Why Westchester County should vote Democrat.

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Today (Tuesday),  the New York state senate has two by-elections. Should the Democrats win, New York state will be under unified Democrat control; the governor’s mansion and lower house are already blue, but the senate is still mostly Republican. One of the senate races is a safe-Democrat Bronx seat. So the only election that matters is the other race, taking place in Westchester County.

For British residents, the idea that Westchester County could be a tossup may seem baffling. The county is immensely rich. And unlike some wealthy inner-city neighbourhoods, it has very little poverty. It would be a bit like Surrey or Buckinghamshire being on the verge of voting Labour- simply unthinkable. And yet it will probably happen. Here’s why it should:

  1. Trump. The president loves to boast of his popularity. Voting Democrat in an area Republicans ought to be competitive in sends a very strong signal of how unpopular Trump really is, particularly in his home state.
  2. Avoiding gridlock. Having a unified state government allows more to get done. With a gridlocked government, urgent reforms tend not to get through. Since there’s no chance of the House or governorship going Republican, the only way to avoid gridlock is to make the Senate Democratic as well.
  3. Education. New York state spends more on education than any other state. While that doesn’t guarantee better results, it can certainly help. Voting Democrat keeps it that way.
  4. The environment. Pollution in the New York urban area is appalling. Although the Westchester Republican candidate, Julie Killian, has a decent record on environmental matters, she still represents a party largely in denial of climate change and unconcerned at the effects of pollution.
  5. Infrastructure. New York’s infrastructure is in desperate need of an upgrade. Not only are the roads falling apart, the subway is under immense pressure as well. Voting Democrat is more likely to result in infrastructure spending. Nationally, Trump talks of infrastructure spending, but has yet to commit any money. It’s unlikely a Republican administration in New York would do much to fix the problem.
  6. A commitment to the community. Westchester shouldn’t feel ashamed to be successful. But that success doesn’t exist only because its residents are harder working and more talented than anyone else. The county depends on the state to run a lot of its services. It also depends on working class and mostly black and Hispanic people to do the less attractive but necessary jobs- cleaning, waitering, plumbing etc. Voting Democrat shows a commitment to New York as a whole, including the less fortunate.
  7. Attracting the right sort of rich people. Let’s face it, America has two sorts of rich people. There are the liberal rich, who tend to work in the tech sector or in the media. With their excessive weed smoking and obsession with organic food, they can be highly infuriating from the perspective of the average American. But they are far better than the other sort of rich people, the conservative rich. These are the sort of people who spend too much time playing golf, own needlessly big cars (which they don’t drive well), and talk about how much God has blessed them (never mind the billions of people God has chosen not to bless for some reason.) They believe poverty isn’t much of a problem in America, but that their taxes are way too high (their taxes are amongst the developed world’s lowest.) Voting Democrat is a good way to get rid of them.
  8. De-radicalising the Democratic Party. There is a small minority of ultra-socialist Democrats who would like the party to become an exclusively working class outfit. They admire Cuba and Venezuela more than Denmark or Germany. For these people, having wealthy supporters is a sign of weakness and excessive moderation. If Westchester County votes Democrat, the American far-left becomes less powerful. Which is a good thing, both in terms of future electability and the quality of public policy.
  9. Reforming the Republican Party. If places like Westchester County vote Democrat, the party will have an impenetrable coalition of wealthy, college educated whites and ethnic minorities. Long-term, the Republicans can’t rely on working class whites alone- their proportion of the population is in serious decline. Voting Democrat now forces the Republicans to think about the future. This will hopefully mean a GOP that comes up with a serious policy platform to appeal to a broader range of people, instead of indulging the base with people like Trump.

 

Parking pests

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A new phenomenon is disturbing my usual peace of mind. I refer to the habit that has recently caught on whereby visitors to our neighborhood, either from Maryland or Virginia, park on our block and sit there in the car, engrossed in their cellphones or computers, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Two hours has been observed. Early for an appointment? A quiet period away from the wife and kids? I don’t know but the point is that they keep the car engine running throughout, ticking over for an hour or more. I don’t know whether this is bad for the car, but it is for me. Our block is already busy with traffic, and these parkers are fouling the air, sitting there with the engines running. The air quality in this large city is already famously bad, and here we are having to endure even more smelly fumes. I suppose it is an indication of the single-minded concentration of modern man on himself, and a total indifference to the health and well-being of the residents, fellow human beings, living close to his parking spot.

Am I getting over-fussy or is this plain thoughtless and selfish? Whatever your reaction, mine is a disturbance of what should be ataraxic retirement.

Is NewYork doomed?

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New York should prepare for 15-metre storm surges by 2300. Much worse is yet to come. Climate change will bring good news and really bad news for New York City. The good news is that hurricanes might be more likely to miss the city over the next three centuries. This means the future risk of big storm surges, relative to local sea level, could be lower than today. However, the really bad news is that if we don’t slash greenhouse gas emissions, local sea level will rise by a huge 13 metres or more. With this factored in, New York could be facing storm surges at least 15 metres above the current sea level by 2300 (PNAS, doi.org/cfgw).

“Sea level rise itself is a very big hazard, before you start to look at tropical cyclones,” says Andra Garner of Rutgers University in New Jersey. Garner’s team used climate models to simulate the paths of future hurricanes and the storm surges they will produce. These were combined with estimates of sea level rise. They conclude that 2.3-metre floods, which happened in New York on average once in 500 years before 1800, struck roughly every 25 years from 1970 to 2005, will probably hit every five years by 2030 to 2045. If we don’t cut emissions, local sea level could permanently rise by 2.3 metres before the century ends. What’s more, meteorologist Jeff Masters of Weather Underground says the good news part could be wrong: at least one study shows climate change will make hurricanes more likely to hit the north-east US. (New Scientist)

London long ago built a flood barrage downstream from the city. It was contraversial at the time, but the flood gates have already been used, and will be used more often as sea levels rise. If Europe can protect against flooding why hasn’t something similar been done in New York, where seaside houses, damaged by hurricane Sandy have been renovated, when these same residential neighborhoods should have been relocated inland? These people who now enjoy nice sea views will only have further flooding disasters to look forward to. Conclusion: don’t threaten your ataraxia by moving to the seaside a house on a hill is the smart thing to look for.

Standing up to the bullies

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“If you want a classic formulation from our new Gilded Age, here it is, as described recently in the Guardian: “A head-on assault on teachers for their long summer vacations would ‘sound tone-deaf when there are dozens of videos and social media posts going viral from teachers about their second jobs [and] having to rely on food pantries.’” That’s advice for what not to criticize in a “messaging guide” produced by the State Policy Network (SPN), an “alliance” of 66 right-wing “ideas factories,” funded by the Koch Brothers, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), and the DeVos family (that is, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s billionaire relatives and Amway heirs). It’s part of a right-wing stealth strategy for finding just the right approach to discrediting America’s restive red-state teachers, chafing under seemingly never-ending tax-cut regimes in states like Oklahoma, programs sponsored by those same plutocratics. As an approach to governing, such tax-cutting, now decades old, has been a giveaway to the rich (just as Donald Trump’s recent tax “reform” bill will be). When it comes to what formerly were known as public schools (what the right now calls “government schools,”) the results have been catastrophic. Oklahoma, for instance, has cut per-student funding by 28% in the last decade.

“In the past, SPN went after the unions, who are fought an inequality gap that has recently come close to reaching the record heights of the previous Gilded Age in 1913. Now, however, it’s those ungrateful striking teachers that are SPN’s target and for good reason. In red states like Arizona, Kentucky, and West Virginia, their recent protests, walkouts, and strikes in favor of saving schools that have been put on a financial starvation diet (like teachers’ salaries) and increasingly lack everything, even in a few cases the time to teach. They are beginning to shake up state politics, and not in ways that either those billionaires or the Republican Party much likes. After all, those teachers teach… well, students (from whom we’ve heard quite a bit recently)… and those students, unbelievably enough, have… parents, and when you add up those teachers, parents, and students (future voters all), they turn out to be a group with the kind of numerical heft that billionaires, despite the way they’ve been multiplying year by year in this country, lack.” (Tomgram 4/19/2018, reporting on a Guardian article).

And yet… ordinary citizens in states like Arizona, Kentucky and West Virginia continue to vote for a political party that is in hock to the grabitocracy and gives every appearance of despising “schooling” (education being another thing altogether – you have to learn how to learn before you begin a true education). Were Epicurus alive today I am convinced that he would want us to give priority to having the best schools, the best teachers, an informed populace and an ability to think for oneself. One can’t help concluding, however, that some people with extreme right-wing views don’t believe in school at all, but want a compliant and ignorant electorate that watches Fox News and does what it’s told. This could end very badly, but then if you are taught no history you have no idea what could be in store for you.