Bill de Blasio's Excellent PR Adventure

 Bill de Blasio's two terms as Mayor of New York City have shown a certain consistency. A very fast-talking con man (he can talk his way around even the most pointed question that nails him dead to rights- for examples, listen to his weekly appearances on a certain radio program [1]), de Blasio's modus operandi is to gaslight people with grandiose "liberal" rhetoric while instituting reactionary policies behind people's backs. In this, he is in the mold of the Democratic Party's poohbah's, Obama and The Two Clintons. Indeed, de Blasio comes from the Clinton's machine, having managed Hillary Clinton's first campaign for U.S. Senate from New York State. If anything, Bill de Blasio is Bill Clinton on steroids, a guy who talks faster and is more disingenuous. An expert sophist, de Blasio manages to rationalize away any damning evidence against him.

Another consistency: he mostly did the opposite of what he promised to do as a candidate (and what he continually claims to be doing). His positive accomplishments are mainly one: pre-K school for children. Give him credit for that, and that's pretty much it. Otherwise it's betrayals and attacks on people's well-being.

Perhaps his most egregious crime has been his full-throated defense of police brutality. The city police (NYPD) brutally assaulted for months on end the protesters who took to the streets in the wake of the graphic murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis, Minnesota police. De Blasio consistently vilified the victims of NYPD violence.

Now what is this Excellent Public Relations Adventure of which I spoke in the title? First this introduction to the theme.

One de Blasio scam was baiting people to get COVID vaccines by offering a $100 "incentive." Only they don't pay up. To illustrate the point, I could relate one person's attempt to get paid, an exercise in utter futility, but that story is too lengthy for this essay. Just briefly, the contractor that is supposed to pay, an outfit called "akimbo," doesn't mail the debit cards, doesn't respond to emails, and is unreachable by phone. City employees for their part put people on a runaround treadmill and tell the victims to inform "akimbo." To add injury to injury, "akimbo" makes extra money selling the emails of the vaccinated to spammers. Immediately after getting vaccinated, the vaccine-related spam starts arriving- the $100 debit card never does.

I have a suspicion that de Blasio never had any intention of paying people. At the least, he doesn't care.  He just wants to be able to boast about how he got people to submit to vaccination. 

Now, de Blasio's Excellent PR Adventure: He pulled a similar stunt to the "vaccine incentive" trick  the first week of December, when he announced- informing nobody in advance, and  consulting with no one, according to the New York Times- that henceforth businesses would be required to insist that their employees be vaccinated.  And that everyone, even children as young as five, would have to be vaccinated if they wanted to eat in a restaurant or enter any other public place. All 184,000 New York City businesses were now under Mayoral orders to REQUIRE all their employees to be vaccinated for the new coronavirus, and to screen all people entering their premises for COVID vaccination status. No exceptions, and no option to be tested for infection in lieu of vaccination.

The fact that there was no plan for any of this, and that he never even discussed it with city officials before announcing it, gives the game away. It's not real, but typical de Blasio smoke and mirrors.

Self-styled caudillo de Blasio's edict nominally takes effect December 27. De Blasio will stop being mayor on January 1st, 5 whole days later. His successor has been coy on whether he will enforce the decree of his predecessor. Even though there is no mechanism to enforce this imperial ukase, media in New York City has given a platform to the frenzied overreactions of a few selected  individuals from "the business community." Thus adding to the illusion that de Blasio actually DID something, as opposed to ANNOUNCING something. ANNOUNCING things that never actually happen has been a hallmark of de Blasio's mayoralty. He's very big on making Grand Announcements, such as there will be "zero traffic fatalities" in New York City, and how he'll build- indeed IS building, "affordable housing," a phrase he must have uttered hundreds of times. 

De Blasio has reaped national media attention for several days running so far for his latest stunt. He even got some international media coverage, for example by the BBC, the main global propaganda arm of the British government. That is the payoff.

But what is the point? Is de Blasio merely a political exhibitionist? Does he have an insatiable need for attention because of a swollen ego? Actually he's running for Governor of New York State (state capital is the city of Albany, a nothingburg far to the north). He's been term-limited out of the Mayoralty of New York City because of a law passed by the city's voters in a referendum, a law that a previous Mayor, Michael Bloomberg Billionaire, ignored and illegally ran for a third term, which he won. His opposition includes the current Governor, Kathy Hochul, who inherited the seat after Governor Andrew "The Molester" Cuomo was forced out and his mousy lieutenant governor, Ms. Hochul, was automatically elevated to the top job. Also vying to grab the top political rung in the state was state attorney general Letitia James, until she announced on December 9th she was quitting. On the same day, Hochul publicly endorsed James' reelection for state AG, indicating prearrangement between the two. Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi is also running. (Another announced candidate for Governor in the 2022 election is Jumaane Williams, who was just elected last month as New York City Public Advocate. Ambitious, no?) These are all Democrats competing in the upcoming June Democratic Primary. [2]

Cuomo was finally exposed as a compulsive molester, and for his role in causing the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents and covering it up. Those things, along with the media finally reporting what they knew for years, that Cuomo is a rage-filled, abusive bully, finally pried his fingers from the levers of power.

De Blasio is deeply unpopular in New York City, with 8 million people has almost half the state's population. Outside of the City, the state is quite reactionary, so de Blasio will have to jettison his fake-liberal outer garb. His opponents will try to keep him from getting away with it. But de Blasio is probably thinking back to how he won the city mayoralty. Low in the polls, he ran in a crowded field, which enabled him to emerge on top.

And de Blasio has "raised his profile" with his latest high-handed "mandate."

If de Blasio were somehow to climb up the next rung of the political ladder, he only good thing would be Andrew Cuomo damaging his teeth by gnashing them. Cuomo as Governor had a hobby of making de Blasio's life miserable. It appeared he did it just for sport, as a cat tortures a captive mouse. What poetic justice that would be for the venal, execrable Cuomo!

My latest scam is working like a charm! Albany Governor's Mansion, Here I Come!

  

1]  For years, de Blasio has been hosted every Friday for an hour on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on "public" radio station WNYC, in New York City. WNYC.org. Brian Lehrer, a classic dweeb, always lets the Flim-Flam Man get away with his evasions. Callers who call in to complain about being screwed by the de Blasio regime would be parried with some Clintonian-like "I feel your pain" verbal jujitsu. No matter what he did, nothing could ever be de Blasio's fault.

 

De Blasio is more slippery than a greased eel and can seemingly fast-talk his way out of anything. While Trump could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and not lose any support, as he boasted, de Blasio could do it and talk his way out of it with a gusher of verbiage.

2] Letitia James gave as a reason to remaining in theattorney general spot ongoing important cases. These cases are a civil suit against the crook Donald Trump, who inflates the value of his assets to get bank loans, and deflates them on his tax returns. She is also working to strip the National Rifle Association of its registration as a charity in New York State, stemming from the major corruption by its top officials who have used millions of NRA funds for personal expenditures. The NRA tried to evade liability by filing a frivolous bankruptcy claim, which the courts rejected.
 

The Big Lie: Police Work Is "Dangerous" (It's Not)

In the U.S. the chances of being murdered if you are a cop is LESS than the chance of being murdered if you are a mere citizen. That is a fact. Policing is NOT a particularly hazardous occupation. Other jobs are MUCH more dangerous. Coal mining. Farming. Commercial fishing. Construction. Working in a meat packing plant. All are MUCH more physically dangerous than being a cop, in terms of serious injuries and deaths. (It is not so rare for people to be maimed for life in those other occupations.  It is exceedingly rare for police to suffer such misfortune.)

Cops spend most of their time sitting in their cars. Doing paperwork in their cop fortresses  is another major use of their time. Chasing "perps" down alleys, like on the repression- porn TV show "Cops," a vile propaganda program, is a minuscule percentage of what they do.

There are close to a million cops in the U.S., and yet only around 50 a year are currently killed by other people while on the job. That is half the average of 100 a year of several decades ago, when there were half as many cops. It was safe then, and now it's four times safer.

Yet cops, their fellow traveling reactionaries and white racist cheerleaders, and most of all the U.S. corporate oligarchy's propaganda system, constantly beat their breasts about how police "risk their lives for us." They raise this rhetorical wall of verbal garbage as a shield whenever there is attempt by mere citizens to criticize their outrageous, repressive behavior. (The corporate oligarchic propaganda system refers to itself as "the media," as if it's the one and only media there is, and is purely neutral and objective with no political character.) Very, very rarely, some police are in potentially dangerous (to themselves) situations. And yes, on rare occasions, one or two get killed. It would be like getting struck by lightning, except getting struck by lightning happens far more often than a cop getting killed occurs.

On the other side of the ledger, U.S. police shoot dead over 1,000 people each and every year in the U.S. Now, presumably these aren't ALL homicides. Surely some of these killings must be justified. And yet, one has to wonder why in other "advanced" countries, like those in Europe, and Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the number of people shot or shot dead by police is such a tiny fraction of the U.S number.

Police, like all reactionaries, like to pretend they are being persecuted. In their case, criticism of their crimes is the "persecution." They expect praise for their criminal acts, or at least silence (and media cooperation in spreading lies about their conduct). Police in the U.S. are NOT persecuted. In a nation that has systematically attacked and destroyed the union movement for decades reducing organized labor to a shadow of what it once was, police unions are allowed grotesquely exaggerated political power. Even as teachers' unions are under systematic assault by state governments and billionaires and their hired propagandists pushing "charter schools" and vouchers, police unions are treated with the deference usually reserved for the Roman Catholic Pope.

Because of their role as oppressors of the "lower" (i.e. poorer) classes in the U.S., a growing percentage of the population, cops are hated by more and more people. On occasions when public outrage explodes over police atrocities, cops feel genuinely aggrieved and insulted. THEY are outraged that anyone is outraged at THEM instead of profusely THANKING them for murdering someone, for example. Then they and their reactionary defenders and media propagandist enablers start to bleat about how "dangerous" it is to be a cop, how they have to make "split second decisions" or be killed. This is BULLSHIT. Every time they cold-bloodedly murder someone, or brutally beat someone who rubbed them the wrong way (or who merely has the wrong skin pigmentation) or break into homes ot attack people protesting causes the cops despise, they trot out their alleged need to make "split-second decisions" and screech that the second-guessing is HANDCUFFING the police and ENDANGERING THEM by making them hesitant to become instantly violent like a Hell's Angel or a steroid-addled bodybuilder subject to sudden and unprovoked rages. (By the way, many cops ARE 'roided-up goons. And many are violent veterans of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where they developed a taste for shedding human blood. Or just developed a combat mentality, which they apply to their "police" work, "protecting the serving" the rich and the power structure created by and for the rich.)



Cops are NOT "law enforcers." They are social order enforcers. They are guardians of the existing power structure. This is the single most important thing to understand about the police. Everything they do makes perfect sense once you perceive this fundamental fact.

Since "blacks" are the U.S. equivalent of Indian Dalits, "untouchables," and occupy the bottom status rung in a deeply racist society, and "need" to be "kept in their place," a task in which violence has historically been a central tool, although not the only one, we should not be mystified by "why do they keep killing black people?" If it wasn't desired that they regularly commit such atrocities, the legal and political systems would not PROTECT THEM WHEN THEY DO IT. And the only times they are NOT protected is when there is unrest AND the unrest does not SUBSIDE quickly.

Chinese dictator and "communist" emperor Mao Zedong infamously wrote that "political power flows out of the barrel of a gun." It also sprays from the nozzle of a pepper spray can, a tear gas canister, and sparks off the tips of a taser's barbs. That is, power always ultimately rests on physical force. Without the ability to use physical force to enforce one's will when challenged, there is no power. There may be influence, but not power. Power is the ability to force others to do what you dictate, not do what you ban, or to punish for disobedience.

In the current two weeks and counting nationwide (indeed global) mass protests against the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on March 25, the bourgeois politicians and propagandists have been talking as if they are on the same side as those they oppress. They've been wringing their hands nonstop, Tugging at their chins and wondering how to "fix" the "problem of racism." Meanwhile, the whole time, their police have been violently assaulting the protesters, killing several, and shooting an eye out of at least three people, among other atrocities. But the only "violence" those in power perceive is window-breaking and "looting" by people they insist on tying to the protesters. So as soon as the heat dies down, expect things to be back to business as usual.

Killer cop Derek Chauvin was only indicted after a police station was burned down in Minneapolis. It was only after 8 days or so of national turbulence that Minnesota state Attorney General Keith Ellison, a phony "progressive," took over the case and indicted the other 3 murderers of George Floyd. He is already warning how "hard" it will be to obtain convictions.

Malcolm X once said, "The only thing power understands, IS power." Or in this case, pressure. Pressure from masses of people. Most importantly, most of the demonstrators have been "white." That is new in the Black Lives Matter movement. That is also decisive. Blacks in the U.S. are a small minority, so having allies in the rest of the population is essential.

Ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek "Crusher" Chauvin bravely putting his life on the line to "protect and serve." And ingrates have the nerve to protest! What is the world coming to?

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