Rudy: Without Lhota, NYC Could Mirror Chicago, Detroit

The man who once hired New York City mayoral hopeful Joe Lhota as his deputy recently detailed the stakes involved in the race for Gracie Mansion. Rudolph W. Giuliani told local conservatives that “We get one chance to get it right,” by electing his Republican protégé. “And if we get it wrong,” America’s mayor added, “you know what can happen. Bill de Blasio creates a sense of fear about what can happen to this city, and the fear is real. This city very easily could become another Chicago or Detroit or a combination of Chicago or Detroit.”

Giuliani observed that Chicago has some 2.7 million people, compared to New York’s 8.3 million, “yet Chicago has three and a half times the murder rate in New York City. They have had more murders than we have had.” Indeed, FBI data indicate that murders climbed in Chicago from 431 in 2011 to 500 last year, a 13.8 percent hike. New York’s homicides simultaneously slipped from 515 to 419, an 18.6 percent drop. Murders peaked in 1990, three years before Giuliani was elected, when a now-unfathomable 2,245 people were killed in America’s most populous city.

Why is New York City so secure, while Chicago increasingly is notorious for the slayings on its streets?

Giuliani dismissed gun control as the magic bullet. “Whether you like it or not, we both have the same restrictive gun laws.” Giuliani explained. Thus, the Big Apple and the Windy City are in a draw on this front.

“Crime did not go down in New York City because of climate change,” Giuliani said. “It didn’t fall because people became nice. Crime went down because of pro-active and focused policing. Stop-question-and-frisk and Compstat have done that. Crime is down 80 percent,” since Giuliani arrived and implemented these measures. (Compstat uses crime statistics to help deploy each precinct’s police officers to trouble spots where lawlessness prevails. Commanders then are judged on how they manage these law-enforcement resources. They stand up and describe their results at evaluation sessions where peers and supervisors commend, critique, and otherwise hold them accountable.)

“These days, we have a pretty demoralized police department,” Giuliani lamented. “If I’m a cop, I know that if I make a mistake, I can be called a racist. The mayor could try to scapegoat me, and I can get sued — the latter of which the City Council passed, and de Blasio supports,” referring to the Community Policing Act. Giuliani worried that cops will encounter criminals, consider these new hindrances, and then hesitate. Changing stop-and-frisk into wait-and-see can turn life into death.

“How can we become another Detroit?” Giuliani wondered. He pointed to Motor City’s budget-busting union agreements and decades of municipal graft, largesse, and featherbedding. “When it came to government unions, I gave no raises for two years. Someone has to say, ‘No raise!’ to the unions.”

“When I was mayor, the Yankees won four championships,” Giuliani laughed. “This is what pro-active policing and fiscal conservatism do for a city.” Giuliani also noted that, when elected, he “was New York City’s first Republican mayor in 20 years and the first to stay Republican in 50 years.”

An independent organization called New Yorkers for Proven Leadership is backing Lhota with TV ads financed by citizens who, like Giuliani, fret about this metropolis’s future. NYPL’s strategists believe that voters will overlook Lhota’s low poll numbers and gravitate toward him if they understand the sharp contrasts between the GOP nominee and his Democrat rival.

Lhota preaches fiscal restraint while de Blasio is a full-throated tax-and-spend liberal. He very openly wants to pinch prosperous New Yorkers even harder to fund universal, government-run pre-kindergarten and after-school programs. That means less money in the wallets of job creators and more in the pockets of educrats and unionized teachers.

Of course, this assumes that the wealthy will not relocate and, instead, remain and absorb insults about not paying their “fair share” of taxes. As the Manhattan Institute’s E. J. McMahon demonstrated in last summer’s City Journal, the top 1 percent of New Yorkers — who earn at least $493,439 — already generate 43.2 percent of city income-tax revenue. Rather than credit them for paying so much of City Hall’s bills, de Blasio denounces them and demands more.

Lhota wants to increase school-choice options and double the number of local charter schools. De Blasio has the teachers’-union’s endorsement and, no surprise, says: “I won’t favor charters.” In fact, de Blasio wants to charge some charter schools rent, even though they are government institutions, albeit liberated from the work rules and red tape that ensnare too many traditional schools.

According to Jenny Sedlis of StudentsFirstNY, 50,000 Gotham families are on waiting lists to enter charter schools. While de Blasio says he only would force more affluent charter schools to pay rent, he already has terrified the leaders of more modest charters.

“We could not exist if rent were charged,” said Stacy Gauthier, principal of Renaissance Charter School in Queens. She told the New York Post: “We would be closed down.” What has Renaissance done lately? Its graduates currently enjoy a 100 percent college-acceptance rate, compared to 51.6 percent across New York City’s government high schools.

Some 20,000 parents, students, and their supporters demonstrated October 9 on behalf of the city’s 183 charter schools. They marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and rallied near City Hall.

“Charter schools are public schools,” Lhota declared at the protest. “There’s no reason for [de Blasio] to charge rent, and there’s no reason why we can’t use surplus space in schools to co-locate charter schools.”

• While Lhota wants robust policing and backs the NYPD’s stop-question-and-frisk policy, de Blasio disagrees. He tars that crime-fighting tactic as “racial profiling” and replied, “I really appreciate that analysis” when actor/MSNBC host Alec Baldwin cracked that “stop-and-frisk to me seems lazy.”

Giuliani also warned that if de Blasio “has done weird things in his life, he could be a weird mayor.”

“Who goes to Cuba for a honeymoon?” Giuliani marveled. “Only a socialist. It’s not a crime to be a socialist. It’s stupid, but it’s not a crime.”

To amplify its pro-Lhota message, New Yorkers for Proven Leadership needs cash — and soon. Rudy Giuliani believes it can boost Joe Lhota’s prospects: “If they have the money, they can turn this around.”

New Yorkers for Proven Leadership, Inc.
Attn: Ryan Medrano
5 East 22nd Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10010

New York City to the rest of America: COME TOGETHER ON THE ROAD TO SERFDOM

New York City’s Marxist Power Couple
“You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Nikita Khrushchev.

NEW YORK CITY’S MARXIST POWER COUPLE

10/14/2013
by Cliff Kincaid

“De Blasio opens up to Baldwin” is how MSNBC described Alec Baldwin’s show with New York City’s Obama-backed Democratic “progressive” mayoral candidate, Bill De Blasio. “I was an early supporter of de Blasio’s,” Baldwin acknowledged.

Having been a virtual arm of the Obama White House for years, MSNBC is now turning into an arm of the de Blasio campaign. De Blasio, a former aide to socialist New York City Mayor David Dinkins, faces law-and-order Republican candidate Joe Lhota on November 5.

De Blasio’s support for communist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, and his embrace of Islam as an emerging political force, were highlighted in a recent New York Times article. The paper also noted his illegal “honeymoon” to Communist Cuba. However, the mysterious trip occurred in either 1991or 1994, depending on which paper you read, and much about the nature of the travel remains unknown.

Our review of documents concerning de Blasio’s involvement in the communist-front Nicaragua Solidarity Network confirms that notes of one meeting in 1991 say that he stated that Islam was an emerging “power,” and wondered if there were “progressive elements” in Islam “we can work with.”

Marxists like de Blasio who were sympathetic to the Sandinista “liberation” struggle in Nicaragua were typically active in support of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a Soviet/Cuban-backed terrorist group. Indeed, anti-Israel and pro-PLO material was found in the archives of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network.

Another document regarding the “vision” of the group says, “End world capitalism and replace it,” and next to de Blasio’s initials are the words “democratic socialism.”

Baldwin’s comments during his MSNBC de Blasio interview included such observations as, “You seem to have a very warm positive healthy home life.” De Blasio, who is white, married a black woman and former lesbian, Chirlane McCray, and they have had two children together.

Modern-day progressives usually consider it wrong to even discuss the option of voluntarily leaving the homosexual lifestyle, but they have let the matter of McCray’s rejection of lesbianism pass without critical comment.

De Blasio says one of his wife’s poems about “growing up as a young African-American girl in a racist society” helped him to fall in love with her.

There is no indication that McCray abandoned Marxism after living in an enclave known as the Combahee River Collective.

The Combahee River Collective had issued a “revolutionary” 1977 statement saying, “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources.

We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

The “collective” has been depicted by the media as a respectable group of feminist intellectuals, who were merely “radical” in some of their thinking.

The Combahee River Collective “statement” was favorably cited by Harvard Professor Richard Levins in a Monthly Review article called, “Continuing Sources of Marxism: Looking for the Movement as a Whole.”

In discussing the emergence of the Combahee River Collective and other such groups, he wrote, “In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that what distinguishes communists from other socialists is internationalism and looking for the movement as a whole. ‘Looking for the movement as a whole’ is a fluid concept that expands to embrace ever more inclusive struggles against capitalism and for a just and sustainable world. Increasingly, a movement centered on the working class has to champion the entire cause of the species.”

He mentions the Combahee River Collective after noting that a “core of strong proto-feminist women [had] emerged in the Communist Party USA just at the time when McCarthyism was making all red organizing difficult.”

He went on, “Groups such as Redstockings, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, and the Combahee River Collective and publications such as Sojourner developed a stance against the whole system of oppression. Within feminism, Marxists have played a leading role in insisting on a class analysis that showed that ‘women’ cannot be treated as a homogeneous mass with common interests, and also struggled against racism within the feminist movement.”

Bringing the situation up to date, New York magazine ran a story declaring that Chirlane McCray “would be a First Lady in the mold” of Hillary Clinton.

On a Spanish language New York radio station, WADO 1280 AM, de Blasio was asked about his Cuba trip and he proved evasive: “What did you see in Cuba, what is your impression going on your honeymoon in a country that hasn’t had free elections in the last 50 years. What did you get from the trip?” The radio host went on, “If I can ask you one thing you came back from Cuba with, what was that thing?”

As noted by the New York Daily News, de Blasio dodged the questions and replied, “I didn’t go on a trip to fully study the country, I don’t pretend to have full perspective on the country. I have a huge critique of the current government there because it’s undemocratic.”

But it was just as undemocratic then as it is now. So why did he visit the communist-controlled island, and what did he see and do there?

De Blasio’s opponent, Joe Lhota, has said that de Blasio “needs to explain himself—and explain himself now—to the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who escaped Marxist tyranny in Asia, Central America, and from behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.”

Lhota noted that de Blasio’s involvement with the communist Sandinistas “didn’t happen in 1917; it happened 70 years later when the cruelty and intrinsic failure of communism had become crystal clear to anyone with a modicum of reason.”

He added that de Blasio, who promises to tax the rich and spend more public money, is pursuing a “class warfare strategy” that is “directly out of the Marxist playbook.”

The new MSNBC show, “Up Late with Alec Baldwin,” did include some legitimate news reaffirming de Blasio’s controversial announced intention to crack down on police surveillance of terrorists and criminals. De Blasio opposes the stop-and-frisk practices of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and wants to replace Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has authorized surveillance of radical Muslims in order to thwart terrorist attacks.

“There have been 16 known terrorist plots against New York City since September 11, 2001,” the NYPD says.

The current mayor is Michael Bloomberg, a liberal who has nevertheless been a strong supporter of aggressive police tactics against potential criminals and terrorists.

Bloomberg says, for example, that overturning stop-and-frisk would turn “over the streets to the criminals.”
Mike Long, the chairman of the Conservative Party of New York, told Emily Miller of The Washington Times, “I don’t often agree with Mike Bloomberg, but stop and frisk has made New York City that much safer. It has clearly saved the lives of people of color and is absolutely an important tool for making New York City one of the safest cities in the country.” Long said that without this enforcement mechanism, “we will be like Chicago in very short order.”

But the liberal media are betting that Lhota’s “Republican” label will be more objectionable than the communist sympathies of de Blasio and his wife, sympathies that are being played down by most reporters.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism.

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