By Gary Tilzer
Eric Adam’s “Tale of Two Cities” is about the dichotomy between his moderate base and the very left-wing and inexperienced city council working in tandem with the progressive nonprofits and PACs, such as the AOC’s “Courage to Change,” that helped elected the largest block of the city council members this year. Many of the newly elected city council members worked as community activists for liberal elected officials or for not-for-profit organizations funded by liberals. Looking back in history, the city council members and prior to 1989 Boards of Estimate members that build NYC and kept it going over the years, were small business owner, financial accountants, police officers, health care workers, firefighters, veterans, and teachers.
Adams Faces Record Challenges for an Incoming Mayor
His Common-Sense Moderate Base Can Help Him Govern
Adams ran a common-sense moderate base campaign, that rebuffed key left-wing proposals such as “defund the police,” as out of touch with average New Yorkers. Adams’ co-partner in government is the city council, whose many members are left-wing and want to change the world, defund the police, and reimagine government by spending money on problems similar to the de Blasio administration. The fact that Adams won every high crime neighborhood in the city could be extremely helpful with his negotiations with the city council and can help him gain public needed support against them.
It is not just an activist’s ideological city council that may present challenges to the new mayor. Adams will also have to repair the city’s economy that has been gut punched by COVID. He faces increasing crime and high taxes, among other things, that are causing loss of local businesses and exodus of middle-class families from the city. Even Wall Street that contributes 18% of the city and state taxes is starting to show signs of wanting to leave.
The new mayor is also forced to fix the same city problems that the de Blasio administration failed to fix, after spending tens of billions of dollars. These continuing problems include lack of affordable housing, homelessness, crime, NYCHA repairs, failing public schools and gentrification displacement. A good first step for Adams’ common-sense administration goals is his management plan to combing all agency metrics onto a single platform like CompStat which uses crime analytics to track NYPD performance in real time.
Adams Has Less Than a Year to Repair NYC’s Economy to Avoid Being Blamed for Cuts in City Services and Worker Layoffs
If past is a prolog, it will be Adams and not the city council that will be blamed for cuts in services and layoff of city workers by the press, should they become necessary.
No matter how many ads the city and state run on TV claiming “NY is Back,” the new mayor’s first budget already has a deficit of $5.4 billion for the next year. In addition, when the federal stimulus runs out, in a year or two, the city is bound to face a double-digit, billions of dollars budget gap. Even though the media is not explaining the serious condition of the city’s economy, the buck stops at Adams’ desk as he is likely to be blamed for cuts in the budget and layoffs of the city.
Everyone knows that controlling crime is an important first step to get the city’s economy back on track. Developing a working relationship with the NYPD and the mayor, to stop offices from leading the force, will be precarious, with a city council who has many anti-police minded members. While back in 2015 some council members would chant “I can’t breathe” and then vote to hire 1,300 new cops, year 2021 is a different world. This past year, many incoming city council members ran on anti-police platforms. Winners include: 14 backed by the Working Families Party (WFP) and 2 backed by the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA). Other candidates, such as Ms. Crystal Hudson, adopted progressive policy planks and received endorsements and funding from AOC’s PAC and other left-leaning organizations and elected officials. After redistricting all the city council candidates must run again in 2023, so their WFA and DSA council members will have to show they accomplished something. Mobilizing Adams’s common-sense moderate base to exert pressure on the city council will help establish avenues of cooperation between the mayor’s office and the lawmaking body on important issues including crime control, especially if it is connected to their reelection in two years.
Goal: Every Voice, Work Together to Save NYC
It would be a good strategy for Adams’s team to create a vehicle to force the media to cover the voices and opinions of the city’s high crime neighborhoods and voices of other common-sense moderate New Yorkers from different backgrounds all over the city. The anti-moderate bent of the local media that was shocked that poor high crime neighborhoods voted for a candidate that want to bring back the plain clothes unit, that was against defunding the police, will not change the local press left-wing writing narrative, unless it is pushed to do so.
A good strategy for the new mayor would be to create outside his office an economic advisory board, like Governor Hugh Carey used in the 1970’s to rescue the city from bankruptcy. Carey got real estate, banking, and the labor community to work together to prevent a NYC bankruptcy. To keep up with changing times, values and politics, the Carey style economic board should be expanded to include members from every city neighborhood and ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual orientation groups to make sure everyone is working together to save NYC. When all the city’s interests’ groups are working together making sacrifices and compromises, all the different interests in the city will work together to repair the city’s economy, similar to what the labor leader Victor Gotbaum did a generation ago in the 70’s when the city went broke:
The head of the Municipal Labor Committee, in the first substantive response to the tough wage policy laid down by the state’s Emergency Financial Control Board, said yesterday that the municipal labor unions in New York could live within the board’s rules, which require that any increase in pay be financed by productivity. But the labor leader, Victor Gotbaum, warned at a news conference that the unions, whose contracts with the city expire on June 30, would not allow conditions to he imposed on them, and he accused the Control Board of, in effect, issuing guidelines by fiat. But despite the threat of a July 1 strike, Mr. Gotbaum made his most significant statement in an offhand way, almost as an afterthought, as he was being pressed by reporters apparently seeking to elicit a proclamation of war. “I am delighted that my brothers in transit were able to sign a contract based on the guidelines,” Mr. Gotbaum said. “I am hopeful we can sign a contract based on the guidelines. I believe we can.” Labor leader Victor Gotbaum Hopeful Unions Will Agree on Productivity – NY Times, May 21, 1976.
The economic board made up of New Yorkers from all backgrounds can box in the council’s more radical proposals. The board will also generate press stories about NYC true economic condition, which is necessary for the compromise needed to fix the city’s economy.
The Adams’ economic boards could also work with companies like Amazon looking to bring high paying jobs into the city making sure that businesses are welcomed into local communities.
Jaw Boning the Times to Allow Minority Communities to Speak for Themselves
After the support Adams received from the city’s high crime neighborhoods went unreported during the campaign, it would be fair game if the new mayor challenges the NY Times which the other local media copies, to cover other neighborhoods besides liberal Park Slope and the Upper Westside to diversify NYC voices and opinions heard in the local media. Adams only received 7% of the Park Slope vote in the first round of voting.
It is clear in a city where journalism has been broken by the internet, the Times because it is look at as a leader by the city’s media, can do a lot better covering the city. Where does the Times think it is going? The online edition is receiving 33% less hits since Trump left the presidency. Perhaps it is time to drop the narrative reporting and go back to Adolph S. Ochs, the owner of The New York Times, 1897 famous slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
The press is damaging to the city when New Yorkers must wait until election day to find out what the city thinks about issues such as defunding the police. It is very clear that the press and most of the candidates were misled by the internet on crime. More importantly it is not right that city residences living in high crime areas do not have a local press to put pressure on their elected officials to stop the killings. The inability of the black voter’s real voice to be heard in the media also enables damaging gentrification, failing schools and shootings in minority neighborhoods to continue without pressure on the elected officials to stop it. An article written by a liberal narrative trapped reporter is no substitute from hearing the real voice of city residences being hurt by crime or any other problem. If we heard the voices and views of the residences of high crime areas on the need to control shooting during the campaign, it would not have been a surprise to the media, that Adams won all the neighborhoods suffering from crime.
The cover-up of the true concerns and opinions of the city’s high crime poor, minority communities during the mayoral campaign must be considered as a cause of the bad conditions these poor communities are forced to live with. We have just gone through a campaign where the citizens of the city’s high crime neighborhoods were silenced. In other words, the voice of the silent majority that won the race was suppressed by reporters and their publishers–a serious media failure. Look what happen in Manhattan when the media only covered the out of sight out of mind internet:
“If there’s a lesson to be learned from the Democratic mayoral primary — it’s that it’s easy to ignore street violence when there’s little street violence to be seen. Such is the oblivious attitude of mostly white Manhattanites who voted against Eric Adams, the only real law-and-order candidate in the race.”– NY Post 6/10/2021.
The failure of the media to pick up on the new mayor’s support in the high crime neighborhoods , gives Adams an opportunity to send a message to the media that all voices of all communities and viewpoints must be heard during his administration. Adams should invite the NY Times’ media reporter Ben Smith to Raymond Bush Park, in Bed-Stuy to talk to families and community members who were there the night one-year-old Davell Gardner was shot dead in the stomach as he sat in his stroller during an outdoor family gathering. Smith has the skills and his colleagues’ respect to get them to diversify voices and viewpoints covered in local media, especially during campaigns. He can show the harm that the city’s minority, poor neighborhoods suffer from the raging gun violence.
It would be a public service if Smith can inform the NY Times readers and the progressives left about the suffering of the city’s poor crime affected neighborhoods that voted for Eric Adams. All eyes would be on Smith to explain why the media mostly covered internet activists on their office computers who wanted to keep defunding the police, while not going to minority neighborhoods to interview the parents who children were in danger of being shot at. They would have understood that those communities were suffering from growing gun violence and increasing crime rates. It would be nice if the local NY media gave up the job of AFT/UFT Randi Weingarten’s public relations stenographer and covered the viewpoints of parents and grandparents of children attending NYC failing schools or blocked from sending their children to charter schools of their choice.
More Out of Touch Times: While the Times wrote that black candidates are poised to occupy some of New York’s top elected offices, including those of mayor, public advocate and two of the city’s five district attorneys in their July 13th story that “Eric Adams’s Win Is a ‘Watershed Moment’ for Black Leaders in New York,” they failed to discuss a strong possibility that the black community in Brooklyn and possibly Queens and Manhattan will lose local city state and federal district seat(s), because of increasing gentrification and census redistricting in 2022 and 2023.
The Press Must Examine Why de Blasio Throwing Money at Problems Like Homelessness, Affordable Housing and Bad Schools Accomplished Very Little
New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in 2013 that the incoming Mayor de Blasio, along with the dozen newly elected City Council members who had been backed by the Working Families Party, represented the dawning of a “new era” in New York City politics. “[T]he town’s most progressive government in five decades,” Gonzalez called it.
With the new much larger number of progressives on the city council, there will be pressure on Adams to increase funding everywhere. The city’s media must use the lack of results from the de Blasio spending spree as an example that it takes more than spending billions on developers and hotel owners to fix problems like homelessness.
Throwing money at problems is the definition of de Blasio’s progressivism era. De Blasio took advantage of the increase in tax revenue from the capitalist bull market on Wall Street and the nation’s economy during his two terms in office to expand the number of city workers in the mayor’s office and threw tens of billions at the city’s problems without fixing any of his “Tale of Two Cities” promises to correct inequities in income or city services during his eight years in office. The Manhattan Institute used census data to find something called the “Gini coefficient,” a measurement of income distribution. The data showed the city has made miniscule progress during the de Blasio years.
De Blasio Failed Progressive Agenda
Record Budget Spending – In the eight years de Blasio was mayor, his budget increased by almost 30% from $70 million to $100 million. The term limited retiring mayor spent billions of dollars, but failed to fix the problems, leaving them to the incoming mayor. For example, de Blasio spent billions creating new plans almost every year to combat homelessness, as his plans were ridiculed in the local media as failures, the mayor would come up with a new plan to spend money. As the new mayor take over, the homeless are still on the streets and their numbers are growing in the almost empty subways.
Where is the Affordable Housing? A decade after de Blasio campaigned, promising to build more affordable housing for the city’s poor and minorities in their neighborhoods. Today most of those minority and poor residence are gone from those neighborhoods because of gentrification. False promises by the developers and the elected officials obtained billions in city’s tax breaks (some lasting 30 years) to build affordable housing for the poor, minorities, that were never built, or were purposely too expensive for the local long-time residents. Instead, those government subsidies were used to build luxury housing, attracting white and affluent out of towners in their 20’s & 30’s to minority neighborhoods. As a result of de Blasio’s affordable progressive housing programs, hundreds of thousands of longtime and lower-income residents were pushed out of those neighborhoods as they were gentrified. The longtime residents were in some cases left homeless, burdened by rapidly rising rents.
As written in the socialist worker,
Encouraged by the promises of new large-scale development, real estate speculators have descended on East New York like vultures. As a result, months after de Blasio announced that that neighborhood would be one of his 15 neighborhoods slated for rezoning, land prices in the area tripled and real estate transactions increased by 1,500 percent from the year before. We know Adams is aware of developers by looking at his past contributors. We also know that he is upset of what gentrification has done to the city’s poor and minority neighborhoods when he told the told the NY Post that the gentrifies should more back to Iowa. Socialist Worker: New York is still a tale of two cities (March 14, 2017).
NYCHA Continued Problems – De Blasio ran for mayor opposing Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed sale of NYCHA parking lots to pay for operating expenses. Once elected, de Blasio quickly changed his mind and began selling public housing parking lots. Despite those sales, the new mayor will have to manage NYCHA that still lacks the funds for the hundreds of thousands of repairs needed and necessary lead clean-up to protect children.
Failed Schools – Despite billions spend on education of city students, the city’s poorest and minority neighborhood schools are in worst shape today than they were before de Blasio was elected. The 16 months of online classes imposed by COVID was not the only reason; the reading and math scores of the students were low before the virus. By attacking the gifted and specialized schools, the de Blasio administration distracted the public and the media from the fact that his education improvement plans failed to work before the virus hit. The media is so used to covering the schools with press releases that Adams was unfairly attached by the other mayoral candidates that he wanted to raise class sizes to 400, when he suggested that there should be supplemental specialized classes up to 400 students each. Every New Yorker who attended public schools back in the day and went on school trips to the Museum of Natural History, attending one of their 400 seat auditorium museum classes with students from other schools, taught by museum’s exhibition specialists, knew exactly what Adams was talking about.
Special Interests Hijacking a Permanent Ideological Split Council
The next mayor will face constant press release from the exceptionally large group of ideologically op
inionated members elected to the council. In addition, because of the lack of city council wins by the Queens and Brooklyn democratic party bosses (except the Bronx), county bosses will not have the power to elect the next council speaker, like they have since the modern council was created back in 1989. There is a strong possibility of a deep permanent ideological split in the city council, regardless which side wins the council speaker’s seat in January 2022. Expect lobbyists, unions and non-profits, some city funded, to have more control over the new city council than elected party bosses. See, Will Rank Choice Voting Confusion Give Lobbyists the Opportunity to Gain Full Control of the City Council? -Jewish Voice, June 5th
The Woke Coverage of the NYPD, Effected the Mayor’s Race Until A 4-Year-Old Girl Was Shot in Times Square, 39 Days Before Election Day
As Karol Markowicz’ March 14th column in the NY Post headline said: “No one running for NYC mayor seems to care about crime.” The mayoral candidates were avoiding addressing the rise in city crime rates because they believe they would lose votes or become the target of the woke progressives defund the police movement, that seems to have dominated the press coverage at the time.
The voices that were not heard and still are not in the press or on the internet are the minority communities’ voters who live in neighborhoods where shootings are increasing and whose votes made Adams the next mayor.
On May 10th, a 4-year-old Brooklyn girl, Skye Martinez, was waiting in line for toys in Times Square, when a gunman arguing with others over the sale of movie disks open fire on the crowd hitting the little girl and two others. Immediately after, Adams rushed to Times Square to denounce the shooting. Images of Police Officer Alyssa Vogel running with the shot 4-year-old Skye to a waiting ambulance were watched in horror by the world, along with Adams denouncing the shooting of littleSkye. The day after the 4-year-old girl was shot in Times Square, the NY Times endorse Kathryn Garcia for Mayor, in a failed attempted to lessen the effect of the dramatic shooting on the mayoral race. A couple of days after the shooting, on May 13th, Errol Lewis hosted the first mayor debate on NY1 focusing 25% of the debate on public safety and rising crime.
After the Times Square shooting, media coverage about crime increased for the final 39 days of the election. The Times Square Shootings of 2 Woman and A Four-Year-Old Girl Interrupts the Mayor’s Race -Jewish Voice, June 5th. With the increased crime coverage Adams mostly stayed on top of the polls for the rest of the campaign.
