Editorials from around New York

Recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New York’s newspapers:

The Jamestown Post-Journal on writing economic growth into New York’s budget when tax collections aren’t increasing.

Nov. 16

New York’s tax receipts aren’t getting any better the further we get into this fiscal year.

Last week, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in a news release that tax collections for the first half of the 2016-17 fiscal year decreased $1.3 billion (3.5 percent) to $36.9 billion from the same period in 2015-16. Personal income tax receipts, the state’s largest source of revenue, were particularly below expectations.

New York isn’t in as poor a fiscal condition as some states. The state has a fund balance of nearly $10 billion, so it’s not as if school aid isn’t going to be disbursed or retirees aren’t going to be paid. But, a chunk of that fund balance is from monetary fines, settlements, forfeitures or restitutions that are supposed to be spent on one-time programs rather than be used to fund yearly obligations. DiNapoli says only $856.9 million of $4.5 billion that was to be transferred into an infrastructure improvement fund has actually been transferred - meaning much of that money is hanging around in the general fund making the bottom line look better than it actually is.

It is good the state isn’t broke, but it will be if state officials continue writing economic growth into the budget when the economy is stagnant. That projected growth was an assumption upon which Gov. Andrew Cuomo based a budget with increased spending. If those tax collection goals can’t be met, then spending must be cut in next year’s budget.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2eFQUsB

The Poughkeepsie Journal on how New York state officials must address the deficiencies with its medical-marijuana program.

Nov. 15

New York has had a tortuous history getting its medical marijuana program running, but now that enlightened effort has been further complicated by a neighboring state legalizing pot altogether.

New York has been considerably behind other states in helping to relieve those suffering with cancer, glaucoma and other serious illnesses.

Two years ago, the state passed medical marijuana legislation, but, in a shortsighted manner, it put more regulatory restrictions on the process and the drug’s use than virtually any other state.

Predictably, those hindrances have become an apparent in the implementation of the law. For instance, only marijuana extracts such as liquid and oil for vaporization and capsules can be made and distributed; neither smoking nor eating it in its raw form is legal in New York. And the state took the unusual route of requiring physicians to complete an educational $250 online course before they can authorize medical marijuana for patients - something not typically applied to other new drugs or other states. As is, there are only five medical marijuana companies with 20 dispensaries in New York state.

State health officials now say they want to double both these numbers. They also intend to increase access by allowing nurse practitioners to administer the drug for certified patients - which would help those living in rural areas - and through home delivery, where the registered companies can offer medical marijuana to patients after undergoing a department review.

Frankly, these policies should have been instituted from the inception. While New York has lumbered along, attitudes toward marijuana have changed across the country and, this election, they hit close to home. Voters in Massachusetts voted to legalize recreation marijuana, and this surely will have an impact on New York, a bordering state. Possession of some pot in Massachusetts will start being legal on Dec. 15, and marijuana shops will begin opening in 2018.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders have said they have no interest in trying to move legalization efforts forward in New York. Perhaps that is the case for now, but, following this year’s election results, seven states - as well as the District of Columbia - now have approved such legislation.

New York can take that fight up another day. For now, state officials have to iron out the obvious deficiencies with the medical-marijuana program and expand it quickly to bring relief to those needlessly in pain.

___

Online:

https://pojonews.co/2fXpu10

The Oneonta Daily Star on the need to respect that Republican Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States but make sure abhorrent policies are challenged.

Nov. 15

So what is it with all these protests over the election of Donald Trump as president?

Are they just a bunch of mostly young, spoiled liberals - some of whom probably didn’t even bother to vote - throwing fits after a fair-and-square plebiscite because they didn’t get their way? Sort of like a child who throws his lollipop onto the carpet, then bawls because he can’t have it anymore?

Or are they for the most part principled youths who want to send a message to the new president that many of the things he espoused during the campaign - including singling out minorities, immigrants and weakening freedom of the press - would not happen without resistance?

We suspect the answer is a good deal of both.

In more than 25 cities, young people, many of whom were “Bernie or Bust” devotees of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and did not vote for Hillary Clinton, woke up last Wednesday to the realization that their health care is in jeopardy because Trump and a Republican-led Congress have vowed to repeal Obamacare. But there are other issues, too.

Last week, about 100 students marched around the SUNY Oneonta campus in a peaceful demonstration.

Junior Kevin Torres of New York City said he was one of the student organizers.

Trump was elected “fair and square,” Torres said. But “we wanted to express some of our concerns” about Trump’s statements about minorities and others. We hope this protest is heard by anyone who would take such actions.”

Demonstrations elsewhere have not been so peaceful. In the liberal bastion of Portland, Oregon, for example, things got ugly. On Saturday, 71 people were arrested, someone was wounded in a shooting, and property was destroyed.

“It was ridiculous,” a former Oneonta resident now living in Portland told The Daily Star outside a business with a boarded-up broken storefront window. “Everything was peaceful, but there was a group of anarchists who don’t care about any issues who did all the rioting. They were just looking for an excuse to make trouble. Everybody else was peaceful.”

She reported that a protest march Sunday was much more sedate, and police said there were no arrests.

In Atlanta, organizers sent out invitations to protest, stating “We do not respect the fact that Trump is president of the United States.”

You will find no newspaper during the campaign more ardent than this one in its condemnation of Donald Trump’s hurtful statements and his utter unpreparedness to be the leader of the free world, but we disagree strongly with that comment by the Atlanta group.

We do respect the fact that Donald Trump is president-elect of the United States. He prevailed in an honest election.

In short, he is our president, and we shall root hard for his success.

But it is also important to remember that the protesters have every First Amendment right to express their views. The Atlanta group’s issues are legitimate.

“No to rape culture,” its posting said. “No to a president that not so subtly romanticizes white supremacy and mourns its loss though we all know it has been alive and well. No to leaders who propagate the destruction of our environment.”

It does not hurt to make sure the new administration knows that abhorrent policies will not go unchallenged, if not in Congress, then in the streets.

No, it does not hurt at all.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2f4w98t

The Albany Times Union on how fracking has led to increasing seismic activity in states including Oklahoma.

Nov. 11

Disasters, whether natural or man-made, don’t care what political party you prefer, or whether you’d rather hug a derrick or a tree.

Just ask the residents and businesses of Cushing, Oklahoma, where dozens of buildings were damaged this past Sunday by a 5.0 magnitude earthquake. It’s the latest quake in a state that’s been dubbed the earthquake capital of America.

Buildings cracked. Ceilings dropped. Bricks rained down on sidewalks from facades.

The reason?

Fracking.

Oh, the oil and gas industry will say these earthquakes weren’t caused by high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing; that the wells from which oil and gas are extracted haven’t been connected to the increasing seismic activity in states like Oklahoma. The responsibility for all those tremblors, we will hear, instead lies with deep wells into which the tens of millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals used in fracking are injected.

That’s sort of like saying that there’s no link between nuclear energy and the problem of where to store nuclear waste. Or that the smell wafting from a farm has nothing to do with cows, only what they leave behind.

Why are we writing about this now? Because following Tuesday’s election, federal energy policy looks likely to take a 180-degree turn backward, dramatically changing America from a nation increasingly using clean, renewable energy to one determined to burn all the oil, gas, and coal it can.

President-elect Donald Trump wants to, in his words, “Unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves.” He calls for opening federal government lands to more oil, gas and coal leasing.

That means more of the problems associated with fossil fuels - more fracking waste fluids to dispose of, more greenhouse gasses, more air pollution. There is, we should note, no such thing at this time as commercial scale “clean coal,” no matter how often politicians use the term.

There is not a word about clean, renewable energy in Mr. Trump’s entire energy policy, and it received only passing mention in his speeches. Perhaps worse, Mr. Trump has mused that global warming is a hoax, perpetrated by China to disadvantage U.S. businesses.

This cavalier denial of science - and such evidence as disappearing shorelines and flooding in U.S. communities as sea levels rise - is astonishing in a person about to assume the presidency. Increasingly, the control of Congress is in the hands of politicians who believe the same - or at least are willing to legislate as if they believe it, for the sake of appeasing their constituents or campaign donors, regardless of the facts.

It’s getting harder all the time, though, to deny the facts, especially when those facts are leaving roads and front yards underwater, and facades falling off buildings on Main Street, in some of the reddest of red states.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/2fYNfnd

The Wall Street Journal on Steve Bannon, Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s “chief strategist.”

Nov. 15

One post-election question is whether Democrats plan to treat defeat as an education in the limits of personal destruction as a political tool, and the early evidence isn’t promising. Witness the Chernobyl over Steve Bannon, who will be President-elect Trump’s “chief strategist” as liberals assail him as a white supremacist and anti-Semite.

Mr. Bannon is the former chairman of the incendiary Breitbart News website, as well as a Goldman Sachs alum, Navy veteran and early investor in “Seinfeld.” He kept a low profile at Donald Trump’s elbow for the final campaign stretch, but according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren at the Journal’s CEO Council on Tuesday, “This is a man who says, by his very presence, that this is a White House that will embrace bigotry.”

We’ve never met Mr. Bannon, and we don’t presume to know his character, but maybe one lesson of 2016 is that deciding that Americans who disagree with you are bigots is a losing strategy. Politics would be healthier if accusations of racism in the country that twice elected the first black President were reserved for more serious use.

We can comment more confidently on Breitbart, whose political priorities and journalistic ethics aren’t ours. Before Mr. Trump’s rise, the site was a hub for 120-decibel screeds against President Obama plus assaults on “the Republican establishment” over immigration, trade and “globalism.” (These columns were a frequent target.) Breitbart became Mr. Trump’s de facto media arm, like much of the mainstream media was Hillary Clinton’s.

“I’m a Leninist,” Mr. Bannon told a profiler for the Daily Beast in 2014. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

He also called Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right” in July, referring to the online movement that sometimes trafficks in racism and anti-Semitism. Breitbart continues to prosecute an especially ugly campaign against the Chobani yogurt company and founder Hamdi Ulukaya for employing Iraqi and Afghan refugees who have qualified to live in the U.S.

Then again, a yellow press is not a new phenomenon and the obligation of the mainstream media is to maintain credibility so readers don’t turn to other options. That so many reporters and editors treated Trump voters like Martian invaders hasn’t helped. But the key point is that Mr. Trump’s political opponents have an interest in exaggerating the alt-right’s influence - which is marginal at best - for the purposes of guilt-by-association. Breitbart publishes offensive items, but we doubt the site will inform the State of the Union address. Internet trolls yearn for their targets to respond so they seem influential, but the best response is usually not to take the bait.

The recent media habit of searching out neo-Nazis, Confederacy nostalgists and other undesirables to opine about Mr. Trump is also a mistake. These voices have long been relegated to the fringes of politics and there’s no reason to give them a soapbox now. Nobody credible was poring over the Daily Stormer until the left found it politically useful.

Mr. Trump’s obligation is to avoid lending the prestige of the White House to this political underbelly. About the worst thing for U.S. democracy would be the legitimization of a white-identity grievance politics, mirroring how the left has polarized racial and sexual tensions to motivate voters. The President must represent all Americans, as Mr. Trump has promised to do.

The political tendency Mr. Bannon represents - and some of the unsavory customers he isn’t responsible for - deserves a watchful eye. Indulging these forces would doom the Trump Presidency, as we hope incoming Chief of Staff Reince Priebus understands.

As chief White House strategist, Mr. Bannon will have to decide how he relates to Breitbart from the West Wing. Will Mr. Bannon now direct the site from afar in a command and enforcement role, like the Kremlin’s RT, and attempt to sow more division within the GOP? Like it or not, Mr. Bannon will need the establishment in Congress to pass Mr. Trump’s agenda, persuade the public and govern successfully. Things didn’t turn out so well for Lenin.

The abiding truth is that partisan propaganda is not a reliable guide to reality, on the right or left. Democrats are now reeling in part because the New York Times, Think Progress, MSNBC, Vox and all the rest told them Mr. Trump could never win. Republicans don’t need a right-wing version.

___

Online:

https://on.wsj.com/2eEBRPz