Spring, 2022

Welcome to The Hudson Valley Vindicator.

If you’re reading this page, chances are you’re a concerned citizen trying to understand what’s wrong with our towns, our state, maybe even the country, and what you can do about it.

The mid-Hudson boasts several daily newspapers and a host of startups, but one subject that doesn’t get the local coverage it deserves is Economic Development – specifically, policies that siphon money away from the public purse and therefore services for the people. These once well-intentioned “incentives” have morphed into welfare-for-millionaires and billionaires, and today, the only thing they incentivize is the culture of dependency, this time by corporations and wealthy grifters.

If you didn’t like the Financial Crisis bank bailouts, if you were shocked by revelations in the Pandora Papers about billionaires who pay no tax, you won’t like what you read in The Hudson Valley Vindicator.

These “incentives” are a microcosm within a macrocosm. Tax breaks for big names such as Amazon get the headlines, but Hudson Valley boondogglers also spend your money on ventures such as dirty energy projects that poison local waters as well as luxury housing funded entirely by the public.

In varying combinations, these stories feature the trifecta of corporate welfare, environmental destruction, and wage suppression — sold to the public under the guise of “job creation” and subsidized with the help of complaisant and perhaps complicit government bodies.

My goal is to uncover and explicate these protection-rackets-for-the-rich in Ulster County and perhaps the region. I may be the one to document them, but it is you, the reader, who can bring your outrage to bear on legislators and demand accountability. It is you who can turn your concern into action. It is you who can bring about change.

My name is Ilona Ross, and many years ago, I was a journalist at The Associated Press in Manhattan. In those days, I considered it the height of glamor to get myself physically evicted from a United Nations press conference by a banana republic despot’s goons, or to record the horror stories told by Cambodian refugees fleeing Pol Pot’s reign of terror. The thought of a planning board would have lulled me to sleep.

Today, I know that local councils, planning boards and unelected economic development authorities are where the money’s at. Thrown off the scent by obfuscation, many observers give up guarding the henhouse. I hope to fill that niche.

About the name. In 2019, on July 4th, the day I celebrate the freedoms enshrined in my beloved homeland’s founding documents, I opened my laptop to read that yet another publication, the Youngstown Vindicator, was folding. That paper was not on my radar, but its name was too hot to pass up.

Cynthia Rickard, a longtime Vindy reporter, had this to say about the evolution of the news business over the past four decades: “The task of being your eyes and ears, your protectors of right in our democracy, defenders of the weak, the downtrodden, the forgotten, abused or neglected, exposers of corruption, spotlight on heroes and helpers, often became more chore than calling as we’ve watched our country’s Fourth Estate being systematically dismantled through a false, but effective narrative of lies sown into the American culture through simple, but frequent repetition.”

Please read the rest of her piece. Cynthia, if you ever land on this page, you’ve got to believe that all is not lost. There is a reason our forefathers protected a free press, the only profession mentioned in the Constitution.

Richard Beeman, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, describes Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote this way. “There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.”

Journalism is crucial to that active and informed involvement, and in my tiny sphere of influence, in this very small online publication, I will do my best to uphold the legacy of Cynthia and that of Franklin.

Kindly wish this venture Godspeed.