Is Bill de Blasio The Future of Progressive Politics In The Democratic Party? [View all]

[cali]

He's a no bones about it Progressive and he's saying the things that Progressives should say. He also has the history to back those words up. If he becomes mayor, he could lead the way for a progressive/liberal resurgence.

Bill de Blasio’s Vision

When it came to the most important speech of his campaign for mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio’s timing couldn’t have been worse. On May 30th, at the New School, the candidate sketched a powerful picture of the issue that he wanted to put at the center of the race: the city’s “inequality crisis.” “Right now, as we’re gathered this morning, one New Yorker is rushing past an attended desk in the lobby of a majestic skyscraper,” de Blasio began. “A few miles away, a single mother is also rushing, holding her two young children by the hands as they hurry down the steps of the subway entrance…” The first New Yorker is thinking about how to profit from the bull market in stocks; the second is trying to figure out how to pay her grocery bill.

De Blasio described New York’s rising inequality in terms that were not only personal but also analytical: the number of luxury apartments being built, soaring C.E.O. pay, declining middle-class incomes (the city’s middle class isn’t just shrinking, he said; it’s “in danger of disappearing”), and the stark fact that almost half the city’s residents live in poverty, or very nearly in it. He mentioned a New Yorker infographic showing the neighborhood-by-neighborhood income extremes that commuters pass through as they ride the 2 train.

De Blasio had some answers, too—the most ambitious proposals of any candidate in the race. These included an income-tax increase for New Yorkers making more than five hundred thousand dollars a year, which would pay for universal pre-K education and after-school programs for kids in middle school; two hundred thousand new units of affordable housing (currently, people can remain on the waiting list for public housing in New York for years); and tax incentives that are directed away from big development projects and toward small neighborhood businesses and industries. He also talked about preparing the city’s students for technology jobs and ending the police department’s stop-and-frisk program—a practice that, as a judge ruled Monday, has violated New Yorkers’ constitutional rights.

It was a far-reaching speech, making its case in both economic and moral terms, describing a city—or, in de Blasio’s somewhat predictable phrase, “two cities”—that just about every resident with some level of awareness is familiar with, likely takes for granted, and perhaps tunes out. De Blasio was trying to move inequality out of the realm of loud street noise—to make New Yorkers think about it, and not as an unpleasant fact of metropolitan life but as an immense problem that must be addressed.

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/08/bill-de-blasio-speech-new-york-mayor-inequality.html