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| Eric Adams (source) |
Eric Adams, likely New York City's next mayor, just won the Democratic Party nomination after a kludgy, ranked-voting, election. At the end, Mr. Adams won by 8,426 votes--but he would have had a larger margin were the votes counted as in a normal election.
Left Voice (LV), the publication representing a loose collective of NYC college professors and their groupies, is so far the only blog on my Beat to say anything about the election. The article, Eric Adams is a Cop and a Zionist, was penned by Tatiana Cozzarelli.
Because of his tough on crime campaign, Mr. Adams carried the vote in all boroughs except Manhattan. The NY Post reports that "Inhabitants of lower-income, high-crime, mostly minority neighborhoods turned out for Adams in huge numbers, up to 70 percent of votes." Working-class Black voters turned out for Mr. Adams in droves, presumably because they are far disproportionately victims of crime.
He spent 22 years as a member of the NYPD, retiring at the rank of Captain. So on the first charge Ms. Cozzarelli is correct--the man is a cop, or at least a retired one. Though he's not oblivious to police brutality, noting that he and his brother were beaten up by a couple of racist cops when he was 15 years old. He says that experience convinced him to join the police force. He was obviously really good at his job--only 1% of the force gets to be a Captain.
None of this was a secret--everybody who voted for him knew he'd been a cop. They voted for him precisely because of that experience--crime is out of control in Black and Hispanic working class districts. Murders, or course, are the worst, but fortunately are relatively rare (and NYC has a comparatively low murder rate). More common and corrosive are property crimes, destroying livelihoods and opportunities. Stores close because of robberies and shoplifting. The shops that remain have to raise their prices to cover the cost. The victims are working class and elderly people who lose their possessions and jobs, and have to travel outside of the neighborhood to go shopping. Of course they want more cops on the beat.
That's all news to Ms. Cozzarelli, who thinks the fix is in. First, she claims that only 950,000 people voted in the election--which she compares to NYC's population of 8.5 million. Of course many of those people are recent immigrants and not yet citizens, and many others are too young. The relevant number is the 3.8 million folks registered as Democrats--of which 25% went to the polls. That surely is sufficient to represent the will of the public. Anybody who cared, voted. And the people who didn't vote don't count.
Then she claims he was supported by all the wrong people. She writes,
Adams was endorsed by the pro-Trump New York Post, and is strongly pro-charter schools and vocally opposed to laws protecting tenants. And it’s no wonder — he is a wealthy landlord himself, with ties to and funding from real estate developers. Three millionaire hedge fund investors provided almost $2 million into the super PAC backing Adams’s campaign.
Charter schools are very popular in Black and Hispanic communities, who want to get out from under the thumb of the teachers' unions. They want their children to at least be literate and numerate--skills which the public school system no longer provides. For many families, structure and order in their kids' lives is similarly important. Ms. Cozzarelli's blind allegiance to the teachers' union reflects her own self-interest--not the opinion of voters.
She attributes the union support only to the bureaucrats--forgetting that many union members (largely public employees) live in high-crime neighborhoods and need more police support.
Then she obviously believes Black voters are really, really stupid. From her account, the only reason Black folks voted for Mr. Adams is because some hedge fund bozos contributed $2 million to his campaign effort. So yeah--all that money got the word out that he's a retired cop, will be tough on crime, and supports charter schools. There is nothing shocking about that.
Ms. Cozzarelli apparently thinks that Black folks--by a large majority honest and upstanding citizens--should not be entitled to 911 services. This is pathetic.
Finally, she writes
Further, Adams is a proud Zionist and has said that he would like to retire in the occupied territories in the Golan Heights. Like many of the city’s top cops, he’s traveled to Israel twice, seeking to nurture the already-cozy relationship between the NYPD and the Zionist occupation forces. He put out a strong statement in support of Israel last month, as the Zionist state murdered Palestinians, saying, “Today on Yom Yerushalayim, Israel came under attack from Hamas-fired rockets in Gaza. Israelis live under the constant threat of terrorism and war and New York City’s bond with Israel remains unbreakable. I stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel at this time of crisis.”
Mr. Adams later walked back moving to the Golan Heights, saying he was joking, but he stands by the rest of his statement. Of course this is politically expedient--Jews make up 13% of NYC's population. An antisemite isn't going to win their vote.
And that's the problem with Left Voice and much of the progressive Left--they're antisemitic. My working definition of antisemitism is anybody who supports Hamas--an avowedly antisemitic organization dedicated to Jew hatred. Mr. Adams' enthusiastic endorsement of Israel--while nice from my point of view--wouldn't be necessary to earn my support. All he would have to do is repudiate Hamas.
So who is this Tatiana Cozzarelli who writes such gibberish? The question is important because Marxists put weight on a "class analysis", of which a person's "origins" are important. For whatever reason, Left Voice has scrubbed the brief biographies of their contributors from their webpage. But Google helps, and from this site I recovered what I believe used to be there:
Tatiana Cozzarelli is a former middle school teacher and current Urban Education PhD student at CUNY.
It turns out that she graduated from Swarthmore in 2008, and taught middle school for a few years at a private school (charter school?) in Rhode Island before going to grad school. This establishes her as a card-carrying member of the lumpen proletariat. Here is the Communist Party's definition of the term.
LUMPENPROLETARIAT - German for "rag proletariat." Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them "most radical" because they are "most exploited," but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle.
Much of this doesn't apply to Ms. Cozzarelli, but the phrase makes no positive contribution to an economy certainly does. Grad school is a waste of time for almost anybody--and grad study in "Urban Education" is a total loss. Any job she ever gets will come at taxpayers' expense. She will never provide any service that people are voluntarily willing to pay for. The derogatory name for somebody like her is welfare queen. A more piquant term is lumpen intelligentsia.
Here she is--already in her mid-thirties--wasting her time and our money, faking it as a scholar while engaging in "more radical" political activism, which goal is to impoverish the lives of honest working people around the globe. She merely wants to defund the police so that law enforcement can be turned over to "community organizations" like street gangs and drug dealers, who will then be more effective in ripping off poor people.
Look--I'm petty bourgeois from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. But at least I know where the class line is. I understand that the true party of the working class is the Republican Party. And absent that, they vote for Eric Adams.
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