Live the ‘American Dream,’ Just Not in My City
NYC’s Tough Guy Mayor Gets Trump-Like on Homelessness and Immigration
The former billionaire mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg, once declared the city a “boutique,” meant to be exclusive — a place only for multi-millionaires, billionaires, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and Frank Ocean’s homer.
Today the former NYPD cop Eric Adams is the boutique’s mayor and he’s a centrist (or neoliberal) who mocks leftists, poor people, LGBTQ persons, and is reviving old-school law-and-order tactics and taking new action to erode a “right to shelter” to help keep comfortable the oligarchs of mediocrity who make the boutique their home.
Jacobin magazine, Adams and his team hate it, says unlike his predecessors, “rhetoric used by Adams and his officials to discuss homelessness, the expanded role of police in sweeps, and the renewed focus on tightening sheltering policy.
New York’s right to shelter dates back to a 1981 consent decree, which affirmed that the New York State constitution required that the government provide shelter for destitute individuals. Separate litigation required that families deemed ‘eligible’ be temporarily housed. Both mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg moved to narrow or eliminate the right.”
Adams like his predecessors have all loved the NYPD — it’s the force protecting the rabid capitalists and their shopping opportunities and dwindling restaurant choices. When monied tourists come to NYC, Mayor Adams wants to ensure they spend their money unfettered by musty homeless people. The NYPD, where Adams used to draw paychecks, is a long-used tool of the city’s mayors to put homeless people out of the way, feel up young Black men and women and then charge them with petty crimes, harass them, and move them out of the way too.
NYC Mayor Adams, the foolish cop at heart, is the new tough guy or manly man on steroids — he went to El Paso, Texas to prove it. Texas, governed by the trifling idiot king Greg Abbott, has shipped busloads of asylum seekers to the billionaire city, to fuck with “Blue state” politicians and the Biden administration, and to score political points in deep-red Texas, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but who’s counting.
In Texas, Adams posed with a border patrol security wankers (a shriveled white guy wearing green and a holster with a gun, which you know turns Mayor Adams on). All stoked or bemused Adams then told the asylum seekers at the Mexico border that he wanted to secure their “right to work,’ so they could relocate to the U.S. preferably not Adams’ boutique shop though.
What Adams did not tell the asylum seekers is how terribly his administration treats the homeless in NYC and how he is working overtime to secure their disappearance from the city where Beyoncé works for Tiffany and Frank Ocean is a tribune for the billionaire class with his appointment-only shopping spot, er boutique, in the meat-packing district. (Ocean may be set to “perform” at Coachella this year, but it is likely Ocean will use the set to prance and peddle for Homer.)
As Jacobin reports:
In March 2022, Adams launched an above-ground encampment clearance initiative. Following the legacy of [Mayor Bill] de Blasio’s sweep blitz of 2021, teams of sanitation crews, homeless outreach workers, and cops dismantled encampments and forced people to move. Since then, more than fourteen hundred sweeps have been conducted; less than one hundred people caught in the sweeps have accepted shelter.
In August, Mayor Adams formally put the NYPD in charge of his encampment sweeps, while keeping municipal outreach teams as a key part of the process of moving homeless people from sight. Adams’s decision to place the NYPD in charge of sweeps is likely only to increase the use of criminality to move people out of sight.
While some groups are trying to challenge Adams on a legal front, Jacobin notes the litigation route is limited and that no grassroots effort exist to protect, let alone expand “right to shelter” laws in the U.S. Not stunning in a country that enjoys mocking people in poverty, rarely helping them.
(Yes, in the 1960s President Lyndon Johnson gave the U.S. Medicare and Medicaid, both means-tested, small-time “health care” insurance plans that continue to fail the nation, especially those in need of health care coverage — it’s a big number. President Obama’s “Affordable Care Act,” is pathetic as well— a private health insurance mess and expensive.)
In Adams case, he and his team are garnering national attention, for looking like a right-wing loon, which is close to reality if not there. Adams’ tough guy efforts are literally killing people, it’s as if his administration gets its rocks off throwing homeless people into bonfires and then terrorizing asylum seekers and mocking them for wanting to move to the U.S., especially NYC — how dare they entertain the notion.
There may be people and groups in Washington, D.C. claiming to be devoted to helping homeless people, but homeless people in NYC and other large cities from coast to coast must be dubious. Grassroots on the local level is needed — none exist. The challenge is always going to be tough in a nation so uncaring.
Only one point to agree on here — Adams and lots of people love slapping around poor people at home and those seeking to move to the U.S. for all kinds of reasons, like political persecution, economic opportunity, or boredom, remember there are thrill-seekers everywhere, not just on your daily walk or drive to work.
