Until the 1980s, each New York City garbage truck had a crew of three men. In a landmark agreement, Mayor Ed Koch got the union to eliminate one man, with the other two each getting an $11 daily bonus in exchange.
The two-man crews are still intact — and so is the bonus. It’s now $40 a day per man, even though most current workers weren’t on the job when the deal was struck. They get about $10,000 a year for giving up the third man they never had.
Some other things have changed. Where one truck picked up all household trash, the city now dispenses three larger ones for the task. One truck for garbage, one for paper and cardboard recycling and one for glass and metal.
To review: Pickups have gone from one truck and three men to three trucks and six men, each with a bonus.
I mention this history because City Hall has a new sanitation efficiency plan. It’s eliminating some managerial positions and putting other supervisors back on cleaning duty.
It says this will save $20 million a year. Can we afford it?
Liberal dose of duplicity
A Conservative friend wise about human nature and politics summarizes his views this way: “Liberals don’t think they have any politics. They think they are in a state of nature. Only those who disagree with them are unnatural.”
It’s a brilliant insight, and tells you all you need to know about the culture and political wars in America today. Less than two years after the arc of history seemed to favor them, the high priests of liberal orthodoxy are on the run.
They have overreached, and now they must pay.
But they are not going quietly or with decency. They are desperate and dangerous, astonishingly reckless in their attacks on the majority of Americans who commit the secular sin of disagreement.
Faced with massive public resistance to their demands for conformity, President Obama and his religious-like acolytes have given up trying to persuade skeptics. They are reduced to trying to crush dissent.
To them, resistance is heresy, and must be eliminated.
They are not embarrassed by the obvious double standards they are embracing or the false claims they are peddling. They are, as my friend observed, incapable of recognizing as legitimate any view but their own, so the end justifies the means.
Obama’s scurrilous conduct is Exhibit A of the panic on the left. Discarding the sunny-side-up mask, he crisscrosses the country in fear-monger mode. His base appeals to women, blacks, Latinos and students are identity-group politics at its worst.
He is not alone in having a worldview that depends on absolute conformity. Deviation is also dangerous to the institutions that form the backbone of the liberal establishment he leads.
The Juan Williams case says it all. Claims by the goon squad at NPR that he was fired for “expressing a personal opinion on a divisive issue” are transparent hogwash.
He and other NPR analysts and correspondents routinely express opinions that favor Democrats. He was fired because he expressed an inconvenient opinion — that he and many Americans often associate Muslims with terrorists. And he did it on Fox News, the antichrist to the church of the left.
His fears are widely shared but don’t fit with NPR’s authorized view of the world. So it — he — must be silenced.
In firing him, NPR instantly created another example of why the country is turning right. Tens of millions of ordinary people have been roused to fight for rights they assumed they had. From health-care mandates to rising federal debt to confiscatory taxes to suffocating speech codes, they have correctly concluded their liberty is under assault.
To be sure, dissenters do not have a monopoly on wisdom or common sense. A partisan label is never a guarantee of righteousness, as the reversal of political fortunes in two years demonstrates.
Rather, the American system, we learn again, is intolerant of only one thing: intolerance. Whether its hammer comes from left or right, it always wakes the spirit of revolution. Freedom of speech, to dissent, to oppose, to fight back, is not just the literal content of the First Amendment. It is the essence of who we are as a people.
Obama, of course, infamously discounted American Exceptionalism when he was asked about it, suggesting he does not view our national character as unique. His mistake.
Still, we should be grateful. Just as Obama’s election was the result of George W. Bush’s failures, the awakening of the American majority wouldn’t have happened without Obama’s overreach.
Because he did, the right to say no — hell, no! — will soon be secured anew. Hold on for nine more days.
‘Buying in’ to albany $leaze
Several years ago, before he jumped New Jersey’s ship of state by declaring himself a “gay American,” sleazy Jim McGreevey signaled his willingness to go along with a corrupt land deal by uttering the plotters’ code word: Machiavelli. Only after he realized his participation was picked up on a prosecutor’s wire did he beat a quick exit from the governor’s mansion.
Now comes another memorable phrase from the annals of corruption, this one courtesy of the casino fix in Albany. “The Brooklyn buy-in” was apparently how lobbyists signaled their willingness to make contributions to John Sampson, the Senate Democratic leader from Brooklyn, so they could get the lucrative contract.
The report by state Inspector General Joseph Fisch on how the Aqueduct Entertainment Group initially got the deal should be required reading for anybody still unconvinced about the rot in New York. The compelling picture Fisch paints isn’t that of a crooked pol or three.
It shows an epidemic of corruption where every issue is reduced to a transaction. The search for an honest public official in the state capital turned up empty.
That’s the true disgrace. With the scheming so widespread, even those not involved had to smell something rotten. Yet there is no indication a single legislator or staff member blew the whistle. By their silence, they all contributed to “the Brooklyn buy-in.”
Kirsten’s stamp act
No one will ever accuse Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of being an original thinker. After her GOP rival, Joe DioGuardi, said she’s a rubber stamp for President Obama, Gillibrand denied it — then inadvertently pleaded guilty. She charged that DioGuardi “supports the same failed trickle-down economics of the Bush administration.” If those words sound familiar, they are. They’re the talking points Obama has used for months.
Gilly wanna cracker?