Editorials

Although this page supported Barack Obama during the Democratic presidential primaries, we never questioned Hillary Clinton’s intelligence, competence and determination. Only a fool would do so. She has been an effective voice for the state in the Senate and proved to be a genuine consensus-builder in an increasingly divided and dysfunctional capital.

The president-elect could not have made a better choice for secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton has been a public figure of global significance for nearly two decades. Now, she will be the public face of the United States as a new administration seeks to mend international fences. For New York, of course, Mrs.  read more »

New York joins the world in mourning the horrific and senseless terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week, during which over 188 people lost their lives, and grief and fear flooded India’s financial capital. As home to one of the world’s most flourishing communities of Indian émigrés, New York shares a brotherly bond with Mumbai, now doubly reinforced by our own recent history of enduring terrorist violence. Just as the world’s hearts went out to New York after 9/11, New Yorkers now lean toward the citizens of Mumbai.

The terrorists chose to include among their targets potent symbols of Mumbai’s flourishing economy—the luxurious Taj Mahal Palace and Oberoi hotels, and the bustling Leopold Cafe.  read more »

With the city facing a $4 billion budget gap over the next two years, New Yorkers are fortunate that we have a fiscally conservative mayor in City Hall, one who understands that an elected official’s responsibility is to make tough decisions rather than pass the buck—or lack of bucks—on to the next mayor. Indeed, we supported Michael Bloomberg’s controversial change to the term-limits law, allowing him a chance at a third term, because we believe his economic worldview is what the city needs right now as we plunge ahead through a global financial crisis. In addition, his talent at choosing the best and brightest as his top people, such as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, is what the city needs when each day brings new challenges from unpredictable national and international events.  read more »

Although it may be hard for some to swallow, the federal bailout of Citigroup was necessary. New York City and the nation already are in dire straits; another collapse surely would have left thousands more workers on the street at a time when job prospects are, to say the least, terribly lean.

It goes without saying that New York has been especially hard hit in this historic catastrophe. The failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were horrific; the job contractions in what’s left of the financial industry have been awful. Jobs by the tens of thousands have vanished in the city and surrounding suburbs.  read more »

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 »