The Consequences of the Pervasive Tax-Cut/Budget Cut Ideology

Piles of garbage and snow still litter the streets of New York:



The Daily News finds the city's snow plow records show that the city ignored many neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens:

Mayor Bloomberg scoffed at claims that city snowplows favored Manhattan - where he lives - over the outer boroughs.

"I care about all parts of this city," he said.

But a Daily News review of Department of Sanitation records shows a stark disparity in the time it took to clear Manhattan streets and the time it took to plow out much of Brooklyn and Queens.

The records show south Brooklyn neighborhoods - Carroll Gardens, Bay Ridge, Midwood, Flatbush, Mill Basin, Coney Island and Flatlands - were left largely untouched long after Manhattan was plowed nearly top to bottom.

By 4 a.m. Monday, all of Manhattan's primary routes and 92% of its secondary routes from Inwood to Wall St. were checked off as plowed.

That means a plow made at least one pass over all the streets within the route, with the exception of streets blocked by abandoned vehicles, said Keith Mellis, a department spokesman.

Meanwhile in south Brooklyn, only 67% of the main routes and a scant 27% of its secondary routes had been plowed.

North Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick and Crown Heights didn't fare much better. There, all primary routes had been plowed but only half the secondary routes were cleared as of 4 a.m. Tuesday.

A similar disparity emerged in western Queens, which includes Astoria, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Flushing, Forest Hills, Elmhurst, Woodhaven and Kew Gardens.

There, 100% of the primary roads were cleared by 4 a.m. Tuesday, but only 47% of the secondary roads got plowed.

Mellis said that may be because abandoned vehicles blocked more streets in the boroughs. "We know that there were a lot of buses and cars stuck on certain blocks," he said.

The tale of two cities continued well into Tuesday. By 5 p.m., all of Manhattan was deemed plowed, but only 46% of south Brooklyn's secondary streets had been cleared, and 10% of its main roadways had yet to see a plow.

Western Queens was slightly better; 66% of the secondary streets had been cleared.

By noon Wednesday - three days after the storm hit - more than a quarter of south Brooklyn's routes remained uncleared. Less than half its tertiary streets were plowed. By then, most of the primary and secondary roads elsewhere in the city had been checked off as cleared.

The last road in Manhattan was declared plowed as of 5 p.m. Tuesday. The last roads in Brooklyn and Queens were deemed plowed 9 a.m. Thursday - nearly two days later.

City residents remain enraged over the Bloomberg Blizzard Disaster of 2010:

It's not just the snow cleanup that's rotten in the city: A week's worth of last year's garbage is stinking things up for the start of 2011.

The good news is that citywide trash pickup, absent since Sunday's 20-inch blizzard, will resume Monday in areas scheduled for collection that day.

The bad news: Only if your street is clear.

"We have to get back to a normal schedule," said Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty.

It can't come soon enough for outer borough residents still struggling with ice-covered streets, snowed-in cars and pent-up anger.

"This is unacceptable," said Alan Baum, whose mother, Daisy, remained stranded on a Jamaica street coated with several inches of snow and growing mounds of garbage. "This is not the first time New York City had a snowstorm. You could say this is Bloomberg's Katrina."

Lisa Rabito, 49, said her block of 76th St. was "an atrocious mess," with 4 inches of packed snow still on the street.

At one point, her neighbors took to the streets with snowblowers in an effort to do what the city had not in the five days since the blizzard began Sunday.

The announcement that garbage will be collected only on streets cleared of snow was bad news for those Brooklyn residents struggling yesterday with still-blocked roadways.

In East New York, cars kept getting stuck in the ice and snow of unplowed Blake Ave. An irate Deborah Maxwell spent 45 minutes with her trapped 2000 BMW before neighbors freed her car.

"Do they care about the citizens or do they care about themselves?" asked Maxwell, 40, an unemployed finance worker. "Five days later and I'm still getting stuck? What's the problem?"

Vinny Singh, 24, helped free a city Access-A-Ride vehicle trapped for 90 minutes yesterday on Blake Ave. The unplowed streets kept the electrician from moving his car, and cost him a week's worth of work.

"Somebody should throw a snowball at Bloomberg," he said. "Let him wait for a bus for five hours and see how it feels. ...This can't happen again. I can't afford it."

Sanitation workers hope to begin garbage collection this weekend by emptying containers at some large apartment buildings, a department spokesman said.

They will also begin emptying litter baskets across the city this weekend. More details on next week's plans are expected tomorrow.

The commissioner, in an end-of-year note to his troops, thanked them for "your dedication and endless hours of work during the recent blizzard."

Cleanup costs for the blizzard, the first storm of the season, were expected to climb above $20.5 million - more than half the city's snow removal budget of $38.5 million for the season.

Bloomberg's Katrina. An atrocious mess. Five days later and I'm still getting stuck.

That's what people are saying about Bloomberg - the Mayor of Accountability.

It's 47 degrees as of 11:00 AM this morning, so the temperature should start to remove the snow that Bloomberg couldn't.

But be aware of two things going forward - with over half the NYC snow removal budget blown on this one storm, you can be sure Bloomberg will tie future snow removal to additional cuts to city agencies and layoffs of city employees.

The Daily News has already tied the Bloomberg Blizzard failure of 2010 to public employee pensions.

But this is jive.

The fact is, Bloomberg refuses to raise taxes on rich people or corporations and prefers cuts to services and public employees - just as Obama and other politicians around the country have promoted the same policies.

As David Sirota noted, these policies have consequences:

Like so many wealth-worshiping politicians across the land, Bloomberg spent the last few years focused on two priorities: He campaigned against proposals to replenish depleted public coffers via slightly higher taxes on Wall Streeters, all while citing those depleted coffers as a rationale for massive municipal layoffs. Those job cuts, which were particularly acute at New York's snow-removing sanitation department, have now predictably translated into an immobilized metropolis.

Bloomberg and other politicians who champion this pervasive tax-cut/budget-cut ideology will certainly employ rhetorical spin to distract from this cause-and-effect story. But with New York still resembling the ice planet Hoth, it's clear Mother Nature can't be spun, and even more clear that conservative economic ideology will probably deliver similar results all over America during future weather-related catastrophes.

But, then, how can such a bankrupt ideology persist in the face of such terrible consequences? Welcome to the third problem highlighted by the New York snowstorm: plutocracy.

We all know that American politics is dominated by money. The U.S. Senate is a millionaires' club, and the politicians who aren't personally rich are typically bankrolled by corporate interests. Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg personifies this plutocratic order - and his declaration that "the city is going fine" during the blizzard because "Broadway shows were full" demonstrates what plutocracy means in practice. It means that when an emergency does not hurt the Blooombergs of the world, our government does not see any emergency at all.

Yes, as long as the Bloombergs' streets are plowed (as the mayor's was), as long as the all-important rich are enjoying their theater engagements, the plutocrats think everything is A-OK. They don't care that, say, an outer-borough newborn died because EMTs couldn't get to the baby's home for nine hours. They don't care that another outer-borough woman had to wait 30 hours for an ambulance after breaking her ankle. And those plutocrats certainly aren't about to change the conservative economic policies that help make these crises so horrific for the non-rich.

Again, this triple threat of climate change, economic conservatism and plutocracy is not limited to New York. It's the new ubiquitous normal in America, which is why the Big Apple's blizzard experience is so significant.

A real-time counter to demagogues' more sensational predictions of our doomsday, New York's winter trouble presents the nation's gloomy future in more banal - but equally troubling - terms. The blizzard suggests that America's decline will not look like an Armageddon-ish explosion in Washington. It will look like a traffic-snarling snowdrift in Queens.

You can be sure that the corporate media will begin to target the WRONG purveyors of this mess.

Indeed, they already have, with the Daily News blaming pubic employee pensions and the NY Post blaming unionized sanitation workers for an alleged official union citywide snow removal slowdown that they have yet to provide any proof for outside of hearsay.

The reality is, Bloomberg and other politicians around the country - fully supported by many people at the election polls and in the public opinion polls - have cut taxes to the bare bone so that government is forced to do so much more than ever before with so much less in the coffers.

This storm - Bloomberg's Katrina, as one man put it - is the consequence of those policies.

And given the realities of the bare government coffers (as opposed to the full Wall Street coffers), we will see more and more of this in the future.

And of course it will be the fault of public employees and government workers.

Anybody want to bet that there will be calls to privatize the sanitation department after this?

Because we can't, you know, raise taxes on hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson or the Wall Street Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs.

So we'll just have to make do with what we have.

That means more with less, that means privatizing everything in sight - from the public school system to the sanitation department - and making sure that profits are flowing in on Wall Street and the streets are plowed on Bloomberg's street.

And everybody else in the city can just go without.