Instead of winning passage for his $5.2 billion plan of budget-balancing measures to help close multibillion-dollar gaps in this and next year’s budget, Governor David Paterson plans to go to Washington for help. Lots of luck. While one has to admire the governor’s determination, the notion of New York taking a place behind the Big Three automakers and various other charity cases is just a little unsettling.

It would have been a far, far better thing if Albany had gotten its collective act together and acted when it met in an emergency session on Tuesday. But action isn’t on the agenda of the Senate majority leader, Dean Skelos of Long Island.  read more »

With the announcement last week that its top seven executives would forgo annual bonuses for 2008, Goldman Sachs continues to demonstrate why it has always stood out from the rest of Wall Street as a leader that represents the best in capitalism. By giving up tens of millions of dollars in compensation, Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, its co-presidents, Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried, and their colleagues understand that in tough times, leadership by example matters. Indeed, their willingness to give up money that they rightly deserve—these are the executives, after all, who deftly steered Goldman through the storm as peers such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch crashed and foundered on the rocks—proves why brilliant managers deserve big bucks when their companies have a good year.  read more »

As President-elect Barack Obama begins to assemble tough, pragmatic problem-solvers for his team, he ought to consider Joel Klein. We cannot think of anyone more qualified to be secretary of education than New York’s schools chancellor. He has just the right mix of abrasiveness and charm to take on this important task. We’re hesitant to lose him, because he has done a remarkable job in New York. But if he can do for the nation what he has done in New York, we’ll all be better off.

Mr. Klein, of course, took over as chancellor of the city’s new Department of Education in 2002, after newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg used his political muscle to scrap the patronage haven that was the old Board of Education, replacing it with a mayoral agency under his direct control.  read more »

Governor David Paterson announced this week he is going after both of the Big Untouchable Issues in Albany: School funding and Medicaid. He’s also broaching the idea of renegotiating public employee union contracts. This is not a man who’s afraid of a fight.

That the governor is wading into the state’s thorniest budget territory should indicate just how dire New York’s finances are. Projecting a budget gap of $47 billion over the next three and a half years, along with 50 percent more jobs lost in the financial sector than after 9/11, Governor Paterson understands that only by making serious cuts in the state’s two major expenditures will New York dodge even bigger crises.  read more »

Forty years have passed since the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Forty years have passed since the Kerner Commission warned that America was on the verge of becoming two nations, one white, the other black, “separate and unequal.” Forty years have passed since Richard Nixon capitalized on white resentment to win the presidency. Forty years have passed since George Wallace, segregationist, won 46 electoral votes and 13 percent of the popular vote as a third-party presidential candidate.

Forty years—the blink of history’s eye. A time period historians a thousand years from now will regard as statistically insignificant. But in those 40 years, in half a lifetime, the nation moved from the politics of division to the politics of inclusion, from Nixon and Wallace to Barack Obama and the audacity of hope.  read more »

Score it a victory for common sense: Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, resisting the siren call of faux populism, has withdrawn his support for a big tax hike on New Yorkers who make more than $1 million a year. Mr. Silver’s decision means that the plan is dead. May it rest in peace.

As recently as this past August, Mr. Silver seemed willing to go along with a plan to add two new tax brackets designed to squeeze more tax revenue from the well-to-do. Under a plan cooked up by some of the so-called progressives in Mr. Silver’s caucus, the state would have increased the tax rate on incomes between $1 million and $5 million to 7.  read more »

New Yorkers are lucky to have an attorney general keeping a close eye on companies caught up in the current financial maelstrom, particularly when, as in the case of American International Group, there is an appearance of its executives living large while taxpayers foot the bill.

In the past two weeks, Andrew Cuomo has successfully pressured AIG to suspend compensation and bonus payments to current and former executives, essentially turning off the tap, at least for now, on the company’s $600 million bonus fund, and freezing a $19 million payout to the company’s former chief executive, Martin Sullivan.

“There should not even be any contemplation of bonuses for executive performance, because I find it hard to conceive of a situation that you could justify a performance bonus for management that virtually bankrupted the company,” he told reporters.  read more »

It goes without saying that Charles O’Byrne, secretary to Governor David Paterson, should have filed his tax returns from 2001 to 2005. That was an egregious mistake, one brought on by personal difficulties, including clinical depression, according to Mr. O’Byrne.

Mr. O’Byrne said he already has paid about $200,000 in back taxes and penalties to make amends. His story rings true; Mr. O’Byrne’s bitter resignation from the Jesuits and his subsequent attempts to find a new life outside the priesthood are a matter of public record. It seems clear that Mr. O’Bryne went through a difficult few years before landing a job with Mr.  read more »

Michael Bloomberg’s late-season proposal to extend term limits has stirred appropriate passions on both sides of the issue. The council hearings have highlighted strong views; the hearings attracted thoughtful comments from people like the former governor, Mario Cuomo, and New York University’s president, John Sexton, both of whom support the extension of term limits to three terms.

When the City Council votes on the plan in the coming days, they will not be doing so in a vacuum: The volatile situation on Wall Street, and its impact on the city’s economic infrastructure for years to come, should force all New Yorkers to ask themselves if they really want to take a chance on a new mayor, new comptroller, new public advocate, new Council speaker and a crowd of new council members.  read more »

When Franklin D. Roosevelt lifted his hand on March 4, 1933, to take the oath of office after an American financial earthquake, our financial system was so broken that many felt it needed a savior.

Within 100 days, the four-year governor of New York—whom Walter Lippmann had declared “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President”—had broken through the national panic and redefined the ambitions of the American presidency.

The current crises match what Franklin Roosevelt faced: We have been dealt a financial body-blow, and are running a pair of wars.  read more »