Jamestown City Democratic Committee

06/07/2026

06/03/2026

I've talked a little bit about what we went through in February--when on Thursday afternoon, Kevin's nurse told me, "he's just not himself," and by Saturday he's in the hospital with pneumonia and we're discussing whether or not he needs to be in the ICU.

For one week, he just layed in a hospital bed, struggling to breathe and we're trying to stave off sepsis.

He's fine now. It took several weeks, but by spring he was mostly back to himself.

But I'm bringing this up because I just got the statement from that hospital stay--it cost $118,000.

We did all the right things. He gets his flu shots (which is how this all started, ironically). He rarely goes out in public during flu season. We keep him as healthy as humanly possible, and we still ended up here.

My point is this: one incident like this, without Medicaid, puts us on a downward spiral that most families never recover from.

And that's why I've been paying very close attention to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) and the current lies about Medicaid fraud being perpetuated by the highest levels of our govt.

When people hear "Medicaid cuts," they often picture someone else. Someone who isn't working. Someone who isn't their neighbor. Someone who isn't their child.

But for families like ours, Medicaid isn't some abstract government program. It's the difference between surviving a medical crisis and financial ruin.

I've been in enough hospital rooms to know that no parent is sitting there thinking about politics while their child struggles to breathe.

You're thinking: "Will my child be okay?"

The last thing any family should have to think about in that moment is whether they're about to lose their home, drain their retirement account, or declare bankruptcy because their child got sick.

Yet that's exactly the reality many families will face with these Medicaid cuts.

Kevin's hospital stay wasn't the result of neglect, bad choices, or not trying hard enough. Sometimes terrible things happen even when you do everything right.

This false narrative that Medicaid is just chock full of waste and fraud isn't true. It's just being said, over and over and over, so that people become comfortable with the cuts.

Medical needs don't vanish because a budget line item got smaller.

And families like ours don't magically become able to absorb six-figure medical bills.

For us, Medicaid isn't a safety net. It's the thing standing between stability and catastrophe.

06/03/2026

When you put idiots in charge...

In a twist so ironic it almost writes itself, the federal agency responsible for keeping America's farms and ecosystems free of invasive pests is now overrun with bed bugs, and you can thank the trump administration's budget axe for setting the stage. DOGE gutted APHIS, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, slashing its funding by roughly 22% and cutting staff by 17%, leaving the George Washington Carver Center in Beltsville, Maryland, crawling with an infestation that workers say has been mishandled at every turn. As one USDA employee put it to the outlet NOTUS, the irony "was lost on no one."

The response from leadership has been about as reassuring as a scratchy motel mattress. After the building was fumigated, employees were sent back in, complained of fumes making them sick, got sent home again, and then when the bugs resurfaced a third time, management told workers to use their personal vacation days if they did not want to sit in an infested office. No extra telework, no real solutions, just a shrug and a suggestion to burn your PTO.

This is what happens when you treat government agencies like line items to be deleted. APHIS exists to protect the country's agricultural infrastructure from the kinds of invasive threats that can devastate entire ecosystems and food supplies, and the people doing that work are now too busy being paranoid and itchy to do much of anything else. Sure, the bed bug story is darkly funny in that laugh so you don't cry kind of way, but it becomes a lot less funny when you zoom out and remember that right now the United States is on track to lose its measles elimination status for the first time since 2000, with nearly 4,000 confirmed cases spread across 47 states since 2025. These are the same people running point on tick infestations, disease containment, and agricultural biosecurity. Incompetence at this scale is not a punchline. It is a public health emergency wearing a clown suit.

05/30/2026

In today's Post-Journal:

Blaming New York Won’t Bring Chautauqua County Jobs Back

Bush Industries is closing, leaving more than 200 people without work in the south of the county. In a region that has already absorbed losses from Truck-Lite and Serta, this is not just another closure. It’s a blow to the foundation of our community.

And once again, instead of sitting with that reality and doing the hard work to solve it, our Republican leadership is reaching for a familiar script.

Blame New York State.

Senator George Borrello and Assemblyman Andrew Molitor both pointed to “burdensome regulations” and the cost of doing business in New York as the explanation. That argument is politically convenient. It is not what the company itself said.

According to eSolutions Furniture Group, the Canadian parent company of Bush Industries, the bankruptcy was driven by a combination of factors: tariffs imposed by the U.S. government, declining post-pandemic demand, increased offshore competition, and ongoing cash constraints.

That matters because if you start with the wrong diagnosis, you guarantee the wrong response.

Bush Industries was already under pressure. The furniture industry has been hollowed out for decades by global competition. Consumers–often out of necessity–buy cheaper imported goods. Domestic manufacturers, carrying higher labor and material costs, operate on thinner margins. That was the landscape well before this year.

Then demand shifted. During the pandemic, people invested in home offices. That surge didn’t last. When demand pulled back, so did revenue.

And then tariffs hit.

Tariffs are taxes on imports paid by U.S. businesses. Companies absorb them first, but the cost moves–increasing prices, squeezing profit margins, and forcing decisions about whether a business can continue operating at all. In a strong company, tariffs can be managed. In a company already facing cash constraints, they accelerate the fall. That is basic business math.

None of this means tariffs are always bad. Used strategically, they can support domestic industry. Early American leaders used them that way to build manufacturing capacity.

But broad, arbitrary, and poorly targeted tariffs don’t strengthen fragile companies. They expose them.

And that’s where the conversation in Chautauqua County is failing.

Instead of asking:

– What industries can we realistically support and grow here now?

– What supply chains can we support?

– What workforce investments could make us competitive?

We are being offered a recycled talking point about Albany.

Even locally, the response raises more questions than answers. County Executive PJ Wendel said that offers were made to purchase the company but were rejected. But in a bankruptcy process, decisions are driven by creditors and court oversight, with a mandate to maximize recovery–not preserve local jobs. That reality should shape what we ask for and how we respond.

Because hope is not a strategy.

Chautauqua County is not losing jobs because of a single policy or a single place. We are losing them because we have not built a coordinated, realistic economic strategy that matches where the market actually is–and because too many decisions are still being shaped by what fits a political narrative, not what will actually work here.

Until we do, closures like this will keep happening–no matter who we choose to blame.

More than 200 jobs don’t disappear on paper. They disappear in households.

They show up as a mortgage that can’t be paid. As a second job that wasn’t supposed to be necessary. As a young person deciding not to come back after college because there’s nothing here to come back to.

And while families in this county do that math at their kitchen tables, our Republican leadership is still playing politics.

We deserve better than talking points. We deserve leadership that is honest about what is happening, clear about what can be done, and willing to do the hard work of building an economy that actually strengthens our communities.

If we don’t change direction, this won’t be the last time we have this conversation. It will be the next company, the next household, and the next set of families left to figure it out on their own.

Julie Jackson-Forsberg is a Jamestown resident.