BLOOD MONEY

Joseph Tiraco

Microsoft finally wises up. Learns that to get things done in D.C. you bribe, er, I meant to say *lobby* the right people.

- Jessee Berst's Anchor Desk at ZDNet.

Nothing new in the rich and perfumed greasing all the right wheels to roll up big profits. Mayor La Guardia held a life long revulsion of grafty politicians who he labeled, tinhorns and cutthroats, lowest of the low; Achille La Guardia, his father, an army bandleader sent to Cuba during the Spanish-American war, was poisoned to death on tainted rations sold to the government by politically adroit profiteers; food poisoning was the leading cause of American fatalities during that war. Politicians and profiteers are a heartless and very deadly duo.

At Metropolitan Avenue in Queens, some of the world's largest corporations are building a monument to politician-profiteer cooperation; sort of a redolent "eat only canned food and don't drink the water" sick joke once played on fighting GIs revised for megastore employees and shoppers. Under the guise of entry-level job creation, a century of environmental progress is going out the window. On soil so noxious a few good whiffs can send a person to the hospital, a billion dollar shopping mall is rearing its ugly head.

Now who in government could have been *lobbied* to issue building permits on a toxic waste dump? What's a few more casualties to the profiteer-politician axis; if the whole American army could be poisoned in exchange for contributions, who were we but chronic complainers to stand between politicians and a quick buck over mere polluted earth, poisoned groundwater, birth defects, high cancer rates, and premature death in a place as tranquil and green as Queens County?

Are the New York courts immune to profiteer *lobbying?* The Forest Hills homeowner lawsuit was channeled to a lame duck judge who batted not an eyelash while ruling that an obscure newspaper ad made everything perfectly legal.

And, how much *lobbying* was done in Albany to derail the state's environmental machinery? Can deformed babies equate to reelection fund-raising? Sure, if you're ambitious enough. How many liver transplants = 1 public office?

How does the money change hands? Through exemptions in the law which are sold like candy bars to finance private campaigns. The State of New York transferred public land to Home Depot by issuing an exemption to the state's environmental SEQRA laws for the occasion. Home Depot gets to build their monstrosity in a residential community of one and two family homes through an exemption granted by the mayor to New York City's environmental laws know as ULURP. Sports Authority is rising on a toxic waste site through yet another exemption to environmental safeguards. Only the average citizen, the forgotten man, is expected to live by the law; smiling posers and the perfumed are exempt-for a price. Making it all perfectly legal, some black draped pawn ascends the high bench and slaps down outraged dissenters.

What's missing from this picture? Not another dictatorial style iron fisted trains run on time politician, but vivid recollections of the Little Flower and Judge Seabury at work; incorruptible crusaders of yore enlisting powerful newspaper editors to help clean up the rat's nest that is New York politics.

Courts are the constitutional counterbalance to politicians, but judges move in political orbits, belong to the same political organizations, are appointed by politicians or subject to the ballot box and hence owe allegiance to party bosses who control the election machinery; politicians and judges seem two sides of the same coin, and any balance is tenuous at best. It takes exceptional courage to buck the system, and valor is just as rare in judges as in the populous at large.

The so called Separation of Powers (between Executive, Administrative, and Judiciary branches of government) is an 18^th Century catch phrase used to sell the constitution to the public. The founders simply created three broad categories of politicians, and pronounced problems associated with forming a free and just society, a puzzlement perplexing philosophers since the beginning of time, as solved. All they did was divide by three (perhaps a number with religious significance, but three piles of manure smell remarkably similar to the sum total lumped in one gigantic pile.) After two centuries, the defacto separation boils down to a less ethereal and much more confrontational - two, us against them. We the People trying to get through life in spite of all the politicians outlined in all the constitutions piled high, city, state and federal.

Where's the referee for this All American sport of rulers and the ruled butting heads? Who tosses the flags to mark the fouls? Who attempts to keep order in this eerie game with no rules between the masses and their alter egos? Apparently, those paragons of virtue, the public opinion makers: reporters who move in and out of the shadows like Lamont Cranston giving us all the news that's fit to print, and society's Harpies, the on your side television crews. But how important is advertising revenue - the media's counterpart of the political contribution? Can large corporations that traffic in public opinion be influenced by money? Would they actually attack cash customers as a matter of course when the medium can just as easily be filled with sensational crimes, sex scandals and celebrity pictures? Public opinion makers that eschew large blocks of air time and full page ad revenue in favor of the public felicity are every bit as rare as valorous judges. The rationale for accepting money from sources that gain politically by the transaction is remarkably similar on all accounts: politicians, judges, and public opinion makers say the money plays no part in any decision making process, it merely buys something else, like access or good will or ad space or benevolent gifts or inexpressible intangibles. . . something else, not influence, not inducement, not exemption, not editorial opinion; money can't buy these people as it can mere mortals. For politicians and image makers at the zenith of the public eye are gods sitting on high atop massive egos and ordinary forces of nature are beneath them; money is just a way to keep score.

As we delegate our everyday interests to elected representatives, making more time to pursue all this happiness described in the constitution, the government we live by, in order to fulfill our expectations, requires systematic actuation of the rarest commodity on Earth - human virtue. Quite predictably, mediocrity is instead the rule; immoderate ambition escalates the cost of keeping power in private hands exposing to sale all things without distinction, public trust, the law, the land; and sets the countryside into a constant state of rapine in order to pay for election campaigns - this with a better then 98% reelection rate in the State of New York. Imagine the cost of an election process actually competitive? A search for the practical results of the hole we have dug for ourselves returns the reader to the starting point: Metropolitan Avenue in Queens.

Money and land use are the legitimate tools of power, but a tacit understanding woven into the strands of people, privilege, power, self interest comprising the course fabric of republican life maintains that the citizenry are not chattel, and somewhere beneath the intrigue all the actions performed in the public's name will at length advance the public good. Politicians sold for their personal aggrandizement state owned land to Home Depot (a pittance went into the public treasury, large *contributions* went into private pockets.) State land was combined with industrial property to form a 35 acre parcel for a shopping mall. Laws were bent to avoid public accountability on both the city and state level, accommodating the largest lobbying campaign in the city's history with a commensurate share sent to Albany. When the industrial land turned out to be highly toxic, rather then the government intervening to protect public health, which would have meant politicians reneging on *contribution* money deals, government expedited the building process, as if to conceal as quickly as possible the infamy, and the public got short shrift. Not only will the mall owners receive tax writeoffs, but the state will rebuild the Woodhaven Boulevard bridge at public expense and considerable community pain, mainly for the benefit of Home Depot.

To foster on this fairest of communities yet another shopping mall of ubiquitous discount chain stores, about as useful to the community as a second appendix to a healthy mortal, politicians are ready, willing, and able to poison the public. On property where a Reynolds Aluminum plant stood during the Second World War, and was supplanted by industrial buildings whose occupant companies daily poured chemicals into the soil as a method of disposal - on one of the most toxic sites in the state - Sports Authority, waving around exemptions to environmental compliance laws purchased from politicians like Yankee flags captured by Confederate troops, and their partners for the mall Home Depot, are preparing to pour flooring concrete and make a parking lot which will entomb the toxic waste for decades to come. The groundwater is poison. The soil is poison. The air is poison. Trees, shrubs, plants, everything within a 35 acre radius is poison. Yet, building permits hanging in plain sight for all to see flaunt the detestable corruption, and woeful lack of political morality in New York government.

Young women - perhaps your wife or daughter - both living around the site, and who might work in the contaminated buildings (for discount retailers that traditionally have no employee medical plans) when they fall ill or suffer birth defects, and as victims are prone to do, might blame themselves, imagining too much coffee drinking, or enjoying a glass of wine with dinner, or being too close to cigarette smoke, or some other preventable cause, for bringing about their own misfortune; when the blame ascribes to politicians quite willing, even eager to sell their souls for sizable contributions, and to commit atrocities in return for power. Blame too the judges who ratify the act, and public opinion makers who avert their stare for their share. No valor here, and no virtue.

April 25, 1998