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CAPITOL
Legislative pay raises a tough sell for Silver
Some lawmakers say timing is wrong in rocky economic times
BY MICHAEL GORMLEY The Associated Press

    Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has taken on some tough cases as a trial lawyer. But this time he’s defending an unsympathetic client, with a questionable case, to a jury that is less than trustful.
    Silver is making the case for pay raises for state legislators, the vast majority of whom have been eking out a living for years on $100,000 or more for the part-time job.
    The average job in New York pays about $45,820.
    The Manhattan Democrat, however, made his opening argument to reporters last week about the issue that has been on the negotiating table for a year, and which passed the Republican-led Senate last year. A bill would create an independent commission to set a raise and perhaps a regular progression of raises.
    “I’m proud to say I support it,” Silver said.
    Most other lawmakers have been silent or have issued statements ranting against the raises at a time when the economy is struggling and programs their voters care about are being trimmed.
    “There are many legislators who work very hard, who work extremely long hours and it’s not just the days of session here in Albany,” Silver argued. “I think many of their constituents know they are available to them on a 24-hour basis to respond to their needs.”
    By law, lawmakers can’t raise their own salaries. So in the past, lawmakers have waited until after they are re-elected. They come back to Albany in December for a special session and voted to raise the salary of the next sitting Legislature. Then the lawmakers — 95 percent of whom win re-election in part because the system heavily favors incumbents — can start collecting the pay raise a couple weeks later, when the new two-year session begins in January.
    And this is a legislative election year.
    “The one thing I think voters are cynical about is, is trying to hide action in the middle of the night,” Silver said. “I’m not going to vote ‘no,’ and if I’m lucky enough to be re-elected, quietly go get the increased check and deposit it in my checking account. I’m not going to grandstand.”
    The base pay for a state legislator is $79,500, second only to Michigan and California. Each legislator also gets at least $8,800 for attending the January to June session along with per diem expenses. There are also days in Albany devoted to committee meetings, hearings and office days, which also each draw $143 a day.
    Per diems are for lodging and meals for out-of-towners, although the old saying in Albany is if a lawmaker is picking up a check, something is wrong. For decades, lobbyists picked up the checks. But after public outrage forced some reforms of state government in recent years, that spending is limited. So lobbyists now often cover those dinners through payments to campaigns.
    More than half of lawmakers also get a few thousand to more than $30,000 more in stipends for committee posts and other “leadership positions” such as speaker or majority leader in each house. For example, even a Republican member of the small and mostly powerless GOP minority conference gets at least $9,000 more for being a “ranking minority member” of a committee.
    Few measures have such bipartisan support as the pay raise bill, at least privately. But it’s hard to stand up and call for a raise when you’re making two or three times as much as a voter who helps decide whether you keep your job.
    It’s particularly hard this election year. Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a millionaire, is calling for reduced growth in spending in the face of a $4.4 billion deficit and tough economic times. A week ago The Buffalo News editorialized against it: “They are already among the country’s most highly paid state lawmakers and they have done virtually nothing to merit an increase.”
    So Silver, who is secure in the seat he’s held since 1976 — and in the speaker’s job that he’s held for more than a decade — is the logical standard bearer for a pay raise.

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As the chief officer of one house of a state legislature known for its political inertia (the 2005 New York state budget was the first in 20 years to pass the Assembly on time), Silver has often been criticized as characteristic of the inside power structure of New York State government. During the administration of Governor George Pataki, Silver was criticized for participating in a "three men in a room" system of government in which Silver, the governor, and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno exercised nearly all control over government business in the state. So far it has not become evident if this system will continue with the new governor, Eliot Spitzer, who has been highly critical of this arrangement.

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Sheldon Silver, a creep, a fraud, and a Member of the New York State Assembly
Ever wonder why you cannot find an affordable apartment in New York City? Sheldon Silver is your man. Ever wonder why the New York City Subways are overcrowded, dirty and disgusting? Ask Sheldon Silver.
Who is this slimy creep whose picture is on the right? This disgusting excuse for a human being is the man who forces the city to continue with a system which almost nobody wants and which enables a few fat cats to stay rich, while the rest of us residents of this city must suffer.

Sheldon Silver

The name for the disgusting system which this slimy creep enforces is called RENT CONTROL.

It does not bother me so much that rent control benefits a relative handful of extremely wealthy people who want to keep all their money. If I were rich like they are, I would want to keep all my money too!

What bothers me is that the creepy slimeball Sheldon Silver claims to represent the poor downtrodden masses yearning to breathe free. Every time someone talks about abolishing rent control, Sheldon Silver produces some gnarled 86 year old woman who is living on her monthly pension check of $286.43 per month, and who will have to go sleep on the street if her rent is raised.

This is a fraud. There are 71,000 rent controlled apartments in New York City. Hardly any of them are occupied by poor people and very few are occupied by the elderly.

In reality, the typical owner of a rent controlled apartment lives in a high rise apartment building on the Upper East Side, which is the most exclusive neighborhood where the richest people in New York City live (and where Sheldon Silver lives too) and pays $136.49 per month for a three-bedroom apartment in a luxury building, which the tenant of record in turn sublets to somebody else for $5,000 per month while the tenant in name only lives on the French Riviera.

This scam of living in a supposedly rent controlled apartment in the Upper East Side and receiving or paying rent to another tenant is so common that almost everybody does it.

This is the reason that the number of 71,000 rent controlled apartments never goes down. These people who have these apartments live forever. If someone dies, another person by the same name immediately appears.

Now, our evil monster mayor (You know his name. He may be a monster and a Fascist but at least he is not a Communist) wants to build the famous Second Avenue subway line.

Famous? Why?

Famous because this line was supposed to have been built in about 1953. Sheldon Silver has been holding it up and preventing this line from being built.

For those of you who have not kept up with the latest developments on this, it goes like this:

Here in New York, we used to have what was known as the "L". This was an elevated line which started in the Bronx, came down Second Avenue to Wall and William Streets, turned around and went back up First Avenue to the Bronx.

As that time, New York City was ruled by a man named Robert Moses. He was not the mayor. He was something far more important: The Parks Commissioner. New York City has a lot of parks and they were all under the iron fist of Robert Moses.

The long suffering people of this metropolis did not really like the "eL" because bums slept under it and property values went down. Therefore, they voted a $500 million bond issue. These millions of dollars were raised to tear down the L and dig a subway line in its place.

This project was half way completed. The part that was completed was that they tore down the L in 1956. They never built the subway.

What happened to the money? No. Sheldon Silver did not steal it. What happened was: Robert Moses decided to join the Brooklyn Yacht Club. He submitted his application and of course he was well recommended because HE CONTROLLED THE CITY OF NEW YORK.

However, the Brooklyn Yacht Club turned him down and denied him membership. They had a good reason. The reason was that he was Jewish. (As good a reason as any!)

For some reason, Robert Moses did not take kindly to this decision, so he decided to build a highway right through all the land owned by the Brooklyn Yacht Club. The name of this highway Moses built was the BQE.

So, the next time you are riding down the BQE and you happen to notice that you are traveling right above where the boats are docked, remember that Robert Moses built it like that so that the members of the Brooklyn Yacht Club would have no place to park their yachts.

But Robert Moses needed money to build his highway over the yacht club. Where did he get the money? Easy. He took the money which had been raised to build the Second Avenue Subway. He used that money to build the BQE instead.

What has this to do with Sheldon Silver? (Remember that he is the sleazy creep we are talking about.) Here is what the New York Times said about Sheldon on September 29, 1999:

"New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority said on Tuesday that it planned to spend $1.6 billion for a new Long Island Rail Road tunnel to Grand Central Terminal and $700 million to restart the long-dormant Second Avenue subway project.

'The proposals, in the M.T.A.'s five-year capital plan, still face scrutiny in Albany, where Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has warned that he may block the plan because it favors suburban commuters."

"Favors suburban commuters"!? What a load of crap! Sheldon doesn't want it built because according to the plan it goes through HARLEM. You see, that it where those BLACK PEOPLE live. Sheldon knows that if the subway starts in Harlem and comes down Second Avenue, that will bring those black people into the same neighborhood where those fine, decent, upstanding and respectable white people, including himself, live.

The Second Avenue subway tunnel has already been dug, but only from 125th Street to 124th Street in Harlem. Sheldon Silver plans to leave it that way.

Sam Sloan

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[i]
Government is supposed to serve us.

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  Unfortunatly, the pickins are slim.

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That sorta defeats the logic our current town board is using to support their argument for a raise, doesn't it?  Like I've been saying, the salary isn't going to attract any better.  If that were the case we'd have the best of the best serving us at the higher levels of government and clearly we don't.

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Kaye presses for judicial pay hike
Chief judge says she'll sue if the state's judges don't get first raise in nearly a decade

By ROBERT GAVIN, Staff writer  
First published: Tuesday, April 1, 2008

ALBANY -- Calling it a "shameful" embarrassment, Chief Judge Judith Kaye threatened to sue state leaders Monday if New York's judges don't get pay raises for the first time since 1999.
"We have achieved a record -- and it's a shameful, disgraceful record," Kaye, the state's top-ranked judge, told an estimated crowd of 125 at the New York State Bar Association. "Never again should the judges have to endure this."
     
Kaye, chief of the state Court of Appeals, said first-year associates at large law firms make more money than do seasoned judges. She said New York ranks near the national bottom in judicial compensation. Meanwhile, she noted that federal judges, who make considerably more than their state counterparts, consider their own situation a "crisis."
State Supreme Court judges earn $136,700-a-year, while those at the federal level make $169,200, supporters of Kaye's cause said.
Kaye questioned why state lawmakers have consistently tied judicial pay raises to their own salary hikes, effectively holding the proposal "trapped in Albany politics."
"The legislative pay raises are none of my business," Kaye said. "Let them figure that out for themselves."
Kaye expressed exasperation with state lawmakers constantly telling her they support her cause, only to do nothing. There are proposals in both houses of the legislature to increase jurists' pay, but lawmakers haven't reached an agreement.
Bernard Nussbaum, a lawyer working at zero cost on Kaye's behalf, said he's prepared to argue a lawsuit -- and place Gov. David Paterson, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Joseph L. Bruno all on the witness stand.
"Let them explain this hostage-taking," he said.