Farmer Gary And A Tale Of Bull 

Gary Ackerman is no farmer.

The closest he comes to cows is at Peter Luger.

The closest he comes to bull is, well, Congress.

As regulars to this column know, Gary and I have been friends for a long time — a very long time. Forty years ago when we met, I was just a young kid. He became my older friend. And I have followed and participated in his career ever since. He, likewise, has had quite an influence on mine.

Gary is a concerned, bright, progressive (most of time) legislator. He has taken his seniority on the House Foreign Relations Committee seriously and has become one of this nation’s leading experts on the Middle and Far East — areas under the purview of his subcommittee. He takes his job seriously but still remembers how to smile. Voting for war just wasn’t the easiest thing for him. He was tortured.

In May of 2001, Gary Ackerman was honored by Farm Sactuary, one of the nation’s largest animal protection and rescue organizations.

He grew up in public housing; he was educated by free public education. He is an advocate for those in the City’s middle and under class. His love of people — his compassion — is his most outstanding trait.

Now I didn’t come here to praise Gary. I came here because I’ve been scratching my head about city boy Gary Ackerman and his prophetic legislation on downed animals.

As 2003 ended, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman declared that the use of downed cattle would be banned due to Mad Cow disease.

Gary was the sponsor of legislation in Congress to ban downed animals, a measure which failed by three votes last July. He has since been critical of the Agriculture Department and the cattle industry, particularly during the recent Mad Cow scare.

Gary reacted to Veneman’s action:

In fact, I discovered, Gary had introduced legislation banning the use of downer cattle for 12 straight years.

What made City boy Gary one of our national spokespersons on a farming issue? His legislation, introduced tenaciously 12 times, was indeed prophetic and could have saved the cattle industry millions (if not more), and this nation great worry.

Now, I was in Florida when the Secretary, Gary and everyone else were throwing the bull about downed animals and Mad Cow. So I emailed Gary on his Blackberry: "How does a city kid born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens become prophetic on an agricultural issue?"

In a discussion last week, Gary told me the story.

It didn’t start out for Gary as a concern about the food stream. "It was simply the right thing to do. The finances made it important for the industry to get the animals to the slaughterhouse alive — so they dragged them. It was inhumane."

Gary explained that such a miniscule percent of the downers were tested and that they went into the food stream before test results came back that the industry. He said the Department of Agriculture, in claiming they must not be euthanized but brought to the slaughterhouse for testing, were simply "full of bull."

Once in the food stream as we have just discovered, Ackerman explains, you have to play Humpty Dumpty cow and try to piece it together again — after the meat has been spread to quite a number of states.

So, in 1993 Ackerman received an award from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) presented by Kim Bassinger – a highlight of his career (at least for me) – and was befriended by the animal rights groups.

With their help, Gary developed an expertise and has since then been championing the cause of humane treatment of downed animals. And like it turns out so often, doing the ethical thing is also often the right thing for all affected.

"The [cattle] industry is now a wreck," explains Gary. "Their greed in preventing my legislation from passing has cost them thousands of times more. Japan, which buys 180,000,000 head per year, has stopped importing US Cattle. Imagine the financial implication," Gary added.

There was a lot more to our discussion pointing out the horrendous health oversight by the Department of Agriculture and the greed of an industry that is now in crises.

But in the interest of space and time, I brought the discussion to a close and asked: "Gar, do you still go to Luger’s?"

"Of course," he responded, "I had a great two pound lobster there last week."

Four Benjamins Offered To Private Homeowners

The State of the City address, delivered Friday in the cavernous Silvercup Studio in Long Island City, may have signaled the opening of Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign for re-election.  

The backdrop resembled a Karl Rove production: super-sized flags of the US and NYC, and enormous photographs of Manhattan skyscrapers. Stage right displayed a huge photograph of the Unisphere. At center stage, we saw an enlarged photo of a modest private house, whose owner the Mayor would like to benefit with $400 in tax relief.  On the great Silvercup stage, the usual elected officials and their appointees were gone.  Dozens of military reservists, some recently returned from Iraq, and selected Queens schoolchildren, in three rows of bleachers, shared the stage.

The Mayor spoke vigorously and firmly, in a baritone voice.  It was not his normal speaking voice, but he has learned that you cannot address an audience of 700 people and hundreds of thousands on television, in conversational tones. 

When you speak before a crowd, you try to capture their mood, to reach out to them to sense how they feel, and to modify your delivery when needed to strengthen rapport with your audience. The Mayor did it right yesterday, and whether his new style is intuitive or learned, it made a more satisfying impression on all those in the room. It also makes for better television, which, of course, is the far larger audience.   If people feel that you are absorbing their mood and reacting to it, it makes them more ready to listen to you and to think favorably of what you are saying.

Does the perception of involvement make a difference?   Sure it does.  But "show me the money."

The substance of his remarks: the $400 tax rebate for homeowners, and condo and co-op dwellers is the important message being delivered. But even there, it is not only the money, it is the awareness that the Mayor knows that this group feels that it has been injured, and is trying to make it up to them.

Should the tax relief, if justified, be handled in this way?   Tax policy is always a matter of rough justice, or injustice.   No one can judge precisely the most equitable way of distributing largesse, or relieving the public of exactions.  But when the Mayor acts on the principle of "I feel your pain", people are more likely to be favorably disposed to him. It is also evident that owners of private homes are a core constituency for the Mayor, since he is unlikely to score heavily in public housing.

The usual "fiscal experts", consulted by the Times, were skeptical of the proposed tax cut.  Some objected because the cut favored homeowners, and not large landlords.  Others wondered whether it was fiscally responsible to cut taxes at all, even though the city’s surplus this year will approach a half billion.  The once-mighty Democratic Party is now in its eleventh year of exclusion from the mayoralty of a heavily Democratic city.  It is in its tenth year of powerlessness in a state where it has a substantial majority in voter registration. They will do their best to muddy the waters, to switch the targeted real estate tax relief to other areas, in order to assure that whatever is enacted bears as little resemblance as possible to the Bloomberg proposal. Then they will claim credit themselves for lowering taxes. That’s how it’s done.

Meanwhile, back at the City Council, Speaker Gifford Miller, having successfully passed legislation extending his term in office despite referenda in 1993 and 1996 establishing term limits, and successfully defending his term-extension in the Court of Appeals, was unanimously re-elected, although he will be a lame duck unless his term can be further extended.  In the Speaker’s defense, it must be said that the lawsuit that the Council exceeded its powers in modifying the referenda was contaminated by a Brooklyn judge who overruled his law assistant, and then had the assistant’s work destroyed.  This made it appear that the case was a scheme by the Brooklyn organization to wrest the Speakership from Manhattan, a view which could contain a kernel of truth.

Various Councilmembers from Brooklyn and Queens will try to succeed Miller in January 2006, but the decision on the Council leadership has historically been made by the Democratic county leaders, just as Mr. Miller was chosen in 2002 by an alliance of Tom Manton, the Queens leader, and the Bronx team of Roberto Ramirez and Jose Rivera.  At that time, Mr. Rivera’s 23-year-old son, Joel, was elected the Council’s majority leader, the No. 2 leadership position.  The previous speaker, Peter Vallone, was selected by their predecessors, Stanley Friedman of the Bronx and Donald Manes of Queens.  That deal was consummated just two days before Mr. Manes’ first, unsuccessful suicide attempt on Jan. 10, 1986. 

In politics, timing is everything.

Not4Publication.com by Dom Nunziato