Mayor, the Hon. Bill de Blasio. He worked for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1988! He honeymooned in Cuba in 1991! He claims he never saw any Sandinista brutality in Nicaragua, and that “it’s well known thatthere’s been some good things that happened in” Cuba.
Says NYC “is not the exclusive domain of the One Percent.” This is the cant of the radicals who in recent years were taking over parks and other public places, fouling them with their bodily discharges, and committing petty crimes—some not so petty, for instance, rape and mayhem. If Mr. de Blasio were more careful with his rhetoric he would refrain from using the language of barbarians.
Yet he cannot resist such demagogic urge, because he thinks he has been raised to the mayorship of a third world metropolis. Actually New York City includes, along with its One Percent, a prosperous middle class and an industrious working class—along with its impoverished minority. The impoverished are the unfortunates of the city, but things are being done to help them, and the most promising things being done are in education where the lucky ones go to charter schools. Many of the very poor rely on these charter schools. Now with the complicity of the teachers unions de Blasio wants to make the challenges of the charter schools even greater. He will, if he has his way, have all students enrolled in the city’s failing schools.
De Blasio shares with another so-called “progressive” the ill-informed view that income inequality is a grave problem in America. His fellow progressive, President Barack Obama, said on December 4 that “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” is “the defining challenge of our time.” But inequality is “growing” only if you listen to the tendentious left. Truth be known, according to a scholarly study conducted by Lee Ohanian and Kip Hagopian for Policy Review, “inequality actually declined 1.8 percent between 1993 and 2009….” Even the President admitted in his December speech that the rate of poverty has declined by 40 percent since 1967 from 26 percent to 16 percent, but he ignored the passage’s import in his speech. Other studies, for instance, one released by the Congressional Budget Office in October 2011, have come to similar conclusions.
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