“Know The Enemy” was a slogan that appeared on a U.S. government poster in 1944, when I was 10 years old and WW II was still raging.
The Battle of the Bulge hadn’t happened yet, and we were beginning to prepare for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, sometime in 1945, or maybe it would have to be in 1946.
The poster showed the face of a Japanese soldier, our avowed enemy, and also the face of a Chinese soldier, our vaunted ally.
The poster explained how we, Americans unfamiliar with “Orientals,” could determine who was Japanese and who was Chinese, by the different shapes of their eyes, noses, mouths, ears, chins, etc.
The poster was pure jingoistic propaganda, and I learned after the war was over that the purported facial differences were all false. While I’ve long forgotten the details of that poster, I’ve never forgotten its powerful slogan, “Know The Enemy.” I can use it now.
In a short message like this one, I cannot begin to give you even a concise history of the decline and fall of New York State, which began about 1960, with the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency.
Suffice it to say that since that date, great technological, economic and demographic changes have been taking place that have wrecked an unprepared New York State for those changes.
As businesses fled the state over the years, so did its population. No other state has lost more population every year, over the years, than New York State has. The Empire State is no more.
In 2011, a very liberal/progressive Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and a very liberal/progressive Democratic speaker of the state assembly, Sheldon Silver, both had to admit that New York state was in peril because of the very high costs of doing business here and the very high costs of living here.
These high costs were being generated, to a great extent, by the highest local property tax burdens in the nation. The governor and the assembly speaker conceived a way to not reduce property taxes but to at least slow down their growth.
They proposed a “tax levy cap” law, which would limit the annual growth in property taxes to the lower of the rate of inflation, or 2 percent.
Everyone in the state approved that initiative, except some school administrators and our teachers and their powerful unions. However, in spite of vigorous and threatening opposition from the teachers’ unions, Gov. Cuomo and Speaker Silver found a way around that powerful opposition.
They coupled their proposed tax levy cap law with a renewal of the New York City rent control law. No politician in the state Legislature would ever dare to vote “no” on a law that renews the New York City rent control law, no matter what that law was attached to.
Currently, both the city rent control law and the tax levy cap law have to be renewed together, in Albany, about every three years.
To show you what an implacable enemy the teachers and their unions are since 2011 the teachers’ unions have been pressuring New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to bring as much pressure as he can on Albany to decouple the city’s rent control law from the tax levy cap law, which primarily benefits suburban homeowners.
Why? So that a renewal of a separated tax levy cap law could be defeated in the state Legislature by the teachers, without affecting the city’s rent control law.
Joel Katz
Port Washington
