William Wilhelm de Blasio, the mayor of New York City (your city) seemingly proves once again how disconnected he is from the agencies that are under his auspice and the money that flows like a water out of a firehose from them even during a pandemic and an induced economic crisis.
Last spring, frontline medical workers scrambled in vain to find proper surgical masks as the coronavirus swept through hospitals across the city.
Doctors, nurses and medical technicians were forced to reuse the same mask over and over — a dangerously ineffective method to stem infection from a virus that’s now taken the lives of more than 24,000 New Yorkers.
City officials jumped into action, signing more than $1 billion in emergency no-bid contracts with seemingly anybody who claimed they could produce high-quality masks and other crucial COVID gear — including ventilators.
Among them: Genuine Parts Company, an Atlanta-based firm that specializes in auto parts. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), which handles most of City Hall’s purchases, had bought parts for city vehicles from Genuine in the past.
An auto parts company from Atlanta?? Why? And for what kind of city vehicles? Being that de Blasio’s DCAS felt that they can entrust them to deliver PPE’s to the virus frontline workers…
Go on…
According to internal records obtained by THE CITY, DCAS paid $348,000 for what was described by Genuine as 300,000 “non-Latex surgical masks” that were marked as “received” by the city on April 7. That was at the peak of the virus’ spread in New York City, when the seven-day average for daily hospitalizations hit 1,642, compared to this week’s 52.
But records show that when DCAS’ Bureau of Quality Assurance inspected the delivered goods, workers discovered not surgical masks but “disposable single-use non-surgical mask/dust mask/Not FDA approved.”
The items were nevertheless deemed “accepted due to public necessity.” DCAS paid full price and placed subsequent orders for more masks from the car parts dealer, records show. DCAS then “redirected” the masks — useless in emergency rooms — elsewhere for non-medical use.
The Genuine mask purchase is part of a disturbing pattern uncovered during an investigation by THE CITY of DCAS’ pandemic-spurred emergency buying spree.
During some of the most dire weeks of the crisis, THE CITY found, the agency lost track of key equipment from masks to ventilators — driving an exasperated DCAS official to declare in one early May meeting: “Stop this s—t! Stop this s—t! Fix the problem!”
And guess who also was involved in this honest incompetence graft? The Blaz’s art dealer buddy Charlie Trebele, the city’s COVID “essential” “first responder” Contractor Gadget .
A similar scenario unfolded with another vendor, Digital Gadgets, an electronics firm whose CEO, Charlie Tebele, along with family members, has been a frequent donor to de Blasio’s various political campaigns.
In late March, DCAS awarded $19 million in no-bid contracts to Digital for high quality N95 masks and lower quality KN95 masks. That included an $8 million contract for what the firm promised would be two million “surgical grade N95s,” according to internal DCAS documents.
19? How droll to match the estimate with the disease. Contractor Gadget also gave the same digits backwards and higher.
The company also won a $91 million contract to provide DCAS with ventilators that was later cancelled because, Benson told THE CITY, the agency “decided to order a different ventilator model.”
Digital Gadgets — which previously supplied hoverboards to QVC — did deliver masks. But DCAS records reveal that the agency’s Bureau of Quality Assurance discovered the masks Digital delivered were not “surgical grade N95s” as promised and had not been approved by either the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
So the corporations the city depended on to ship face masks and ventilators depended on a company not even from New York that already was contracted for auto supplies to city service vehicles and a company that makes toys for tech bobos. And both of those PPE’s were cheap knockoffs. Sure sounds like these companies grifted the city real good with the expenses they saved by skimping on the products at the expense of doctors, nurses, nursing home aides and tens of thousands of lives in New York City during the worse and most deadly time in the first few months of the pandemic.
GPC is a big national corporation, but Contractor Gadget Charlie’s company basically sells crap that’s mostly seen on T.V.. He’s also benefited quite nicely from his investments aka donations to de Blasio’s mayoral and farcical presidential campaign and the corrupted yet legal 501 c 4 PAC fund run by the mayor in City Hall, the Campaign For One New York; not only with a a government appointed seat on the COVID economic recovery task force collective gifted by the Blaz, Chuckles also was able to pay the mortgage to his Upper East Side townhouse with the emergency funding gifted to his company for his imitation PPE provisions to the city’s hospitals and nursing homes. Pretty sweet for a company that had a failing grade from the Better Business Bureau at the time (and present time).
This has drawn the ire of City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Scott Stringer who has been trying to get information about these tainted contracts for months, but his signifying nothing fury is laughable because he allowed the Blaz to authorize executive power over the city’s pandemic response which included total control over these contracts and their fiscal costs, which rendered his duties to monitor these checks and balances null and void and made his position as an elected official useless and neutered.
de Blasio’s an idiot savant. He may not know shit about preparing for a crisis and evidently leading a city during one, but his brain cells get energized the second an opportunity comes up to make sure anyone who gave him money immediately gets a cherry contract with the city.
Liberty Ave. And 123rd street. Where the gilded asphalt path abruptly stops.
Richmond Hill, Queens, N.Y.
A week before Halloween, an encouraging sight sprung forth to auto owners and cyclists. The decade long dilapidation of Liberty Avenue beginning at Lefferts Boulevard was about to get repaved with fresh tar and asphalt. Being a cyclist myself, it was elating to finally look forward to a smooth path and finally see the cracks and crevices produced by many winters, persistent double and triple parking and K and illegal U-turns by overtly aggressive drivers remediated.
What’s frustrating about this is that a while back the D.O.T. milled and repaved the entirety of Liberty under the elevated train from Rockaway Blvd to the last stop at Lefferts Blvd but they decided for some damn reason not to stretch out the repaving 15 blocks east to the Van Wyck Expressway to at least make it look compatible as well as prevent the road from suffering from further degradation.
But in yet another case of diminishing returns of half-ass efforts from your city, it turned out that they only repaved 2 fucking blocks.
Even more frustrating and fucking maddening is that the long overdue road repair was permitted and possibly inspired and demanded to make way for a film shoot.
A day after the repaving, film permits appeared taped on lamp posts and this parking meter here for something mysteriously titled V3. It must be some sequel of some cruddy film franchise or maybe it could be a historic film chronicling the nascent stages of the invention of V8 juice when the beverage contained only 3 vegetables.The freshly paved scenery was supervised by someone only named Rocco.
The trucks and trailers with the Jersey or Penn plates and catering truck were supposed to arrive to assemble the proverbial fourth wall for the shoot on Liberty on Monday but a strange development happened on the day that footage above was shot the day before though, all the permits were removed from said posts and meters and the producers decided to move all their rigs on 103rd avenue instead and 120 street.
The next day the catering truck moved to Liberty and two charter buses appeared buttressed by orange safety cones. The charter bus facing east and the catering truck in front of that charter bus facing west were parked on city bus stops for the Q110.
And another charter bus was parked by 103rd avenue around the corner. I assume these vehicles were the mode of transportation for all the creative forces and talent involved with this project.
And the action took place at Leo F. Kearns funeral home halfway down the block.
Spoiler alert! Someone in this movie dies!
It’s been a week since this production, and being that it took two days it will probably result in a 2 minute scene. I came to this synopsis because the last few times that major shows were filmed in this enclave of Southeast Queens were HBO’s Bored to Death where they took a day to film Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman ask a cashier a question in a scene that was 10 seconds and the other was also by HBO called …the Night Of where the trailers took over 2 blocks for a good week to film some catalyst scenes for the first episode (sadly, the shows executive producer, James Gandolfini died a week after that shoot in Italy, man it would have been actually cool to bump into him).
Wait, I forgot the odious and easily hacked social media platform corporation that sold out their customers for billions of ad dollars and now government contractor Facebook filmed a show here in the springtime. At least they split so fast it was barely noticeable. Probably because they realized it wasn’t Brooklyn.
Too bad Broad City is ending, it actually would have been nice if those funny ladies stopped by and did some jokes about roti shops.
But I’m digressing, because this road upgrade was obviously done for aesthetic reasons for this V3 movie. Which gives the impression that some special tweeding went down to benefit the film industry over the needs of the driving and riding constituents and also essential bus transit service that continues to get neglected again and again. This can be verified by the I.M. exchange between Cynthia Nixon and Mayor Bill de Blasio when the failed gubernatorial candidate wanted to get her pal in City Hall to halt chopper flights over Central Park that were bothering her director pal’s Shakespeare performances there as she forwarded his complaints to him and your mayor happily and hurriedly obliged and got it done for her. It also helped that TV’s Miranda’s wife was working for Mayor Big Slow at the time as one of his advisors.
So the rest of Liberty will probably remain a broken ass mess in this broke ass city. As well the majority of streets that intersect with it and the avenues south and east of the busy avenue are in equally shitty and even worse. It doesn’t look like there is going to be any upgrade in the near future or even beyond as the new pretty, vibrant and hip burgs get nice things and the dirty southeast of Queens gets dirtier and rockier. And not to mention the massive renovation of the BQE.
And even with this sudden attention from Hollywood, which from the way this city favors this industry, has become an official citizen person of New York. At the expense of safe streets, commuting and the dwindling patience and sanity of it’s residents.
This is what it said when entering the Queens Lefferts Blvd destination A train on 14th Street in Manhattan. Fuck the MTA.
It’s been almost a year since this digital publication decreed the MTA as the worst fucking transit system in the universe, which to no surprise to me is the most read post in the existence of Impunity City. Your city and mine. Since then, there has been a multitude of articles by professional journalists actually confirming my vulgar opinion. But none as deftly infuriating as the most recent piece by the now full time digital Village Voice. It ultimately turns out that the rationale for the perpetual shit service of the transit system is because of the actual modernization of the signal system leading to a policy of running the trains at a slower speed which was discovered in a three year old study by an intern at Columbia University that the MTA, in their hapless way, tried to throw it in the memory hole. (The only bright side of this is that this study probably didn’t cost taxpayers a dime).
The root cause of the subway system’s decay, it turns out, isn’t budget cuts or overcrowding — rather, the collapse of the subway system appears to have been primarily self-inflicted by the authority itself, in response to a single accident two decades ago that set the transit system on a path to disaster.
But there is one type of delay that’s gotten exponentially worse during that time: a catchall category blandly titled “insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown,” which captures every delay without an obvious cause. From January 2012 to December 2017, these delays increased by a whopping 1,190 percent — from 105 per weekday to 1,355. In December, one out of every six trains run across the entire system experienced such a delay. The increase has been steady and uninterrupted over the past six years.
In 1995, a Manhattan-bound J train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge rear-ended an M train that was stopped on the bridge, killing the J train operator and injuring more than fifty passengers. The National Transportation and Safety Board investigation placed most of the blame on the J train operator, who the NTSB suspected had been asleep. But the NTSB also identified potential issues with the signal system that contributed to the accident, which it found didn’t guarantee train operators enough time to apply the emergency brakes even when awake.
“They slowed the trains down after the Williamsburg Bridge crash,” a veteran train operator who asked not to be identified told the Village Voice. “The MTA said the train was going too fast for the signal system.” As a result, the MTA, quite literally, slowed all the trains down, issuing a bulletin informing employees in April 1996 that their propulsion systems would be modified so they could achieve a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour, down from the previous high of 50 to 55 miles per hour on a flat grade.
But the MTA didn’t stop there, internal documents show. One of the NTSB’s safety recommendations was to set speed limits. As a result, the MTA began a still-ongoing process of changing the way many signals work to meet modern safety standards. Previously, trains would encounter green lights if the track ahead was clear; if not, a red light would trip the train’s brakes if it tried to cross that section of track, stopping it a safe distance from the train ahead. (Restarting the train after it is tripped can take anywhere from one to ten minutes, and the incident gets noted in the operator’s performance file, according to MTA sources.) Under the new program, generally referred to as signal modifications, the brakes would be tripped based not only on whether the track ahead was vacant, but also on the train’s speed.
NYCT’s estimates were so off in part because they didn’t account for a human element. The most problematic of the newly modified signals were “one-shot timers,” so called because the operator has only one chance to meet the posted speed limit. One-shot timers are easier and cheaper to install, say MTA sources; the more “shots” the operators have to get under the required speed, the more timing mechanisms have to be installed across a longer portion of track. (An MTA spokesperson disputed this, characterizing the decision to install one- or two-shot timers as safety-related.) But the consequences of going over the speed limit are high — the train is stopped, and the operator gets penalized — so many operators now opt to go well below the posted speed limit just to be on the safe side.
So because of a train wreck on the bridge, the trains have been pussyfooting across the rails for the past two decades, extending platform wait times and commutes. And this exposes the dirty little secret of the daily refrain during the daily sojourns of commuters “train is delayed because of red signal ahead”. It also explains why the commute the day after this Voice article came out that the trains were moving sloooowwer than usual.
Now with the city’s population explosion from all the tower development and rampant tourism growing every year, in addition to the reprehensible etiquette of commuters lethargically boarding and exiting trains while gazing at their phones, the frightening overcrowded platforms especially by major transfer hubs where commuters have to wait on the stairs, it has made this fubar transit system slower and slower. Which must be throwing those new countdown clocks and jumbo touch screen schedules off kilter.
This is ultimately an existential and irremediable disaster. But my prophecy is becoming possible because of the feud nobody likes of the two top officials nobody likes, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Andy Cuomo. de Blasio refuses to pony up half of the money for the $830 million action plan (which the Voice points out won’t help much, but it’s a start since it’ll supposedly fund overtime work) and at the last MTA board meeting in a stroke of funding blowback, Mario’s son decided to allocate 1 billion dollars for renovations and modernizations at 6 stations. So instead of signal modernization. track repairs and train maintenance, expect more art on the walls to ignore or pricey novelty take-out eateries on the mezzanines.
This retarded targeted spending comes on the heels of the NY Times expose of the MTA’s expensive moronic contracting, worker redundancies at work sites, and the transit union’s abuse of overtime hours. And with the recent revelations of the new crop of hired operators and conductors had insufficient training, it makes the MTA’s decision to run trains at a slugs pace for safety reasons utterly without merit. It should be worrisome how quick their reactions are when they confront those sudden switches from those pesky “one stop timers” which explain why lately the trains are always stopping short in the tunnels and arriving at the stations.
(On the subject of lacking merit for safety, at a train yard in East New York, four workers have filed suit against the MTA refusing to place flags on tracks to warn arriving trains of their presence on the rails and withheld their pay and denied them work hours the more they continued to address the hazards in their surroundings.)
But the necessity to worry should take hold for the MTA under the new leader Andy Byford, who is very cognizant of the inefficiencies causing commuters to lose money every day. He has ordered office workers to get out of their cubicle pens and head underground donning orange vests to assist and mollify commuters to make their terrible train rides easier, making them basically yoeman subway escorts as they through no fault of their own disregard their actual responsibilities to make the MTA operate. Get this, they called this the Subway Action Plan, just like the continuing dormant joint city and state plan that is currently languishing in civic purgatory.
And that’s not all that twit directing the worst fucking transit system of the universe just did, they took another dump on the bureaucratic shitshow by inventing a new executive job called Chief Customer Officer and hired some chick from a marketing firm who the MTA contracted for consulting services last year. Apparently, according to the press release, the CCO’s focus is to not alleviate the constant delays that is effecting the customers salaries every goddamn day, but to get workers to be more customer friendly (holy shit, just like what was mentioned right above this paragraph!) and get rid of “transit jargon” which you would think would be the same verbal pablum excuse for every damn delay but it’s actually the workers euphemisms and abbreviations for the technical problems plaguing the system. Which is actually a workplace order and nothing familiar to what the populace are paying $2.75 for every fucking day.
This woman is getting paid $200,000 for doing what Byford calls in his own native Britain euphemistic terms, doing away with redundancies like token booth clerks and putting them on “the field” to help commuters. Which is bloody ironic and hysterical since the idea was already in place, making the Chief Customer Officer position fucking redundant itself!
It can’t be any more transparent that the MTA is more concerned with spinning the optical quality of the transit service than actually running it efficiently.
All this fucking nonsense, squabbling, machinating, marketing and incompetence as the MTA’s debt is now at fucking $38.6 billion dollars.
Fuck the MTA. Nah, it’s already fucked.
Update:
At a MTA committee board hearing the other day, an official, Stephen Plochochi audaciously revealed that the transit agency recently extended the contracts of corrupted firms that have settled billion dollar suits involving bribery in three nations, the U.S. Army and for half-assed work at a nuclear power plant. They are tasked with upgrading the antiquated and jiggered for slow service for the last 20 years signal system and the renovation of the Cortlandt St. station by the New World Trade Center.
How is the new Chief Customer Officer going to spin this craven bullshit of wanton stupidity and enabling to the commuting public.
Quoted VP Stephen, who clearly doesn’t give a fuck:
“New York City Transit and the MTA as a whole for many, many, many years — for the 30 years that I’ve been here and for many before that — have looked atthis as a rehabilitative organization,”
Except when it obviously comes to rehabilitating the essential infrastructure of the subway and the fleet of train cars. Fuck no, it’s to rehabilitate recidivist criminal contractors who are so corrupted and moneyed that they can still thrive and get rewarded for their unethical standards and tactics.
Plochochi said the MTA has a “robust program” for overseeing contractors that includes assigning monitors to ensure “good ethics and compliance” by companies with checkered pasts.
Yes, these firms will be good little boys and girls now that they got another billions of dollars which will surely go to its targeted and intended purpose, even with the MTA’s and the state’s sordid past and present for unchecked wasteful spending and obvious lousy vetting. Actually, the latter is clearly intentional and standard executive-driven procedure at the fucking worst and robustly unprofessional transit system in the universe. Fuck Plochochi, Fuck Byford and fuck the MTA.
Chirlane McCray is just dying for you to hear from her. (telling pic by James Messerschmidt, NY Post)
Last week the city of New York (your city remember) was foisted upon with two new additions to the current administration by our self-exalted mayor de Blasio for appointees no one, sane or insane, brained or brainless, even asked for.
The first one while not actually official was revealing enough and actually conveys total confirmation and the mayor did not even hold back considering how weak, intellectually bereft and dependent he comes off. It wasn’t even a Freudian or regular slip of the tongue, but it sure was inappropriate. And it was announced after he announced the hiring of the new Schools Chancellor a few days after his first pick dropped him like a brick during a press conference.
The mayor’s wife is now the pseudonor Co-Mayor Charlene McCray!
“I want to thank Chirlane for the many, many hours she has put in this effort,” de Blasio said in a statement before adding, “I want to thank First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, as well. The three of us acted as a team.’’
McCray, City Hall revealed, also sat in on meetings all weekend between her husband and his top aides discussing the appointment. And the first lady was there when de Blasio made Carranza an official offer.
A quote from McCray was included in the press release, too.
“I look forward to working closely with [Carranza] to help all of the inner cities’ children and their families,” she said.
But political observers say that there’s more to McCray’s input in official city business than meets the eye — that it is a bid to elevate her political standing for a possible run for office herself.
“There’s a concerted effort to get her as much exposure as possible,” said a source familiar with McCray’s role at City Hall.
“There’s a clear understanding . . . that these are joint announcements, and Chirlane is going to have a presence and a voice every time one of these appointments is being made.”
So this is what the minuscule amount of voters and a majority of non-voters signed up another four years for in addition to de Faustio slacking off, fucking around and lying like a rat since January. Let’s also add being an arrogant self-righteous douchebag too, because he insulted journalists and anyone left in the constituency with common sense by scoffing off any accusations of nepotism by accusing them of being idiots and sexists.
The mayor’s insecurity regarding the news media’s collective intellect is a regular thing but charging them with sexism is a new pathetic low and the Blaz has as much understanding of the term as Spinal Tap did.
But this is about Chirlie after all. And in her first week as co-mayor, she’s not off to a good start. For her influence in the chancellor pick, Richard Carranza, has not been quite a ladies man or a gentlemen when it comes to dealing with women in the workplace. Since it took less than 24 hours and on International Women’s Day, which the Blaz clearly cited to lash out at the press, to find out that while as the board superintendent in San Francisco he was cheating on his wife at the office and destroyed a female educators career when she confronted him about his salacious affair and later had the school district pay her a $75,000 settlement for the torment and undermining he put her through for exposing the cheating greaseball.
Maybe the Blaz came out inaugurating his wife so he can again deflect blame for his stupid governmental policies and decisions on someone else but that might have been the case all along, although this guy seems a perfect fit for the corrupt cronyism environment in city hall being that Carranza feels he was abdicated from the charges because he didn’t have to pay the settlement out of his wallet but the school district and taxpayers did. Which is in uncanny resemblance of the mayor’s warped justification for using his constituents tax dollars for his expensive personal lawyers for his pay to play court hearings. Because a month before choosing a letch for a schools chancellor they got together and appointed another deputy mayor to de Faustio’s confederacy of useless syncophantic hacks. This one is being used specifically for his fucking wife’s $850 million dollar mental health program THRIVENYC, which to chagrin of the citizenry nobody knows what it is or what it’s even accomplished, judging by the majority of mentally ill homeless people wandering around the streets and subway and the emotional duress everyone struggling to afford living in this city is going through. Although it’s backed by six non-profit groups of which consists of four sorority groups.
Apparently de Faustio and Chirlie are aware of the lack of recognition of THRIVE too. In recognition of the Parkland School Massacre but not of the movement and revolution galvanized by the students there, the mayors arranged to have a town hall meeting with high school students to discuss ways to secure their school’s environment and ensure safety. As the kids were making suggestions for improvements, notably the lack of student counselors and the selective disbursement of metal detectors and addressing their current tribulations, de Faustio kept shutting them down so his wife can impose her THRIVE agenda on them. The kids were not impressed or amused but were thoroughly insulted and undermined. Which will make adapting to the new schools chancellor’s inevitable underwhelming existence much easier.
“I think he disregarded the whole point of this meeting, which was to hear the students out, and I don’t think he did it to the full extent that it should’ve been,” said Ayobami Olabode, 16, a student at Scholars’ Academy in Queens.
“He didn’t really hear us out the way he should have,” Andrea Colon, 17, who had asked the mayor to invest in counselors instead of school safety agents and metal detectors, said. “He was sort of dismissive in a way.”
“I actually hadn’t heard of the Thrive program before,” said Colon, a senior at Rockaway Park High School For Environmental Sustainability. “He kept on bringing that up. But my school definitely does not have that.”
So instead of hearing out the kids, de Faustio devoted most of his attention to pimping his wife’s program and her freeloading political career. And exploiting a tragedy to promote the expensive THRIVE program to boot and vainly trying to justify it’s existence by blowing off the kids questions just because they didn’t fit the narrative.
For dominating the narrative is the only thing de Faustio has done with aplomb right behind using his office for fundraising and taking bribes for civic services for scumbags. As he recently addressed the idiotic sexists (his words) in the news media by demanding that Chirlie should get a salary for her work which she surreptitiously volunteered for. As if the 300 grand to pay her personal aides and her multiple free ride jaunts to other national cities on the actually elected mayor’s constituents tax dollars is not enough compensation, giving her ample opportunity to boost her national profile and inspiring her intent on running for political office. Which no one fucking asked her to do and no one is fucking interested. And her reported presence (and interference) in over 80 meetings gives the impression that she is not only co-mayor but an agent of the city.
All this chicanery by co-mayor de Faustio is enough to drive you crazy if you let it. So maybe THRIVE will be there for every citizen in the five boroughs to depend on as they try to follow this fugazi mayoral partnership. Maybe Chirlie can get her mental health initiative off the ground now assuming she is running the city for the next few days as her husband has went on another ego trip out of the city for the next few days in four cities as the self-appointed arbiter/activist for progressive policies and politics. And yes, nobody fucking asked him to do that either.
As if two mayors are not enough to tolerate, especially two absolutely shitty oblivious and arrogant mayors, it was announced on a snowy and blustery Wednesday when all networks were reporting on the weather that the new night mayor has been appointed. And she’s a boozy doozy.
That’s Ariel Palitz. The new nighttime mayor. The mayor from happy hour to closing time. She’s the mayor when Bill and Chirl go to sleep. And she loves New York, although not it’s residents. She ran a niteclub for 10 years and sat on Lower East Side district community board. Though not experienced in running a political office, she’s pretty adept at political tactics and machinations and exploiting her position of power for selfish means for the benefit of herself and her night club entrepreneur peers. In the last few years she has worked with an event firm specializing in what they dubbed “real estate integrated hospitality services”
Considering it took 5 months since the announcement of this new waste of bureaucracy, besides THRIVE, without a doubt that this pick was thoroughly sought and vetted. This girl is player and she fits this corrupt administration to a dirty T. For her time simultaneously running a club and a chair on the board, the Lower East Side has transformed in the last decade to what is currently a nightly Gilded Age bacchanalia with a bar anywhere you turn your head and take a step christened as Hell Square, an environmental noise and health hazard area that was revolutionized by the new Night Mayor herself being that she ran (and bragged about having) the loudest bar in the district.
Prior to what the drunken radius has devolved to, night mayor Palitz made a ghastly prophecy of what she now will have the humble solemn duty to remediate:
“The East Village is ripe for the picking right now. There’s an opportunity to change the culture and the makeup of the neighborhood from the underground nightlife experience to a high-end clientele.”
Here’s some of that high-end clientele that has changed the makeup of the neighborhood. As documented by the L.E.S. Dwellers, and there’s more where that came from.
And being her recent consulting gig, she will be tasked to handle complaints, ameliorate any disgust by or stem displacement of longtime residents of areas with similar party bar oversaturation, as the NY Times notes:
In her first interview since accepting the post, Ms. Palitz suggested that her stint as the Nightlife Mayor would be slightly more sober and focus less on carousing than on conflict mediation. In today’s New York, gentrification has pitted partygoers against the settled residents of neighborhoods like the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. In her first official act, Ms. Palitz promised to hold a series of listening tours and entertain the gripes of those who are bothered by the vomit on their streets or the noise at 3 a.m..
Now in charge of a mayoral office with a 12-person advisory board, a $300,000 budget and a salary of $130,000 a year, Ms. Palitz seems to have realized that even a doyenne of New York night life must make a few concessions when joining city government.
What de Blasio and Chirlane has done with hiring Ariel is akin to Trump’s picks to head departments in his plutocabinet in that they hired a woman who has obvious conflicts of interest regarding the nite life industry. And also like relying on a flipped mobster for intel because he knows where the bodies are buried, or in Ariels case where the bodies are puking and pissing and of course, according to her consultant bio, proclaimed ties to real estate. It’s going to be fascinating how that hospitality/real estate integration is going to play here, for it sure as had an effect on the environment of the LES when she was on the board going by the exorbitant rent hikes and new glass towers. And providing an outsourced predatory developer tactic with all the alcoholic idiots yelling and puking in front of residential buildings with idling app driving service cars and limos clogging the streets driving everyone nuts.
Ariel has got a sweet ride going here with a new cushy six figure salary and a budget to finagle with anyhow she pleases. Now with the night mayor officially assigned where it used to be under the purview of the actual elected mayor, de Faustio and Chirlie can focus on the issues of the day in the daylight hours. Well the afternoon hours for he still wastes his entire morning for his daily motorcade two borough trek to Park Slope and then to City Hall. Maybe this short inning middle relief pitching style of governing might have some stability. Have Chirlane govern in the morning, de Faustio in the day, and Ariel at night into the wee hours.
Maybe the city and the citizenry will be able to THRIVE somewhat. Or it will just turn into CrazyTown while it tries to be Fun City 2.0.
I couldn’t have expressed his delusions better myself. Hmm, yeah I could.
Just a few days after winning the election with the record low 8.5% of votes by around 700,000 out of 5,000,000 registered voters, Day Mayor Bill de Blasio decreed that he now has an official mandate to pass his bland fauxgressive neoliberal policies. He is so sure of this and himself that he petulantly repeated it 12 times to the press circle.
Of course he would say this, for shit-talking is the default standard for public speaking in these dark days of politics and money this young century.
Go, on Billy:
“Guys, an election’s an election. People decide if they want to participate,” he said.
“You can go back through every election in history and parse it and question it and relitigate (??) it, but we have one unified system . . . So this is a clear, strong mandate.”
“I don’t know what your definition of an election is, but my definition is that people decide to participate and whoever gets the most votes wins, and if you have a two-thirds margin, that is a clear, strong mandate, and that came from everyone that participated. I think it’s unquestionably a clear mandate,” he said in a City Hall press conference.
I guess he and maybe his cult of 300 city aides are looking at the wide percentage margin of the total vote instead of the 80% who didn’t bother to show up on Tuesday and the 70,000 less votes he got this time around.
Politico had a good analysis regarding de Faustio’s pathetic bragging citing a few books on the topic:
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels show in their book “Democracy for Realists” that voters mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues.
“Voters, even the most informed voters, typically make choices not on the basis of policy preferences or ideology, but on the basis of who they are — their social identities,” they write.
Julia Azari, a professor of political science at Marquette University, found in her book “Delivering the People’s Message” that presidents talk more about mandates either when their presidency is lacking legitimacy or when they are pushing at the boundaries of their authority.
“It’s a defensive strategy for politicians who feel like they are not legitimate, or under threat or flailing in some form or fashion,” Azari said in an interview.
She said that claims of a mandate are really about what the politician needs, as opposed to what the election was really about.
Which brings up the fact and the hubristic boasting by the day mayor about how Donald Trump played a massive factor in his small victory:
Hizzoner gave credit for the win to his message — but also to President Trump, who he claimed drove many voters to the polls.
“Oh, my God. Yes. Absolutely,” he said when asked if Trump played a role.
“I say with humility, I have been a leading anti-Trump voice,” de Blasio said. “A lot of people have been turned back on to the political process because of their frustration with Donald Trump.”
And why he is ultra-defensive and cognizant of his weakened status and his credibility with his constituents, even the ones who begrudgingly support him or voted for him out of fear.
Although it’s not like he didn’t try to persuade or even induce people to come out to ensure the legitimacy for his “mandate” even before he won. As if the awarding of $2,000,000 in matching campaign funds from the B.O.E. derived from his bogus claims of challenging primary competitors even though Bill had a 70% advantage and the public was not familiar with his opponents.
For it should be noted that in the weeks leading to the underwhelming turnout on Election Day, the mayor hedged his bets and made absolutely sure for his heavily favored certain victory by sending out a language translator contractor at taxpaying voter expense in southern Brooklyn, which was home to the presidential primary purge last year, to aide Russian and Creole speaking citizens to vote with orders to the NYPD not to interfere with the hired gun interpreters and the shady operation. Because the incumbent mayor and the minions in city council care so much for democracy’s process.
The taint of influencing voters and the recent admonishment of the BOE after their admission and charges didn’t do much to prevent the presence of the mercenary interpreters despite the 100 foot anti-encroachment order.
Now he’s back and declaring of a undeserved, unearned, self-professed mandate, it’s quite known who will benefit from this grandstanding. In fact, they already have been benefiting since the beginning of the weak mayor’s first term, and that’s the ones involved in the worst aspects of predatory development and equity being the owners and their lobbyists.
This was immediately acknowledged in the East Village in Manhattan, as community organizations are taking proactive measures to resist the invasive and enabled actions of the Gentrification Industrial Complex involving the re-elected mayor and his subservience to his developer donors in a mission to remake a residential area into a commercial metropolis. Also in Queens where Long Island City has just been subsumed by tower pestilence and massive rent increases in areas nearby in the last 24 months.
It’s what to expect from this stupid fucking idiot and the dire future the next 4 years hold for the citizens of the five boroughs. Persist and resist, and hope Norman Seabrook is found guilty (wait for it).
Liberty Ave. And 123rd street. Where the gilded asphalt path abruptly stops.
And the action took place at Leo F. Kearns funeral home halfway down the block.
Spoiler alert! Someone in this movie dies!
This is what it said when entering the Queens Lefferts Blvd destination A train on 14th Street in Manhattan. Fuck the MTA.
I couldn’t have expressed his delusions better myself. Hmm, 
Impunity City 