Brad Lander for city comptroller? Sure! Let’s have daffy Dianne Morales for mayor, too! Or maybe capitalism-killer Hugo Chavez, except that the former Venezuelan Marxist is inconveniently deceased.
Like Morales, far-left Lander wants to defund the NYPD. Yup, he’d yank $1 billion out of the police budget even as growing numbers of poor-neighborhood residents run for their lives from bullets, stray or otherwise. Surely, he’ll stick with that position after the crime surge dribbles into the affluent brownstone nabes he represents, including parts of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Park Slope.
Yet the term-limited City Council member is, incomprehensibly, endorsed by The New York Times. Although the “All the Woke That’s Fit to Print” organ claims not to be on board with Lander’s pitch to gut the cops, the paper asserts that he “stands above” other candidates for comptroller.
As Vito Corleone woefully asked fellow dons over the sad state of mob affairs, “How did things ever get so far? I don’t know.”
Although it’s technically true that the comptroller doesn’t set the NYPD’s budget, a man so in thrall to a criminal-coddling agenda should not be allowed near a tot’s piggy bank, much less the city treasury.
His defund lunacy is merely count No. 1 in the indictment of Lander’s elitist, out-of-touch and downright hypocritical platform.
Like most in the woke pantheon, he cringes at the idea of private-enterprise profit. Which is why he’s backed by a jolly squad of progressives in a ubiquitous TV commercial: loopy firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would-be Wall Street-killer Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Public Advocate and Maya Wiley-for-mayor endorser Jumaane Williams and wannabe US Supreme Court-packer Rep. Jerrold Nadler.
AOC chirps that Lander works “for and with the people.” All vilify economic exploitation, capitalism-driven environmental ruin, income “inequity” and systemic racism. None cares much for New York City’s jobs-holding, law-abiding, tax-paying middle class.
The comptroller’s most important job is to steer the city’s $248 billion pension funds, “so we can guarantee retirement security for our city’s teachers, firefighters, nurses, and payroll administrators,” Lander’s site says.
In a rational world, that would mean getting the highest possible return on investment with the least risk. But Lander’s investment decisions would also take into account a shopping cart of priorities involving climate, sustainability and social justice. Teachers, firefighters and the other municipal workers shouldn’t give up their $5 Million Mega-Multiplier Lotto cards just yet.
Meanwhile, Lander’s council voting record in crucial land-use matters is 100 percent meshugaas. He voted against rezoning a small portion of a relatively tiny sliver of Flushing, Queens, which would allow construction along a vacant waterfront site that’s cut off from the neighborhood’s heart by an iron fence. Fortunately, even the council’s development-averse land-use committee blessed the proposal by 14-1 and the full council by 39-5.
Yet Lander supports a proposed Herculean rezoning of Gowanus, Brooklyn, that would bring the low-rise neighborhood a Robert Moses-scale palisade of towers up to 30 stories tall. For the sake of creating a relative handful of “affordable” apartments, it would be “the first mandatory inclusionary housing re-zoning proposed for a whiter, wealthier neighborhood,” he proudly says on his Web site.
And yet, while Lander preens as a caped crusader for justice, he is a proven hypocrite. In one classic liberal do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do howler, he railed against dangerous drivers on city streets, pushing a “Reckless Driver Accountability Act” through the council. Yet cameras caught Lander himself speeding at more than 10 miles per hour above the limit eight times since June of 2016, some of them in school zones.
He also laughs off parking rules, having amassed a mind-boggling 118 vehicle and trafficking violations since 2013.
Lander vowed to clean up his act. But did he ever hear of subways and buses? They’d put him in contact with AOC’s “people” — but the true public, not the Park Slope organic-dinner-party set that cheers him on.