Cuomo to City renters: DROP DEAD, Mayor Responds
Where are the promises of the Governor to the City? This rent control thing is being one sided towards owners as far as Albany is concerned. Does the Governor thinks that the blocks of voters who handed him the elections, which was a coalition of, city dwellers, blacks, hispanics and gays will not remember when is clearly evident that those groups are being hit in the wallet by his don’t touch approach, which translates to let them die approach.. He can’t hide behind the mayor which is customary or the legislators because people know that he controls Albany. This is Mario Cuomo sr. all over again and if you remember when his father left office there was a sign of relief. He had lost the backing and respect of most voters, again for going his way and not caring about what his mouth had articulated compare to his actions. There the Governor is saying one thing and doing nothing or the opposite.
This Governor allowed the rent control law to expire because he wanted money out of public schools and into the Catholic and Evangelical [rabidly anti gay and teaching it so] schools. He didn’t care. It was right in the open and it was reported and still he did nothing to have a deal done because of the worse reason a governor could have. Defending public schools by mouth but taking their money and giving it to more wealthy parents who decided that public schools was not good enough for them. Yeah, I understand but that was their choice. What right does the government have to subsidize those schools on the tax payers dime? Actually I have been waiting for the mayor to say something because it was just ridiculous how he was being undermined. It was like if Cuomo had appointed the mayor and now he was going to let him out to dry. He kept throwing the mayor under the bus, garbage trucks and school buses.
Finally de Blasio did something more than just saying something. He exploded and verbalized the game the Governor has been playing. The governor likes to take chances, that’s how he got here by betting all or nothing. In this particular game he was not just trowing the mayor under the bus but the poor and lower middle class city dwellers. I have been a supported of Cuomo but just like his father before him he is showing he is just your typical politician saying one thing and doing the other or just plain doing nothing. It hasn’t hit him that on his games of chess which he is an expert, he is playing with the lives of people that can least afford to play the game because they just don’t have the money to play.
The actions of this Governor reminds me when Gerald Ford denied NYC what he had done for Chrysler and his friend Lee Iacocca, the CEO of Chrysler. He gave him loan guarantees to keep the car maker afloat and away from bankruptcy but when NYC asked for a similar thing with even less risk, he said NO! It was the outcry from NYC and its friends that had the foot in mouth Ford make a U turn. Typical; Pay the favors to the CEO and screw the city…same with Cuomo, pay back to the private schools for their support and screw the renters. The thing is he chose the worse way to do it. I guess he thinks the poor don’t have the power or the memory to remember come election day. I don’t trust politicians but this one I liked..no more, he is not special but typical on how he goes about, his mouth never catching up to his actions.
Mayor Bill de Blasio left town for a family vacation out West on Tuesday. He left behind one enormous piece of baggage, which he dropped with a thud on his way out.
In an interview with the City Hall press corps, he unloaded on Gov. Andrew Cuomo, accusing him of sabotaging the city’s interests, being blinded by political scheming and showing no interest in honest policy making. He said he expected the governor to seek revenge, but added that he wasn’t taking it any more. “I started a year and a half ago with a hope of a very strong partnership,” Mr. de Blasio said. “I have been disappointed at every turn.”
The surprise attack — there is hardly another way to describe it — came days after the end of a discouraging session for the mayor in Albany, in which major pieces of his agenda were eroded, upended or ignored, too often at the hands of his fellow Democrat, the governor.
The immediate analysis focused not on the truth of what the mayor said, but on whether he was a fool and a noob for saying it, or whining, or showing weakness at playing Albany chess against a grandmaster.
The important point is that everything he said is true. By any fair reading of the events of the last Albany session, the governor has acted disgracefully toward the 8.5 million people of the city Mr. de Blasio leads. Though Mr. Cuomo poses as liberal and reform-minded when it suits him, his indifference to the city’s needs, and his poorly disguised disdain for the mayor, are further discrediting an already disheartening second term.
Mr. Cuomo’s hand was acutely evident when crucial goals for Mr. de Blasio — like extending mayoral control of the New York City schools, repairing crumbling public housing, investing in mass transit — became needless struggles. An important deal that Mr. de Blasio struck with the real estate industry this spring, to reform a tax break for developers called 421-a, would have added many thousands of units of dearly needed affordable housing. In Albany it was nearly sabotaged. Efforts to extend and update rent-control laws governing more than one million city apartments were similarly undermined.
When the governor wasn’t playing Tommy Lee Jones in the upstate manhunt for two escaped killers, he was saying it was too late to fix 421-a, although it was not, or challenging the mayor over managing wage rates for construction workers or costly disability-pension giveaways to police officers and firefighters. Mr. de Blasio said the governor’s vindictiveness had even extended earlier in the year to surprise state inspections of city homeless shelters.
Mr. de Blasio’s many critics say he was foolish to go on the attack and are waiting for Mr. Cuomo to bury the hatchet, in Mr. de Blasio.
But really — what should he have done?
State law gives the Legislature and governor far too much control over New York City’s business, and whenever the mayor — any mayor — takes his petitions to Albany, he has to beg, wheedle, cajole and bargain.
For a year and a half, Mr. de Blasio — maybe naĂ¯vely, maybe cunningly, maybe because he had no other choice — played nice with Mr. Cuomo, stressing their decades-long acquaintance and going out of his way not to pick fights. Sometimes it worked, as when the mayor won funding for a huge expansion of prekindergarten. Sometimes it didn’t. He was never going to eliminate longstanding mayor-governor tensions. But he has seemed to be making an effort to get past the nonsense, with a steadfast focus on policy over personality and power plays.
Some are now wondering whether Mr. de Blasio’s stand-up-to-the-bully tack will backfire. If it does, it will make clearer than ever who the bully is.
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