by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Our crackerjack governor, Mr. James McGreevey from Edison, NJ, has had a great idea as to how to put some badly needed money into the state treasury. He is, it seems, going to raise the tax on people who make more than $500K per year. According to the Newark Star-Ledger, this measure affects about 28,000 taxpayers who live in the Garden State. The problem with this tax is that 1) it is targeted at a very mobile segment of the population, and 2) it makes living in New Jersey even less palatable for the wealthy than it is now. Pennsylvania will have a top tax rate of approximately 1/2 of New Jersey's new rate, and the spread between NYC and New Jersey will grow much, much smaller. People who may have been thinking about purchasing one of the 30+ multimillion dollar estates currently on the market here in Joisey will now more than likely reexamine that choice. In fact, I can see nothing good coming of this. However, that is not what I wanted to talk about today.

In the process of passing the budget which depends somewhat on the newly minted aforementioned tax rate, a little drama played out which appears to be uniquely New Jersey in flavor. The Democrats hold a very thin majority in the New Jersey Senate...so thin that the defection of two Democrats from the party line could endanger McGreevey's budget. Now, in the urban core of Newark, we are breeding politicians who take their cues from Boss Tweed's Tamany Hall or Mayor Daily's Chicago. I mean, talk about cynical politics--and talk about divisiveness: I bring you one Sharpe James who is both Mayor of Newark and a state senator from Essex County (read: Newark.)

Mr. James threatened to withhold his vote from the budget bill (another topic for another day) unless the legislature passed a bill he was proposing. "What bill was that?", you may ask. Well, it seems that Mr. James is upset with the City Council of Newark and wants the authority to block its sale of some city property to a community based group. At this point you might be curious as to what group Mr. Sharpe thought was not worthy of receiving such largess from the City Council. That group was an Hispanic organization which wants to build a community center.

From where I sit, what Mr. Sharpe is doing reeks of the same sort of exclusionary politics the Black community have been dealing with for the last 100+ years. My guess is that if the group in question had been named "The Martin Luther King House" instead of "La Casa de Don Pedro", Mr. Sharpe would have had no problem with the sale of the land in question. All I can say is "shame on you, Mr. James; shame on you!"

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005