12 The Great Neck News, Friday, April 3, 2015
GN
Car hits bus, five sent to hospital By A da m L i d g e t t
Five people were taken to the hospital Tuesday evening when a car ran into a bus on Middle Neck Road as it was dropping off passengers.
Five people were transported to a local hospital Tuesday after a car struck the back of a bus dropping off passengers on Middle Neck Road. Nassau County police said that at about 5:45 p.m. Tuesday a bus was stopped on Middle Neck Road near Fairview Avenue when the car drove into the back of the bus. Police said they were not sure how fast the car was going or why the car did not stop. A man and two women who were in the car at the time of the accident were transported to the hospital. Police said one of the women was driving the car at the time. Two people on the bus were also transported to the hospital, police said. Police said Wednesday they did not believe anyone had critical injuries. Police said they do not plan to charge anyone in what they are labeling as an accident. Reach reporter Adam Lidgett by email at alidgett@theislandnow.com, by phone at 516.307.1045 x203 and on Twitter @ AdamLidgett. Also follow us on Twitter @theislandnow and Facebook at facebook.com/theislandnow.
Big money is undermining democracy It’s stunning to me that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell feels such impunity from voters that he can instruct states and courthouses to disregard President Obama’s executive order requiring federal contractors to reduce carbon emissions, that he will do whatever he has to keep miners in the coal mines and coal-fired utility plants spewing pollutants into the atmosphere, contributing to the epidemic of childhood asthma. It’s stunning because the majority of Americans want government to address the source of violent and extreme weather that has proved so lethal and so destructive - this despite millions of dollars spent on ads and propagandist media denying climate change, and even Gov. Rick Scott’s order prohibiting the use of the term. And I’ll bet they also want to be rid of the yoke of oppression of fossil fuel giants who use their monopolistic control of energy to dominate the economy and world affairs and sap household’s spending power. McConnell can do that because he doesn’t care about “ordinary” voters. He only cares about the big money donors, who these days are the Koch Brothers (promising to spend $889 million on the 2016 elections), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street and the Old Fossils. You can go down the list of what a “majority” of Americans favor compared to the policies that are being pushed in government houses: gun violence prevention, immigration reform, raising the minimum wage, ending corporate tax incentives to offshoring
jobs and profits, allowing graduates to refi- or when a small elite is able to really shape nance student debt, universal pre-K, access to government through political spending.” affordable health care, climate change mitiWith the Congress and Judiciary ocgation and environmental protection. cupied by Big Money interests, don’t expect Sitting through a panel discussion on any “campaign finance reform” to come “Big Money in Politics” presented by the out of Congress, and certainly don’t expect League of Women Voters-Port Washington the courts to admit to its own fraudulent & Manhasset (Great Neck members also) and irresponsible “interpretation” of rights on March 19, I felt my blood (cash is speech entitled to boil and depressed at the First Amendment protections same time hearing how the over actual speech, but there combined assault of strategic is no actual right to “one perright wing judicial supremists son, one vote”; corporations and legislative actions have are more entitled to “human” opened floodgates to anonyrights than actual persons). mous wealthy elites who literYou can forget about any ally can buy (or sell out) electConstitutional amendment ed officeholders, is completely to overturn Citizens United undermining any pretense of and establish who is actually KAREN RUBIN a government “by the people, a “person” entitled to rights, Pulse of the Peninsula for the people.” which has worked so much to “The question of regulatthe benefit of the side which ing money in politics is one of people work- now controls the Congressional majority as ing to protect government from domination well as 24 states. of big money spenders, small economic elites, And as the march of conservatives litpassing laws, watching laws getting watered erally buy up state and even local offices down, riddled with holes by federal judiciary sweeps the nation, they will move on to buy which for 40 years has misunderstood what elections in purple and then blue states. Look the Constitution ought to allow us to do in at how the Kochs bought Wisconsin’s state democracy to protect representative govern- government, installing Scott Walker as Govment,” said Liz Kennedy, counsel at the pub- ernor, and then the tiny town of Iron County, lic policy organization Demos. “A functioning Wisconsin (population 6000) where they democracy is one in which government is wanted to install officials favorable to giving responsive to citizens, considered as politi- them mining rights. cal equals. When you start from that underBut there are things that can happen, at standing, it is profoundly anti-democratic for least before the conservative takeover of govanyone to be able to purchase political power ernment is absolute (and because of holding
the reins of gerrymandering and access to voting, would be virtually perpetual, at least until the revolution). These solutions were only hinted at during the League of Women Voters’ fascinating panel on “Big Money in Politics” because there was so much to cover about how we got to this situation, and how destructive to any pretense of democracy it is. But here’s what could happen almost immediately (and it must happen immediately before the mechanisms are in place to take over the White House in 2016): The IRS could and should enforce its rule limiting 501(c)4 groups to social action and not any political activity (somehow, the threshold kept slipping, slipping, and now the IRS says that a group can do 49% of its total activity for political purposes - that was the whole controversy over the IRS inquiry into so-called Conservative groups, when the IRS was scrutinizing progressive groups as much or more - it’s just that these types of groups mushroomed after the 2010 Citizens United decision). “The IRS is also contemplating action,” Kennedy said at the League of Women Voters panel. “It was news today that the IRS commissioner said they are contemplating a rule that would apply not just to c4s, but 501c5s (union) and c6 (trade) - like the US Chamber of Commerce and the Kochs - where you don’t have to disclose donors’ identity. The real question is what counts as political activity. The government wants to encourage Get Out the Vote campaigns, grassroots activity. Continued on Page 40