New York City Housing Authority: Can Anyone Do Socialism Better?

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Readers of this blog know that you don’t have to travel to Venezuela or North Korea to watch socialism failing. Right here in New York City, we have the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), run in a classic socialist model consisting of public ownership, most costs covered by taxpayer subsidies, and absolutely no one who ever gets an extra nickel in their paycheck for keeping the place from falling apart. Result: costs go up and up and up, and the place is falling apart. For a few of my previous posts about NYCHA, see here, here and here.

In February 2017 I asked the eternal question, “Which Will Collapse First: North Korea Or The New York City Housing Authority?” Close to two years later, they’re still running neck and neck.

If you’re wondering if NYCHA is really falling apart, the daily newspapers will give you plenty of evidence. As just one example, here’s a report from ABC News on November 24, headline “NYCHA tenants living without heat fed up, want answers.” Excerpt:

The tenants in the Grant Houses in Harlem are suffering, and it is not even winter yet. They have frigid tap water and cold, dead radiators. "I have a right to expect heat, I have a right to expect hot water. If I have a complaint, I expect for it to be repaired," says resident Barbara Stevens. Tenants are outraged, and they're not alone. At one time or another last month, tens of thousands of apartments in the city's public housing system were without heat, hot water or both - and thousands more in the past few days alone. Comptroller Stringer is demanding answers. "This is a citywide disgrace!" he said. . . .

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Progressive Hypocrisy At The Highest Levels: The Case Of Paul Weiss

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Progressive Hypocrisy At The Highest Levels: The Case Of Paul Weiss

A core mission of this blog has been making fun of sanctimonious progressives who demand that others be forced to take actions and make sacrifices that the progressives themselves would never make in their own lives. The climate follies provide nearly infinite examples. Almost as many examples can be found in the realm of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” This week we have an example of a progressive icon at the very highest level caught with its pants down in “diversity” hypocrisy.  Oh, what fun!

Have you heard of the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, sometimes known just as “Paul Weiss”?  If you haven’t, you should have.  It is one of those New York-based firms at the very pinnacle of the U.S. legal firmament.  It has around 1000 lawyers and about 200 partners, plus or minus.  The firm represents a who’s who of corporate America in corporate transactions and litigation.  According to the American Lawyer, in 2017 the partners at Paul Weiss earned an average of over $4.5 million per head.  That is not a typo.  Expectations are that profits for 2018 will be up substantially.

In a post way back in June 2014 titled “Is Lack Of ‘Diversity’ At Big Law Firms A Crisis?” I summarized some of the strange history of the New York legal practice, particularly the long-time division of the profession into Jewish and non-Jewish firms.  From the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, thousands of Jews, many the children of recent immigrants, flooded into the legal profession, in numbers far exceeding their percentage of the overall population; but the then-prestigious “white shoe” firms nakedly discriminated against the Jews.  As a result, many Jews formed their own start-up firms, some of which then grew to become powerhouses by the late-20th century.  Today, many of these firms continue to have substantial pluralities of Jews in their ranks of attorneys, and even more so at the top levels of leadership. . . .

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Is It Fair To Describe Land Acquisition By Jews In East Jerusalem As "Ethnic Cleansing"?

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Several days ago a friend brought to my attention a December 2 article from something called “The National,” with the headline “How Palestinians in Jerusalem are being targeted in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.”  If you haven’t heard of it, The National bills itself as “the Middle East’s leading English-language news service,” and is produced in the UAE.

Now, “ethnic cleansing” is a rather charged term.  I first heard that term used in the 1990s in the context of efforts by the Serbian army to remove Muslims and Croats from certain areas of Bosnia.  Here is a description of what that “ethnic cleansing” consisted of from Wikipedia:

The ethnic cleansing campaign that took place throughout areas controlled by the Bosnian Serbs targeted Muslim Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. The ethnic cleansing campaign included unlawful confinement, murder, rape, sexual assault, torture, beating, robbery, and inhumane treatment of civilians; the targeting of political leaders, intellectuals, and professionals; the unlawful deportation and transfer of civilians; the unlawful shelling of civilians; the unlawful appropriation and plunder of real and personal property; the destruction of homes and businesses; and the destruction of places of worship.

The worst single event in the Bosnian ethnic cleansing occurred in and around the town of Srebrenica in 1995.  From the same Wikipedia article:

The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000  Bosniak("Bosnian Muslim") men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians, in and around the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina,

I have also seen the term “ethnic cleansing” used in connection with the events in Rwanda, also in the mid-1990s, that included the 1994 killing of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million members of the Tutsi tribe by members of the Hutu tribe.  The term “genocide” is also frequently used to describe these events.Now, is it remotely accurate to describe current events in Israel using this highly charged term “ethnic cleansing”?  The article from the National particularly focuses on developments in a neighborhood of East Jerusalem known to Palestinians as Silwan, located in a steep valley immediately south of the walled Old City of Jerusalem.  In recent decades the area has been inhabited mainly by Palestinians. Jews often refer to the same area, or at least part of it, as the “City of David,” based on a belief that this was the location where King David first established the city and built his palace back around 1000 BC.  Apparently there is substantial archeological evidence to support this belief, but I have not personally evaluated that.  When I visited Israel in 2017, there was a large archeological dig going on in some of this area, which you could look into from the adjacent higher ground; and there are plans to turn the archeological site into a visitors’ center.  Clearly, if there had previously been homes on this spot, they had been removed.

So how have Jews or Jewish organizations obtained control of this area to conduct their archeological dig? . . .

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Children Buy Into Climate Tipping Point

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twelve years left.jpg

The two-week UN climate conference has now come to an end in Poland.  And what good is a big UN conference without some serious propaganda?  

So the final message from this conference was, as far as I can tell, that the children of the world have accepted the now-official twelve year "tipping point" to save the world, and are demanding that the adults "take action."  Above is a photo from the Washington Post showing a group of Polish teenagers going on "#CLIMATESTRIKE" because there are only "12 YEARS LEFT".

Didn't these poor kids read the October 11 Manhattan Contrarian post about climate "tipping points"?  If they had, they would have known that the tipping points have already passed.  For example, Al Gore has already officially told us that the planetary "point of no return" was reached in 2016; James Hansen (of NASA) has already officially told us that the year when the "West Side Highway will be under water" was 2008; UN IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri had already officially announced that after 2012 it was "too late" to stop climate catastrophe; and head of UN Foundation Timothy Wirth had already told us that 2012 would be our "last chance" to save the planet.  Yes kids, I'm sorry to have to tell you, but we're already doomed.  So what's the point of setting another "tipping point”?  We're already tipped.  I recommend that you go out and enjoy an ice cream cone.

If you want to see something even worse, check out this Twitter tag #climatestrike.  Scroll a little down to find the speech delivered by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, with high moral dudgeon.  It's really creepy.

The New York Attorney General's Office Sinks To Yet A New Low

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It was 20 years ago – November 1998 – when the desperately ambitious Eliot Spitzer got elected Attorney General of New York.  Spitzer proceeded to show the world how this office could be thoroughly politicized, using phony prosecutions of one financial institution after another to get his name in the papers on a daily basis.  By 2007 Spitzer had moved on to the office of Governor (in which he lasted barely more than a year before seeing his career implode in a prostitution scandal).  But the lessons that Spitzer taught about how to abuse the law enforcement powers of the AG’s office in the pursuit of personal ambition were not lost on his successors.

In the 2012 election, we got the even-more-desperately-ambitious (and darling of the progressive left) Eric Schneiderman as AG.  Schneiderman took the politicization of the office to a level even far beyond that of Spitzer, which is saying a lot.  For a review a small selection of Schneiderman’s improper activities, see my May 8, 2018 post, “Good Riddance To Eric Schneiderman.”  By the way, that post was occasioned by Schneiderman’s own resignation from office, again over an issue of mistreatment of women.  What is it about these guys?  Could it be that bad guys are actually bad in more than one aspect of their lives?

And now the 2018 election has given us one Letitia James as our next AG, to assume office on January 1.  Ms. James has most recently served as New York City “Public Advocate” – an elected office without observable responsibilities that principally serves to keep its holder in the public eye at taxpayer expense ready to step in to fill the next office when its occupant either implodes or is term-limited.  (The prior Public Advocate was Bill de Blasio.)  

What are the prospects for Ms. James? . . .

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When Will It Be OK To Laugh At The Climate Campaigners?

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When Will It Be OK To Laugh At The Climate Campaigners?

The climate campaigners are so terribly, terribly earnest.  I guess it’s what we should expect.  After all, they have a mission to “save the planet.”  

A great opportunity to demonstrate your earnestness and fervor as a climate campaigner has been the latest UN climate confab, known as “COP 24,” taking place in Katowice, Poland this week and last.  22,000 bureaucrats and functionaries have gathered to tell the world that it must promptly do away with the evil fossil fuels and transition to clean energy. Over and over, the alarm was sounded.  From Think Progress on December 10:

The conference comes only two months after the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an ominous report projecting that the world only has around 12 years before crossing a dangerous global warming threshold.  A subsequent report released two weeks ago, the congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment, found that every region of the United States is already suffering the impacts of climate change.

And then, into the middle of what should have been universal acclaim for immediate UN-directed action, there dropped a U.S.-sponsored panel with the title “U.S. Innovative Technologies Spur Economic Dynamism.”  The lead speaker was a guy named Wells Griffith, advisor to President Trump at the Department of Energy.  Other panelists included “speakers representing natural gas, fracking, and nuclear energy proponents.”  Griffith was quoted as saying “We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security.”  Such incredible chutzpah!  What is the proper response?Anger and protests, of course.  Oh, and also laughter.  I mean, this was completely outside the bounds of polite conversation.  What kind of dolts could be saying such preposterous things?  From the Independent:

Mr. Griffith spoke for about ten minutes before the audience started laughing, mocking, and yelling at him.  Eventually, they started chanting “keep it in the ground” and “shame on you.”

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, are we allowed to notice that absolutely no one is remotely taking seriously the idea that carbon emissions from fossil fuels are really going to be significantly reduced? . . .

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