It was exactly what you wanted, right? Perfect ways to keep people who pay the taxes living in this town, right? What do the pols care? They got great pay, lots of staff (even in the City Council). They got health care average people can’t even dream about. They get expenses. They get to have lunches and dinners in fancy places. The representatives who used to work for the people now work for themselves.
These pols get treated like they invented all the elements of the periodic table besides the gases. They don’t even have names anymore. Call their offices and see what happens. Sorry the staffer says, the Assembly Member is in a meeting. Please give your name and phone number and the Assembly Member will return your call. The Senator isn’t available now. Please leave your name, phone number and we will be in touch says that one. The Congressman? Doing important business. Someone not traveling somewhere with His Importance will get back to you.
The truth? Re-apportioned permanently protected seats accompanied by high-priced election lawyers unaffordable for challengers, massive campaign spending, a one-party system, and so-called progressives getting ready to define dissent as an offense punishable by death penalty explains much.
On one block on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, you can believe that ambulance top red lights are really sleep aids, because they go all night. The cops whisper that drugs are sold from a shelter building. And there is on the same block another social service facility. Go a block east and you will see the outcome of flawed social policy as begging, homelessness and filth clog Broadway. The area in front of the entrance to the 96th street subway station requires learning multiple word salad dialects, only so you can say excuse me while trying to get on your way.
The newest thing? A new homeless shelter to be planted on 97th street. Things to look forward to: three such facilities in two blocks, feeding Broadway’s daily show and its biggest stage, the subway entrance.
The Assembly Member. The Senator as in State Senator. The Congressmen are busy doing whatever it is they do. We have seen this before. The permanent political class helped the Cross Bronx Expressway be built. The connected highways then helped empty parishes and neighborhoods 60 years ago, and we have still not recovered.
The new expressways are the homeless shelters and the fear citizens have of the word salad speakers, of the shooters, the stabbers, the shovers, of bathrooms once called our streets.
The politicians? Why should they care? The new Tammany Hall, the boss rule reformers–people like Do-Nothing while they shoot my constituents Jerry Nadler or all the others who speak blah blah or some other language–are in for a surprise. The people who don’t mind doing their fair share and who have done exactly that have gotten the joke. It is 1955. It is Tammany Hall. It is boss rule. It is the kind of permanent government our politicians say they hate. Not true.
Think that’s harsh? Look around. Those guys, the pols, have done it to us. And there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. The permanent government versus the people. Guess who won? The pols. And the moving vans.
