New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson Has Served New Rochelle in a “Thousand Honest Ways”

Jason Millman, writing in The Hill, exposes how a Washington politician sought to keep secret a provision of the Obama Health Care bill. The New York Times got hold of memos from Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and published them the day after Christmas.

Democrat regrets language in memo on ‘death panels’ that reignited debate

In the memo, first reported on Dec. 26 by The New York Times, Blumenaeur’s office expressed concern that new attention to end-of-life care planning could doom an end-of-life provision included in a Medicare regulation issued last month.

“Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response,” the memo read. “The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

This post is not about Blumenauer or Obama or the Health Care Bill or The New York Times.

It is about the modus operandi of certain politicians who are anti-good government, who do not believe in transparency, who prefer government to operate in the dark, how they seek to do that and how they plot and plan to attack if caught.

Of particular note is Blumenauer writing “it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it”. This is the primary goal, to deceive, to kick the can down the road in the certain knowledge that “The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it. Politicians like this one actively seek to keep public information hidden or obscured. The hope being that the politician can slip a fast one past the public to get some law passed when would not have support if brought forward for public discussion.

Even more pernicious is the plotting and planning for a response if caught. Blumenauer says ominously “we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response”. Keep a close watch on what? Bloggers and reporters who begin to report on this “hidden” section of the law. And what will they do to these bloggers and reporters? Attack! “we…may be calling on you”, he says. For what? “…a rapid, targeted response”, he says.

Now, this is hardly news that politicians operate that way. What Blumenauer is doing in seeking to push through this particular provision of the Health Care Bill is blatantly anti-democratic, the sort of corrupt, deceitful, machinations that are all too common.

So why bring it up?

The Blumenauer memo provides a perfect illustration that infects the minds of career politicians. They are willing to do anything to advance their agenda, reward their loyal supporters and gain a political advantage even if that means corrupting the political process and even breaking the law. New Rochelle’s current political leadership in a nutshell under the Idoni-Bramson regime.

The goal of our twin governments — the City of New Rochelle and the City School District of New Rochelle — is to hide information from the public so they can advance their agenda in secret all while stealing your money and gouging you with the highest taxes in America. Like Senator Thomas Paine in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, these men and women claim they serve their constituents in a “thousand honest ways”. If you ask him, this would be Mayor Bramson’s excuse for allowing men like Domenic Procopio to serve as Chairman of the Municipal Civil Service Commission or appointing Procopio’s son to an important City Commission or allowing the decades-long corruption in the Department of Public Works or the falsification of building records by Senior Building Inspectors. “Yes, but look at all the good things I’ve done like installing bike racks at City Hall and clearing lilly-pads from a pond near my own home.”

It would be the Mayor’s excuse for attempting to sneak a home rule bill through the New York State Assembly so he could tear down the New Rochelle Armory to benefit a wealthy developer currently under investigation by the Department of Justice for the activities in nearby Yonkers.

See if Blumenauer’s memo sounds familiar now?

Once “press or blogs” had “discovered” his maneuver to destroy the New Rochelle Armory to clear the way for Forest City/Ratner’s Echo Bay Project, a project Bramson shilled for like a carnival barker, Bramson was ready with his “rapid, targeted response” which included sending his fellow Democrats on the City Council as attack dogs. The following Monday, Barry Fertel went on WVOX to accuse me and this site of being anti-semitic by attributing words I have never wrote to me. Three days later Marianne Sussman went on WVOX to call for my being banned from the WVOX airwaves. Those were the obvious public responses.

Less obvious but perhaps more dangerous for our democracy, according to two reliable sources, Bramson instructed City Clerk Bennie Giles to obstruct my requests for public records. Bennie Giles became City Clerk in January 2010. After initially getting cooperation from Giles, who serves at the pleasure of a City Council controlled by Bramson, records were suddenly being withheld. Deny it all he wants (and he surely will) the drought in complying with my Freedom of Information Law requests began at the time of the “TORA! TORA! TORA!” article and continued up until recently when Giles was cut out of the loop by the City Manager. These sources have informed me that it was Bramson who ordered Giles not to provide public records to Talk of the Sound. Just to be clear, it is a crime to withhold public records and a crime to order public records to be withheld.

The impropriety of the failure to comply with New York State law is so extreme as to be comical.

Among the records Bramson has sought to withhold from Talk of the Sound are records related to the DPW including a truck that has “gone missing” for four years, Bramson’s pet project, the hybrid garbage truck and the trucks that are now the subject of the DA investigation. The Green Garbage Truck, the leading edge of Bramson’s GreeNR plans for New Rochelle, has been such a colossal failure that Bramson cannot afford to have the public learn how hundreds of thousands of dollars was spent on a truck that delivered close to know fuel savings, ran mostly as a diesel vehicle due to a broken electrical system and is, at this time, sitting idle in the City Yard because the truck will not run, as has often been the case. The Green Garbage Truck is now a quarter-million dollar paperweight and the Mayor cannot have the public knowing that his first GreeNR project ended in a huge waste of taxpayer money, no fuel savings and left NeW Rochelle with nothing more than an useable hunk of rusting metal.

People often wonder why Talk of the Sound makes such a big deal about FOIL. It’s simple really. The bedrock upon which are democracy operates is that we have an informed electorate. The foundation which sits on that bedrock is the Freedom of Information Law and the Open Meeting Law; without them the only source for information about the function of our governments at all levels is the word of self-interested politicians and bureaucrats. Not surprisingly there is often a conflict between the actual records and what these people claim. Unlike people living in a totalitarian state, we are not required as Americans to accept the governments version of events. We have a right to see for ourselves. It is this right that people like Mayor Noam Bramson and City Clerk Bennie Giles as well as Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak and the Board of Education seek to take away. They are the forces for secret government, back-room details and a culture of corrupt bargaining through which New Rochelle residents are cheated as men like Vito Costa, Frank Demasi, Richard Fevang and many others seek to steal everything not nailed down.

Frank Capra’s fictional Senator Paine sums this up nicely to Jimmy Stewart’s character, Jefferson Smith, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”:

I was hoping you’d be spared all this. I was hoping that you’d see the sights, absorb a lot of history, and go back to your boys. Now you’ve been living in a boy’s world, Jeff, and for heaven’s sakes, stay there! This is a man’s world. It’s a brutal world Jeff, and you’ve no place in it. You’ll only get hurt. Now take my advice. Forget Taylor and what he said. Forget you ever heard of the Willet Creek Dam…I know it’s tough to run head-on into facts but, well as I said, this is a man’s world Jeff, and you’ve got to check your ideals outside the door, like you do your rubbers. Thirty years ago I had your ideals. I was you. I had to make the same decision you were asked to make today. And I made it. I compromised – yes! So that all those years, I could sit in that Senate and serve the people in a thousand honest ways. You’ve got to face facts, Jeff. I’ve served our state well, haven’t I? We have the lowest unemployment and the highest federal grants. But, well, I’ve had to compromise. I’ve had to play ball. You can’t count on people voting. Half the time they don’t vote anyway. That’s how states and empires have been built since time began. Don’t you understand? Well Jeff, you can take my word for it. That’s how things are. Now I’ve told you all this because, well I’ve grown very fond of you. About like a son, in fact. And I don’t want to see you get hurt.

Smith, initially defeated by Paine and driven from the Senate in disgrace, returns, tells the truth over and over for hours until he cannot stand any longer and in the final climactic scene confronts Paine with his own words spoken as a younger, idealistic man who once fought for “Lost Causes” just like Smith and Smith’s father who along with Paine were known as the “Twin Champions of Lost Causes”.

Maybe New Rochelle is a lost cause. But I don’t care if all of the armies of the Bramsons and Klugmans and Generosos and Procopios and Bulfantes and Polows and their cronies come marching into City Hall. Not only will somebody listen, they are already listening. And to those anti-democratic, self-serving, corrupt leeches who have been sucking this City dry for decades. Your days are numbered. The soon-to-be-handed-down indictments in the DA investigation of the DPW will be another nail in the coffin, an investigation that has already spread to a second City department and several Counties in New York and the State of New Jersey (i.e., a federal case). The corruption in the Municipal Service Commission is becoming plain to see as is the corruption in the BoE Security and Buildings and Grounds departments.

We don’t need men and women who serve New Rochelle in a “Thousand Honest Ways” but check their ideals outside the door, prepared to “compromise” with the forces of evil and corruption in our City. They need to go and now is the time.