Follow Up on the News

Olive Matters...
What’s Their Stance?

She noted that one newly-announced Olive candidate, Ralph Legnini, had asked if he could come before Olive Matters to seek their support for the slate of four candidates he’s running with who are against the current board’s pending proposal to redistrict Onteora for a new 5-8 Middle School, necessitating the closing of another elementary school.
“We said that’s crazy, that’s like asking somebody from Woodstock to support an Olive candidate,” Boggess continued. “We’re definitely not supporting anyone not from Olive… Olive only candidates, that’s who we support.”
Later, Boggess wrote that the group DID meet with Legnini, who made his case. But all in attendance politely disagreed, standing by their belief that taxpayer issues were paramount at the moment, at least in their terms.
In explanation of the Olive Matters Olive-only stance regarding Onteora matters, Boggess was no-nonsense. She noted that even though a deal has been struck between New York City and the Town of Olive that makes the Large Parcel issue that raised the townspeoples’ school taxes moot for the coming decade, her group won’t be happy until laws are passed in Albany that specifically remove reservoirs from any consideration if its implementation.
“All we have now is a ten year reprieve,” she said. “What happens after 10 years if New York City and the town can’t agree on a value anymore?”
Boggess said the rest of the Onteora School district had former Woodstock supervisor Jeremy Wilber and former Shandaken supervisor Bob Cross to thank for the Olive Matters stance, which would push for their town’s complete control of the school board until which time Large Parcel is removed from consideration by the state. No matter what any local candidates say about not implementing it. And no matter whether either of the former supervisors ever apologized for their previous stances.
She also noted that Olive Matters was fully supporting the Middle School plan, and planning process, pushed by the three incumbent candidates it helped bring to the Onteora board in an upset election three years ago. She pointed out that the middle school discussions had taken long enough – three years – to already allow everyone a say, and that “parents who don’t want this don’t understand” that unless schools are closed and consolidation allowed to happen, there would be more cuts to education, including “things like band and art” because of the district’s runaway expenses.
Boggess’ husband Drew served as a member of the school district’s Budget Study Group that recently recommended closing a school and consolidating programs, as well as hiring new teachers at lower wages, as a means of stemming the sort of high costs it characterized, in its recently disseminated report, via the image of a runaway train.
“These three people have kept our budget down and done a bang-up job,” Boggess said of OCS Board President MaryJane Bernholz and boardmembers Cindy O’Connor and Rita Vanacore. “We’re tired of seeing our board members being unduly badmouthed, just like we’re tired of being bad-mouthed as a town.”
Boggess spoke about how candidates opposing the Olive incumbents were talking about issues related to qualities of education and community when what mattered most to the Olive voters Olive Matters represented were more interested in pure economics.
“They should ride around with our Meals on Wheels programs and ask our seniors themselves to pay these $100,000 salaries for teachers,” she said. “Tell them why there are 60 passenger busses with only 40 kids on them. Tell them you want all this stuff paid for out of their Social Security checks.”
Boggess noted that Olive Matters didn’t care which school closed, as long as one did.
“We can’t keep feeding this monster,” she said.
After noting that Olive Matters wouldn’t mind Woodstock and West Hurley splitting from the rest of Onteora, the better for the remaining district’s school aid formulas, Boggess was asked whether anyone in her organization was giving thought to the effects of rising energy prices and those who are now saying it will force an eventual return to smaller, community-oriented education.
“I don’t think a lot of people here understand or care about any of that right now,” she replied. “Right now, everyone’s more concerned about paying bills that are piling up. And a lot of our senior citizens are without children now, so they don’t really care. ‘Why would it effect me,’ they say.”
Should the new slate ask to speak to Olive Matters at an upcoming meeting, via Legnini, an Olive resident, or any of the other candidates, Boggess said they would likely be put on the agenda. But the she added that there might also be a chance that no one would show up to listen to them.
Does Olive Matters have a fourth candidate for the open slots up for election May 20, in addition to the three incumbents they consider theirs?
Boggess said there were other petitions out but no official word of anyone yet.
Has their turnout been as strong as it once was, back when Large Parcel was more of a pressing issue?
“We have a turn out. We’re kind of silently active, with a formidable e-mail list,” Boggess said. “WE want a big push to have only Olive people on the board.”
Forever?
“It would be nice to figure out how the heck all these towns can get together,” she said. “But for now, we’re sick of people considering us ‘low tax Olive.’”

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Farming Then & Now

Indeed our whole society changed markedly starting around the 1940s as a result of burgeoning cheap fuel supplies. Land use planning in the US encouraged the expansion of the suburbs with cheap fuel and relatively inexpensive cars that provided the means to live in the country and commute to a distant city for employment. The suburban sprawl has resulted in a substantial loss of farmland across the US and has also contributed to the 22 barrels per person per year of oil consumption in the US, 40% of which is used for transport. (The rest of the industrialized world uses 4 to 6 barrels of oil per person per year.) Modern food production requires 10 to 15 calories of petroleum inputs in the form of synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and tractor fuel to produce and deliver 1 calorie of food to your dinner plate. On the other hand, organic agriculture uses natural farm-derived inputs that are usually composted before use on the gardens or fields. The caloric input required is much lower and it is derived on the farm to the greatest extent possible. The organic system depends on recycling waste (animal and green manures and compost) back to the soil to replace nutrients taken out with the crop. When Cuba suffered a collapse of oil imports due to the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, their relatively modern agricultural sector was stopped dead in its tracks. Organic gardeners and farmers were elevated by government decree to the status and pay of doctors and engineers, and they were given control of the state farms and lands. It took three years and an average weight loss of 25 pounds per person before they got their production back and they are now a model for the rest of the world. Many visitors from other countries now visit Cuba for the purpose of documenting their natural organic food production systems for possible adoption and use in their home countries. High fuel prices are now driving the conversion back to organics in many countries.
The organic way requires more labor but is that bad? The new energy paradigm may well cause a return to more local food production in the US and indeed there seems to be a growing consciousness of food and where it comes from. With that context in mind the following observations and recollections by our neighbors who grew up on local farms from the 30s through the present are all the more relevant.
The way of life that they describe is essentially seasonal organic production. They have much of the knowledge needed to at least partially convert back to traditional local biological means of production, if necessary. There are common threads throughout the growing number of interviews of local farmers, trappers, sawyers and stonecutters, retired and not.
They all described a varied work life that revolved around the seasons and production for home use of all types of food, fuel and other necessities, with the excess production going to market. The rocky Catskill foothills in Olive and uplands leading up into Shandaken were not conducive to large scale farming such as exists in the rich bottomland of the Rondout and Esopus Valleys. The farms here in Olive and Shandaken were small scale and diversified with small to medium sized dairy’s predominating being well distributed throughout both Olive and Shandaken.
All persons interviewed observed that cows were omnipresent and many families had a cow or two to produce milk and cream to make butter, cheese and yogurt for home use and for sale. The cow seemingly was the basis of the local homestead nutritional system, providing food, compost and cash from the excess production, including a premium for the value-added goods like butter, cheese and yogurt. They are self reproducing, to boot. Little wonder there was literally several thousand cows from Olive up into the Catskills right up through the Roxbury Valley in Delaware County by the early 1940s. By the 70s and 80s the local dairy industry was all but gone due to low milk prices and increasing costs. One by one they folded and sold off the herds and equipment with the Fox Farm in Olivebridge being the last modern dairy in these parts to close and liquidate the herd somewhere around 1990 with the encouragement of the federal PIK buyout program, which would buy out and liquidate dairy herds due to overproduction and depressed milk prices.
The shoe seems to be on the other foot now with milk bringing eighteen dollars a hundredweight in 2007 and slightly less in 2008.
Next Issue: The last farmers remember, and look forward to a rebirth of fagriculture in these hills...

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Saving Habeas Corpus...

Having rented a house in Olive while still in law school in 1970, Ratner became so attached to the area that he later bought a home in West Shokan so that he would always have that connection to return to.
”Unfortunately, I didn’t really get there at all this winter,” he said. “And right now I’m trying to think of a way to get there tomorrow.”
Ratner has been too busy in his role as a legal Lancelot on the frontline of courtroom decisions that are redefining the concept of freedom in America - tightly focused on the survival of habeas corpus and the fate of the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.
Founded during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s by famed attorneys Arthur Kinoy, William Kunstler, Morton Stavis and Benjamin Smith, the CCR gained renewed notice in 2002 with Ratner’s decision to challenge civil liberties abridgments imposed following the 9/11 attacks.
“I would say our biggest success, so far, was making ‘Guantanamo Bay’ a household word but, even more, in getting attorneys there to protect people from torture and then helping release hundreds of the innocent,” Ratner reflected. “Clearly, winning the first big case in the 2004 Supreme Court decision for Rasul v. Bush, giving habeas corpus rights, or the right to petition detention to the prisoners of Guantanamo was vital.”
The Habeas corpus writ is a concept dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D., ratified in Britain in 1689 and included as a key provision of the U.S. Constitution. Basically, it guarantees the right to a fair trial to anyone accused of a crime. It was considered “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.” But when Congress granted AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) to the Executive branch of government in September, 2001, the administration expanded it to include anyone the President decided was an “International Terrorist.” This was a first step, in Ratner’s view, in the circumvention of Constitutional rights.
“In the United States, there were 93,000 people who were picked up immediately afterwards, who were undocumented workers, not one terrorist,” Ratner recalled. “These were special registration people for young men between the ages of 18 to 35 from certain Muslim countries and people the FBI wanted to look at.
““Then there’s the Guantanamo Bay category, which is roughly 750. Five hundred have been released and we think the high majority of those left there will also be released.,” the former NLG (National Lawyers Guild) President continued. “That’s not the so-called ‘high value detainees,’ of which there are 14 and I’m not willing to say very much about that. Not in the sense that I don’t know but in the sense that most of what the government has to say turns out not to be the case. Rumsfeld calls them ‘the worst of the worst’- people who are going to chew through hydraulic cords, bring down airplanes, that want to kill us and it turns out that this was not the case at all. So, my feeling about what the government puts forward, either publicly or in secret evidence, is that I’m highly, highly skeptical.”
Rooting his doubts in the CCR’s experiences in cases already handled, Ratner sounds fairly optimistic about the defense even if, at first glance, most of the chips seem be on the government’s side of the table. The scorecard, however, seems to indicate otherwise. Even though CCR’s client, the first ‘Gitmo’ detainee granted legal representation, David Hicks, entered a plea bargain last year which allowed him to return to his native Australia, the New York Times noted that he “was bargaining in the shadow of many things-the conditions at the base, international diplomacy, homesickness and the possibility of indefinite detention without charge. But he was not, for the most part, bargaining in the shadow of the law...The statute under which he was to be tried was brand new and untested. The relevant regulations are as yet largely unwritten. ”
“They’ve never had a successful prosecution from beginning to end. Not one,” observed Ratner of the Gitmo slate. “The only case they had, a client I represented for a while - David Hicks - pled guilty (as “enemy combatant”), got 9 months in jail and is out. Every other time the government has been faced with a real hearing, where they have to come up with actual evidence, they responded by releasing the prisoners. And then you add torture and we know that victims and survivors of torture really do say what their interrogators want to hear.”
Ratner points to the 2006 analysis of Defense Department files on 517 Guantanamo detainees by Professor Mark Denbeaux of Setion Hall University, which found that the majority of detainees had committed no hostile acts against the U.S. and, in fact, only 5% of them had been captured by U.S. forces while 86% had been turned over for the $4,000 or $5,000 bounties offered, no questions asked, and notes that the government’s use of money has been a major issue.
“Their claim with regard to at least some of the so-called ‘secret detainees’ who are in some of those black sites and through whom they claim to have been able to solve some plots, I don’t have it in front of me but a lot of that is essentially ‘made from whole cloth’,” Ratner charged. “To the extent that we’ve been able to dependably corroborate whether those plots even existed or whether the torture resulted in any apprehensions, we’ve been able to demonstrate that they haven’t gotten very much of anything from torture.”
With such an enormous percentage of the national budget geared to the terror threat and the techno-security companies favored by the administration, this is a disturbing claim. Over last weekend we saw an example of how the “new justice system” flexed its muscle as “Operation Sudden Impact” coordinated a three-state task force encompassing federal, state and local agencies in an “anti-terror, anti-crime” operation in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. Although no actual terrorists were discovered, 332 arrests were made and 1,292 traffic violations issued in Memphis alone. But, more importantly, it was the first known exercise of the NIMS (National Incident Management System) equipment issued to towns around the country from FEMA funds to interconnect federal, state and local authorities.
As reported here in December, 2006, the Olive Police Department received a $25,000 grant, secured from the state budget by Senator Bonacic, to enable them to participate in the Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program under Director of New York’s Homeland Security Office, Brigadier General F. David Sheppard... when the call comes.
Additionally, as a New York municipality, Olive will have the benefit of plugging into a federally-funded database called Matrix (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) owned by Seisint, Inc., a private security company associated with former Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, to protect it by sharing data like voter registrations, civil court records, history of address changes, etc. instantly between the agencies. New York is only one of 7 states in the nation to have signed on to the program so far, the others being Florida, Ohio, Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Utah. States which have rejected the system, for reasons of long-term costs or privacy concerns, include California, Texas, Oregon, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.
A writ of habeas corpus stands as the most important item to the 332 people arrested in the sweep, even if they aren’t accused of terrorism. But Ratner’s 2004 habeas corpus victory, which the New York Times hailed as “the most important civil rights victory in 50 years” was short lived and the battle continues even as his Center defends one of the “high-value detainees” against a death penalty charge issued in February.
“What we got out of the June 2004 decision was the ability to send attorneys to Guantanamo and we now have a group of some 600 attorneys, not just from civil rights groups but mostly from big law firms, who are representing the Guantanamo detainees,” said Ratner, sounding like he was quoting from a John Grisham novel. “As a result of that, we were able to stop the torture at least there and put pressure on various countries and the government to get people out. So, that success opened a huge door for us.
“At the same time, Congress passed a law stripping habeas from them and it went to the Supreme Court again in 2006,” he noted. “The Court said it wasn’t done right and Congress did it again, supposedly right, and that’s the case still pending, which will be decided in about a month. So, it’s Sisyphus-like; the third time we’re been there but in the interim we’ve at least been able to protect people from the worse aspects of torture and help get people out.”
In an exclusive April interview, which concludes in our next issue, Michael Ratner (whose book with Ellen Ray, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know is available in paperback) also shares his views on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed & the closing of Monument Road in Olive; the shocking behavior of the mainstream press on issues of urgent concern; the use of private corporations in foreign conflicts and domestic intelligence gathering; how the use of huge bounties led to a flood of false arrests and why the Center for Constitutional Rights will continue its pursuit of European indictments of Donald Rumsfeld and other former key administration officials for war crimes, adding President Bush and Vice-President Cheney to the list as soon as they leave office.

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A Jar Of Olives...
Spring? Signs Are Popping Up Everywhere

The fire companies held their 61st Anniversary Dinner at the Hillside Manor this past Saturday. There had to be over 200 people there to share the festivities despite the fact that many volunteers were fighting the forest fire on Minnewaska Ridge. It just pointed out how unselfishly these men and women give of their time to keep all of us safe. Joe Rechen, formerly of Shokan’s Company Two, was the guest speaker, and John Ingram, who received his forty-year service pin, was the host with the most. Angelo Russo earned the not-so-prestigious “Agitator Award” although Ralph Van Kleeck, Sr. said, “This year there were so many people who could have received it.” The award consists of the agitator from a washing machine scrounged from the landfill. Angelo’s son, Craig, earned the Firefighter of the Year Fire Police Award. Companies one through five awards went to: Tim Dupree, Jr., Brian Davis, Andrew Eberhardt, Ronald Bodingheimer, and Tommy Kraus.
Yard Sale signs are beginning to appear as people start spring-cleaning and weeding out the clothes they’ve outgrown after an in-active winter. The Tongore Garden Club will be having its annual plant sale on Memorial Day Weekend at Dolly Denman’s place on Route 28 Shokan. The Reservoir Methodist Church, just down (or up) the road, will have its huge Flea Market, Rummage Sale, and Yard Sale. Traffic should be at a standstill with many smaller sales that will kite-tail to these annual events.
Earth Day is this week although Earth Day should be every day. I notice that Jean Davis, Joe Ahouse and Melanie Reynolds pick up litter as they take their daily walk. If we all did a little, a lot can be accomplished. Sharon McInerney’s fourth grade class composed a Broadway-style musical review about Keeping Green. They performed, all in their green tee shirts, for the talent show and at the Earth Day Celebration.
I am busy trying to make soil on our little piece of earth. Our new home is on the side of a mountain, so our dirt is really just smaller rocks. I compost, throw out the coffee grounds on the gardens, and keep adding peat moss in hopes to make something that will sustain plant life. By the way, here is a hint from someone who used to work in a florist shop: When your hands get good and grimy from digging in the dirt, throw a teaspoon of sugar onto your soapy hands. It’s just enough of an abrasive to work on green and brown gardening hands.
I am enjoying the palette of Mother Nature. She definitely likes the colors green and yellow in her spring wardrobe. I can see the lime green of the weeping willow trees, the bright yellow of the daffodils and forsythia, and the green of plant shoots fighting their way through the leaves of last fall. I am always amazed at the tenacity of plants to grow in the harshest of conditions. I think there is a lesson there for us all.

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