Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

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The roundabout at Rte 7 and Rte 146 hasn't held up traffic nor emergency vehicles.  If anything, it has greatly reduced the rush hour headaches.

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Something smells rotten with centralized dispatch center siting


    I read with great interest your March 29 story on the Rotterdam Town Board meeting where a new police department building was discussed.
    In that article was the fact that the Unified Communications Center (Schenectady County’s new central dispatch) was incorporated in both locations they proposed. They also stated that Rotterdam would save $260,000 a year for its residents by having this arrangement.
    I am presently a dispatcher in the town of Glenville, and when we saw and reviewed the request for proposals for the new center, we noted there was a waiting area and a walk-up window. We all questioned this, as the center was supposed to be stand-alone, with no police or fi re infl uences, and a non-descript building. With this article now published, we see that from the beginning it was going to be incorporated into Rotterdam’s building plan.
    I really find it outrageous, especially from a taxpayer’s point of view, that all towns were not afforded this same opportunity to “bid” on a new building with combined services. Glenville and Scotia both need new buildings and may have been able to also offer this same setup to save our residents money. Possibly Niskayuna, the city of Schenectady or even Princetown may have wanted to put together a package for this as well.
    I really find it odd that the legislator who spearheaded central dispatch, Tony Jasenski, a retired police administrator from Rotterdam and chairman of the Rotterdam Democratic Party, never mentioned that this project encompassed a new public safety building for Rotterdam, even when dispatchers questioned why there was a waiting room and walk-up window. Both of these services will need to be replaced at present locations with added personnel when dispatchers leave.
    I feel other town administrations, the city of Schenectady, and all county taxpayers should be outraged that they were hoodwinked with this whole project,

    DAVID GALLUP
    Scotia

Quoted from rollarama

It's NOW OR NEVER Rotterdam.  Monday, April 8th, 7pm, Rotterdam Sr Citizens Ctr Hamburg St.  Be there for this important meeting.  We ALL NEED TO GET INVOLVED

Quoted from GrahamBonnet

be real (cost of current bldg rehab)

will never be considered

need to go w Galesi

will delay it as long as possible to appease Hamburgers

Hamburgers will forgive democraps as always and "wait" for the next promise to be fulfilled (but will never be fulfilled)

How is the vet center in Draper going Joe Boxr? Still expect your democrap pals to build it? Hold your breath

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Illegal Police Department Activity Threaten to Bankrupt Counties Nationwide

Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
February 7, 2013





Local police departments (LPDs) across the nation are incorporated as specialized non-profits. Most LPDs are known to the Secretary of State in their respective state as an association which gives the impression to the average citizen that this is a union. However this is not the case.

The LPDs are contracted by the City Council to preform police services and securitize the city they are hired in. This is the exchange of a local government hiring a private security firm to stabilize the local population and generate revenue for the city through tickets, arrests and recording infractions. However, this does not include upholding local laws, as the County Sheriff’s Office is elected to take charge of.

The problem with this system is that the LPDs, being corporations, are subject to corporate law. And corporations fall into dissolution (i.e. the termination of the corporation) for various reasons quite often. When it is the LPD that dissolves; this becomes a question of legal authority over the citizens by the hired private security firm known as the LPD.

Corporations that dissolve are not allowed by law to conduct business. These same rules apply to the LPD that is actually a corporation hired by the local government or city council to preform police services.

For example, in the State of Oregon, over 12 LPDs are in dissolution. On the Secretary of State website, when a LPD is dissolved it is classified as “INA” or inactive. This includes LPDs in the following cities:

• Beaverton
• Canby
• Charleston
• Eugene
• Gresham
• King County
• Lake Oswego
• Lebanon
• Portland
• Sherwood
• Weston

According to corporate law, if a corporation dissolves, it must withdraw as a business entity. This means that once the LPD is dissolved, they cannot continue to perform police services for the city in which they were hired.

And in fact, should this be brought to the public, it might be common place (as it is in the State of Oregon) that LPDs are in dissolution and not legally allowed to conduct police services because they lack legal authority as a dissolved corporation.

It also stands that the local governments that are privy to this information would be involved in not only egregious corruption but are knowingly misleading the citizens of their towns and cities. Once the LPD is dissolved, from the date of dissolution, any arrest, ticket, or police service preformed is now an illegal act. It is tantamount to a citizen impersonating a police officer which as serious legal ramifications.

Should citizens become aware of this fact in their city – that their LPD is a corporation that has dissolved and is continuing to operate as if they have legal right to do so – there would be justified legal recourse for every citizen who had been arrested, jailed, forced to pay a ticket of any kind and forced to appear in municipal court under those circumstances (including court costs, attorney’s fees and fees attributed by the court).

In 2012, Louis F. Quijas, Assistant Secretary of the Office for State and Local Law Enforcement (OSLLE), for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explained the purpose of the OSLLE as a front “office that provided coordination and partnership with state, local, and tribal law enforcement.”

The OSLLE was recommended by the 9/11 Commission. It was created to “lead the coordination of DHS-wide policies relating to state, local, and tribal law enforcement’s role in preventing acts of terrorism and to serve as the primary liaison between non-Federal law enforcement agencies across the country and the Department.”

Intelligence is disseminated through OSLLE to LPDs or “non-Federal law enforcement partners” to keep information flowing through initiatives such as the “If You See Something, Say Something™”, the Blue Campaign, the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI), and the Department’s efforts in Countering Violent Extremism.

OSLLE consistently works with LPDs on education, actionable information, operations and intelligence for the purpose of their part in the operations of the DHS with regard to keeping “our homeland safe”.

OSLLE also works as a liaison between LPDs to maintain DHS leadership and considerations of “issues, concerns, and requirements of state, local, and tribal law enforcement during budget, grant, and policy development processes.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) upholds relationships with LPDs for the purposes of and participation with National Preparedness Grant Program that began this year.

To ensure that local police departments continue to meet the requirements of training from DHS, officers regularly attend the DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia.

LPDs are focused through OSLLE and DHS to “remain vigilant and to protect our communities from all threats, whether terrorism or other criminal activities” as DHS expands its control over local law enforcement and the communities they oversee.

As stated in the DHS directive from the Office for State and Local Law Enforcement (SLLE), the assistant Secretary for SLLE has “the primary official responsible for leading the coordination of Department-wide policies related to the role of state, tribal, and local law enforcement in preventing, preparing for, protecting against, and responding to natural disasters, acts of terrorism and other man- made disasters within the US.”

This directive also sets guidelines of advocacy for DHS by the LPDs. Authorization of DHS to take over LPDs is given in Title 6 of the United States Code, Section 607, “Terrorism prevention”.

In 2008, the Bureau of Justice Statistics stated that LPD “make up more than two-thirds of the 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the US” which translates to an estimated 12,501 law enforcement agencies. Of those LPDs, there are more than 461,000 sworn officers.

Last year President Obama signed an executive order (EO) that created the White House Homeland Security Partnership Council and Steering Committee which tied DHS to local partnerships, federal and private institutions “to address homeland security challenges.”

Members of the Steering Committee include:

• Department of State
• Department of US Treasury
• Department of Defense
• Department of Justice
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• The Federal Bureau of Investigations

In 2011, Congress encouraged private sector “police companies” to replace law enforcement on the State and local level by coercing a new police protection insurance that would tack on a fee to citizens for the use of “police protection”.

This move was justified by having citizens pay for the police to be called to scenes as a “communal service” that is contractual just as any other service or good is paid for. As a customer, the citizen would tell 911 dispatch their insurance information for payment purposes to be billed after the police were deployed to the scene, or services were rendered.

Turning LPDs into private security firms that provide services to the public was the scheme behind privatizing law enforcement.

Under state government contract, private security firms preform law enforcement services. With legislative bodies on both the state and Congressional level supporting this change, private corporations enter into contractual agreements with city councils to provide armed security patrol. Just as a rent-a-cop is hired to secure private property, local police departments are masked rent-a-cops that were hired by local government to secure their city.

This fact has been hidden from public scrutiny and has added to the blending of social perception of what the police are and what they do so that police services are able to function without question. At the same time, citizens are expected to pay fees for these “services” that were once inherent to life in a structured town or city.

In early 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report entitled “Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission” which outlined in part on how to redirect efforts of the federal government from international terrorism toward home-grown terrorists and build a DHS-controlled police force agency that would control all cities and towns through the use of local police departments.

DHS maintains that “the threat grows more localized” which necessitates the militarization of local police in major cities in the US and the training of staff from local agencies to make sure that oversight is restricted to the federal government.

Private corporations have been parading as public servants policing cities and towns across America without the knowledge of the average citizen for quite some time. Although they wear the same badges as LPDs of the past, these private security firms are not there to uphold peace or enforce any laws and city ordinances. Just like any other corporation, they seek out opportunities to collect revenue for the benefit of the city that hired them.

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Economic Fascism and the Power Elite
Mises Daily: Tuesday, March 05, 2013 by David S. D'Amato

ArticleComments Also by David S. D'Amato
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The state—the organization of the political means—is the institution that allows an idle, unproductive class of parasites to live at the expense of ordinary, working people, whose means are industrious activity and consensual exchange in the marketplace. We ought not assume, however, that the indigent segment of society, those who receive social welfare aid from the state, are necessarily foremost among the parasites of the political means. Rather, free-market libertarians from Albert Jay Nock to Murray Rothbard and Butler Shaffer have demonstrated that in the statist economy of theft and wealth redistribution, it is the elite—powerful, entrenched commercial players—who most benefit. Historically and empirically, this phenomenon of elite command of the apparatuses of government is readily apparent and unmistakable in its expression, particularly as regards the twentieth-century American economy. Economic historian Robert Higgs has argued that the American economy developed into a variant of corporatism or “tripartism,” an economic fascism defined by formal collusion between certain key interests and various arms of the state. “Corporatism,” writes Higgs, “faces the problem of factions directly; in effect, it resolves the problem of the people versus the interests by forthrightly declaring that the interests, when properly organized and channeled, are the people” (emphasis added).[1] Like every permutation of the authoritarian idea, the corporatism described by Higgs attempts to submerge the individual within the anatomy of the leviathan state—of which we must now regard many nominally “private” actors as a part.

    
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These firms, in their partnership with the state, are “granted a deliberate, representational monopoly”[2] as payment for a level of control exercised by government. The iron triangles that form the fascist tripartism detailed by Higgs recall the thesis of C. Wright Mills’s groundbreaking sociological study, The Power Elite. In his masterwork, published first in 1956, Mills gives an account of an intermeshed elite made up of a “political directorate,” the “warlords” of the military establishment, and “corporate chieftains” at the helm of Big Business bureaucracies.[3] Hardly resulting from the legitimate free market defended by libertarians, the social and economic problems and crises we see all around us are in fact the moldering fruits of elite statism. And war, as both the engine of an entire economic paradigm and its attendant psychological and sociological substructure, has been the American state’s most preferred expedient, burdening peaceful, productive society with class rule. The permanent war economy, the unremitting exercise in plunder that now makes up a terrifyingly large portion of the economy at large, must necessarily poise itself upon antisocial state-worship. As Vicesimus Knox wrote, “Fear is the principle of all despotic government, and therefore despots make war their first study and delight.”[4] The existence of a corporate command-and-control economy, whose configuration grows out of layered state interventions, depends crucially on popular attitudes regarding the state. Only a public trusting of elite judgment and expertise would abide a system built on just the kinds of subjugation that the American ruling elite hypocritically claimed to defy in two world wars.

    
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Fundamentally related to these insights into the practical relationships between Big Business and Big Government, is the proposal of Rothbard’s short-lived journal, Left and Right. Presenting the journal, Rothbard said that the title “highlights our conviction that the present-day categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’ have become misleading and obsolete.”[5] Left and right designations become particularly troublesome when we consider modern American conservatism as a “barren defense of the status quo.”[6] The concord of war statism reached by the political elite during the twentieth century certainly wasn’t liberal in any coherent or meaningful sense—a near antithesis of the liberalism of which Mises and Hayek regarded themselves as the legatees.

    
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Mises and Hayek inherited that consistent, comprehensive liberalism from, among many others, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, French political thinkers writing in the early nineteenth century. During Comte and Dunoyer’s time, many very different and contradictory ideas all claimed liberalism; theirs was an “industrialist” rendering that placed the state firmly and unambiguously in opposition to nonviolent, economic society, the principles of which were not coercive, governmental machinations, but harmonious trade. The “industrialisme” of Comte and Dunoyer, then, was very much an antecedent to Oppenheimer’s famous distinction between the political and economic means to wealth. Industry and exchange were to be venerated as the defining hallmarks of a free and just social and economic system, one loosed from the old privileges of ruling classes extending back through history. As Rothbard put it, in contrast to the productive classes (comprising “workers, entrepreneurs, producers of all kinds”), the nonproductive classes used “the state to levy tribute upon the producers.”[7] Very much a rebuke of the established order, the free market ideas of Comte and Dunoyer’s industrialist journal Le Censeur européen had radical and thus very unconservative implications: a hope to completely replace government with “the administration of things”[8] (a phrase coined by Comte and only later used by Saint-Simon). Just as did Rothbard hundreds of years later, Comte and Dunoyer folded economic analyses—inherited primarily from Jean-Baptiste Say—in with historical and philosophical narratives, fashioning a unique and libertarian notion of class. Their economic propositions emerged from a holistic, methodological approach, tracing a historical divide between “the devouring” (“the hornets”) and “the industrious” (“the bees”).[9] Indeed, Comte and Dunoyer championed a classless society, though not in the sense of absolute equality or the end of private property. If the free market truly was the means of “dissolving the ruling classes,”[10] then it was privilege and monopoly, upheld by the coercive power of the state, and not legitimate property and trade, that were to be opposed.

    
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The political means may not be as plain to see, as glaring or as straightforward as they were in Comte and Dunoyer’s time. Central banking under the Federal Reserve System, today’s government subsidies, and regulatory barriers to entry are perhaps not as easily ascertainable to the layman as were affronts against the free market as they existed in Comte and Dunoyer’s day. But these interconnected instruments for binding and exploiting the society that is their host are just as menacing, if not more so. Where those living under the tyranny of old monarchical systems could be expected to understand full well the class nature of the statist rule around them, most today are misdirected by the democratic rhetoric that clothes the American state. Rothbard’s Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy would prove an instructive read for those in, for example, the Occupy crowd who misguidedly ascribe our current economic predicament to the free market. The ties between the war economy, the Federal Reserve’s central banking system, and the powerful Wall Street banks are, as demonstrated in Rothbard’s monograph, a defining feature of the state monopoly capitalism that has prevailed.

In the present day, following the maturation of the connections identified by Mills, Rothbard, Higgs and others, the economy has been “centralized . . . into a highly structured bureaucracy under the effective direction and control of leading business interests.”[11] We can in no way be said to have a free market, as the ties between powerful interests and the federal government are as strong as ever. Politics is an expensive, high-stakes game of favors and bribery, a fact that libertarians like Comte and Dunoyer saw clearly hundreds of years ago.