Tyner not an anti-Semite

Dear Editor: Progressives were called communists in the 1950s, whenever the corrupt establishment wanted to shut someone up. It happened to our Pete Seeger, who was blacklisted by the media and the record companies for years. Back then, anyone who sang songs against war and racism was a subversive in the eyes of the state, whether he was in the Communist Party or not.

Anti-Semitism is the new communism. Our populist reformer, Dutchess County Legislator Joel Tyner, D-Clinton, has been fighting a campaign against privatizing the city of Poughkeepsie bus system, a move that would destroy jobs as well as eliminate many bus stops. Rather than looking at the economic racism of yet another privatization boondoggle, our local media prefer calling Tyner names, this time the amorphous charge of being an anti-Semite.

There were some heated words exchanged between Joel and some other Democratic members of the Dutchess County Legislature who refused to back him on saving the public bus service. Sad to say, there are Democrats in the county are quite content to be junior partners in the Republican machine.

Now our media, as subservient to the establishment as some of our local Democrats, claim the whole issue is antiSemitism, not the rip-off of public services from the black community. It seems like the new era of slanderous innuendo is a lot like the old one, the McCarthy Era.

Joel is not an anti-Semite, and he did not refer to anyone’s religion when he criticized local Democrats. The charge is trash. Fred Nagel Rhinebeck