Month: December 2012

December 29, 2012

Kathy Sheehan announces her run for mayor of Albany, another challenger hovers and the Treasurer’s office is now wide open

The presidential elections are barely over and already the City of Albany is gearing up for a mayoral election. If you don’t want to know about it then too bad. Unless you hide in a box for the next nine months or so, you will hear about it. So you might as well pay attention and you might as well register as a Democrat if you want your vote to count.

I’m talking about the September 2013 Democratic Party Primary, which in the City of Albany and lately in the surrounding suburbs is almost always the deciding election, the November general election being merely a rubber stamp. Once upon a time back in the day the Primary voters always obediently voted for Old Boy Democrats. Occasionally a “dissident Democrat” would challenge the Old Boys and even more rarely win, but that was at most an aberration.

Not any longer. These days a majority of the Democratic Primary voters are a select well-informed and independent group. As we clearly saw this past September, the best way for a candidate to win the Primary with voters like these is to demonstrate competence and a fair mastery of the pressing issues. The candidates in this last Primary who relied on vague slogans and negative attacks were rejected by this select group, and we can expect the same in 2013.

Kathy Sheehan Announces Her Candidacy For Mayor Of Albany, Washington Park, Nov. 17, 2012

The big news on the mayoral front is that City of Albany Treasurer Kathy Sheehan has announced that she is running for mayor. This was not what you would call a surprise to anyone who follows this sort of thing, Ms. Sheehan’s intentions have been common knowledge in political circles for about a year. I would say that she made her official announcement at the earliest possible opportunity, that is, shortly after the presidential elections.

She chose a sunny Saturday afternoon November 17 in front of the Moses statue in Washington Park to announce. I thought that was pretty risky expecting the weather to cooperate like that, but it did. Ms. Sheehan is generally anything but a risk taker, but I suppose if you plan for all the things that you can plan for then it makes the occasional calculated risk plausible. Anyway, she had an indoor venue reserved downtown just in case.

From what I saw and from the photos that I took I would guess that about 250 people came out for the announcement. Some of the same old activists and political junkies were there, but most of the crowd was composed of people that I did not know. If you consider that the people who attend these sort of things are the people who care enough to show up, then this looked like a very good start for her campaign.

Kathy Sheehan Waits For The Applause To Subside

Right near the beginning of her remarks she declared, “Let me make one thing clear. I’m not running against anyone – I’m running for mayor. And with your support I will win.” In fact this was the first thing she said to the crowd after the cheering had subsided after she made the official “I’m Kathy Sheehan and I’m here to announce that I’m running for mayor” statement.

I heard that. For much too long the City has been divided into two camps, those who support the current mayor and those who want to get rid of Him. Not since 1997 have the voters been presented with a convincing alternative to the incumbent, a challenger who can win and who at the very least is capable of running the City. This was certainly true during the last mayoral race in 2009, when two challengers emerged who bumbled and fought with each other and whose campaigns eventually collapsed in penniless ennui, first one then the other.

Ms. Sheehan’s 2013 candidacy is, as they say, a game changer. In her short time as Treasurer she has transformed the office from an embarrassingly old fashioned tool of corruption into an efficient 21st century operation that all of a sudden produces new significant revenue for the City. And she did this without mass layoffs, rather she brought in new managers and shifted longterm employees to other positions without cutting salaries.

One might ask, why wasn’t this done before? I would answer, we’ve never had anyone run the department who thought like this before, and we’ve never had a Treasurer who was strong willed enough to defy the Old Boy political machine. As a long suffering taxpayer, I’d like to see this kind of benign efficiency spread to all departments of City government, and I’d like to see it done as soon as possible.

Kathy Sheehan And Husband Bob Sheehan

But the problems of Albany City government go beyond mere inefficiently run departments. The structural problem is that the departments have no way to communicate with each other except in a limited fashion through the department heads, but mostly the departments must communicate through the executive, the mayor. In current business parlance, each department is stuck in it’s own “silo,” which makes cooperative planning across Albany City government impossible.

As for why we are saddled with this leftover 19th Century model, it is not by accident but it is most certainly by design. Isolation is a form of top down control, if all communication must pass through the mayor’s office then the mayor makes all the interdepartmental decisions and retains total control of everybody and everything inside City Hall. Stifling interdepartmental communication is also a way of preventing alliances from forming that might end up challenging the power at the top.

The Crowd Listens Carefully To Kathy

Kathy Sheehan addressed this issue succinctly in her announcement speech in Washington Park. She cited her experience as a vice president and general counsel (she has a degree from Albany Law) at Intermagnetics, a medical device manufacturer:

When I came to City Hall three years ago, it reminded me of the company I started working for back in 1996. Intermagnetics was a pretty good business, located just up the road in Latham. The problem was we were stuck. We weren’t growing and we were losing out to our competitors. We had a culture that resisted change and wasn’t accountable. When something went wrong, everyone blamed somebody else — some other department.

So I became part of a new leadership team and together, we completely transformed the business by breaking down barriers between departments, empowering our employees and creating a Boundaryless Culture — no more excuses, no more walls, just hard work and a strong drive to deliver excellence every day. I’ve used that experience to professionalize the Treasurer’s office, make property tax collections more efficient and implement collection systems that are accountable and fair to everyone.

December 2, 2012

The 2012 presidential election may have been salvaged by a coalition of online patriots

There are so many local things I ought to be talking about. I’ve even started writing about them. This is, after all, supposed to be a local blog. But I’m still thinking about the presidential election this past November 6.

Yeah sure, for the past three weeks all these high paid important pundits have said all kinds of this that and the other and we’re all tired of hearing it. But a lot of people seem to have been left with a funny feeling about the election, like something important happened that didn’t get explained, something under the surface. I sure felt that way.

Photo That Accompanied President Obama’s Nov. 6 Victory Tweet

We’ve been hearing a lot of chatter from the corporate media about The Demographic Shift. They keep telling us that the White People, if you exclude Hispanics in that category, have statistically been reduced to the status of the major minority. That is the reason, the paid pundits tell us, why that social climber Mitt Romney and that nasty peckerhead teabagger Paul Ryan lost to the incumbent’s brilliantly conducted campaign that “reached out” to the non-white minorities.

Whatever. The truth is that a lot of the White People in this country, such as me, ceased to think of White as “normal” a long time ago. As a famous comedian pointed out, Mr. Obama fits the accepted standard template of a White Person almost precisely, while his lily white challengers came off looking like a bizarre freak show. “If you want a white president,” said Chris Rock, “I’ve got a polo-wearing, Hawaii living, home beer brewing, league bowling guy for you.”

But shortly after the election I heard about something utterly extraordinary… could it be true? Did a group of hackers swoop down at the precise right moment and set things right, thus allowing the majority to assert itself in the voting booth? Was The Empire saved from destroying itself by a voluntary association of true patriots?

Does Barack Obama owe his re-election to Anonymous?

Spokesperson From Anonymous Delivers A Pre-Election Warning To Karl Rove

About a week before the November 6 election Anonymous issued a video warning to Republican Party Boss Karl Rove. “We are watching you, we know that you will attempt to rig the election.” The spokesperson in the video then declared that “If we catch you we will turn over all of the data to the appropriate officials in the hopes that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

I’m sure that Rove was less than impressed with the threat of informing the authorities of his scheme to subvert the voting tallies on Election Day. After all, he is the authorities. True, back in 2008 his vote rigging scheme was exposed and stopped by court order a day before the presidential election, but he was never prosecuted. (Personally, I think he should have been executed for treason with a bullet to the head – after a fair trial of course. Not kidding about that.)

But consider that neither the extreme right-wing Democrats nor the Anti-American Republicans have ever done anything on a federal level to combat electronic vote rigging. Ever. That’s the consequence of having a one party system in this country, the two subsidiaries of the Ruling Party are not allowed to seriously compete with each other. As a result neither branch of the ruling party can challenge fundamental corruption by the other.

Now, is what I’m about to tell you a conspiracy theory or an elaborate hoax concocted by a bunch of jokers? Maybe. We’ll probably never quite know for sure. But I’ll just say that this account is not only very, very plausible, it’s the only explanation that fits the available observable facts.

Boss Rove Still In Denial Late In The Day (11:43 EST)

We all remember what happened late in the evening on November 6 around 11:13 PM. Karl Rove, live and on the air in Rupert Murdoch’s FOX “News” studios had a complete meltdown. It seems that FOX was the very last corporate network to call the State of Ohio for Mr. Obama, a call which more than clinched the victory for the President. In response Rove displayed what could only be described as a hissy fit, declaring that a batch of uncounted votes from the southern precincts of Ohio would suddenly change the predicted result. Say what?

It was close to midnight when Mitt Romney finally emerged from hiding to face the world and give a less than gracious concession speech between clenched teeth. Paul Ryan reportedly wandered about shellshocked. Both of their Stepford spouses blubbered conspicuously, not with despair but with what looked to me like rage.

In the next few days it became well known that all of the top Gops and their corporate sponsors were absolutely open mouth shocked by Romney and Ryan’s failure to win. Cyberspace was choked with comments and videos from devastated Republican Party voters who had picked up on that top of the heap confidence. All this certainty in the outcome despite pre-election polling that showed the President leading handily, or at least slightly ahead. Disappointment, yes, but why would anyone be shocked and surprised?

The Phony Brooks Brothers Media Riot In 2000, Numbers In Photo ID Re-pub Politicians And Paid Staffers Demanding Florida Stop Counting Votes. Why? To Buy Time? For What?

Funny thing about that. Independent minded people with long memories will recall that the top Gops displayed the same sort of confidence in the outcome on Election Day in 2004 and again back in 2000. Late in the day after the polls closed they confidently declared that a batch of mysteriously uncounted votes would turn up in certain key “battleground” states that would favor the Re-pub candidate, Dubya. By golly these votes appeared exactly as they said they would, and in 2000 and 2004 those bad boys smirked their way into the White House and hardly anyone complained.

In 2008 we found out how the vote total fraud worked in 2004. The vote totals from most of Ohio’s voting precincts were transmitted over the web to the Secretary of State’s office in Columbus to be tabulated. Supposedly this transmission over the web was secure from hackers, but there was nothing in place to prevent a partisan like Rove from diverting the transmission into a fraudulent server.

Rove had set up an alleged “back-up system” for electronic vote counting after the polls closed, run by a supposedly private contractor called Govtech Solutions LLC, which in turn contracted for Smartech Corp. of Tennessee. Well sure enough there was a brief outage during the vote count, GovTech came on line and soon all those favorable votes appeared and tipped Ohio into the Re-pub column. Very simple classic vote manipulation gone cyber.

In 2004 this received zero coverage from the corporate media. But a group of outraged voters from Ohio sued in Federal court citing the RICO criminal conspiracy statute, a case called King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell. It seems that GovTech was owned by Rove’s personal IT guru, a fellow named Michael Connell. It was, as a lawyer put it, “an outrageous conflict of interest,” to put it mildly.

Michael Connell’s Plane That "Ran Out Of Gas."

The complex case dragged on for three years, but the upshot is that on the day before Election Day 2008 US District Judge Solomon Oliver agreed and ordered the “backup system” be taken offline for the next day election. Mr. Connell gave the star testimony, from a later interview it appears that after a lot of soul searching he decided that rigging elections was not the best way to get into heaven. From McClatchy newspapers:

A 2004 election-night computer architecture map for Blackwell’s office appears to suggest that as many as 51 of Ohio’s 88 counties periodically sent their results to the secretary of state’s office… SMARTech appears to have had the ability to intercept election returns before they were publicly disclosed… Connell’s appearance, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, culminated weeks of jockeying over his testimony, amid unsubstantiated allegations that he’s been subjected to threats of retaliation if he tells all he knows.