{"id":15650,"date":"2021-03-02T09:30:39","date_gmt":"2021-03-02T14:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=15650"},"modified":"2021-03-02T09:30:39","modified_gmt":"2021-03-02T14:30:39","slug":"the-wreckers-of-new-york-and-their-bitter-rivalry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/02\/the-wreckers-of-new-york-and-their-bitter-rivalry\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wreckers of New York and their Bitter Rivalry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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American Institute for Economic Research<\/a>, March 2, 2021<\/h3>\n

The Wreckers of New York and their Bitter Rivalry<\/a><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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\"JamesJames Bovard<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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    What happens when two masters of political illusion seek to dominate the same turf?<\/strong> New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have prospered by championing disastrous policies that once assured them sainthood from local and national media. Both New York state and city are increasingly ravished by the two central planners whose power extends far beyond their competence.<\/strong> They are also bitter rivals, despite having similar paths to power and political ambitions.<\/p>\n

    Both Cuomo and de Blasio used the same federal agency \u2013 HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development \u2013 as a stepping stone to greater political power. As I wrote 21 years ago for the American Spectator<\/a>, Cuomo was \u201cthe Clinton administration\u2019s most megalomaniacal cabinet secretary,\u201d obsessed with \u201cgenerating favorable publicity for himself and his agency.\u201d Cuomo launched almost a hundred new HUD programs \u2013 a fete for an agency widely derided as the most incompetent federal bureaucracy. He created the Community Builders program, a cadre of 800 HUD employees specially recruited and paid up to $100,000 a year to spread the word about HUD\u2019s successes and to illegally lobby on legislation. Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) derided the program as \u201d Cuomo\u2019s personal army.\u201d One HUD official declared that the Community Builders were \u201cDemocratic ward-heelers who act as a pipeline between Democratic city officials, party leaders, and the administration and the Democratic National Committee.\u201d HUD\u2019s Inspector General warned that Cuomo\u2019s constant reform initiatives have \u201chad a crippling effect on many of HUD\u2019s ongoing operations.\u201d<\/p>\n

    But none of that mattered to the media \u2013 especially after Cuomo exploited perverse liability laws to launch an unwarranted attack on the Second Amendment. Cuomo spearheaded the Clinton administration\u2019s attack on gun makers, threatening that they would perish from \u201cdeath by a thousand cuts<\/a>\u201d of all the lawsuits launched against them. HUD was renowned for bankrolling the worst hellholes in many American cities \u2013 some housing projects had crime rates 20 times higher than the national average. Serendipitously, Cuomo discovered the guilty party: gun manufacturers. But blaming gun makers for the violence in housing projects was like blaming microphones for the lies that politicians tell.<\/p>\n

    Smith and Wesson capitulated to federal threats and agreed to sweeping new controls over its gun designs and marketing and new restrictions on gun buyers. Cuomo boasted that the new specifications for firearms will result in \u201ca product that did not exist<\/a> last week.\u201d A HUD press release on the settlement promised, \u201cWithin 12 months, handguns will be designed so they cannot be readily operated by a child under 6.\u201d HUD had previously shown no competence on firearm designs but that didn\u2019t deter Cuomo. However, other gun makers refused to capitulate to Cuomo\u2019s threats. Smith and Wesson was devastated by a consumer backlash and judges threw the Cuomo-spurred lawsuits out of court.<\/p>\n

    But Cuomo recognized that promising to micromanage people\u2019s lives and safety was still the ticket for national sainthood.<\/strong> Cuomo, who was elected governor in 2010, was determined that New York would be the first state to enact sweeping gun controls after a mass shooting at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. In January 2013, New York legislators and staffers heaved together a bevy of anti-gun provisions which were christened as the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, the SAFE Act. After the law passed, Cuomo boasted, \u201cYou can overpower the extremists<\/a> with intelligence and with reason and with commonsense and you can make this state a safer state.\u201d But a federal judge later declared that parts of the legislation were \u201centirely indecipherable<\/a>,\u201d such as the provision banning firearms features that did not exist. Because Cuomo wanted the mantle of the nation\u2019s toughest anti-gun governor, the SAFE act idiotically decreed that gun owners were permitted to load only seven bullets into ten round magazines. The federal judge nullified that mandate as an \u201can arbitrary restriction that impermissibly infringes on the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.\u201d Most New York gun owners ignored the law\u2019s requirement to register their semi-automatic weapons.<\/p>\n

    Bill de Blasio also rose to power starting with HUD, working as a regional director under Cuomo. After managing Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2000, de Blasio was elected to the New York City Council in 2002 and became mayor in 2014. De Blasio\u2019s passion for central planning extends to controlling every classroom for every child in the Big Apple. He sought to impose a new tax on the richest citizens to fund universal pre-kindergarten but Cuomo vetoed the plan. De Blasio then targeted charter schools, seeking to strip an option from parents who wanted to send their kids to schools that weren\u2019t utterly mediocre thanks to the teachers\u2019 union. De Blasio also sought to torpedo programs for gifted students<\/a>, which he considers discriminatory against minorities who are less likely to qualify. The mayor also believes that educational equity requires radically changing who owns what inside the city. De Blasio proudly quoted a Fox News headline<\/a> bashing his comments on the need for sweeping reforms: \u201cNYC mayor sees the redistribution of wealth as an important factor toward ending structural racism in education.\u201d<\/p>\n

    In 2019, de Blasio flogged the same theme, perhaps hoping to propel himself to the Democratic presidential nomination. In his \u201cState of the City\u201d speech, he proclaimed, \u201cHere\u2019s the truth, brothers and sisters, there\u2019s plenty of money in the world. Plenty of money in this city. It\u2019s just in the wrong hands<\/a>!\u201d The New York Times noted that de Blasio \u201ccast himself as an aspiring Robin Hood<\/a> \u2014 aiming to take from the rich and give to the poor.\u201d But affluent New York City residents are not in the same plight as Russian peasants whose land was seized for Soviet collective farms. At some point, taxation makes flight profitable.<\/p>\n

    The governor and the mayor have perennially wrangled over who has the right to micromanage New Yorkers\u2019 lives. As early as 2016, a professor at Baruch College declared that their brawling \u201cshould be on HBO boxing<\/a>.\u201d Last Fall, the New Yorker<\/em> noted the half-decade \u201crunning serial of de Blasio-Cuomo pissing contests<\/a>, some almost comically trivial (a spat over euthanizing a deer in Harlem) and some not funny at all (their posturing over the pitiable state of the housing projects under the jurisdiction of the New York City Housing Authority).\u201d<\/p>\n

    De Blasio, presuming that his election made him czar of all local transit, sought to cripple Uber\u2019s operations in New York City but Cuomo blocked him. On the flipside, Cuomo was a more zealous regulator of prominent protuberances. \u201cIn 2015, Cuomo wanted to clamp down on the growing number of topless women<\/a> soliciting tourist donations in Times Square with an outright ban, while de Blasio instead set about establishing a task force to get to the root of the issue,\u201d Fox News reported.<\/p>\n

    The Covid pandemic brought the hostility between the two political kingpins to the boiling point. On March 17, de Blasio suggested he was considering issuing a \u201cshelter in place\u201d decree. Cuomo blocked de Blasio\u2019s effort because \u201cthe fear, the panic<\/a>, is a bigger problem than the virus.\u201d Cuomo also declared, \u201cRumors are part of the fear, the anxiety. People spread rumors: Maybe we\u2019re going to quarantine New York City? That is not true. \u2026 I have no interest whatsoever and no plan whatsoever to quarantine any city<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Cuomo\u2019s initial instincts were sound \u2013 similar to other governors who resisted cascading demands to place everyone under house arrest.<\/p>\n

    But on March 20, Cuomo congratulated himself for dictating a statewide lockdown: \u201cI want to be able to say to the people of New York \u2014 I did everything we could do. And if everything we do saves just one life,<\/a> I\u2019ll be happy.\u201d Sacrificing the freedom of 20 million people was a small price to pay for permitting the governor to brag about saving one life. Upstate counties had only a smattering of Covid<\/a> cases at the time that Cuomo shut down their businesses and schools but a statewide lockdown assured him far more applause from the national media. Cuomo\u2019s daily press conferences on fighting Covid earned him an Emmy Award for his \u201cmasterful use<\/a> of television.\u201d But his mandate forcing nursing homes to admit Covid-infected patients, leading to more than 12,000 deaths, earned him a federal investigation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Restaurants were caught in the crossfire of chaotic and ever-changing decrees from both the mayor and the governor. On March 11, de Blasio declared that \u201cIf you\u2019re not sick<\/a>, you should be going about your life,\u201d including eating out in restaurants. De Blasio stressed that the Covid \u201cdoes not transmit through food and drink.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Two days later, de Blasio ordered restaurants to operate at only 50% capacity.<\/p>\n

    On March 15, Cuomo declared during a television interview that he was \u201caggressively recommending<\/a>\u201d voluntary shutdowns by businesses: \u201cIf you don\u2019t need to be open, don\u2019t be open.\u201d De Blasio announced a shutdown of restaurants that evening and, the next morning, a tweet by Cuomo<\/a> changed the deadline for the shutdown to that evening.<\/p>\n

    On July 1, Cuomo announced that he was not permitting indoor dining in restaurants to resume in part because he was displeased with the lack of aggressive enforcement of mandates for masks and social distancing<\/a> by New York City officials.<\/p>\n

    In August, Cuomo justified perpetuating tighter restrictions on restaurants in the Big Apple than imposed elsewhere in the state because \u201cwe have a much bigger problem in New York City\u2026 with a lack of compliance<\/a>\u201d with the latest regulations. Restaurants were eventually allowed to partially reopen but Cuomo shut them again in December even though New York state contact tracing data showed that \u201crestaurants and bars account for just 1.43 percent<\/a> of recent known COVID-19 exposures.\u201d Cuomo justified closing down the businesses based on metrics from the \u201cstate\u2019s micro-cluster model<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

    New York City restaurants were permitted to offer outdoor dining but their customers were prohibited from using<\/a> the restaurant bathrooms \u2013 sparking another brawl between Cuomo and de Blasio before patrons were permitted to hit the john. New York state senator Jessica Ramos complained, \u201cI doubt a restaurant was consulted in drafting these new and absurd guidelines<\/a>. These confusing and ever-changing rules are pushing our restaurants to close.\u201d<\/p>\n

    After Cuomo decreed that restaurants could not be open between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., he was sued in January by a group of 80 Buffalo restaurants who complained: \u201cThere is no valid or sound scientific or medical rationale for prohibiting restaurants from operating between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. while allowing supermarkets<\/a>, malls, and other businesses with large numbers of customers from operating during these hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

    A group of New York City restaurants filed a $2 billion class action lawsuit<\/a> against both Cuomo and de Blasio. Unfortunately, because most of the news media had bought into the Covid panic storyline, both politicians were cheered for practically every restriction they dictated.<\/p>\n

    Both Cuomo and de Blasio favor central planning for public safety, minimizing citizens\u2019 ability to defend their own lives. But they disagree on how much arbitrary power government agents deserve. Cuomo won the Police Benevolent Association\u2019s \u201cMan of the Year<\/a>\u201d award \u2013 one of the ultimate tributes from the New York City police union conferred upon politicians and others that buttress the power of cops. De Blasio repeatedly clashed with the union but was thwarted by state laws that effectively provided secrecy and immunity to policemen who assail private citizens. After New York City was rocked by riots and looting last summer after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Cuomo threatened to \u201cdisplace the mayor<\/a> of New York City and bring in the National Guard, and basically take over the mayor\u2019s job\u201d to restore order.<\/p>\n

    Instead, de Blasio became a left-wing hero for announcing plans to cut a billion dollars from the budget for the police department. His progressive crusade faltered after violent crime exploded in the city: shootings doubled from 2019 with almost 2,000 people<\/a> gunned down. Murders were up almost 50%. A coalition of 150 business leaders sent a letter to de Blasio last September lamenting, \u201cThere is widespread anxiety<\/a> over public safety, cleanliness and other quality of life issues that are contributing to deteriorating conditions in commercial districts and neighborhoods across the five boroughs.\u201d Neither Cuomo nor de Blasio have responded to the crime surge by admitting that government has no right to continue disarming people it can no longer protect.<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \u201cThere has been talk, lately, of New York needing a savior, a hero from the political class,\u201d the New Yorker<\/em> noted last October. Unfortunately, New Yorkers apparently retain faith in central planning of their lives despite the dismal failures at both the mayoral and gubernatorial level. The political profits of demagoguery will perennially trump the calculus of benevolence. The only \u201csavior\u201d worth trusting is the revival of individual freedom and a vast decrease in regulatory restrictions and tax exactions.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    American Institute for Economic Research, March 2, 2021 The Wreckers of New York and their Bitter Rivalry James Bovard What happens when two masters of political illusion seek to dominate the same turf? New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have prospered by championing disastrous policies that once assured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2349,2370,2709,280,1645,2711,148,316,2465,2710],"class_list":["post-15650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-covid","tag-cuomo","tag-de-blasio","tag-gun-control","tag-new-york","tag-restaurant","tag-schools","tag-second-amendment","tag-shutdown","tag-topless"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Wreckers of New York and their Bitter Rivalry - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Gov. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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