de Blasio con't.

A facebook post started a conversation on de Blasio and Brooklyn between some of my friends including TW.

Here is a response that follows that thread.

Big T. You misconstrue the lion’s share of my irritation as directed at de Blasio the politician when it comes from a bone-weariness of all things Brooklyn, but to some of your points. No I mean 90% of his actions since being elected, so since early November. I know its super fashionable to beat up on Bloomberg, especially well done at the inauguration by some de Blasio followers who need basic lessons on time, place and decorum. Or does coarseness come with populism? But really, to shovel onto the back of the exiting Bloomberg a 30 year national, yea, global trend toward wealth inequality and all that comes with it, is like scolding the major domo of the first class deck with the course of the Titanic. Was he perfect? Not near. Was he an abject failure? Far from it. You have to go back to Koch to find as good and that was a long time ago. Bottom line. He took a city in the red (thanks to a republican) and gave it back to us with a surplus. Policy doesn’t mean much if your city is loosing money. Ask Detroit.

That Manhattan is symbolically elitist and Brooklyn is populist is probable, symbolically of course. But don’t look to closely. De Blasio and all y’all slopeans are the 1% jammed into a tight corner of Brooklyn, symbolically and otherwise.  Dasani, who was featured in the homeless story in the NY Times, who found herself at the inauguration, looks across the street in Ft. Green at all your friends and my friends and de Blasio’s friends who have moved into her neighborhood creating such a vivid snapshot of economic disparity in action. The one-percent have a median annual income of $750K. There are a lot of de Blasio’s neighbors who would slip into the lower end of that spectrum. If de Blaso himself is not yet there, no doubt he will be before he meets Jefferson in heaven. Be careful drawing lines is all I’m saying.

As to whether or not I’m a progressive, in the general sense, sure. In the political party sense, I am not at all sure. I am too slippery, some might say inconsistent, to find myself a comfortable label. I do have a deep distrust of the general population. After all, only 60% of adult Americans believe in evolution. And it’s falling! Not climbing!

Concerning de Blasio I am in agreement with a lot of his policy directions but I am worried nonetheless. If New York City is a Boeing 777, ie a big expensive, complicated machine, then Bloomberg, before he took over the controls, had hours in the captain’s seat of an Airbus 350, ie his big expensive, complicated company. De Blasio has a couple of hours in a Piper Cub. He has shown a realization of this lack of experience by hiring on lots of old hands whom, when looking at the control panels of NYC don’t say, ooo, look at the pretty lights. I am also bracing myself for the hike in property taxes. As president of my co-op, my treasurer and I are going to have to find a way not to raise the maintenance on 60 families. I’m sure your co-op will be faced with the same because de Blasio has lumped property owners in the category of the under-taxed. He’s probably right but I still have to figure out how to ease the pain. There’s a nice piece on de Blasio’s challenges vis a vis rewriting the two cities narrative and how, among other things, the upper middle class might not cotton to some of it landing on their doorstep.

Did you know that when a meteor hit the earth and caused the extinction of the dinasoars, it only took two minutes? Two minutes for the planet to heat up to 300 degrees and kill almost every living creature exposed to the air. I’ve decided to be more worried about that.