The Mayoral race is looking like the Belmont. A long mile and a half to go. Am I going to get canceled for comparing the candidates to horses? With Wiley taking a great leap, I expected some quick hit on her. And sure enough:
Lee Fang@lhfang·Maya Wiley, the NYC mayoral candidate who wants to cut $1 billion per year from police, pays for private security on her block in upscale Prospect Park South. A neighbor recounted her demands for more aggressive NYPD policing after her partner was mugged. nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-ope
This will be front page of the NY Post. But actually, Lee Fang misrepresents what the article was saying --- but Wiley will also have to respond and it will be a tough ride as she tries to thread a police reform needle.
Garcia is a sudden convert to the cause of charter schools, which have become, over the last two decades, emblems of the neoliberal project.... Garcia had no history discussing any kind of education issues before this mayoral race. She’s made it clear, thanks either to her genuine belief in charters or her awareness that rich people who support charters will donate to local campaigns, that’s where she stands now.... The editorial board[NYT] , which prides itself on its liberalism, did not seem to know or care that Garcia’s views on housing are not very different than Bloomberg’s—or even Adams or Yang’s, for that matter. Voters who take their cues from the Times may not care either. .... Ross Barkan, https://rossbarkan.substack.com/p/kathryn-garcia-reclaiming-the-neoliberal?
Garcia/Wiley rising, Yang/Stringer/Morales falling.
There are a few election lanes - the left/progressive with Wiley seizing control as Stringer/Morales fall, the right with Adams/Yang and the neo-liberal right-center with Garcia whom the NYT and Daily News endorsed. Reminder to Trumpies: The NYT is NOT LEFT. The business community apparently now sees Yang as a joke, incapable of managing this city. Capable management is at the top rung now which is helping Garcia and even keeping Stringer alive -- even from the business community which sees him as taking a progressive lane for this election and would move center if he wins.
Ross points to Garcia on housing, which as we saw with Bloomberg who built built built often half empty housing while ignoring infrastructure to go with it, allowing public housing to go under in the hope that unliveable conditions will drive people to move to Florida, will make the city even more affordable and when there are no people, there is no commerce. Bloomberg is a major cause of homelessness and the city housing crisis.
Someone [Garcia] who believes landlords with millions of dollars in equity experience struggles similar to what tenants, many paying most of their income to rent, endure is not going to side with the working class. Garcia is a Park Slope home-owner, which likely makes her a millionaire on paper. The suffering of a city tenant isn’t something she can possibly know. And it’s not clear she wants to know it. It’s a myth that small, hard-working landlords control most of the housing stock in the five boroughs. They are not lavishly funding the Real Estate Board of New York.
Mulgrew ignores Garcia threat
It was interesting that the left and center occupied by Mulgrew have told people not to rank Yang or Adams but do not include Garcia who may echo Bloomberg more than anyone. Tell me again, which side is the UFT leadership really on when it ignores Garcia on the charter cap?
For all the revolutions in politics today—the rise of the democratic socialists, the ascendance of AOC—the neoliberal approach, in municipal politics at least, has not left us. As predicted in the 1970s, CUNY never would be tuition-free again. The stock transfer tax, effectively ended in 1981, would not come back. The massive affordable housing projects of midcentury and earlier—Parkchester, Electchester, the Coops, Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, the vast tracts of NYCHA housing—would be no more, replaced with market-rate development that would, from time to time, parcel out units to a few middle-class residents.
[Garcia's] platform has several progressive proposals.... But there is another Garcia, a truer Garcia—a manager, a technocrat, a neoliberal skeptical of the most fundamental safeguards against the violence of the free-market in a city that is chasing out its working class and poor. She doesn’t hide this, exactly—she’s a blunt person—but it comes out only with enough prodding. Garcia is a sudden convert to the cause of charter schools, which have become, over the last two decades, emblems of the neoliberal project. If government-run education is said to be failing, why not have the public pay for private schools and circumvent those nasty teachers’ unions? Charter schools did not exist in New York for almost the entirety of the 20th century. Now, we’ve been conditioned to believe that a school system can’t function without them. Yang and Adams are supporters of charters too, and the left-wing Dianne Morales actually founded one. Garcia had no history discussing any kind of education issues before this mayoral race. She’s made it clear, thanks either to her genuine belief in charters or her awareness that rich people who support charters will donate to local campaigns, that’s where she stands now.
Morales dramedy continues, as former employees are pro and con
The Morales dramedy continues to resonate as some top Morales people defected to Wiley so quickly, some are thinking conspiracy. Dianne Morales’ NYC Mayoral Campaign Turmoil is ‘Déjà Vu’ for Some Ex-Staff - THE CITY https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/6
THE CITY spoke to more than a dozen of Morales’ former staffers about their experiences at Phipps under her. Most wished to remain anonymous so they could speak freely without professional consequences. The people broadly fell into two camps: those who had been working at Phipps before Morales took over and detailed how she fostered a work environment rife with anxiety and mistrust, and those who praised what they called her inspiring, visionary leadership. The latter camp was made up overwhelmingly of employees she hired.‘[It was] like the cult of Dianne.’Overall, all the former employees agreed: Morales was charismatic, extremely smart and fiercely loyal to her people....
The progressive Democrat’s current woes reflect past management issues, some ex-employees said, while others defended her as a strong leader. Morales charges she’s being undermined, but is “managing the disruption.”
Here are parts 1-3 where I pin some of the blame people connected to DSA. Ross Barkan led the "Morales is a faux leftist campaign." Part 3 digs deep --
- Dianne Morales, Part 2: Hits from the left - Ross...
- The Dianne Morales Mayoral Dramedy - an Ed Notes n...
There is no question that the implosion of the Morales campaign and the second charge against Scott Stringer, this one 30 years later - I know, I know, sometimes things need to marinate - have boosted Wiley to the top of the progressives. And yesterday with the endorsements of AOC and Bowman (both of whom had pulled their Stringer endorsements) Wiley now has an unencumbered progressive lane since even of people vote for Stringer or Morales I can see Wiley will be in the top 4 and will get the votes of progressives as they drop off, though according to Barkan, Garcia is fooling enough progressives to deny Wiley. (I was sort of shocked to see some lefty teacher friends choose Wiley and Garcia and some Wiley and Adams -- like the hard left NY State Nurses (NYSNA). A head scratcher.
I think Yang has crested and you see that the business community is not interested in him. The leader is still Adams and I'm going to bet that going into the final week it will be Adams, Garcia and Wiley maybe pulling even with Yang - a sort of right, center and left lineup. I might have actually ranked Garcia if she didn't take the strongest pro-charter stance of them all and joined parents who were demanding schools be open no matter what.
If Wiley starts rising quickly in the polls, I expect somewhere, some
way a political hit on her -- some kid she knew in 6th grade will accuse
her of grabbing his balls.
More historical perspective from Ross Barkan:
Since 1975, every mayor of New York City has been something of a neoliberal. These men may have varied by party or vision—a couple hewing left while others took a more ruthless approach—but all ultimately governed under the constraints foisted upon them by the era we still live in today. The difference between the left-leaning Democrats (David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio) and the oligarch-friendly Republicans (Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg) could only be so dramatic when a certain segment of the power elite was determining the course of events...The social democratic era, buoyed by New Deal largesse under Fiorello La Guardia and continuing through a number of liberal Republican and Democratic mayors, abruptly came to a halt when the city nearly went bankrupt. The crisis mattered because it would reorder the city’s politics indefinitely: instead of expanding the social safety net and creating new services for the working class and poor, the new aim of the modern city would be to make it as attractive as possible to capital. Economic growth would be the new religion, with tax breaks showered on wealthy men like Donald Trump....
Some sidelights
I was out with a bunch of old colleagues and one of them was ranting against teachers in general and claimed gold-bricking -- that they just didn't want to go into work and should have been made to and fired if they didn't. A former chapter leader, yet. Oy! There's troubling times ahead
