New York Is A Summer Festival (Of Shit, Apparently)
... [I]f there is one American city in this moment that can help us understand (and forecast) general trends in U.S. politics, it is New York.
The state’s notorious culture of corruption, for example, provides some insight into the deep-seated rot in Trump’s camp. As Jeet Heer put it in The New Republic last year, “It’s impossible to understand why Trump’s administration has been so scandal-wracked without appreciating where he comes from.” Heer calls New York “the most politically toxic place in America,” and in terms of corruption, this is undoubtedly true. A PolitiFact analysis from 2016 documented that between 2006 and 2015, the state endured 28 corruption scandals involving public officials, followed by Pennsylvania in second place with 24 corruption cases and New Jersey with 12 cases.
Many paragraphs of how awful, stupid & evil both Bloomberg & N.Y.C. are.
Bloomberg, who was a registered Republican for half of his mayoral career, wants to prevent the progressive revolt that is currently brewing in his own city from going national. In his heart, he would probably prefer another four years of President Trump over a President Sanders. No matter their differences, then, it seems the New York elite—and the American elite in general—will always have each other’s back when a real threat to their power presents itself.
The big conflict in your benighted country is not between North & South, or between the ignernt rural rubes & urbane sophisticates, but between the decadent Northeastern power elites still attached to European feudalism & the people who had to keep moving west to escape fascism.
Calling New York the “most progressive city” in America is certainly a bold claim for a city that has been consistently ranked as one of the most unequal places in the country, but this reveals a lot about the kind of politics that passes for “progressive” these days in many top Democratic circles. As of 2018, New York boasted the highest concentration of billionaires in the world, with more than 100 living in the city, and for a neoliberal Democrat like Bloomberg, this is a sign of genuine progress.
“If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap,” declared Bloomberg in 2013 during his final year as the city’s mayor. (Earlier, he had even mused about luring “all the Russian billionaires” to move to the city, which isn’t an opinion that would fly in today’s Democratic Party).
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