Maybe Donald Trump’s revelations to that colosseum of rapturous Christians were on point? Maybe we don’t need to vote after all? Maybe voting is so 1960s—when senators such as Robert Kennedy (the Camelot father, not the bear-dumping son) or Eugene McCarthy tried to turn out the vote by quoting from Aeschylus or George Bernard Shaw (“Some people see things as they are and say, ‘why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘why not?’”)?
Has not the current presidential election already been decided? Haven’t the reverential camera angles of the Great Democratic Processional on CBS News Mornings and the NBC Today show already anointed Vice President Kamala as the next president? Do we really have to brave the elements on the first Tuesday in November to stand around some unheated elementary school and vote for candidates—by pulling levers from the 1930s—that we don’t really like anyway?
After all, it’s not as if anyone voted for Kamala Harris in this year’s primaries. Harris is as a much as a creature of machine politics as was Rutherford B. Hayes (who in 1876 was gifted the presidency and about whom it was later said: “He did such a good job I almost wish he had been elected…”) or New York’s Boss Tweed (“I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating…”).
At least the likes of Boss Tweed were creatures of machine city politics that delivered votes in exchange for urban development. Now it seems as if the Democratic Party has given up on American cities, beginning with New York, and has thrown in its lot with Trump’s suburban, country club Republicans who dream of government by fiat.
* * *
I got the word on the canonization of Governor Tim Walz for the Democratic vice presidential nomination while on my bicycle, riding in mist and rain from Brooklyn into Manhattan. The news flashed up on an app on my handlebars.
When I am in New York, I stay with friends in Ditmas Park, in part because it’s a two-wheeled family that allows bike parking in the living room.
The ride from central Brooklyn into midtown Manhattan takes about an hour and twenty minutes, even if you hop a few red lights (I confess I do) on the journey or slow down to flip off an erratic truck driver.
My interborough route takes me from Prospect Park South, up Flatbush Avenue, down through Park Slope and Gowanus (of canal and cadaver fame), across downtown Brooklyn, up and over one of the East River bridges, and around Manhattan on my appointed rounds.
To be fair, compared to 30 years ago, New York City has become more bicycle friendly, with many more dedicated lanes and paths across the bridges.
But what astounds me every time I bike into Manhattan is how awful many roads are in New York City. It’s not just a few potholes; many streets in New York are lava beds of undulating pavement, grooves, broken glass, and crumbling sidewalks.
Ironically, two of the worst streets in Manhattan are Fifth and Madison avenues, along which the market capitalization of the adjacent real estate runs into many billions. But bring a mountain bike with shock absorbers if you ever plan to ride from Madison Square up to East 86th Street.
The last thing on the mind of Vice President Harris when she picked Walz to be her vice-presidential candidate was the death and life of great American cities. Instead her mind was at the mall.
* * *
My Brooklyn bike rides were the first time that I had been in New York since Governor Kathy Hochul cynically cancelled the state’s agreed policies on what is called congestion pricing—the idea of charging vehicles that use the roads in Manhattan below 60th Street.
Congestion pricing policies were about ten years in the making and modeled on a similar program in London, which charges cars entering the central city.
In the case of New York, congestion pricing had many goals: to relieve the gridlocked traffic that has turned Manhattan into a tangle of stalled cars, trucks, and buses; to raise money for mass transit across the city and suburbs; and to clean up some of the dirty air that comes from the extended parking lot that is the city’s mean streets, especially during rush hours.
Over the course of implementing congestion pricing, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and other government bodies secured buy-in from everyone from the federal government to the New York City Council.
Private cars were to have been charged $15 at peak times and $7.50 off peak. Large trucks and tour buses would have paid $20, while taxis and Uber would have gotten off lightly, paying either $1.25 or $2.50, respectively.
It was estimated that over time congestion pricing would have generated new revenue of $15 billion, which would gone largely to the MTA, which in turn would have invested heavily in the broken infrastructure of the city’s mass transit, notably the subways.
Twenty percent of the revenue would also have gone to improve the equally decayed suburban train lines of the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North. (Yesterday it took me two hours to travel on the train from Grand Central to New Haven, a distance of 76 miles; in Europe, that journey takes about an hour.)
* * *
New York would have been the first city in the nation to adopt congestion pricing (an historic precedent to reclaim American cities from gas guzzlers), but then Governor Hochul (I would say by exceeding her authority) declared that she was “indefinitely pausing” the implementation of congestion pricing.
In scrapping the program Hochul declared:
Let’s be real: a $15 charge may not mean a lot to someone who has the means, but it can break the budget of a working- or middle-class household. It puts the squeeze on the very people who make this City go: the teachers, first responders, small business workers, bodega owners. And given these financial pressures, I cannot add another burden to working- and middle-class New Yorkers – or create another obstacle to continued recovery.
It’s a quaint notion of the New York City economy, but in reality few bodega owners or first responders drive hulking SUVs with black tinted windows into lower Manhattan. That crowd takes the L train in from Bushwick or the R train from Bay Ridge.
It was the high rollers from Nassau and Westchester counties—a political class that drives into New York and can well afford the proposed tax—who received yet another capital gain.
* * *
The real reasons for killing congestion pricing had nothing to do with protecting the economic interests of those “who are struggling to make ends meet” and everything to do with the congested polices of the Democratic Party, which will do anything and everything to keep its oligopoly in power (even it means choking New York City to death on gas fumes).
Hochul killed congestion pricing after receiving frantic phone calls from the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (both members of Congress from Brooklyn, which stood to benefit enormously from the billions to be invested in the subways and buses).
At the time of this influence peddling, Schumer and Jeffries were staring at a “down ballot” disaster in an election that was headlining the addled President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.
The two congressional leaders especially were afraid of losing New York’s 3rd congressional district in Queens and Nassau counties that was once the political home of the Great George Santos (who in Congress represented the check kiting wing of the Republican Party).
Who cares if the 3.2 million daily riders of mass transit in New York were to be thrown under their own buses creeping along in traffic.
* * *
Schumer and Jeffries feared that with the advent of congestion pricing (basically a tax levied on suburbanites), several closely-held Democratic seats in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut might fall to the Republicans.
According to this logic, all those car-commuting suburbanites would deeply resent paying $15 a day to drive their cars into Manhattan and vote Republican in the 2024 election.
Hence pulling the plug on congestion pricing was a gift to wealthy suburbanite Republicans at the expense of New York city residents who, if Schumer, Jeffries, and Hochul had thought about it, will never vote Democratic, no matter what gifts you give them.
Into this bargain, New York remains choked with cars, trucks, broken trains, and bad air, while suburbanites get to bomb into Manhattan in their SUVs for almost no cost and then, to add insult to injury, still get to vote for Donald Trump in the 2024.
I am a little surprised the Daily News hasn’t run a Gerald Ford-like headline: “Hochul and the Harris Democrats to New York: Drop Dead!”
The post Harris’s Delayed Coronation Streets appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
