NEW YORK ISN'T DEAD, YET

 NEW YORK ISN’T DEAD YET

Eric Adams, the Mayor-elect of New York City, is ludicrously being assailed by the left for planning to reimpose some policing measures they consider to be “racist,” never mind that he himself is black. He correctly points out that the now-discredited BLM is just a fringe group, and encouragingly is standing his ground instead caving, the way liberals always do, to the radical left. The reality is that his election was the least racially-tinged election in the history of the city, having been chosen by a majority of both black, white and every other middle and working class constituencies in the city. But the left continues to perceive everything through a racial lens, primarIly because it is composed mostly of self-hating white people. 

If Adams continues to resist the prevailing positions of the dominant elite, who otherwise don’t represent anyone, the prospects for a NYC recovery have brightened considerably after the terrible diBlasio administration. I believe that will likely be true in the state as well with prospect that Lee Zeldin will become our next Governor. Like many I have considered leaving, but having lived here all my life I’ve decided I’m not going to abandon my homeland without a fight, and these prospects indicate there is at least one last chance of turning things around after years of corrupt, dysfunctional government. The challenge is still daunting but it may just come about, despite the still-dominant rotten elite. 

For it has never been true that New York is especially “liberal,” and certainly not “left.” It has little in common with some of the loonier places on the west coast. That is a myth that basically ends at the borders of Manhattan and a few other shore points facing it. Most of the city consists of a myriad of vibrant, fairly conservative residential neighborhoods. It is worth noting that Manhattan was the only place Adams didn't carry in the Democratic Party primary, which simply indicates the extent to which the elite who dominate Manhattan are not only out of touch with the country, but the rest of the city as well. It is only monotonous control of the media that creates that impression.

But even there exceptions exist, like the oldest newspaper in America- the New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton 220 years ago. For despite pages of frivolous “celebrity” nonsense, it is much more than a feisty tabloid and has arguably become the leading, and often lone, voice pursuing the truth and exposing scandals that the rest of the media ignores or suppresses outright for ideological reasons, like the Hunter Biden story they censored during the last election campaign or the Cuomo nursing home catastrophe. But they won’t get Pulitzers, which nowadays are just prizes liberals like to give themselves, along with so many other once-prestigious awards, (and we really need to start delegitimizing them as such). 

Many years ago, during a disastrous NYC newspaper strike that many never recovered from, Eric Sevareid, then a nightly commentator on the CBS Evening News, worried that the strike might take down the New York Times, which he pompously declared was our “nation’s most necessary newspaper,” which was laughable even then. But today there is a paper that does fit that description, one of the few that has kept the notion of a free and independent press alive, and which virtually alone did not bury the truth but exposed it, the New York Post. 

No one knows what the fate of city it covers will be, and things could still get worse from external factors even if the state is finally well-governed again, nor am I even predicting a certain turnaround, but now there is at least a chance that abysmal mismanagement will no longer be a leading cause of decline. 

RULE BY RADICALS

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio faces a crisis of his own making with the police department, as a result of his own radicalism. Whatever the merits of the Eric Garner case, he did not respond thoughtfully or responsibly but ideologically, going on about racism, injustice and the police, and making broad, general statements having little to do with the actual case. There was no doubt that his activist heart was with street protesters, but you can’t run a city that way. Instead of rising above the fray, as he today ironically said a leader is supposed to do, he pontificated about the failings of society and yet again brought in his son, this time as a potential victim of the police. Then, having burned all the bridges with the NYPD, when two officers were subsequently murdered  over the weekend, he could only grasp at the one straw still available to him- the families of the victims, as a rationale for standing down. 

Even worse, the radicals who dominate the City Council, in an unprecedented and reprehensible gesture not only encouraged, but participated in demonstrations against their own police department, in solidarity with the Mayor. The odious NY State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, apparently taking a break from corporate shakedowns, in a naked power grab, announced he would investigate NY City police incidents, which brought an immediate rebuke from the DAs of the majority of the boroughs of the city. It is relatively early in the terms of all of these clowns, and they are only getting started. Things will only get worse. 

The basic reason for this is that radicals cannot govern effectively. They view everything through an ideological lens, and can only reckon with things based on how they comport with that vision. They not only lack any ability to approach things pragmatically; they reject pragmatism altogether. They are not liberals, but hard-left radicals. As a result, more and more things are not going to work as they should. A clash with the NYPD was almost inevitable, given their attitude towards law enforcement. Never before in the history of this city have we seen such contempt for the police on the part of public officials. Given their mindset it is no surprise that even when they try to make nice they only make things worse. Thus, after instigating much of the damage himself, the Mayor now wants to talk about “healing” and “coming together” which is what leftists do after they have irreversibly poisoned the well.

I predicted things would go bad last year, here: http://www.georgesarant.com/2013/10/the-ny-city-commune-of-2014.html. There will eventually be a correction because New York is not a radical town; it isn’t even all that liberal. Until then, hopefully the damage won’t be too bad. In the mean time, after what these public officials have done, there is no way the police are going to be mollified until there is a change, at which point my guess is that the public will be more sympathetic to the NYPD than this batch of politicians. 

THE NY CITY COMMUNE OF 2014

After losing control of the New York City Mayoralty over the past twenty years, it was almost inevitable that the Democratic party would regain the Mayor’s office in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. Unfortunately the worst possible candidate won the Democratic party primary, a far left radical named Bill DeBlasio. Perhaps he was mistaken for an outer-borough moderate by some, since polls show a majority of the population disagrees with many of his positions. Whatever the case, any of the other candidates would have been far better for the future of the city. 

What is in jeopardy now is all the progress that has been made over the past two decades since Rudy Giuliani first became Mayor. I was never a fan of Michael Bloomberg, who succeeded him, but he was, at the very least, a competent manager. DeBlasio, who currently holds the ridiculous position of “Public Advocate,” has a long record of left-wing activism that does not bode well for running a large, diverse, and complex entity like New York City. Worse, he has been joined by several radicals elected to the City Council, with an agenda that draws on dreams of a revolutionary people’s commune. 

We in large measure have the courts to thank for this ominous prospect, by exceeding their authority and declaring the previous city charter unconstitutional, due to supposed population representation issues. There used to be a Board of Estimate which held real power, in addition to the City Council. The Board consisted of the five Borough Presidents, who actually had something to do at the time, the Mayor, the Comptroller, and the President of the City Council. By the court’s logic it was unfair for Staten Island to have the same vote as a borough with a larger population, say Queens. The trouble with this is that the boroughs predate the city, which only assumed its present form in 1898, when they were joined to become “Greater New York.”  Brooklyn, for example, was an independent city long before the consolidation, and could well have done better than in this Manhattan-centric configuration. Representation of these distinct political entities was thus a condition of the amalgamation, and provided a check, particularly on budget and land-use issues. 

One of the principle policies of the radicals is to increase taxes on the “rich,” or  “1%,” although such taxes always seems to trickle down to everyone else. I could care less about the 1%, especially since most of them are oh-so- fashionably progressive in New York City. But their liberalism will then be attenuated by the raid on their pocketbooks. If they are targeted with taxes they will simply move to one of their other houses and make that their legal residence. That means everyone else will be stuck with the bill for the lavish government expansion proposed by these candidates. 

But it is not even the radical policies that are the problem, but rather the administrative ineptitude likely to result from them. For whatever the radical designs, they will inevitably crash into established institutions, resulting in inertia. Indeed the “establishment” is already nervously on board, buying in with campaign contributions, especially from the same ubiquitous real estate interests that are ever present. Given all the weight on one side, it would take a miracle for the alternative candidate, Republican Joe Lhota, to be elected. 

Meanwhile, since the pot will have been increased, more hands will be reaching for the spoils, which inevitably will be distributed politically, resulting in the corruption and dysfunction we have seen in the past. Legislation and expenditures will once again be politically based rather than being determined on the merits. We will again start to hear terms like “ungovernable” and “unmanageable” associated with the city. Then as the political appetites exceed the available resources a downward spiral will commence. 

New York City has come a long way since flirting with near-bankruptcy in the 1970s. We really don’t need to go there again.