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True Blue Door

(2,969 posts)
Wed Nov 6, 2013, 12:57 PM Nov 2013

Hopes and Worries for the new Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio

Every time an apparent liberal heavyweight shows up on the horizon, heading into a big-time office with grand ambitions and lofty rhetoric, the light and shadow of politics deepens. Bill de Blasio is one such person, who has (rather radically) reintroduced wealth inequality and class disparity into the public debate in a way that it has not been present in a very long time despite the issue being the elephant in the room for decades (and I do mean elephant - smirking, flag-lapel-pin-wearing, teabagging elephant).

He won the mayoralty of America's flagship city by speaking to what the sclerotic political institutions had long deemed a third rail in American politics - the glaring fact that a very few among us are increasingly reaping all the benefits and luxuries of society while the rest are left to foot the bill as workers and taxpayers. Nowhere is this fact more painfully in evidence than in New York City, where one part is a 21st century Versailles of soft living, infinite options, glittering (and heavily guarded) skyscrapers, Michelin restaurants, and grownup playgrounds where anyone who appears "not to belong" could be followed and whisked away by police at a moment's notice; and the other New York where things keep getting harder, landlords rule with an iron fist, and if you're a minority, the police behave like predators to your entire family day and night.

But only time will tell if Blasio is equal to the challenge he sees and dares to invoke, because (not to sound like a Matrix character) but knowing the path and walking the path are not the same thing, and convincing the people of New York to give him the authority to try is not the same thing as convincing the myriad interest groups, political blocs, and semi-gangster parasites who make up the New York political machine to go along with his plans. Furthermore, only time will tell if he can withstand the onslaughts of the VAST assortment of powers and resources that will be arrayed to sabotage him and ensure he goes no farther than city politics.

We can already surmise the shape of some of these traps in the very nature of the government he inherits. Bloomberg has created one of the "safest" times in New York history in terms of crime, but he did so by cheating - he turned the city into a police state where minorities have no civil rights and police are not bound by the 4th Amendment at all. Obviously crime is going to go down when the police have unchecked power, but that's not a bargain a free society is willing to make, because it just substitutes crime by criminals for crime by authorities. If/when Blasio intends to cut the Gordian Knot of Bloomberg's NYPD policies, he is going to walk a tightrope that on one side are skyrocketing crime statistics as the relationship between police and citizens returns to "balance," and on the other side are merely cosmetic changes that preserve an indefensible circumstance making life oppressive and frightening for the city's minorities.

That's just one of the many Roadrunner booby traps Bloomberg has left in his wake, that Bill de Blasio will have to either defuse, avoid, or spring with such alacrity that they can't do the intended harm. And even then, it remains to be seen how he intends to force a thoroughly corrupt, 1%-puppeteered city government into addressing the aforementioned elephant in the room, and how he intends to cultivate relationships with a state and federal government that are no less under the control of their own cadres of rich sociopaths. Either he will learn multi-dimensional politics very quickly and play a municipal version of Ender's Game on the streets of Gotham, or he will - sadly, as most do - flounder in the face of traps and sabotage from all sides, then quietly disappear into the background, another failed hope.

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Hopes and Worries for the new Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio (Original Post) True Blue Door Nov 2013 OP
Did you write this? grasswire Nov 2013 #1
Of course I wrote it. WTF? True Blue Door Nov 2013 #2
Mine was a kind query. grasswire Nov 2013 #3
Alright, thanks. True Blue Door Nov 2013 #4

grasswire

(50,130 posts)
3. Mine was a kind query.
Wed Nov 6, 2013, 08:38 PM
Nov 2013

People do post things from other sources here, and a new person might not know the rule about adding the source if quoted.

Don't have a chip on your shoulder. I complimented the writing, and I welcomed you. And I kicked your thread twice now.

And I recced your OP. I appreciated the insight into de Blasio's challenges.

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