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NEW YORK CITY HALL-On Thursday, scores of members of the Taxi Workers Alliance braved arctic temperatures to rally on the steps of City Hall to celebrate passage of landmark legislation to hold Uber and Lyft accountable for capriciously deactivating drivers who in the past had no recourse. The new law provides first in the nation legal protections for 100,000 drivers in New York City against the Wall Street backed Uber and Lyft.
It was just the latest success by the Taxi Workers Alliance for drivers whose industry Mayor Mike Bloomberg decimated with the help of some of his top aides who went on to work for Uber and Lyft even as drivers committed suicide out of despair, one at the gates of City Hall in 2018.
Hours later the City Council would also pass the Aland Etienne Safety & Security Act , named for the 32 BJ SEIU member who was murdered in the line of his duties protecting the public at a Park Avenue office building back in July from an assault gun toting shooter. An off-duty police officer was also killed.
The new legislation, like the Uber & Lyft legislation, had been vetoed by Mayor Adams, would provide a living wage and benefits close to a workforce of 82,000 private security guards who are predominantly Black and Latino.
It is the first time since 1964 that New York City has set a minimum wage standard for private sector workers. Advocates of the bill said the legislation would help reduce the industry's 77 percent annual turnover rate.
Meanwhile, 15,000 nurses with the New York State Nurses Association continued their three week old strike against New York City's wealthiest hospitals Mount Sinai, Montefiore, and New York-Presbyterian which paid its CEO $26 million. At issue, holding on to staffing and benefit gains realized after the COVID pandemic that killed 1.1 million Americans including 3,600 nurses in the first wave, including 500 in New York City.
Here in New York City, and around the nation, unions like 1199 SEIU were on the march in the days after the broad daylight murder in Minneapolis of Alex Jeffrey Pretti , an ICU union nurse at the VA by federal immigration officers.
Not since the 1960s has there been such an earth shaking convergence of resistance to a federal government. Back then it was to oppose a war being fought on the other side of the world. Today, it was about the attempted occupation by masked federal immigration agents of Minneapolis looking to purge the nation of "suspect" people of color.
On this day, New York City City Hall was on the frontlines of an increasingly bloody conflict between local and state governments in places where the population was opposed to the Trump junta's forced removal of tens of thousands of men, women and children it judged deportable without due process.
On Wednesday, Mayor Mamdani told reporters in the Blue Room the City's fiscal picture was bleak thanks to a $12 billion budget gap left to him by his predecessor Mayor Adams. The former Mayor was last seen in Times Square pitching a new cryptocurrency coin "that would also serve to beat back antisemitism and anti-Americanism," according to the AP.
"The Adams administration dramatically and intentionally understated the problem," Mayor Mamdani told reporters in the Blue Room on Wednesday. "The budget gaps are twice as high year after year. Notably, Mayor Adams underestimated known budget expenses so he could show FY26 was balanced. These are not differences in opinion between accountants. They are measured to the tune of more than $7 billion beyond what he published."
Mayor Mamdani is slated to present his first proposed budget in mid-February. He and City Council Speaker Menin have until the end of June to reach a budget deal. Albany's budget deadline is April 1st, although historically it has blown the date.
Mayor Mamdani likened the 2026 budget challenge as on a "scale greater than the Great Recession" that would "require us to pursue every single avenue. That means looking inward into savings and efficiencies. That also means raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and the most profitable corporations. And it means recalibrating the relationship with the state."
As every Mayor before him has done, Mayor Mamdani reminded reporters that New York City is the economic engine for not just New York State but the nation, perennially sending billions more a year to Albany and D.C. than it gets back in aid.
That's the equation the Mayor wants to change, noting that the annual extraction of billions by the state and feds comes at a time when one in four New York City residents lives below the poverty line.
In demanding a re-set with Albany, Mayor Mamdani also blamed former Governor Andrew Cuomo for the city's fiscal duress.
"However, Eric Adams is not the only reason we are here," Mandani said. "For over a decade, as he governed from Albany, former Governor Andrew Cuomo extracted our City's resources, using our revenue to address state-level holes, while withholding from the City what it was owed. The result is a stunning fiscal imbalance. New Yorkers contribute 54.5 percent of state revenue and receive only 40.5 percent back."
Mamdani continued. "No part of this state gives more and gets less in return than New York City. While we did not create this crisis, we will solve it. And we will do so, without balancing the budget on the backs of working people."
In describing the City of New York's fiscal train wreck, Mayor Mamdani made no reference to the current occupant of the White House, President Trump, whose Office of Management and Budget has been impounding billions of dollars of aid due Blue cities and states. In fact, the Trump administration, in the waning days of the Adams administration, seized $80 million dollars out of the City of New York's coffers it had gotten to deal with the mass influx of 200,000 migrants bused into the Big Apple by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in hopes of destabilizing a city not fully recovered from COVID.
He held out hope that he could reset the city's junior partner status with Gov. Hochul, herself facing a spirited primary challenge on her left flank from Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado. Earlier this month, Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani came together to announce the funding of universal childcare for New York City's children under five.
"We will meet this crisis with the bold solutions it demands," Mayor Mamdani said. "That means recalibrating the broken fiscal relationship between the state and the city. And it means that the time has come to tax the richest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations. This is the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and yet we have allowed one in four New Yorkers to live in poverty. It doesn't need to be that way."
What did not make it into Mayor Mamdani's fiscal retrospective was the role of the twelve years of austerity under Mayor Bloomberg, who in addition to leveling the taxi industry for Wall Street, did his best to starve out the city's civil service unions by refusing to settle contracts for years. Rather than tax his peer group, Mayor Bloomberg insisted unions pay for any wage gains with give backs under the guise of productivity gains.
Mayor Bloomberg just couldn't get over the idea that civil servants not pay something for their healthcare "like everybody else." In 2009, using the austerity he said was required by the Great Recession, he got the Municipal Labor Committee to make major concessions that would degrade the health benefits over a half-million retired and active city workers requiring for the first time co-pays for emergency-room, inpatient and ambulatory care.
After twelve years of being pummeled into submission by Mayor Bloomberg, unions like DC 37 Local 2507 and Local 3621, which represents the city's FDNY EMS workforce, saw their wages become increasingly inadequate to support themselves and their families. At the same time, a shadow workforce of tens of thousands of non-profit workers doing work with the homeless for poverty level wages grew exponentially.
That set the stage for Mayor de Blasio and the city's biggest public unions to try and sell out 250,000 civil service retirees by trying to force them on to a predatory Aetna Medicare Advantage plan that was neither Medicare nor an advantage. Under the guise of getting a $600 million annual infusion, de Blasio and his successor Mayor Adams were willing to betray a generation of retirees for whom life-long free health care had been a major reason they committed their working life to public service.
Ultimately, every budget story has to be a history lesson. The key question is how far back do you go to explain the foundations of something as grotesquely out of balance as New York City's economy where the world's richest oligarchs speculate on multi-million dollar apartments while over 100,000 are homeless.
You have to give Mayor Mamdani an incomplete on this week's budget speech for not only omitting the Bloomberg years and the Trump junta's confiscatory policies but the decision by Albany leadership in the early 1980s to start rebating back the Stock Transfer Tax to Wall Street .
The dime per hundred dollar stock transaction amounts to billions no matter if the market goes up or down because it's tied to the volume of transactions.
The London Stock Exchange has had such a stock transfer tax since 1694, despite perennial complaints from the investor class.
For her part, Gov. Hochul has resisted raising taxes because she believes the revenues coming in from the current economy should be sufficient to cover Albany's commitments to its people. It all depends on how we define the economy.
There's the economy that's defined by the ability to make money with money, that would be the economy of the major campaign donors. Then there's the economy where the vast majority of us struggle to eke out a living.
For over forty years, New York State rebated back hundreds of billions BACK to Wall Street while it closed hospitals and psychiatric facilities as well as shortchanged New York City's public schools. Rather than pay as you go for MTA construction, it floated billions in tax free bonds that the wealthy could use to shelter their ever growing mountain of wealth from taxation.
Meanwhile, in Washington, year after year, both political parties in Congress spent trillions on the military and further notice wars that destabilized nations and set off the greatest refugee crisis since WWII.
Now, almost a quarter century after 9/11, that massive federal security apparatus under the Department of Homeland Security created to "fight terrorists" is being turned on our civilian population.
This wealth pyramid has a lot of bricks.
