December 5, 2013

Danny Katch , author of the e-book America's Got Democracy , has thought of a few ways for New York City's new mayor to show business that he means business.

NEW YORK City unions and liberal organizations are organizing a week of rallies and press conferences that they have branded "New Day, New York."

The actions, which target various banks and low-wage employers and culminate in a downtown rally on Thursday, December 5, are meant to combine protest with a celebration of the election of incoming Mayor Bill de Blasio and a number of citywide officials and City Council members who are all liberal Democrats.

"The sun is setting on a city run by and for the 1 Percent," declares the protest website. Sounds great, but if there's one thing liberals should have learned over the Obama years, it's that you shouldn't celebrate just because your team won the coin flip.

I'm all for cheering the exit of the current mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, but let's not pretend that reversing his legacy is going to be as simple as electing a Democrat with a catchy campaign slogan. Bloomberg has left us with a city that has been plundered by the rich, and where class corruption runs so deep that crooked consultants are exalted, while the people who do the city's actual work are demeaned.

New York City's new Mayor Bill de Blasio (Gerard Flynn)

This summer, back when de Blasio was beginning his surge toward victory, Bloomberg gave a strange interview to New York Magazine that completed his fall from lord to lame duck to laughingstock.

The mayor called the de Blasio campaign "racist" simply for running an ad showing the white candidate with his Black wife and children. (Perhaps Bloomberg would have been less offended if the ad had portrayed Bill stopping and frisking his son Dante.) But the part of the interview that will stick to Bloomberg's legacy for the long run is when he mused, "Wouldn't it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?"

Bloomberg was simply trying to make his usual point that New York must cater to rich people like himself in order to pay for services provided by local government. Which is actually a horrible idea when you think about it. Great cities have historically been built on a variety of foundations--industry, trade, conquest--but no great metropolis has ever been dependent on being "The World's Second Home," to use the official Bloomberg slogan. This is supposed to be the city that never sleeps, not the getaway where you can catch up on your sleep.

But why Russian billionaires? Maybe Bloomberg was thinking of Grigori Potemkin, the 19th century Russian general who supposedly built a string of fake river towns in the territory that his army had just won from the Ottoman Empire. His goal was to impress the Tsarina Catherine the Great as she sailed past--and hide from her the ugly truth that the Russian empire's newly conquered area was a war-ravaged mess.

New York is no Potemkin Village, but a city of 8 million people, with a 400-year history. But Bloomberg never saw most of those people nor that history. He believed the city's greatness is that it is a "luxury product" for high-end businesses looking for a large pool of highly educated workers. This vision took the millions of people who make this city great--who gave the world hip hop and Stonewall and Occupy Wall Street, among so much else--and reduced them to actors paid minimum wage to wave nicely to the rich people and then get off the streets.

Bloomberg spent his 12 years in office making the upper echelons of the professional class feel as welcome as possible, while for the rest of us, he built a digital city of data. Children became test scores; adults disappeared under statistics about job creation and decreasing crime, and so on.

Much of this information was useful, but its main usefulness was to the mayor, who loved numbers because they are so much easier than people to improve. For the past 12 years, New York's 99 Percent saw our metrics rise impressively, even as our actual lives often stagnated or grew harder.

Into this city of facades strides Bill de Blasio on a promise to address the spiraling inequality he famously called "a tale of two cities" during his mayoral campaign. De Blasio has pledged to lobby the state to raise the minimum wage and raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for an expansion of early childhood education.

But the new mayor faces an immediate test of his pledge to reduce inequality. Every city union, representing 300,000 workers in all, has been without a contract--and therefore without a raise--for between two to four years. The cost of giving city workers new contracts with back pay is estimated at around $7 billion.

Another way of looking at it is that city workers have been stiffed of $7 billion--money that the Bloomberg administration was supposed to be setting aside and didn't. Imagine pulling a stunt like that with your credit card debt or student loans: not paying for a few years and then balking at how unrealistic it is for the creditors to expect you to pay up.

When de Blasio was asked about the city contracts in a debate, he said there was "no way in the world to pay out the full amount [of back pay]" because $7 billion is "impossible to find."

But in fact, it's quite easy to find big money in New York City. There are buildings full of it. As a recent New York Times article put it:

With the continued economic malaise across Europe and heightened political unrest in hot spots around the world, foreign and American billionaires alike are seeking safer places to park their assets. New York, say analysts, looks like a pretty safe bet these days. "We're building the equivalent of bank safe deposit boxes in the sky that buyers can put all their valuables in and rarely visit," said Jonathan J. Miller of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.

This is the literal Potemkin Village that is Michael Bloomberg's legacy: luxury apartment buildings that are sold out, but almost empty of residents. Another Times article, titled "Why Buy a Condo You Seldom Use? Because You Can") described buildings whose windows are almost completely dark at night because their residents are scattered across the world, rather than living in New York.

A resident of the Plaza Hotel condominiums estimated that "10 percent of the building are really full-time residents like myself." Someone who used to live in the Time Warner Center said, "Our next-door neighbors were absolutely lovely, and we saw them maybe once a year. Most people don't actually live there."

It's an irony that might have stunned even Karl Marx: At the very top of New York City's real estate food chain--above the Brooklyn gentrifiers and even the old Upper East Side elites--is an empty skybox, with no one to enjoy the panoramic views of the city but capital itself. (Marx probably would have gone on to note that more than 50,000 New Yorkers are homeless on any given night.)

So it's curious to read in the same newspaper an article by labor reporter Steven Greenhouse filled with quotes about how unrealistic it is for city unions to demand full back pay for their members. According to unnamed "fiscal experts," if de Blasio "gives billions in retroactive pay to the unions, that means he might have to cut spending on schools, the police or parks, or face a harder time financing his cherished plans for universal prekindergarten."

Or...the new mayor could do the right thing for his city's working class by taking an itty-bitty bite out of those safe deposit boxes in the sky. The only reason these empty buildings exist is because of three forms of unfair tax breaks:

Luxury apartment developers have dozens of schemes to get tax breaks for supposedly building affordable housing.

Thanks to a 1999 law getting rid of a "commuter tax," wealthy people can qualify as non-residents and avoid paying city taxes if they spend 183 days outside the city.

Because of the city's deeply corrupt system property tax assessments for many luxury buildings are kept ludicrously low compared to what middle- and working-class homeowners pay across the city.

If he wants to, de Blasio could raise more than enough money to pay city workers by simply refusing to go along with the fiction that there's no money to be found in the richest city in the world. On January 1, his first day in office, he can instruct the city's property division to reassess luxury buildings. Then he could mobilize the public to pressure Gov. Andrew Cuomo to approve tax increases on the rich or give New York City the home rule to do it ourselves. Alternatively, the new mayor could outfit a few acres of Manhattan parkland with tents and heaters for the Occupy movement to have a new home, and we'll put the pressure on Cuomo ourselves.

The contract negotiations with city unions pose an immediate test of whether de Blasio intends to back up his promises. Addressing inequality means redistributing wealth. The biggest façade of them all is the supposedly impenetrable wall between the vast wealth in private hands in New York City, and the impoverished budget of the city's government.

Taking $7 billion from the elites and giving it to public-sector workforce--the backbone of what's left of the city's stable working class--is a good place to start. De Blasio's budget choice is a perfect illustration of the tale of two cities: the people who make the city go versus inhuman capital.

That's not a slur. It's literally a choice between human beings and empty penthouses.

It isn't that de Blasio doesn't know about all this. After all, the man he chose to run his transition team is Carl Weisbrod, a major player in the local real estate and gentrification business. That's not a good sign for city workers or for the rest of the 99 Percent.

So let's go to today's rally and tell our new mayor that we want real solutions to inequality. After 12 years of living in Bloomberg's Potemkin City, we're tired of phonies.