She’s in. We’re toast.
Melissa Mark-Viverito is the Queen of Taxpayer-Paid Subsidies. She is also Mayor de Blasio’s BFF and kindred spirit, a tax-and-spend hard leftist and bona-fide millionaire who protested with the goons at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, treated herself to a cut-rate house purchased with the help of taxpayers, and lobbied for the gentle treatment of jailed Cuban spies.
And — silly! — she plumb forgot to declare rental income from her East Harlem property to municipal ethics authorities.
In short, she’s bad news for hardworking, taxpaying and patriotic working stiffs who increasingly exist on life support in this city.
Yesterday, as easily as one might order lunch from underpaid fast-food workers, Mark-Viverito, a councilwoman from East Harlem who grew up in Puerto Rico, was elected by her peers to serve as council speaker — the second-most powerful position in the city behind our ultra-leftist, tax-and-spend mayor, de Blasio.
But while Mark-Viverito’s camp stresses that she’s the first Latina to serve as speaker, this political sleight-of-hand merely detracts attention from who she really is and what she might do.
And that would be this hypocrite to exert her newly awesome control over the city and its $70 billion annual budget — pushing the council to rubber-stamp the most ruinous elements of de Blasio’s agenda.
These include passing a law requiring employers to pay sick pay to workers, plus forcing companies that receive government aid to pay employees a living wage (how high?) — both of which are small-business killers.
But will she calm down now that she’s got the power?
The most cuckoo elements of Mark-Viverito’s personality came to the fore when she was just a normal member of the 51-person City Council. She was best known for standing atop the steps in front of City Hall and trash-talking Washington Republicans for no apparent reason.
“After 20 years of Republican economic policy, I think it’s a policy that has really left a lot of people behind,” she once said. “We have an opportunity where people have clearly indicated that they want a new direction.’’
The only direction the city has to go under Mark-Viverito is down.
Mark-Viverito pretends to be like you and me. She isn’t. She’s a lot richer.
She and her family inherited more than $6.7 million in holdings that her doctor father left when he died. And, as The Post reported, knowing that she was soon to get her hands on abundant loot, Mark-Viverito still received a no-interest loan in 1998 from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to help buy a $240,000 East Harlem town house under a program designed to provide cheap digs to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.
Surprise! Mark-Viverito, who makes $112,500 a year as a council member, today is worth more than $1.5 million. Her town house’s value has skyrocketed to $1.2 million. This woman of the people is a member in good standing of the top-earning 1 percent.
So, why didn’t she (much like Mayor de Blasio) disclose rental income on her property on a city financial-disclosure form?
It was an “unintentional mistake,’’ said her spokesman.
As The Post reported exclusively Wednesday, the incoming speaker wrote a letter to the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva in 2009, saying that the so-called “Cuban Five’’ were “unjustly imprisoned in the United States for trying to prevent terrorist attacks against Cuba.’’ Hardly.
The quintet had infiltrated a naval base in Florida and were convicted in 2001 of espionage conspiracy against the United States. One of the five was convicted of murder conspiracy — for providing information about the flight plans of two small planes shot down by the Cuban government in 1996, killing four.
Mark-Viverito wanted the prisoners to spend more time with family. Are milk and cookies next?
The Queen of the Subsidies marches on.