Tag Archive for: Bill de Blasio

De Blasio Blames Guns After Career Criminal Attacks NY Cops

Anti-police leftist New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio predictably blamed guns after a career criminal shot two NYPD officers responding to reports of a man with a gun on Thanksgiving Eve in the Bronx.

The shooting suspect was shot three times during the gun battle with officers. His condition has been upgraded to “serious” from “critical.” NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea noted that the suspect was a “career criminal with far too many arrests.” Shea also stated that the firearm used by the suspect was reported stolen in Georgia last year.

The officers — one male, one female — are both expected to survive, no thanks to Democrat policies and rhetoric that demoralize and demonize police.

In response, de Blasio complained vaguely that there are “too many guns out there.” He added that the criminal’s alleged use of a stolen gun is “another example of a gun from out of state, comes into our city, hurts a New Yorker” — as if the gun hopped a boxcar in Georgia, crossed state lines, and randomly shot cops all by itself.

Police Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch replied to Blasio’s unhelpful comment, “Yes there’s guns on the street, but perps aren’t afraid to carry them. They’re not afraid to put it in their belt, put it in their pocket, and pull it out on a police officer. That’s the problem.”

In the broader sense, soft-on-crime, anti-Second Amendment Democrats like de Blasio are the problem.


Bill de Blasio

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Defunding the NYPD & Disbanding Plainclothes Officers Unit

In the aftermath of the May 25, 2020 death of George Floyd — a black man who died after being physically abused by a white police officer in Minneapolis — a number of U.S. cities were overrun by violent riots led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa. That chaos gave birth to a movement demanding that police departments nationwide be defunded. De Blasio joined that movement when he announced, in a June 7 press conference, a plan to “mov[e] funding from the NYPD to youth initiatives and social services.” “The details will be worked out in the budget process in the weeks ahead,” he added. “But I want people to understand that we are committed to shifting resources to ensure that the focus is on our young people.” “This is a beginning,” the mayor continued. “I want it to be abundantly clear to all New Yorkers. These are first steps to what will be 18 months of making intense change in this city…. This is a transformative moment.” He also announced that street vendor enforcement would “no longer be the responsibility of the NYPD,” and that a civilian agency would thenceforth be responsible for policing citizens’ interactions with city vendors.

On June 15, 2020, the NYPD disbanded its anti-crime unit of some 600 plainclothes officers, reassigning them to new roles in detective bureaus, neighborhood policing, and other areas.

In late June 2020, de Blasio said he had agreed to shift more than $1 billion in annual funding out of the NYPD, thereby reducing its overall annual budget from $6 billion to $5 billion. Much of the diverted money, the mayor stated, would go instead toward the improvement of youth centers and public housing.

To learn more about Bill de Blasio, click here.

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Unions Quiet As NYC Poised To Fire 7,800 Unvaxxed Teachers

Unions representing the approximately 7,800 teachers who will lose their jobs have been largely silent about mass firings due to New York City’s vaccine mandate.

New York City teachers must get vaccinated by Friday in order to keep working, The New York Times (NYT) reported. While several New York City unions have criticized the rushed implementation of the mandate and expressed concern over the looming issue of understaffed schools, unions have been largely silent on the issue of firing unvaccinated teachers.

The Council of School Supervisors and Administrators in New York City criticized the city for going forward with the mandate before addressing the impending staffing shortage, calling it “dangerous and irresponsible” to allow schools to operate so understaffed.

The president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) similarly called for the city to delay the mandate’s implementation, stating that schools “are not ready for the implementation of the vaccine mandate.”

When asked how the union would support unvaccinated workers, a spokesperson for UFT directed the Daily Caller to its vaccine mandate and exemptions page, which explains that teachers without a vaccine or a valid exemption may choose between termination and unpaid leave.

“Permanent medical exemptions … will only be considered where the individual has a documented allergic reaction such that the member cannot receive any of the three authorized COVID-19 vaccines,” the page states.

The American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, and AFL-CIO did not respond to the Daily Caller’s requests for comment.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city has thousands of substitute teachers on standby, the Wall Street Journal reported. Only about one-third of its chapter leaders believe their schools can open without disruption, according to UFT.

The New York City Mayor’s Office announced Monday that 90% of the city’s approximately 78,000 teachers were vaccinated. Teachers who have not received their first shot by midnight Friday will be removed from payroll Monday morning, according to NYT.

COLUMN BY

Laurel Duggan

Education Reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This The Daily Caller Column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

De Blasio Quotes Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in Discussion on Relationship with NYC Business Community

No pretense anymore. None. The Mayor of the capital of capitalism is imposing governance based on the most brutal, anti-human ideology in human history.

The Communists’ chief purpose is to destroy every form of independence—independent work, independent action, independent property, independent thought, an independent mind, or an independent man. Conformity, alikeness, servility, submission and obedience are necessary to establish a Communist slave-state. Ayn Rand

[…]

It is the Communists’ intention to make people think that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful. It is the Communists’ aim to discourage all personal effort and to drive men into a hopeless, dispirited, gray herd of robots who have lost all personal ambition, who are easy to rule, willing to obey and willing to exist in selfless servitude to the State. Ayn Rand

Who will he quote next? Hitler?

De Blasio Quotes Marx’s Communist Manifesto in Discussion on Relationship with NYC Business Community

By: Zachary Evans,National Review, July 24, 2020

New York mayor Bill de Blasio quoted Karl Marx when outlining the relationship he wanted his office to have with the city’s business community, in an appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.

Host Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio how the mayor was approaching businesses for help with recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Lehrer said that the mayor was not known for extensive outreach to the business community given his focus on issues of wealth inequality.

“There’s an underlying truth in the fact that my focus has not been on the business community and the elite,” de Blasio said. “I am tempted to borrow a quote from Karl Marx here…”

“They’ll love that on Wall Street,” Lehrer interjects.

“Yes they will,” de Blasio laughs. “There’s a famous quote that ‘the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie,’ and I use that openly to say no, I read that as a young person and thought, well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

The quote comes from the first chapter of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which Marx outlines his theory of the progressive advancement of the class of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat.

The mayor continued in the interview, “We need to work with the business community, we will work with the business community, but the city government represents the people, represents working people….A lot of folks have just sort of hit a wall when I say guys, you’re gonna have to pay more taxes, and we’re gonna have policies that favor working people more.”

De Blasio ended by saying he knows that many businesses want to help with a “comeback” for the city, and that his administration “really appreciate[s] that.”

The interview was not the first time de Blasio has quoted a communist figure. In 2019, the mayor apologized after quoting communist revolutionary Che Guevara at a rally of striking airport workers in Miami.

“I did not know the phrase I used in Miami today was associated with Che Guevara & I did not mean to offend anyone who heard it that way. I certainly apologize for not understanding that history,” de Blasio wrote on Twitter after backlash from Miami’s Latino community, many of whom are Cuban exiles.


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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New York in the Toilet: Gender Confused Governor Cuomo (D) Bans Travel to Mississippi

It appears that Democrats, particularly New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor of New York City Bill De Blasio, are gender confused. They appear to want New Yorkers to believe the absurd.

Ayn Rand wrote;

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.

The grand absurdity of the 20th Century is that we may be biologically someone other than who we are at birth. It is the absurd notion that a male (man) or female (woman) can chose what sex they are simply by ignoring anatomy, biology and genetics.

In an attempt to make this absurdity the “official ideology” of the City and State of New York requires putting constant pressure on those who believe otherwise.

 from The Blaze reports:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) banned all non-essential travel to Mississippi in an executive order after the Magnolia State passed a religious liberty bill that he described as “hateful injustice against the LGBT community.”

The bill, known as House Bill 1523 or the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act,” was signed into law by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) Tuesday and will go into effect July 1.

All-Gender-Restroom-SignIt appears that Governor Cuomo is confused about the gender identity of some New York citizens and has imposed a travel ban to Mississippi because HB 1523 states:

The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:

(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

[Click here to read the full text of HB 1523]

When Cuomo used the words “hateful injustice” he is referring to political correctness. Cuomo, like the Democratic Party, are all in for homosexuals and will defend that life style regardless of its consequences.

Michael F. Haverluck, reporter for OneNewsNow.com, writes on a new Center for Disease Control study:

After conducting an extensive study on homosexual behavior, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that those involved in such lifestyles experience a far greater amount of violence from one another than those in heterosexual relationships.

CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey is a first-of-its-kind study geared to determine the difference between the victimization of men and women by sexual orientation.

The results show that men and women involved in homosexual behavior undergo much higher rates of sexual violence than men and women who are heterosexual.

Surprising to many, homosexual women experience more violence than men. According to the study, a whopping 44 percent of lesbians were either raped, experienced physical abuse, and/or were stalked by their intimate partners during their lifetime. Even more shockingly, 61 percent of bisexual women endured such violence from their partners.

It is also reported that 37 percent of bisexual women indicated they were stalked, which is more than double the rate that heterosexual women experience from their male partners.

Furthermore, the CDC found that 37 percent of bisexual women were injured during the rape, physical violence, and/or stalking that they experienced at the hands of their sexual partners. [Emphasis added]

In March Cuomo boycotted North Carolina where the legislature, as reported by Vanity Fair, passed a bill “to override the city of Charlotte’s attempts to pass a localized ordinance expanding L.G.B.T. protections, specifically by targeting constituents’ fears that transgender individuals could use the planned Charlotte rule to prey on the opposite sex in bathrooms.”

In a 2014 column titled, “‘It Happened to Me’: How Transgender ‘Bathroom Bills’ Discriminate Against Women by Allowing Men in Women’s Spaces” Donna Miller, from AFTAH, reported:

While these so-called “anti-discrimination”/”gender identity” laws are presented to limit discrimination, these radical laws and policies discriminate against women by forcing them to endure public indecent exposure.  Do you know any other law or policy that a sets apart rules for less than 1 percent of the population (transgenders), but another huge portion of the population (women and girls) are told that they must endure men’s publicly indecency – all in the name of civil rights?

“This is political correctness run amok,” North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory said, dismissing the claims of discrimination against homosexuals by Cuomo.

We agree. Political correctness wants and demands we believe the absurd. You become an enemy of the state, in this case New York, if you choose to not believe the absurd.

It appears that Governor Cuomo is exhibiting macroagression towards the citizens of Mississippi and North Carolina. These two states are resisting and have drawn a red line in the sand against the grand absurdity.

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Progressivism Is Illiberal: Modern Liberalism Is at Odds with Peaceful Interaction by Sandy Ikeda

A New York magazine article headline declares, “De Blasio’s Proposal to Destroy Pedestrian Times Square Is the Opposite of Progressive.”

That’s Bill de Blasio, the current mayor of New York City, who was elected in 2013 after running unabashedly as the progressive, socially democratic candidate. I find it interesting that people are surprised by the mayor’s illiberal stands on many (though not all) of the major issues he has faced in his short time in office.

One of the latest is his proposal to return cars to Times Square Plaza, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, by razing the outdoor space created by the administration of his Republican predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. You see, Mayor Bill says he doesn’t like the goings-on there, which lately include women soliciting topless on the street and people dressed as Elmo hustling tourists. His solution? We can’t control all the hucksterism, so let’s shut the whole thing down!

Justin Davidson, the author of that New York magazine article, says it well:

If de Blasio really believes that the best way to deal with street performers in Times Square is to tear up the pedestrian plaza, may I suggest he try reducing homelessness by eradicating doorways and subway grates?

My point goes beyond Times Square Plaza, of course, although that controversy is instructive, as are others (such as his recent attempt to rein in Uber).

The approach the mayor takes in this and similar matters is characteristic of any political ideology that views unrestrained political power as a legitimate tool of social change. That includes neoconservatism and other modern political ideologies, including progressivism.

While it’s a caricature to say that what progressives would not forbid, they would make mandatory, they show a pattern of using force to ban what they don’t like and of mandating what they do. If you think that sounds illiberal, you’re right. Progressivism isn’t liberalism, especially of the classical variety. But even the watered-down liberalism of campus radicals of the 1960s paid more heed to the principle of tolerance than progressives today do.

Progressivism versus Liberalism

Progressivism today goes beyond the liberal position that, for example, same-sex marriage should have the same legal status as heterosexual marriage, to the belief that the state should threaten physical violence against anyone who refuses to associate or do business with same-sex couples.

Progressives have a low tolerance for opposing points of view. Unfortunately, so do some libertarians, but for the most part libertarians do not endorse using political power to eradicate what they believe are disagreeable public activities. Libertarians are much closer to genuine liberals than progressives are.

To a genuine liberal, tolerance means more than endorsing a wide range of beliefs and practices. It means allowing nonviolent people to say and do things that we strongly disagree with, disapprove of, or find highly offensive. It means not assuming our own moral superiority over the wickedness or stupidity of our ideological opponents. English writer Beatrice Evelyn Hall captured that liberal spirit when she (and not Voltaire) wrote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The plaza and the streets it encompasses were, of course, the creation of government, so we’re not talking about the municipality bulldozing private property. But it’s not the government-created structure the mayor is objecting to; it’s the purely voluntary — “unregulated” — activities going on in it that he doesn’t like and wants to wipe out with heavy hands and hammy fists.

Closing the Gap Economy

The activity in Times Square Plaza is related to what I called in a recent column the “gap economy,” which refers to the unregulated, money-making activities that arise in the free spaces left open by government regulation and that complete with businesses that have adapted themselves to the mixed economy. Progressives like Mayor de Blasio seem to fear what they cannot regulate and control. They don’t understand that in the free market, there is regulation and that the regulatory principle is not coercion but persuasion, competition, and reputation.

Progressives profoundly mistrust the spontaneous, especially when it’s the result of people acting out of self-interest. But that’s the hallmark and the essence of urban life. New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman sees it this way:

Time and again, Mr. de Blasio leaves an impression that he understands very little about the dynamics of urbanism and the physical fabric of the city — its parks and plazas, its open spaces, libraries, transit network and streetscape, which all contribute to issues he cares most about, like equity and social mobility.

He doesn’t understand because he probably thinks in terms of specific, static objectives (such as his so-called “Vision Zero,” which I write about in “Um, Scarcity?”) rather than what Kimmelman rightly refers to as “the dynamics of urbanism.” As the urbanist (and libertarian friendly) Jane Jacobs explained, those dynamics are messy and inherently unpredictable.

It doesn’t seem to matter to the mayor that ordinary people have demonstrated their preference for Times Square Plaza by showing up in record numbers, just as it doesn’t matter that ordinary New Yorkers have gained from gap-economy activities such as Uber or Airbnb. What concerns progressives like the mayor is that it’s not happening the way they want it to happen. (In the case of Uber, thank goodness, the truly liberal elements of New York soundly defeated the progressive forces.)

Davidson writes,

I understand that the mayor doesn’t care for the carnival atmosphere at Times Square — neither do I. But eradicating a pedestrian plaza because you don’t like who’s walking there is like blasting away a beach because you object to bikinis or paving a park because you hate squirrels. It represents such a profound misunderstanding of public space that it makes me question the mayor’s perception of what counts as progressive.

It’s not the mayor Davidson should be questioning so much as the principles that motivate him. De Blasio just happens to illustrate progressivism in a particularly glaring way.

Sandy IkedaSandy Ikeda

Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.

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