Consider what passes for a scandal in New York City these days: The rich, conservative Koch family funding a wing of a city hospital. Wall Street types financing charter schools for poor kids in the South Bronx and Harlem. Non-union Walmart trying to open a store in a low-income neighborhood, which would deliver both cheaper goods and jobs to the locals.
The drive to keep Walmart out has been going for years, but it fits right with the more recent marks of life under Comrade Bill de Blasio.
It’s not that the old stuff that used to make the news here in the Big Apple has been wiped away clean; all those payoffs and bribes to crooked elected officials still exist. Crime still exists in the Big Apple, as do drug-dealing and poverty.
But over the past three months these matters have become so passé; for our new leaders — people like Mayor de Blasio, Public Advocate Letitia James and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and their cronies, with their ties to organized labor and the far-left fringe elements of the Democratic Party — what gets the blood boiling is class warfare. Or, better still, demonizing anyone who makes a buck and dares to give anything back.
At bottom, they hate the fact that people who’ve succeeded by working in the free-market economy want a say in the way our city is run, and not only that, they want to help others succeed by working in the free-market economy.
The attacks would be funny if they weren’t so dangerous, representing a turning point in the history of a city that was known both for its progressive values and for being a place where the rich gave back because they thought it was a civic duty.
Even our most liberal public servants understood this concept. As mayor, David Dinkins had advisers like Deputy Mayor Barry Sullivan, a former banker. Gov. Mario Cuomo leaned on a successful business and commodities speculator named Vincent Tese to head his economic team.
What do we have now? Plenty of leftist retreads with ties to the omnipresent Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, and assorted wack-jobs with no clue how to shovel snow during a storm, much less balance a budget or convince businesses that New York City isn’t the functional equivalent of Cuba.
Worse, the mayor and his cronies have mounted a dangerous assault on any businessman who dares speak up against his insanity. We know de Blasio opposes charter schools because they are an affront to his pals in the teachers unions. But in his warped world, all the objective evidence showing that charters work doesn’t matter; they’re evil because, says Comrade Bill, “A lot of them are funded by very wealthy Wall Street folks and others. . . there’s a very strong private-sector element here.”
The absolute insanity of Comrade Bill’s attack on charters is rivaled by the attacks by his friends in 1199 against the Koch brothers, David and Charles, for giving $100 million to New York-Presbyterian hospital to finance a new wing.
OK, the Kochs don’t like ObamaCare or even the president the health-care law is named after. That might drive 1199 and its leftist allies crazy, but consider what they’re opposing: the largest single donation the hospital ever received; the creation of lots of jobs (presumably union jobs), not to mention state-of-the-art health care that our city needs.
Amid all this, most of our city’s fat cats just keep their head down and refuse to openly oppose any of the insanity. As I’ve noted many times, it’s been a long time since anyone heard Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein comment on anything substantive except possibly his support for lefty causes like gay marriage. Nor do you hear any other business titans warning de Blasio they might bolt, or at least finance a less-partisan alternative, if he doesn’t moderate a few of his leftist policies.
A few brave souls among the city’s business elite haven’t been cowed. Financiers Carl Icahn and Daniel Loeb have been vocal in their opposition to de Blasio’s war on charter schools. Loeb on Tuesday tweeted his disdain for Comrade’s Bill’s schools policy with a link to a Post oped titled “Bill de Blasio’s War for Poverty,” written by Louisiana Gov. Jindal.
But the Loebs and the Icahns need backup, if any of their pals in the business community have the guts to fight.