JOHN BAILEY INTERVIEWS
TARA RITCHIE
ON HOW NEW YORK-PRESBYTERIAN THE ONE AT 1111 WESTCHESTER AVENUE SERVES YOU
WHAT “THE ONE” BRINGS TO WHITE PLAINS AND ALL OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY
WHY NEW YORK-PRESBYTERIAN CREATED IT.
HOW IT’S BEING USED BY NEW PATIENTS AFTER 7 WEEKS SINCE ITS DEBUT
WHO’S USING IT AND WHY IT MAKES SENSE FOR YOU
HOW TO USE IT.
ON WHITE PLAINS WEEK PEOPLE TO BE HEARD NOVEMBER 6 AT 8, SATURDAY NOVEMBER 8 AT 7
AND ANYTIME ON WWW.WPCOMMUNITYMEDIA.ORG
WPCNR CAMPAIGN 2025. NEWS & COMMENT. By John F. Bailey. November 5, 2025:
The picture above shows brochures and mailings that have crossed The CitizeNetReporter’s bustling newsroom this year.
Each promised everything you could want, public safety, more protection, more affordable housing, funding education, protecting jobs, taking care of infrastructure, protecting social security, change, the same old promises, and you can go through 14 years of one leader and at the end of 14 years you realize not much changes. The politicians also ask for campaign contributions.
My father once told me, “I’ve found that no matter what politicians say or do, who gets into office, not much changes and things always remain the same.”
Except in the last year things have really changed.
The politicians who won in 2024 have changed things. They have not made things better. They have promoted very hurtful policies, deported people, promoted hatred and transformed the military into a tool of tyranny. They attack enemies.
Now the politicians who won yesterday are faced with politicians who are aggressive. Like hurting people. Do not like persons who are immigrants, black, Spanish, Mexican, Columbia. They have put persons in charge who change the law by directive, not through congress.
Now on the day after Election Day, we now know that things have changed in this country.
But the challenge is the cliche promises politicians have made are under seige.
Develop wisely, protect people, improve housing, feed the hungry help the homeless.
Not this year the soft touchy feely things, the promises to help mean something.
You have to help if yopu been elected.
No more good works if you cannot finance it. No more crossing your fingers a developer will do what they say. Newly elected electees are on their own and have to lead from the front as Director of Public Safety Davie Chong said.
Financial shortfall holes, well you have to find the money. Invest in people not concrete. Twist bankers arms to help people, not evict, or deny mortgages, dooming them to a vagrant life.
In the era of anything goes the leader cannot ignore moral imperatives. He or she cannot condone deceit and misdirection.
The new Mayor of White Plains has a lot of problems his predecessor did stand up to, aside from environmental green energy process.
There is a strong movement in this country that wants to run everyone’s life. What to think. How to live.
The last time I read the Constitution it said every man is entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
It still does.
I hope the politicians elected yesterday locally still do.
Next year there will be more brochures promising the same things.
This year it really matters that the elected do what have to do.
They have no choice but to do so.
Plan. Execute. Achieve . Advance the conditions of the afflicted and afflict the comfortable and the venal.
it’s no more “Anything Goes” time.
It’s not what you want elected officials.
It is what the people need.
Bring them what they need.
Lower prices. Jobs. Roofs. No rents endlessly raised. No food prices and gas prices the sky’s the limit. Medical care the costs of houses. No health networks that won’t treat you. And please no more making yourself great instead of the people who live in your city.
The county has 16,000 persons who need affordable homes up from 11,750 8 years ago. It is time we started building them, faster.
There are a third of the population of the county that cannot feed themselves. This is a disgrace considering how wealthy this county is. The county should do it.
WPCNR PLUS CA CHANGE, PLUS CA MEME CHANGE. News and comment by John F. Bailey. November 3, 2025:
Marcel Proust said it all: “The more things change the more they remain the same.”
The Fed cost interest rates on October 29, The rush is on.
I find ironic that the lords of money today would lower interest rates on the same day the Great Stock Market Crash happened 96 years ago.
After worrying about how if they cut interest rates, inflation would overheat, the Federal Reserve Bank did the administration bidding which had been pressuring the Fed to cut interest rates and infuse the economy with spending adrenalin.
In the John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, which I printed the Wikipedia synopsis last week, I find it incredulous that with inflation rampant this year, that the Fed would do exactly what happened in the Roaring Twenties. I quote Wikipedia again below:
(You cannot read the following without wondering how smart are those people in Washington who think throwing gasoline (money at lower interest rates) on a hot market will put out the fire inflation they have been trying to put out (inflation) the last year, but couldn’t.
The Florida land boom of the 1920s established the mood “and the conviction that God intended the American middle classes to be rich,” a sentiment so strong that it survived the ensuing crash of property prices.[6]
In the early 1920s, yields of common stocks were favorable and prices low.
In the final six months of 1924, prices began to rise and continued through 1925, from 106 in May 1924 stock prices rose to 181 by December 1925.[7]
After a couple of short downturns during 1926, prices began to increase in earnest throughout 1927, the year in which conventional wisdom saw the seeds of what became the Great Crash sown. Following Britain’s return to the Gold Standard, and subsequent foreign exchange crises, there followed an exodus of gold from Europe to the United States.
EASING INTEREST RATES A COSTLY ERROR
In the spring of 1927, Montagu Norman and other governors of European Banks asked the Federal Reserve to ease their monetary policy and they agreed, reducing the rediscount rate from 4 to 3.5%, a move that Lionel Robbins described as resulting “in one of the most costly errors committed by it or any other banking system in the last 75 years”.
The funds released by the Fed became available to invest in the stock market and “from that date, according to all the evidence, the situation got completely out of control”.[8]
Galbraith disagreed with this simplistic analysis by arguing that the availability of money in the past was no sure recipe for a bubble in common stocks and that prices could still be regarded as a true valuation of the stock at the end of 1927.
It is early in 1928 that the “escape into make believe” started in earnest, when the market began to rise by large vaulting leaps rather than steady increments.
Prominent investors, such as Harrison Williams, the proponent of both the Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Trust, were described by Professor Dice as “having vision for the future and boundless hope and optimism” and not “hampered by the heavy armor of tradition”.[9]
On 12 March, the volume of trading had reached 3,875,910 shares, an all-time high. By 20 June, 5,052,790 shares were traded in a falling market that many prematurely thought signalled the end of the bull market.[10] Prices rose once more and after the election of Hoover, with a “victory boom” resulting in an all-time record trading of 6,641,250 shares in a rising market (16 November).
Overall, the market rose during the year from 245 to 331 which was accompanied by a phenomenal increase in trading on margin,[11] which relieved the buyer from putting up the full purchase price of the stock by using the securities as collateral for a loan.
The buyer obtained full benefit of ownership in rising stock valuation, but the loan amount remained the same. People swarmed to buy stock on margin.
In the early 1920s, brokers’ loans used to finance purchases on margin averaged 1–1.5 billion but by November 1928 had reached six billion.
By the end of 1928, the interest on such loans was yielding 12% to lenders which led to a flood of gold converging on Wall St. from all over the world to fuel the purchase of stocks on margin.[12]
In the wake of Black Tuesday, October 29, London newspapers reported that ruined speculators were throwing themselves from windows but Galbraith asserts there was no substance to these claims of widespread suicides.[13] Embezzlement now came to the fore.
During the bubble, there was a net increase of what Galbraith calls “psychic wealth”; the person being robbed was unaware of their loss whilst the embezzler was materially improved. With the bursting of the bubble, accounts were now more closely scrutinized and reports of defaulting employees became a daily occurrence after the first week of the crash.
Contrary to what had been Wall Street’s perceived tendency in playing down its influence, Galbraith asserted the important contribution of the 1929 crash on the Great Depression which followed:[15] causing a contraction of demand for goods, destroying for a time the normal means of investment and lending, arresting economic growth and causing financial hardship which alienated many from the economic system. [2] Galbraith further argues that the Great Depression was caused by a mixture of five main weaknesses:
First, an imbalance in the income distribution. Galbraith asserts that “the 5 per cent of the population with the highest incomes in that year [1929] received approximately one third of all personal income.” Personal income in the form of rents, dividends, and interest of the well-to-do was approximately twice as much as in the period following the Second World War, leaving the economy dependent on a high level of investment and luxury consumer spending, and vulnerable to the stock market crash.[16]
Second, problems in the structure of corporations. Most specifically, he cites newly formed investment entities of the era (such as holding companies and investment trusts) as contributing to a deflationary spiral, due in no small part to their high reliance on leverage.
Dividends paid the interest on the bonds in the holding companies, and when these were interrupted, the structure collapsed. “It would be hard to imagine a corporate system better designed to continue and accentuate a deflationary cycle.”
Also, “The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds. This, in the long history of such activities, was a kind of flood tide of corporate larceny.”[16]
(Does this sound a lot like today, readers?)
Third, the bad banking structure. The weakness was manifest in the large number of units working independently. As one failed, pressure was applied to another, leading to a domino effect accelerated by increasing unemployment and lower incomes.[17]
Fourth, foreign trade imbalances. During World War I, the US became a creditor nation, exporting more than it imported. High tariffs on imports contributed to this imbalance. Subsequent defaults by foreign governments led to a decline in exports, which was especially hard on farmers.
And finally, “the poor state of economic intelligence.” Galbraith says that the “economists and those who offered economic counsel in the late twenties and early thirties were almost uniquely perverse” and that “the burden of reputable economic advice was invariably on the side of measures that would make things worse.”[18]
Galbraith was of the opinion that the Great Crash had burned itself so deeply into the national consciousness that America had been spared another bubble up to the present time (1954).;[19] however he thought the chances of another speculative orgy which characterized the 1929 crash as rather good as he felt the American people remained susceptible to the conviction that unlimited rewards were to be had and that they individually were meant to share in it. He considered the sense of responsibility in the financial community for the wider community as a whole as not being small but “nearly nil”.[20] Even though government powers were available to prevent a recurrence of a bubble their use was not attractive or politically expedient since an election is in the offing even on the day after an election.[21]
Now, departing from the Wikipedia synopsis of the Galbraith The Great Crash, technically the corporations have recovered by raising prices, firing staff and increased their profits and stock prices. But with less income and the catastrophic cold hearts of congress going along with budget cuts people cannot afford to buy houses, move forward with their lives, get jobs. Banks have not lowered their mortgage rates substantially to inject movement in real estate. Incomes of States, counties and cities have been cut by national spending cuts.
Meanwhile the market keeps on soaring, the stock market that is.
So cutting interest rates on the very day of October 29, seems to be the height of folly.
It took enormous efforts of charity of government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to help Americans out of the Depression which was not really ended until World War II came along.
Now there is no help, no pity, no sense of responsibility in the cold hearts of Congress and our leadership.
There is no help.
Help what’s that?
The irony of the rate cut on October 29 makes me shake my head in shame.
You too can be an economist, a leader, a Congressperson or a Senator.
You and I Mr. Mrs. and Ms. America have to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
There is no Teddy Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt, or Barack Obama now to save us.
We do not learn from the past
Hits: 181
WPCNR NEWS AND COMMENT. From Alex Philippidis of Genome Web Daily News, Mary Ann Leibert, Inc. September 11, 2016:
Editor’s Note:
Alex, well-known local reporter around Westchester County for the last 38 years sent along his remembrance of what happened after the Twin Towers fell:
Two weeks after 9/11, I wrote this article sharing this story of something good that came from something evil… No link to this story exists any more, so I copy it in its entirety below:
Helping the heroes
From: Westchester County Business Journal, Oct. 1, 2001
“The World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his belief in the cooperation of men, and through this cooperation, his ability to find greatness.” – Minoru Yamasaki, architect of the Twin Towers
Nearly three weeks have passed, but the memories are as fresh as ever for Jay Martino and 50 of his colleagues about the hell they witnessed at Ground Zero of the terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center.
“It’s an unimaginable site of destruction. You search your mind to come up with the right verbiage, the right adjectives. How can I describe what I saw? It’s a horrific scene,” said Martino, a general superintendent with Granite/Halmar Construction Co. of Mount Vernon.
Martino, head of the Masons & Concrete Contractors Association of Hudson Valley Inc., led a team of workers who answered their industry’s call to send volunteers and heavy machines to the tons of wreckage that comprised the Twin Towers and five smaller buildings.
Granite/Halmar was among dozens of construction contractors in and around Westchester that sent resources to the World Trade Center in response to a memo distributed to all 650 members of the Construction Industry Council (CIC) of Westchester and Hudson Valley Inc. of Tarrytown.
Yonkers Contracting Co., which helped build the World Trade Center in the 1970s, donated 100 trucks to the rescue effort, while Tilcon New York Inc. of West Nyack and four subcontractors donated equipment and personnel from their 21 quarry and asphalt facilities in New York and New Jersey.
“I think more than any other industry, construction contractors and workers comprehend the enormity of the task at hand because we understand the magnitude of what it takes to create such magnificent structures and buildings,” said Ross J. Pepe, CIC president.
“Everyone in our industry has a deep and new-found appreciation of the ironworkers, operating engineers, laborers, Teamsters and other union workers now at the site as the world watches these guys on TV doing a job that nobody would ever want to do.”
The World Trade Center took half a decade to build, but only two hours for terrorists to level in the series of attacks that shook the world on Sept. 11.
County construction industry responds
The following day when CIC asked for volunteers, hundreds answered the call. Fifty of them came from Granite/Halmar, which had hired them for its many projects under construction – such as the new international arrivals terminal and an expansion of the British Airways terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
“They said they needed cutoff saws, tools, oxygen tanks, manpower. So I put the call out to all of our foreman asking if any of them would volunteer,” Martino recalled “We loaded a half-dozen pickup trucks with oxygen and acetylene gas tanks, plus dust masks, goggles, safety glasses.”
The Granite/Halmar men joined other CIC member companies in assembling at Yonkers Raceway, then following a state police escort south to lower Manhattan. Authorities have divided the area in and around the World Trade Center into four zones, each overseen by a construction contractor: AMEC p.l.c.; Tully Construction Inc.; a joint venture of Turner Construction and Plaza Materials Inc.; and Bovis Lend Lease and two subcontractors, Grace Industries Inc. and Gateway.
Granite/Halmar entered the site working for AMEC, which controls the northwest zone of the recovery area, Granite/Halmar had worked for AMEC at the Kennedy airport projects.
“We hooked up with a firefighter, a captain. He escorted us to ground zero. Right away we went to work with the firemen. They were elated to see us. They had nothing. They had no cutoff saws we could see. They had one set of torches. They were working their way through the pile of rubble with picks and shovels. Everything was done by hand,” Martino said.
“We were cutting steel into pieces. We took everything we could handle and loaded it into 5-gallon barrels, then kept passing them on down the line,” Martino said. “We worked till late in the evening, 11 or 12 o’clock at night.
“It was just amazing, the amount of debris and structural steel there was around. You stood on steel beams that had just collapsed. You’d look at the steel and it was completely clean.
There was no concrete to be found. You didn’t see any chunks of concrete. The fire was so great the concrete had disintegrated.’
“You’d see bits and pieces of carpet, and every once in a while, there would be a bumper to a vehicle. You stood on the steel beams which had collapsed,” Martino said.
Not once during their time at Ground Zero did Martino or his men spot any bodies, or any parts of bodies.
“I was not looking forward to anything like that. I was looking to help and I would have gone anywhere I was told to go. But I kept wondering. What would I do if I saw something? How would I react?”
An especially welcome sight, Martino said, was the hundreds of volunteers who catered to weary rescuers: “Every time you turned around, you heard. Do you need something to drink? Do you want something to eat? They had buckets of water and Gatorade. They had Power Bars.”
Just three years ago Martino and workers from GraniteHalmar’s predecessor, Halmar Builders of New York Inc., transformed the drab exterior public space outside the World Trade Center into World Trade Center Plaza, a public plaza complete with granite pavement and landscaped areas.
Looking at a poster-sized photo of the plaza outside his office, Martino paused. “I feel funny seeing the pictures of it now.”