POINT OF VIEW

Still enforcing some good old-fashioned political power

Posted

Imagine living in an apartment without heat when it’s 10 degrees outside and your landlord tells you it’ll be fixed by 2022.

This is considered reasonable by our allegedly progressive mayor Bill de Blasio.

Also considered reasonable in his New York City Housing Authority, certification that apartments were lead-free were made when inspections were never done. Then a woman and her six children at the Polo Grounds Houses were forced out of their apartment for a lead cleanup, according to a Jan. 27 story in The Daily News.

Housing authority spokeswoman Jasmine Blake complained that the family turned down the city’s offer of a free hotel room. One room for seven people. What a progressive solution.

Damon Bae is likely to lose the business he built from scratch, Fancy Cleaners. The city wants his land to build affordable housing. They’re using eminent domain to pay Bae so little compensation that he can’t afford to move his business elsewhere.

de Blasio has found a way to legally steal Bae’s property, just as he has found a way to legally take bribes via campaign contributions and avoid being indicted.

Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch is once again taking the city to arbitration in response to a horrible contract offer. Ebenezer de Blasio is offering the cops responsible for the continued drop in crime a 4.25 percent raise over three-and-a-half years. Like other city contracts under de Blasio, this is another real money pay cut.

But it gets worse. Like his predecessor, de Blasio demands that even this be funded by givebacks.

The Daily News would have people believe that public school teachers in the absent teacher reserve pool are incompetents who can’t be fired because the union protects them. But 74 percent of them earned ratings of highly effective, effective or satisfactory in their most recent evaluations. They find themselves out of a position when their schools close.

Budget-conscious principals in other schools would prefer to hire less-experienced teachers who are paid less.

But according to Ron Isaac’s Feb. 9 letter in the Chief-Leader, the education department has no problem offering big money to retired principals who are willing to take jobs that would require them to help management fire teachers brought up on disciplinary charges.

In a previous letter, Isaac said de Blasio’s supposedly progressive schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, tends to blindly back principals’ disciplinary actions against teachers.

Any progressive would want to change the city’s flawed property tax assessments that have people in poor neighborhoods paying more than those in wealthy neighborhoods. But not only has de Blasio done nothing to correct this, he’s having the city fight a lawsuit that would rectify it.

So are progressives complaining about any of this? Did many support a truly honest progressive, Sal Albanese, in last year’s election? No. He only got 2 percent of the vote.

There’s a group of Democrats in the New York state senate who helped pass bills giving legal funding for poor people, police-interrogation recordings to reduce wrongful convictions, preservation of the millionaire’s tax, $2.5 billion to ensure clean drinking water, $300 million for the Environmental Protection Fund, $50 million for green infrastructure projects, a $1.5 billion increase for education, $200 million for NYCHA repairs, and $2.5 billion for 100,000 affordable housing units. 

None of this sounds like the Trump agenda.

But in response to past incompetent and corrupt Democratic leadership, they caucus with Republicans. So alleged progressives are labeling them Trump Republicans. Also, while I was not there — so I cannot say anything definitive one way or another — I suspect the sexual allegation against Sen. Jeff Klein (their leader) is a political hit job.

The Norwood News reported that opponents of Klein scorched the senator for attempting to discredit his accuser. But if the accuser is lying, does he not have the right to defend himself?

In criticizing the Independent Democratic Conference while letting de Blasio slide on numerous issues, it appears some people are less concerned with advocating a fairer society and more concerned with enforcing old-fashioned political power.

Richard Warren,

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