InsideOut Interview: Maurice Hinchey

By Owen Lipstein May/June 2009


Back in 1975, Maurice Hinchey distinguished himself by becoming only the second Ulster County Democrat to be elected to the New York State Assembly—since the Civil War. The progressive Democrat is now serving his ninth consecutive term in the U.S. House of Representatives for New York’s 22nd Congressional District, where he sits on the House Appropriations Committee, serving on the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies; the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies; and the Subcommittee on Defense, in addition to being a member of the House Natural Resources and the Joint Economic committees.

Congressman Hinchey took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about national breakdowns past, and the road that lies ahead.


Owen Lipstein: Assuming that President Obama’s proposed federal budget is adopted, what impact will it have in our area?

Maurice Hinchey: Well, a substantial amount of funding for education is going to come into our area. That’s going to have a positive impact on elementary and secondary education, and it is going to improve access to higher education.
There will be funding for the upgrading of health care in this budget. Already we have achieved, with the signature of President Obama, access to health care [for] young people who do not have access under any insurance program of any kind. That’s already been done. And the improvement of health-care availability is going to continue in the context of this budget, as it moves forward and passes into law.
Also, for the first time in a long time—in decades—there is attention being focused on infrastructure: highways, bridges, roads—transportation generally, including rail transportation—and the upgrading of buses to make them more energy efficient.
There will also be a focus of attention on new technology: what we have got to do in more sensible ways to deal with the issues that confront our state, our country, and our species on this planet—the entire planet. There’s going to be a lot more attention focused particularly on new energy-technology, including solar, geothermal, wind: other means by which we can increasingly become more and more energy independent by being able to generate the energy that we need, here in this country, without using fossil fuels.
That needs to be done for a lot of reasons, including, of course, the immediate reason of reducing the cost that people have to pay for fossil fuels, including the oil that we import into this country. But also, we need to deal with another issue that is in danger of condemning this planet, and that is climate change. Global warming. The heating up of this planet as a result of the pollutants that are generated from the use of fossil fuels.
So, all of that and more is contained in this budget. And the contents of this budget are going to make significant changes, positive changes, in the way we are dealing with a whole host of issues.

OL: You were a fierce critic of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a deregulation bill that essentially allowed commercial banks to be investment bankers, too. Can you comment on how that legislation has affected the current economy?

MH: The passage of that Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill was a terrible mistake. It provided for the manipulation of investment, the manipulation of investment banks and mortgage banks in a whole host of ways, which provided for the structure of bonds and other capital-investment materials, which were, in many ways, falsified—all of which gave rise to the current global economic crisis that we’re facing.

OL: Had the bill not passed, do you think the mess we’re in would have been significantly different?

MH: It would. It would be significantly less. I mean, we would still have a problem, and that problem would be the long-term ignoring of [the country’s] internal needs, such as infrastructure, education, health care, new technology, and trying to move toward energy independence. All of that has been ignored for a long time now, going back at least to the beginning of the 1980s.
And the sort of corrupt expenditure in Iraq—the expenditure between $10 billion and $12 billion a month, month after month—all of that would have still been as it is now, part of an economic problem that we were facing. [But] the depth of that problem would not be nearly as severe as it is now as a result of the repeal, under the [1999] Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, of the [1933] Glass Steagall [Act], and the manipulation of capital investment in this country which ensued as a direct result of that repeal...
I argued against that legislation on the floor of the House for the kinds of reasons that I just mentioned. But nevertheless, it passed. And it passed overwhelmingly, with only 37 votes against it.

OL: What is your vision for solar technology in New York?

MH: What we need now is a movement in this country toward energy independence. We are very much dependent upon fossil fuels, and we are very uncomfortably dependent on oil—foreign oil. Seventy percent of the oil that we use in America comes from outside of our country, and that is only likely to continue, and that 70 percent is likely to go up.
We possess 3 percent of known oil reserves on the planet, and that 3 percent is not nearly enough for a country that is using so much oil. At the same time that we are in danger of the economy suffering as a result of our dependence on oil... coming from other places around the world, particularly from the Middle East, from Africa and elsewhere—the cost of that oil is likely to go back up again. And that will be reflected, of course, in the price of gasoline and the price of home heating oil. And that will have a major negative impact on the economic circumstances of the middle-income and working people across our country.
So, we need to be very effectively and aggressively worked toward energy independence here, and [we need to] deal with the issue of global warming, which is also a critical problem that this entire planet faces.
What we have done ourselves, personally and regionally, is to establish the Solar Energy Consortium, which is focused on the means by which we can generate the energy that we need directly from the sun. The sun is the most dependable source of energy that this planet has the ability to use, and this is something that we should no longer ignore. We should be taking advantage of that energy because it has the potential to be the most reliable—and, at some point—the least expensive, and most effective means by which we can produce the energy that we need.

OL: In the popular mind, solar energy used to be associated with areas of the country that tend to be southern or western. Has battery or other technology changed to make it more economically feasible in our area?

MH: Well, its economic feasibility is growing. But it is very much feasible in our area. New York state gets a lot of sun, and that’s particularly true of the Hudson Valley. And we get that sun on a regular basis all year long; even when it’s cloudy, there’s still energy coming from the sun in daylight.

We are also now working, as you mentioned, on the ability of technology—in addition to absorbing that energy out of the sun—to hold onto it longer. We’re working right now with one company that has developed a means of processing battery technology internally, to hold onto energy for a longer period of time. And that process is going to be upgraded over time, as it is now getting appropriate attention, making solar energy much more effective.

OL: How are we going to get people and businesses off the dime, and really coming to understand that not only is solar energy economically feasible, but also not as difficult as people might think to set up?

MH: Well, we haven’t gotten everybody off the dime, but we have gotten quite a few people. And as a result of the establishment of the Solar Energy Consortium, we have attracted a number of companies, locally in New York state, in other parts of the country, and outside of the United States—companies from Germany, for example—that are very interested in what we’re doing, and very interested in working with us.
In addition to that, we’re in discussions on a regular basis with some very large corporations in America that are increasingly understanding the effectiveness of producing solar energy in ways that will be effectively marketable. They are now paying a lot more attention to this. And we’ve been able to come up with a significant amount of public funding to get this process moving, and to enable it to grow. We’re also doing a substantial amount of research in connection with the Solar Energy Consortium in universities like New Paltz, Binghamton, Cornell, and several other colleges and universities in New York state.

OL: You have an amazing record on fighting for the environment. How are you feeling about the Hudson River these days?

MH: Well, we’ve been making progress. And we’ve been suffering from lack of progress, too, in a variety of ways. I mean, I’m a great fan of the Hudson River. In fact, in all of the public work that I’ve done, I’ve always been devoted to the Hudson River. And part of that is a result of the fact that I’ve lived on the edge of the Hudson River all my life.
Initially, I was born on the lower West Side of Manhattan, in Greenwich Village, and grew up there and in Saugerties, which is on the west side of the Hudson River. And even when I was a kid, I can remember traveling the Hudson River on [a] ferry boat from New York City up to Saugerties. The Hudson River has just fascinated me all through my life.
And the history of it is also very, very important. Last week, for example, I went to Amsterdam and spent some time, with the queen of the Netherlands and other officials there, to initiate the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial celebration. We have a direct relationship with Amsterdam, of course, because Henry Hudson was working for the Netherlands when he discovered the Hudson River. As a result of his discovery, the Dutch settled in Manhattan.
So, this river is critically important, [and] I’ve been working on a number of [related] issues. When I was in Albany in the state Legislature, we had a great deal of success at cleaning up the Hudson River, working with the federal government through the establishment of sewer treatment facilities and water upgrading programs that changed the personality, really, of the Hudson in a variety of ways—and stopped people from turning their backs on the river, but instead focusing on it, and bringing people together [around it]. And that’s grown very significantly over the last 40 years.
But unfortunately, back in the ‘80s, we began to make it more difficult, because the federal program for the establishment of sewer treatment facilities and the funding of those sewer treatment facilities was downgraded during the Reagan administration. And that had a negative impact on the development of the sewer treatment plants and the upgrading of rivers, including the Hudson. But nevertheless, the Hudson River now is a lot cleaner than it was after the Second World War, back in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s. It’s a lot cleaner as a result of the efforts that we were engaged in beginning in the 1960s.

OL: Are you a striped-bass fisherman?

MH: I don’t have time for fishing anymore. [He laughs.] But when I was a kid, I used to go trout fishing. But with this job, I don’t have time for any of those kinds of things. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do it again.

OL: How is the cleanup of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the river going?

MH: Finally, now, it’s getting attention. It made significant advances in the first eight years that I was here, working [on it] with the Clinton administration. And the work I was able to do with the Clinton administration between 1993 and 2000 moved that process along very, very effectively. The PCBs were about to be aggressively cleaned up in 2000. But when the Bush administration came in, they stopped it.

OL: That’s appalling.

MH: And it stopped for the last eight years. Now, with the Obama administration, the environmental agency here is once again effectively focused on PCB elimination, and the cleanup of PCBs in the Hudson River is once again beginning. It’s amazing to see the difference in the way Democratic administrations and Republican administrations have operated with regard to the cleaning up of elements of the Hudson River, particularly the cleaning of PCBs, which [has] a very serious, negative impact on the river, and eventually on people who live along the river.

OL: You’ve seen many different presidents and many different administrations. You’ve been a pioneer in many of the areas we’ve talked about. What’s your mood about the country now, as we speak?

MH: Well, this country has been doing things very badly for the last eight years. The illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq is a major part of the international problems that we’re confronting. The failure to deal with the situation in Afghanistan, where the attack of September 11th was originated by al-Qaeda, all of that, and a whole host of other things, [have left us with] serious problems.
Now, those problems are being addressed. They’re being addressed by an intelligent, understanding president, one who is committed to the best interests of this country, and to dealing with the complex issues that we have to confront in an effective, intelligent way that is going to have very positive effects. So I’m feeling a lot more optimistic right now than I have felt in a long time.
But it’s not anything that’s going to be done simply. It’s going to require a lot of attention, and a lot of work by this Congress to get this country back on the right track, and to move it forward in a way that can be exemplary for other countries around the world.