From: Politics Brief <james@wnyc.org>
To: Add1dda@aol.com
Sent: Tue, Jun 9, 2020 4:07 p.m.
Why De Blasio Staffers are Protesting Their Boss
N.S. This is absolute garbage; I'll do a partial fisking.
Keep friends and family informed. Forward the Politics Brief.
Why Mayor De Blasio Is Hemorrhaging Support
By James Ramsay
In the week or so since Mayor Bill de Blasio first defended the NYPD's response to protests against police brutality — and instituted the city's first curfew since 1943 — more than 1,000 current and former staff members have signed a letter saying the mayor is failing at his job. A senior aide resigned, as Politico put it, over "de Blasio's near-unconditional defense of the NYPD amid incidents of violence against protesters." And yesterday, hundreds of employees from the mayor's office gathered at City Hill to express opposition to their boss.
[If Gothamist were a news organization, it would have investigated who organized the protest. Instead, it acts as if it were a given that the protestors' profferred reasons were honest. Its late sister publication, dna.info, would have done the spade work.]
"We came to this administration because we saw someone who was listening," Catherine Almonte, who has served in various roles in the administration, told Gothamist. "We saw someone who shared our values and we showed up to do the work. And we are not happy right now. This is not what we signed up for."
[What did you sign up for? De Blah Blah Blah is a communist, like you. He's pro-black and Hispanic criminal, like you. He even let the rioters ignore the curfew, night after night after night. What's the problem?]
One of the boldest public rebukes yet has come from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who accused the mayor last week of "hiding behind your black wife and children."
"I don't know if they give out F-minuses," Williams added, "but he deserves one, at least for this entire year, in how he responded to the pandemic and how he's responding to the protests. We're probably better off with no mayor at all, to be honest."
[Williams seeks to become mayor. He is one of the most openly racist, cop-hating figures in the city, who has a track record of inciting racist hatred against white cops, even on the street during the bloody, annual West Indian Day Parade. Why does Gothamist refuse to provide the back story?!]
The mayor has not taken kindly to other requests that he step down from the job.
"That is the thing that people do who are not trying to deal with the fullness and the truth of the situation," he said last Friday morning, referring to calls for his resignation. "I'm not going to dignify it."
Later that morning, when asked on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show about the potential dangers of cops forcing protesters close together during a pandemic, the mayor snapped back at Lehrer, saying, "Respectfully, I'm not hearing objectivity in your question." (In a New York Times article earlier this year, de Blasio said of Lehrer, "I don't for a moment think he has a bias.")
George Arzt, who was Mayor Ed Koch's press secretary and has spent years working in city government, told Gothamist that it's "unprecedented" in city history" to have employees protest the policies of the current mayor en masse."
Arzt attributes part of this backlash to the fact that the city hasn't elected a mayor like de Blasio before.
"He's the first person from the progressive wing of the [Democratic] party to have become mayor, and so within that wing of the party, there was great hope," Arzt said. "And the results haven't been there."
[Liar. In 1989, the city elected David Dinkins, of Democratic Socialists of America, mayor.]
There are other reasons why liberals rag on the mayor — he takes an SUV to the gym, he hasn't turned the city into a cyclist's paradise, his affordable housing expansion hasn't gone far enough. But some see the root of this current backlash not just in his shortcomings as a progressive, but in his futile attempt to appease the police — and conservative police unions — who never liked him in the first place.
[How has he "appeased" the police? He's turned New York into a felon's paradise.]
To recap: De Blasio originally ran on ending Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policing strategy (his son Dante highlighted the point in that famous ad from 2013). Then, after a Staten Island grand jury failed to indict an NYPD officer for killing Eric Garner in 2014, de Blasio said he "couldn't help but immediately think what it would mean to me to lose Dante." At a subsequent funeral for two officers who were gunned down in their squad car, police officers turned their backs on him.
"The mayor was clearly so deeply affected by the NYPD backlash in 2014," said City Councilmember Ritchie Torres, "that he has been governing in a state of fear of his own police department ever since. . . . He went from a reformer of the police to an enabler of the police and the culture of silence and indifference to black and brown lives."
Now, even as the mayor has committed (however vaguely) to demands like shifting NYPD funding to youth programs, vestiges of that battle with police unions continue to shape his approach to criminal justice reform.
["Criminal justice reform" is a racist code phrase for "ever more free crimes for black and Hispanic criminals."]
"I believe deeply in the labor movement and what unions were supposed to mean," the mayor said last Friday on The Brian Lehrer Show. "Some of the [police] unions have spent a lot of time dividing the city and holding us back. And instead of participating in positive change, they've tried to stand in the way of it. And they have opposed me for six and a half years running, and they are opposing me today, and they always oppose me. And I'm going to keep fighting against that because this should be about actually how we heal and bring police and community together."
["Heal"? What on Earth does that mean? You can't possibly bring the police and the black "community" together, because blacks are loyal to black cut-throats, and hate anyone who limits the latter's ability to wreak mayhem.
Note that nowhere in his "thing," does James Ramsay even seek to answer his own question.]
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