t this candidate go down to North Albany and the area around the Port, where there are still warehouses and small manufacturing concerns, and talk to business owners about how reining in property taxes and reducing regulations and pointless user fees would benefit their endeavor’s bottom line?

—Why doesn’t this candidate talk to merchants out on Central Avenue and Downtown (a part of the city where Jennings did help preserve and expand business opportunity) and tell them she or he would work with Republicans in the County Legislature to reduce sales taxes and keep them low?

—Why doesn’t such a candidate confront the teachers’ union and the rest of the Education Bureaucrats, telling them that there would be limits set on spending and they had to get used to hard and fast budgets based on lower tax rates and a property inventory that was declining in value?

—Why doesn’t this candidate speak truth to power to the Education mafia about standards and pay based on performance and ending tenure and substituting short term contracts, increasing both employer and employees’ options and freedom?

—Why doesn’t this candidate tell people in Albany in general about the opportunity that comes with less nonsensical regulation and wasteful user fees?

–Why doesn’t such a candidate put herself or himself on the side of residents, not grasping unions or corrupt machine politicians? Why doesn’t such a candidate present the optimism and humor that comes from knowing that when people are free . . . and not taxed-to-death . . .  good things happen?

If this happens, while Jennings and Ellis and Morris tear themselves apart and perennial third-party candidate Jack McEneny dusts off his standard and ponders yet another run, we might be able to end almost 90 years of sometimes efficient corruption and occasionally (mostly in the person of Erastus Corning, Jennings is a typical, Stalinesque, humorless apparatchik) genial disregard for growth and opportunity and freedom.

And if this message is sent in 2009 here in Albany, what could that mean for New York State . . . and the country . . . in 2010?

The time has come for bold and effective action.

Gov. Bobby Jindal had an easier time of it.  He was selling a product that everyone who lived through the Carter years and then saw “Morning in America” under the great Ronald Reagan knows will work.

Instead of debt and pork, Jindal’s products were tax cuts and deregulation.  Instead of “pie in the sky” alternative energy, Jindal could talk of allowing companies and entrepreneurs to develop oil, natural gas and coal resources and to build nuclear planst to meet the nation’s energy needs.

In 2010, America has to make a choice.  I hope it will be the choice of freedom and reason.

http://johnbatchelorshow.com/jb/2009/01/john-galt-will-cut-taxes/

Usually, a Keynesian approach might work.  Unfortunately, that has not worked over the last year.  Everyone is too leveraged: the Federal Government; the States; Municipalities; Businesses; and Consumers.  We are more like Attlee’s 1940s England than FDR’s 1930s America.  We need to get the savings rate up to get banks to lend.  We need to pay down government debt before it crowds out what little private borrowing that is happening.  We need to avoid an oil and gas price spike that will accompany (and probably strangle) any recovery.

Here is my modest proposal:

—Cut taxes, especially on 1099 interest income to encourage deposits;

—Stop trying to “bailout” failing businesses, Fiat’s recent interest in Chrysler demonstrates that markets can potentially solve business problems governments can’t;

—Sell off public lands to pay down debt and privatize all functions like running museums and the like, putting all the revenue towards paying down debt;

—Slash all Federal legal and regulatory bars to oil and gas exploration and development and those on nuclear power, encourage states to do likewise;

—Vastly reduce the size and scope of the Federal Government, (Why is there a Department of Education?);

—Consider allowing Federal territories, like Guam and Puerto Rico, to purchase their independence if they so desire, allocating revenues towards debt reduction;

—Bailout states only if they agree to a “Washington Consensus” series of economic reforms;

—Repeal all Federal wage and hour laws and regulations and encourage states to do likewise;

—Encourage all states to become “Right to Work” states; and

—Consider adopting George W. Bush’s original September 2001 concept of how to fight AQ: not a war but a balanced spectrum of law enforcement, diplomacy, intelligence gathering and covert actions, likely to be more effective and cheaper than what we have been doing.

Will this work?  I don’t know.  However, what we have been doing isn’t working.

Pres. Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review and was an instructor at the University of Chicago Law School.  He can’t have missed the influence of the Chicago School in Economics or of the law and economics movement.  He knows liberal nostrums don’t work, as anyone of his generation does.

Indeed, his health care reform proposals and those of the House Republicans are not incompatible.  However, any thought about, for example, making legal regulation of the practice of medicine or business of insurance more uniform among the several states, thereby reducing barriers to entry and reducing administrative costs, is likely to be drown out by a chorus of individuals in tie-dyed garments yelling, “Single payor, single payor.”  Simply put, our new President is too beholden to his own left wing to bring about market-based healthcare reform that might give cheaper and more universal coverage or to cut taxes and government spending in such a way as to bring about an economic recovery.

“It’s deja vu all over again,” as Yogi Berra said: a Democrat President, failing to implement health care reform and crippling his own left wing in Congress passing a stimulus package.  As Marx said, history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

As things worsen, as they are likely to, many people will start to consider alternatives in 2010.  Like Clinton, losing his left wing in Congress might help Pres. Obama win a second term.  He could implement workable policies with a Republican Congress and pass the blame with his constituencies off on the Republicans, a process you may remember as “triangulation.”

The trick to making sure people know they have a choice requires Republicans to let people know what their alternatives are.  We have to propose market-based solutions and make people understand the advantage they will enjoy in an environment of lower taxes, smaller government and decreased regulation.

To that end the new media, Fox, Talk Radio and the internet, have to be leveraged.  Moreover, the campaign to recapture the House and Senate must begin now.  When people begin to realize in the Summer of this year that “No, he can’t,” they must know that they can by electing conservatives to represent them in 2010.

It is incumebent on the leaders of the conservative movement to begin planning now.

Businesses that can’t borrow money commercially and can’t find a venture capitalist willing to try to fix them, are  well past being saved.  The are candidates for Chapter 7 Liquidation.  In liquidating these companies under the Bankruptcy code, any viable assets (intellectual property, PP&E) can be purchased out of the Bankruptcy estate and put to productive use.

Moreover, talented people, working for a failed enterprise now will have both the opportunity and the need to join or build new businesses.  Such a process of “creative destruction” (as the brilliant Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called it) is why capitalism works and any other system fails.  The decisions of countless consumers force enterprises to become more efficient or close their doors.  By any measure, GM and Chrysler have failed.

It is possible that Ford might find a new lease on life from what it could purchase from the GM or Chrysler bankruptcy estates.  It is possible that India’s Tata Group or China’s Cherry might use this as an opportunity to manufacture, in the United States, the more affordable, more basic cars that the US economy will demand for the next several years.  It is also possible that even the “Worker’s Paradise” called Michigan will enter the 21st (or even the 20th Century) and adopt basic, rational policy such as a Right to Work law, lower taxes and slashing absurd, business-hostile and job-destroying laws and regulations.

To take the tax money of people of modest means to save these inefficient companies, with their insulated management and their job banks, is an insult to all Americans.  We simply cannot reinforce failure or to distrust the wisdom of markets.

GENERAL

—Don’t believe for one second that this is a “Center-Right Country.” It isn’t ideological at all. We are pragmatic. Do what works.

—Historically, Upstate NY is (mostly) a Red State, as (mostly) are the Northern and Southern Suburbs and the Outer Boroughs. The elections of 2006 and 2008 showed some changes to the pattern, which you need to reverse if you hope to succeed.

—The individual appointed to HRC’s seat will face an election in 2010. Chuck Schemer will be up for re-election in 2010 and all House seats will be up for election.  The Governor, Comptroller and the NYS AG are up for re-election, as well.

—Now is almost too late to start getting ready for 2010.

—All NY Republicans, running for state or federal offices, should run on a common platform, just as Gingrich ran his people in the 1994 Congressional Elections. Call it something like “NY XXI (New York Twenty One).”

—You don’t have a bench, so be creative. Michael Garcia, former US Attorney (“USA”) for the Southern District of NY (“SDNY”) under George W. Bush, for NYS AG?  How about running COL Geoff Slack, NYARNG, who successfully commanded the “Fighting 69th” in Iraq in 2004-5, as “Wild Bill” Donovan did in World War I, for some key office?  Where does Dana Perino live? What Party does Dana Delaney belong to?

—Find able, telegenic relatable people from public life, the media, the professions and industry. Find qualified women, African American, Asian American and Latino candidates (as Democrats found qualified war veterans in 2006) … and … find them early. Don’t fight, as with Pataki and Pirro, over who runs for what.

—Give them a platform that appeals: lower taxes; less government red tape; a less hostile business environment; and business and industrial development.

—Look at what works in Georgia, Tennessee … and Ireland … about being business friendly. Talk to Steve Lonegan in NJ. “Not Invented Here” is for schmucks.

—Candidates for Congress and the US Senate from New York should work closely with the Gubernatorial Candidate, the AG candidate and the Comptroller candidate. All should be on common survey as to what New York’s interests in Washington are.

–You need to run against the Spitzer and Cuomo AG’s Office: they harassed, threatened and unjustly fined businesses across the State for dubious reasons. Pissed off businesses are also where the contribution money is! This may also be where the candidates are!

—Use web-sites, Fox News, The NY POST and talk radio (local [e.g., Steve Malzberg on WOR in the NYC area] and national [e.g., Rush, Sean, Laura, et al.]) to get your story out—starting as soon as possible. The Lalor Campaign in the NY 19th Congressional District taught me that: a) main stream media (“MSM”) bias exists; and b) so does new media sluggishness and inability to react to opportunity.

SOME SPECIFICS

—Due to his tax increases, Gov. Patterson will probably lose his bid for election.  Raising taxes is the right thing to do, but you need to crucify him for doing it.

—Run on SLASHING TAXES AND SLASHING THE STATE WORK FORCE!!!!!!

—Run on doing something about property taxes. I don’t think that free, universal public K-12 education funded by property taxes is viable anymore and the real estate price collapse is going to bring this to a crisis point. Think about Howard Jarvis’ Proposition 13 Tax Revolt in California back in 1978: this can lead you out of the wilderness.

—Tax relief is not enough. You need to change education. Run against the Teacher’s Union; they oppose you anyway and they are generally detested by most home owners.

—How about only making public education free up to the age 16? Beyond that tuition could be paid, forcing the public (call them “Government”) schools to compete with the private and parochial schools on a common footing for students in those grades?

—How about doing away with 7th and 8th Grade, where the work is a duplication of what is learned in High School, and getting people out of the system at 16?

—How about doing away with George Pataki’s screwy idea that everyone should go for a Regent’s Diploma?

—You will have the mandate for real change on anything to do with taxation, especially with regards to property taxes.

—NY has too much inane law and regulation at all levels.

—Why does the State care if a doctor wears a badge in a hospital? (NY Educ. Law § 6530 [37]). Why is there a State Law governing the “[m]anufacture and sale” of used hats? (NY Gen. Bus. Law § 392-a). (Come to think of it, how do you “[m]anufacture” a used hat, anyway?)

—Also, consider the fact that there are several shelves worth of the NY Code of Rules and Regulations (“NYCRR”) explaining (and, frequently duplicating) these laws, for example, with 8 NYCRR § 29.1 et seq. restating sections 6530 and 6509 of the Education Law without adding anything of any importance whatsoever.

—We need to simplify NYS Law and Regulation at all levels and make it far more business friendly.  Go out on the state capital steps and read some of the more inane laws and show how voluminous the NYCRR and the Consolidated and Unconsolidated Laws are, in order to gain attention.

—Why is there such a thing as The New York State Arts and Cultural Affairs Law (other than guidance it contains [for some inexplicable reason] on how long the State needs to retain documents and reports like ultrasound tapes).

—Streamlining 10 NYCRR, the Insurance Law and the PHL is vital to national market-based health care reform. Why is NY a corporate practice state?

—If NY goes to the Feds for a bailout, the NY Republican Co-Del must insist that NY adopt market-based reforms including: a 25% reduction in state spending; a 25% reduction in state work force; privatization of parks, museums and other things more effectively run in the private sector; business-friendly reform of the Consolidated Laws and the NYCRR; and the end of ridiculous, outdated state programs.  You won’t win but you will gain a higher profile and gain attention for your ideas.

—If the Obama Administration is popular and successful, run against his Party’s left wing, which is likely to hamstring his efforts.