The City Council will elect a new speaker Wednesday, and the morning-line favorite is Mayor de Blasio buddy Melissa Mark-Viverito, the hard-left activist from East Harlem.
No surprise there. The two have much in common, quite apart from their soak-the-rich politics.
For one thing, they’re both rich. Oh, not Mike Bloomberg rich — who the hell is? But rich enough to own income-generating real-estate.
That’s certainly no crime — and even if it were, the sums involved wouldn’t add up to more than a misdemeanor. But it does matter.
Here’s the thing: It seems that neither de Blasio nor Mark-Viverito ever bothered to report that income to the municipal ethics cops, as the city’s mandatory-disclosure laws require.
It was an “unintentional mistake,” says the Mark-Viverito camp. Of course it was.
There was no need to report, say the de Blasio people, because depreciation ate up all the profits and so on and so forth. Um, sure.
Rough simultaneous translation: Crap. We got caught.
Again, the corner-cutting involves small potatoes. But the other side of that coin is this: If aspirants to high office can’t be trusted with small potatoes, what happens when they’re suddenly in charge of the whole basket of them?
And that’s why the common threads in the lives of Melissa Mark-Viverito and Bill de Blasio matter. Their particular hypocrisies speak directly to the soak-the-rich rhetoric they deployed so promiscuously to win the offices they now hold.
But other issues are in play, too.
Mark-Viverito is just one of 51 council members going into the balloting for speaker — the second-most powerful elective position in city government, behind only the mayor himself.
If she emerges with the job, not only will de Blasio have carried the day for her (a huge coup for the fledgling mayor), but the city’s top two jobs will henceforth be held by former employees of the Service Employees International Union — a special-interest behemoth that has been corrupting state and local government in New York for decades.
SEIU succored de Blasio when he was between jobs earlier in his career, and Mark-Viverito was an SEIU organizer before running for office herself. Clearly, their ties to the union extend beyond ideological cant — without even considering the huge effort it expended to elect them.
Paychecks sometimes come with long-term obligations, and in this respect de Blasio isn’t one to welsh: His first deputy mayor, Anthony Shorris, also spent time on an SEIU payroll, as did a number of the relatively few folks named to top administration jobs so far.
And Mark-Viverito, if she wins Wednesday, will owe the victory not only to de Blasio’s open support, but to less-visible union muscle, too. It’s not just SEIU, of course, but without that organization she’d never have gotten off the back bench to begin with. (Same for de Blasio, of course.)
So now comes payback time.
The unions want tax hikes, at a bare minimum, which explains the speed with which de Blasio slapped aside Gov. Cuomo’s offer to fund the new mayor’s pre-K proposals from state revenues: What Albany gives, Albany can take away, and then what would become of the union boodle de Blasio’s “millionaires’ tax” is intended to fund?
And let’s be clear: Pre-K is just a down payment, should the unions run the table with a Mark-Viverito win. Her debts are huge, and such an outcome would give de Blasio virtually untrammeled control of the City Council — not an unprecedented result, but not a particularly happy one either. Especially not for folks who consider checks and balances to be an integral part of the American way of government.
Mark-Viverito’s ascension is not an entirely done deal — assuming nothing happened after dark Tuesday. Manhattan Councilman Daniel Garodnick has been campaigning hard for the job himself, with the support of some of the Democratic Party’s more traditional king-makers — the “party bosses.”
They have a huge stake in the outcome, too. An unequivocal de Blasio-Mark-Viverito-SEIU victory would mark a turning point in New York politics — sweeping the old guard from power and installing a special-interest cabal in its place.
Were the bosses wise stewards over the years? A strong case can be made that they were, when it mattered; it was in their interest to open the party to as many people as possible, and this they did — which, in itself, served as an important check on political excess.
Yes, the results could be ugly — and often were downright scandalous. But the de Blasio/Mark-Viverito alternative contains no checks whatsoever, no balances — just a government beholden to shockingly narrow interests that have shown no restraint in the past, and who clearly have no plans to do so in the future.
This is progress?