Meet NY State Senator Jeff Klein (D-Bronx) [Dem - you're suprised?]. He’s a busy, busy man, engaged in all types of mundo-important legislative proposals. Along with a good-sized band of other extreme, leftist, psycopath Dems (most notably, the Cuomo, Silver and Schumer trifecta), Klein is busting his hump in a never-ending attempt to drive small businesses to GTFO improve the business climate in the [not so] great state of New York. Sometimes, when he’s distracted from much more important business – like crafting (note in pic) fancy Kabala bracelets on the taxpayer’s dime, cooking up ineffective laws like the unSAFE act, justifying them with completely un-scientific stats/arguments – the good Jeff fancies keeping himself employed with… uh… busy-work.
Klein’s ever-so-genius justification for such a proposal (via NY Daily News)?
“Eric Soufer, spokesman for Sen. Jeff Klein (D-Bronx), says of a proposed liquor warehousing law, ‘At the end of the day, why would we keep New York goods stored in New Jersey warehouses, when the next Bridgegate may be just around the corner?‘”
Isolationism? Check. Discouraging economic growth and competition? Check. Referencing 100% unrelated past NJ traffic events as illogical justifications for do-nothing legislative proposals? Fear not. Jeff’s office has got us covered. At the very least, I think he should give serious consideration to hiring a new public mouthpiece as Mr. Soufer clearly (a) did not get his polish on at the Rothschilds International School of Political Correctness and Deception or (b) was more than sampling the distributors’ swill when making such statements. Now look… I’m all for trying to keep money local. Whether is ethnic-on-ethnic small business, producing and buying quality American products as opposed to funding Chinese smog with [mostly] poorly made junk, or sticking primarilly to chemical-free, organic local produce and meats, I understand and support the dynamic. But actually forcing folks into such a business arrangement is beyond my comprehension.
Jeff righteousness, and desire to keep the money in la familia, seems to know no bounds., right? Well – not really. Like most other pols on public stage, I suspect this bill comes down to little more than money and power as opposed to doing right by the people.
Empire Distributors is probably the largest Liquor Authority sanctioned distributor in New York City (the most populous area of NY for those not in the know), if not the entire state itself. Why does this matter? Empire has contributed tens of thousands of duckets to Klein’s election campaigns. While that’s nothing illegal, combined with a bill that would likely result in a large corporate windfall, the situation wreaks of typical cronyism (to me anyway). In a nutshell, the deal would reduce (if not eliminate) most significant competition as smaller-scale operations would have difficulty re-designing their distribution infrastructure to meet the requirement for [presumably more expensive] NY-based warehouses. Several of those spoken to estimate the pass-me-down costs potentially adding between $5 to $10 per case of liquor if those smaller businesses survive the migration at all. It goes without saying, those costs would ultimately be passed down to retail merchants, liquor stores, bars and of course in the end, consumers.
The New York Alliance of Fine Wine Wholesalers has gone so far as to commission and publish a detailed study on the overall impact to landscape, were such a bill to pass.
So, go on with your bad self Jeff. Dream big. Continue spinning those oft-used cogs, dreaming up “good-for-me, good-for-you-too,” uber-significant bills designed solely to benefit the public at large. Right. I guess we’ll see how this plays out as similar, previous bills, have all met their untimely death, perpetually being “Referred to Committee.” For the laymen among us, that’s another term for “we don’t want the embarrassment of bringing this rather stupid bill to the floor for a vote, so we’ll just bury it indefinitely, classifying it as: we’re looking into it dude.”
