From theVillage Voice

As it heads into the home stretch, the Bloomberg campaign has adopted a new slogan to sum things up and help focus voters on the big picture. The new motto was rolled out at the big Bloomberg rally held primary night on a West Side pier, a gala celebration aimed at snatching attention away from Democrats and on to Mayor Mike. The slogan was emblazoned on Bloomberg’s podium, and tattooed over and over on a TV backdrop. Which made it hard to miss. It read: “Progress. Not Politics.” The first word is a debate worth having. The next two are simply lies.

Not politics? Whatever you think of Bill Thompson’s erratic campaign, at least he was being nominated that very night by his own party in an open primary. Mike Bloomberg? His GOP endorsement came courtesy of a classic, old-school political deal in which five Republican county leaders sat down in a room and agreed to give the mayor their ballot line.

He cut the same insiders’ pact with the cultish local chapter of the Independence Party. The party’s nominating convention this spring featured all the democracy of a Chinese Politburo meeting, including a ruling clique that fawned over the visiting mayor. A few weeks later, Bloomberg sealed the deal with a $250,000 down-payment to the party’s coffers, with presumably a great deal more to come.

Not politics? Bloomberg continues to scorn the city’s campaign finance system, the hard-won reform designed to curb the influence of big money in elections. He spends as much as he wants—the same way the hacks used to do before limits were adopted.

Then there’s the bare-bones political scheming that won the mayor the very right to even appear on the ballot this year. That’s the one topic Mike Bloomberg still refuses to talk about. He gets an electric-like jolt whenever the topic is raised. Just when and why Mike Bloomberg decided to overturn the city’s term limits laws is shrouded in mystery. He’s done his best to keep it that way.

But there’s new light shed on the subject by Joyce Purnick, the veteran New York Times editor and reporter whose insightful political biography, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics, is out this month.

Bloomberg gave Purnick unprecedented access, granting her multiple one-on-one, hour-long interviews. He also green-lighted his top aides—deputies Patti Harris, Kevin Sheekey, and Ed Skyler—to talk as well.

The book makes clear that many months before economic disaster struck in September 2008—the crisis that Bloomberg said prompted his reversal on term limits—the mayor was already pondering the move.

Purnick says that a few weeks after Bloomberg’s February 28, 2008, announcement that he would not seek the presidency, she asked the mayor about then-vague rumors that he was looking for a way to run for mayor again.

“It was clear he had given a third term some thought,” she writes. The mayor told her that “the mechanics” of such a bid were “difficult” because he would need the backing of the city’s daily papers. Bloomberg told her that he knew he could count on Post publisher Rupert Murdoch and the Daily News’ Mort Zuckerman. But he was in the midst of saying he was “uncertain about Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.” when a press aide cut him off, insisting that the rest of the conversation had to be off the record.

That spring, Bloomberg commissioned a poll on public attitudes about changing term limits. Purnick confirms that it showed that voters were likely to vote thumbs down on any move to change term limits in a new referendum.

Other hints of the mayor’s pre-crisis calculations came from her interviews with mega-millionaires who were urging Bloomberg to run again. In July, Bloomberg attended the annual tycoons’ retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho. There, Purnick writes, Bloomberg mingled with Murdoch and other pro–third term chums, including investment mogul Henry Kravis and Time Warner’s Richard Parsons. The mayor was apparently treated to a full-court press from those moguls, who were in turn consulting with real estate big Jerry Speyer and investment strategist Steven Rattner, both of whom were aggressively pushing a third term.

Purnick quotes one “business associate” saying that “they all came back from Sun Valley loaded for bear, sure he was going for it.”

Zuckerman, a key player in Bloomberg’s strategy, told Purnick that the September market crash wasn’t the reason. “No, it was not the economic crisis,” the publisher and real estate magnate said. “He wanted to run for a third term. What else was he going to do? He loves being mayor.”

Bloomberg hesitated, Purnick writes, concerned in part about the response of fellow billionaire Ronald Lauder (”Complication No. 1,” she dubs him), who spent millions to win the original term limits referendum and who successfully beat back a later challenge to the law.

That hesitation, she says, helped the mayor avoid pressure to put term limits on the ballot that fall, when it was even more likely to be defeated by the pro-Obama voters expected to swamp the polls. She said that one close friend of the mayor who was also urging him to run for a third term told her that the mayor “deliberately ran out the clock because of the poll in June.” The friend told her that Bloomberg’s “political advisers were telling him he wouldn’t win a referendum” overturning the term limits law.

It was while that clock was running down that the financial collapse struck, giving the mayor what Purnick dubs “a plausible reason” to push for a fast Council vote rather than a public referendum.

The mayor then turned to “Complication No. 1.” Lauder had already fired an opening shot, running a TV ad depicting politicians as baby diapers that need regular changing. But after what Purnick says was heavy lobbying by the pro-Bloomberg business crowd, Lauder bowed to a one-time change in the law in exchange for a small concession: that the mayor agree to name him to a new Charter Review commission panel in 2010—one that would recommend reinstituting term limits.

Bloomberg and Lauder were so excited about their agreement that they put out a press release describing it. The release was issued by Lauder’s eminent public relations adviser, Howard Rubenstein. But Bloomberg’s City Hall helped write it and approved it. “I will reluctantly support the mayor’s legislation to extend term limits to three terms,” Lauder stated in the release, “with the understanding that I will serve on a Charter-revision commission which will place the question of the number of terms before the voters in 2010.”

Lauder clearly wasn’t getting much in return: The commission doesn’t even exist, and if it is convened, he’ll be just one member. But it was also a glaring example of the city’s top executive using the perks of office to win political advantage. That is something officials are explicitly barred from doing by the City Charter. As good-government advocates Gene Russianoff of NYPIRG and Susan Lerner of Common Cause put it in a letter a few days later to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, “We believe that Mayor Bloomberg has used his position in a prohibited manner to obtain personal advantage in a quid pro quo deal with Ronald Lauder.”

Whatever became of that complaint? “Nothing,” said Russianoff last week. “We never heard a word from the board.”

That’s the policy, a board official said when asked about the matter. When the board doesn’t find any violation, “the public never finds out,” he said. Which is just how the mayor wants to keep it until after November.

trobbins@villagevoice.com

There are multiple examples of how President Barack Obama has reneged on his promise to bring “transparency and accountability” to Washington, D.C., but fewer are more egregious than his cow-towing to labor leaders on the issue of union financial disclosure.

By rescinding Bush-era disclosure requirements for labor union leaders, Obama is swinging the door wide open to rampant corruption and systemic abuse. This decision represents a dangerous shift in federal policy – one that will no doubt be exacerbated by Obama’s appointment of top labor leaders to key enforcement positions within the federal government.

Instead of fulfilling his promise of “accountability,” Obama has now put the fox in charge of guarding the hen house with respect to U.S. labor policy. And instead of honoring his pledge of “transparency,” Obama has decided to strip away one of the few tools the public had at its disposal to hold union leaders accountable.

Why are these latest Obama hypocrisies worth noting?

First, they represent “pay-to-play” corruption on a sweeping, fundamental level. Labor unions gave Obama and Democratic Congressional candidates over $100 million during the last election cycle. In addition to these contributions, Obama and Democratic candidates also benefited from the efforts of a 450,000-strong “voter registration and mobilization” army of union employees.

This is where the most glaring hypocrisy comes into play.

Obama’s stunning reversal on the issue of union disclosure is more than just the latest “payback” to union leaders. Sadly, it’s a betrayal of the American workers whose money and sweat were tapped by union big-wigs to help elect Obama and his Democratic majority.

Take Tyrone Freeman, president of the Los Angeles local Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Freeman was forced to resign his post after federal filings showed that he spent hundreds of thousands of union dollars on companies owned by his family members. Freeman also billed the union $8,100 for expenses related to his wedding in Hawaii.

Then there is the case of Annelle Grajeda, executive VP of the national SEIU, who resigned after she was caught paying her boyfriend tens of thousands of dollars with union money, or Rickman Jackson, the Michigan-based SEIU leader who resigned his position after he was caught renting his home to a union-sponsored nonprofit and receiving nearly $200,000 in “surplus” compensation from non-Michigan unions.

Most recently, we have the stunning defeat of Ernie Duran, Jr. – the president of Colorado’s United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 – who was booted from office after it was revealed that he gave his son Ernie Duran III and daughter Crisanta Duran annual salaries of $134,000. Duran also expensed top-shelf margaritas, a new blue tooth and Denver Broncos’ tickets to union members.

All of these examples of waste and corruption came to light thanks to Bush-era disclosure requirements that enabled the public, press and union members to see how union leaders were spending their hard-earned dues. Unions are compelled to disclose given their various government-granted social powers (including the collection of mandatory dues) and their increasing institutional reliance on taxpayer-funded support services. Were it not for heavy federal involvement in labor policy, unions operating in a free market could insist on privacy and enter into whatever agreements with employers they like. But since the federal government dictates a wide range of rules and conditions (most favorable to the unions), they have assumed a corresponding responsibility to oversee them.

Unfortunately for rank-and-file members, Obama now wants to go back to the “Wild West” system in which union leaders were permitted to spend money on whatever items they wanted without worrying about their members ever becoming the wiser.

How does this approach benefit the workers whose sweat and financial clout ultimately helped elect Obama?

It doesn’t. In fact, it all but guarantees that union employees will never know how their leaders are spending their dues – which is an open invitation to nepotism, cronyism and every form of corruption imaginable.

According to a 2009 Heritage Foundation report, over the last eight years the Office of Labor Management Standards has won 929 convictions against union officials for fraud and embezzlement – resulting in $93 million worth of court-ordered restitution to union members.

Of course the real impact of the union disclosure laws wasn’t necessarily the number of abuses they exposed, but the number of abuses they prevented because union leaders knew that their members would be able to track individual financial expenditures.

Over the last three decades, American workers have been rejecting unions with increasing frequency – with corruption invariably ranking among the top reasons. Rather than living up to his rhetoric and rooting out this corruption, however, Obama seems intent on working with union leaders to cover it up.

From The Wall Street Journal

Last week saw a major victory for property rights, as besieged homeowners in New Jersey claimed victory against politicians and developers trying to seize their land. This continues the nationwide grassroots effort to stop government abuse of eminent domain power since the Supreme Court’s misguided 2005 Kelo ruling.

This story began back in the mid 1990s, when the city of Long Branch marked the well-kept neighborhoods of a cottag beach community “in need of redevelopment.” Residents were told that their homes and property were “blighted” and were to be handed over to real-estate developers for a more than $100 million condo project. The families, represented by the Institute for Justice, protested but the confiscation was initially allowed to proceed by state judge Lawrence Lawson. In August 2008, a three-judge panel of the New Jersey Appellate Division unanimously reversed and remanded that decision, saying that the city did not have enough evidence to declare the area blighted. And last Tuesday the city of Long Branch agreed to drop their eminent domain claims.

This is big news in a state where eminent domain abuse has been rampant. While New Jersey law set a constitutional standard for blight, that standard had been weakened over the years by a legislature intent on pushing through development projects that would win friends or raise tax dollars. In 1992, a redevelopment law was passed that allowed government to seize properties if doing so could be somehow construed to improve the neighborhood.

Under that standard, as Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her dissent in Kelo v. City of New London, any Motel 6 can be knocked down for a Ritz-Carlton. In the Long Branch case, the contracts even ceded the city’s power of eminent domain to the developers, giving private businesses the ability to tell the city when it should confiscate private property.

Such flagrant abuse of public power for private purposes troubles most voters. In the wake of Kelo, some 43 states have reformed eminent domain laws to ensure they couldn’t become a tool used casually against local homeowners on behalf of private interests. New Jersey is one of seven states that did nothing. The Garden State’s courts have been more active, however. In 2007, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that to qualify for blight, an area must be a detriment to the health, safety and welfare of its residents. Subsequent rulings have adopted this more robust protection of private property, including for the homeowners of Long Branch.

A bill now being considered by the New Jersey legislature would codify the blight standard now being used by the courts. It would also increase compensation and provide for clearer notice and rights for homeowners whose property is at risk. Eminent domain reform has languished too long in the state, and Senate Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts will be responsible for seeing that it isn’t left on a shelf to expire at the end of the session. This is a populist cause that GOP candidate for governor Chris Christie could get behind.

Nothing can repay the homeowners of Long Branch for their decade-long ordeal, but their victory sends a welcome message to politicians who think private property can be confiscated at their whim.

From the Cooksville Times

Every few years people talk about term limits for U. S. Senators and Representatives.

Others counter the term limits argument by saying that we have term limits by virtue of the ballot box.

Take Teddy Kennedy–47 years is too long. Robert Byrd–50+ years is too long. Alcee Hastings from Miami has been a Representative for 20+ years. He’s been there too long. He was a Federal judge who was impeached.

How’s this for an idea? In lieu of mandatory term limits on all 535 members of Congress, every 20 years on a year that there’s a Presidential election the ballot would reflect a “house cleaning” question.

If it passes nationwide, the members of Congress would be prohibited from running in their next election.

They would be barred from running for Congress for ten years.

Should it pass, there wouldn’t be a complete turnover in the Senate but all 435 House members would be gone in two years.

The states could do the same in their years when each elects a governor.

The founding fathers never meant for our Senators and Representatives to gain a stranglehold on Congress.

Their original idea was for ordinary citizens to go to the Capitol whether it was New York, Philadelphia, or Washington to represent ordinary citizens.

They never envisioned that our elected representatives would get rich in the process.

Neither did they ever think that it would cost so much to get elected and re-elected into infinity.

These people start working on their re-elections the day after their November victory.

It’s quite apparent that they have forgotten a very important principle.

They work for us. We don’t work for them. This little issue is true for many local elected officials.

But, most local Councilpersons and mayors are term limited.

I’m awfully tired of our Congressmen and women who think their jobs are secure forever.

At least Zach Wamp is leaving Congress. He gets it.

That “housecleaning amendment” looks better each day.

Steve Moore contributes this column and the thoughts and opinions are his and do not necessarily represent those of cookevilletimes.com or the parent company UC Media Group, LLC. If you have an opinion or opposing viewpoint to Steve or have an opinion on anything else, we welcome you comment. Just click e-mail in the top menu bar and send us you thoughts.

From the Associated Press

NEW LONDON, Conn. — Weeds, glass, bricks, pieces of pipe and shingle splinters have replaced the knot of aging homes at the site of the nation’s most notorious eminent domain project.

There are a few signs of life: Feral cats glare at visitors from a miniature jungle of Queen Anne’s lace, thistle and goldenrod. Gulls swoop between the lot’s towering trees and the adjacent sewage treatment plant.

But what of the promised building boom that was supposed to come wrapped and ribboned with up to 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues? They are noticeably missing.

Proponents of the ambitious plan blame the sour economy. Opponents call it a “poetic justice.”

“They are getting what they deserve. They are going to get nothing,” said Susette Kelo, the lead plaintiff in the landmark property rights case. “I don’t think this is what the United States Supreme Court justices had in mind when they made this decision.”

Kelo’s iconic pink home sat for more than a century on that currently empty lot, just steps away from Connecticut’s quaint but economically distressed Long Island Sound waterfront. Shortly after she moved in, in 1997, her house became ground zero in the nation’s best-known land rights catfight.

New London officials decided they needed Kelo’s land and the surrounding 90 acres for a multimillion-dollar private development that included residential, hotel conference, research and development space and a new state park that would compliment a new $350 million Pfizer pharmaceutical research facility.

Kelo and six other homeowners fought for years, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2005, justices voted 5-4 against them, giving cities across the country the right to use eminent domain to take property for private development.

The decision was sharply criticized and created grassroots backlash. Forty states quickly passed new, protective rules and regulations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some protesters even tried to turn the tables on now-retired Justice David Souter, trying unsuccessfully in 2006 to take his New Hampshire home by eminent domain to build an inn.

In New London the city’s prized economic development plan has fallen apart as the economy crumbled.

The Corcoran Jennison Cos., a Boston-based developer, had originally locked in exclusive rights to develop nearly the entire northern half of the Fort Trumbull peninsula.

But those rights expired in June 2008, despite multiple extensions, because the firm was unable to secure financing, according to President Marty Jones.

In July, backers halted fundraising for the project’s crown jewel, a proposed $60 million, 60,000-square-foot Coast Guard museum.

The poor economy meant that donations weren’t “keeping pace with expenses,” said Coast Guard Foundation president Anne Brengle.

The group hopes to resume fundraising in the future, she said.

Overall, proponents say about two-thirds of the 90-acre site is developed, in part because of a 16-acre, $25 million state park. The other third of the land remains without the promised residential housing, office buildings, shops and hotel/conference center facility.

“If there had been no litigation, which took years to work its way through (the court system), then a substantial portion of this project would be constructed by now,” said John Brooks, executive director of the New London Development Corp. “But we are victims of the economic cycle, and there is nothing we can do about that.”

A new engineering tenant is moving into one of the office buildings at 1 Chelsea St., and a bio tech firm with as many as five employees is getting ready to move into an existing building on Howard Street, Brooks said.

Kelo, paid $442,000 by the state for her old property, now lives across the Thames River in Groton, in a white, two-bedroom 1950s bungalow. Her beloved pink house was sold for a dollar and moved less than two miles away, where a local preservationist has refurbished it.

Kelo can see her old neighborhood from her new home, but she finds the view too painful to bear.

“Everything is different, but everything is like still the same,” said Kelo, who works two jobs and has largely maintained a low profile since moving away. “You still have life to deal with every day of the week. I just don’t have eminent domain to deal with every day of the week, even after I ate, slept and breathed it for 10 years.”

Although her side lost, Kelo said she sees the wider ramifications of her property rights battle.

“In the end it was seven of us who fought like wild animals to save what we had,” she said. “I think that though we ultimately didn’t win for ourselves, it has brought attention to what they did to us, and if it can make it better for some other people so they don’t lose their homes to a Dunkin’ Donuts or a Wal-Mart, I think we did some good.”

Scott Bullock, senior attorney for the Institute for Justice, argued Kelo’s case before the Supreme Court. He calls “massive changes that have happened in the law and in the public consciousness” the “real legacy” of Kelo and the other plaintiffs.

The empty land means the city won a “hollow victory,” he said.

“What cities should take from this is to run fleeing from what New London did and do economic development that is market-driven and incorporate properties of folks who are truly committed to their neighborhood and simply want to be a part of what happens,” he said.