The world is on fire, America is deeply divided and deeper in debt, and many city schools are failure factories — but Bill de Blasio has the answer.
“I think billionaires are a lot of the cause of the problems in this country,” he declares.
It has been said that to a hammer, everything is a nail. So it is with New York’s Leftist-in-Chief, whose warped worldview is shaped by resentment of other people’s money.
He’s got a giant chip on his shoulder about wealth and doesn’t like it when the rich resist his agenda. How dare they spend their money to oppose him!
From there it follows that their politics are illegitimate, and that he has every right to use the power of his office to defeat them. And despite state and federal investigations into whether he sold favors to some of those very same wealthy people, he’s absolutely convinced he’s done nothing wrong.
Those are the main takeaways from the mayor’s breathtaking remarks to journalist Harry Siegel. His report of the 40-minute chat in de Blasio’s office begins with Siegel noticing a box of vinyl records on the floor, led by The Clash’s 1980 album, “Sandinista!”
Hmmm, so the old Warren Wilhelm Jr. changed his name (twice) and put on a suit, but he’s still a Sandinista at heart.
Not that we needed much reminder. Day in, and day out the mayor and his allies push their redistribution schemes without shame.
They act under a slogan of power to the people, but in truth they are accumulating power only for themselves. They will decide what is virtue and what is vice.
And so de Blasio orders end runs around campaign laws because he’s trying to make the city “more fair.” Or, as he put it after engineering a second consecutive rent freeze for more than 1 million privately-owned apartments, “We are turning the tide to keep this a city for everyone.”
The socialists of yore would confiscate those apartments. The new ones just dictate the terms the owners must follow, as if the laws of economics, or the tides, can be repealed.
The existing impression that de Blasio is consumed with class warfare is reinforced time and again in the interview, as he returns repeatedly to his bogeymen — rich opponents.
“When I came into office,” he tells Siegel, “I had every reason to believe, given what I talked about in the campaign and given the many, many voices that spoke up against my agenda that happened to have a lot of money and power, we would soon experience a lot of very strong opposition.”
It began, he claims, “in the spring of 2014 when a number of hedge-fund figures funded an advertising campaign against me in terms of charter schools. So that very real concern that we would experience a kind of moneyed opposition that previous mayors have not was quickly proven real.”
Let’s unpack that lie wrapped in a justification. De Blasio won 75 percent of the 2013 vote, and there was no organized opposition, moneyed or otherwise.
Moreover, he created his first slush fund, the Campaign for One New York, before he took office, not in response to the charter fight, which happened months after he took office. Also, it was the mayor himself who started the charter fight by trying to squelch the schools to curry favor from the teachers’ union.
And there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy in his fund-raising. The mayor and his team raised millions for their slush-funds by soliciting donations from the very rich he so obviously detests.
Perhaps his remarks will be a wake-up call to his donors, who serve as useful idiots to his agenda. Of course, the businesses and developers who ponied up the cash wanted a favor in return, and the crux of the investigations is whether the mayor committed crimes in the process.
At least until the probes are resolved, New Yorkers are captive to a mayor who thinks the city would be nirvana if he had no opposition. He wants the city and state to be “like California, where Democrats have consolidated power” and hungers for “the maximum Democratic leadership and the maximum progressive policy.”
Here’s the truth. The People’s Republic of New York is already a one-party town, yet nirvana has never seemed more distant.
Dose of reality for the elite
The smarty-pants set never ceases to amaze. Their self-avowed brilliance notwithstanding, the global elite didn’t have a clue that the Brexit vote would pass.
Their fury is as much about being embarrassed as being on the losing side of the historic divorce.
Their shock recalls an old story about the newspaper astrologist who is gobsmacked when she gets fired. Her boss said she should have seen it coming.
So it is with the educated elite. If they know everything they claim to know about human nature and how the world works, why didn’t they understand the yearning among their countrymen for secure borders and true sovereignty?
And why did the establishment not see there would be inevitable consequences for a rule by experts that was delivering half of what it promised, and at twice the price?
The short answer is that the cloistered halls of government are too often immune to the real world. Those walls keep the outsiders out and the insiders oblivious.
It’s an old story, and as new as the 2016 political tumult in America.
It’s called democracy, and it’s the greatest idea ever devised for securing individual liberty and reminding the elite on both sides of the Atlantic that they may act only with the consent of the governed.
The ‘death’ of rationality
The death of a child is horrendous, and the six dead children cited in the stories about falling Ikea furniture get the blood boiling.
“Enough is enough,” Consumer Product Safety Commission Chairman Elliot Kaye told ABC News. “These are inherently very dangerous and unstable products if children are around them.”
That sounds right, until you learn something else. The six deaths happened over 27 years, starting in 1989.
So Ikea is “voluntarily” recalling 29 million chests and drawers. Customers who bought them as far back as 2002 can get a full refund; those who bought earlier might get a store credit.
Is this regulating business, or killing it under the guise of safety?
Standards of perfection that are retroactive for nearly three decades smack of big government run amok.
Hillary gets another Gray-OK
Headline: “2-Year Panel on Benghazi Ends, Finding No New Fault by Clinton.”
That’s how The New York Times summarizes an 800-page report — through the prism of whether it’s good or bad for The Gray Lady’s candidate.
Actually, the report didn’t need to find “new fault” by Hillary Clinton.
The already-proven ones of being negligent about preventing the fatal terror attack, and of lying to the families of the dead about the cause, are sufficient to render a verdict on her disgraceful conduct.