The Disastrous New Urban Agenda

Tags

cities, fail, Government spending, Government Waste, over-regulations, Progressive bureaucrats, Progressives, social engineering, social-justice, urban blight

Downtown Brooklyn, NYC – Source: Google Earth.

New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio gets no credit for downtown Brooklyn, New York as it is today.  What you see in the above photograph came about because of Michael Bloomberg, building fever throughout the City.

What Commie de Blasio can take credit for is the transportation mess he has created downtown Brooklyn and throughout the City of New York with his over-regulated Vision Zero agenda.

Downtown Brooklyn has always experienced traffic jams 24/7 but that last thing any New Yorker would have imagined is that the congestion could get worse.

Enter de Blasio and Progressive bike lanes where they need not be and the over-regulation of everything that breathes or moves in the City.

Commentary Magazine by Stephen Eide

Unable to spend their way into a progressive future, Democratic mayors have turned to regulation as a panacea.

Democrats currently govern most major American cities and face no serious Republican challenges in any of them. Of the 50 largest cities in the United States, only 13 have Republican mayors. Surprisingly, while urban areas have been turning deep blue, Democratic city governments have not been increasing their spending as much as most people think. Massive debt and poor revenue growth have forced urban Democrats to find a more austere pathway to satisfying their progressive ambitions. They have found it in regulation. By legislating how businesses can conduct themselves, whom they can hire, what they must provide, and much else, Democrats in local governments are transforming the new urban progressive agenda into a regulatory agenda.
 
Because of this, even as these politicians tout their imposed correctives for sluggish growth and inequality, we should expect increased stagnation and growing inequality in the coming years. If Democrats continue to expand regulations, the urban economy will be even less accommodating to small businesses and entrepreneurs than it is alread. And as these economic engines stall, opportunities for the poor and immigrant classes will dry up. The liberal appetite for the imposition of local regulation, like the appetite for spending it has supplanted, will usher in a new chapter in the history of unintended policy consequences. And, once again, the worst-off among us will pay the highest price.[…]
 
Continue Reading — The Disastrous New Urban Agenda

H/t Manhattan Institute.

Elbert Guillory: “Mr. President, Disarm ISIS, Not Us” (video)

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Barack Obama, Elbert Guillory, government tyranny, gun-control, Illegal Immigration, islamic-terrorism, Progressivism, social engineering

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aPublished on Jan 5, 2016 by FreeAtLast PAC

Instead of declaring war on ISIS, President Obama is taking actions to reduce our rights to own and use guns. Meanwhile, Americans anxiously await the next terror attack on our soil. Is it any surprise why Americans are afraid?

Bill de Blasio to Air-Conditioned Businesses: Shut Door or Pay Fine…Really.

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Bill De Blasio, bureacratic and government overreach, climate change fail, New York City Council, social engineering

For starters, the majority of New York City businesses ceased keeping their doors wide open on a hot day while at the same time running their air conditioners YEARS AGO. While some do it to save energy, all do it to cut down on costly utility bills.

At the same time, there are those businesses that have hundreds + customers coming through their doors on a hot summer day and have made the conscious choice to keep their doors open.

Whatever the reason, the choice to keep one’s door(s) open (or not) while running the air conditioner belongs to the store owner not an over-regulating Communist petard looking for yet another pretext to swindle New Yorkers for every little thing no matter how menial from the unimaginable to the just plain ridiculous and from the second they step out of their doors until the second they return.

This latest fleecing (of the day) hails from the Communists at the New York City Council who have already gone after larger New York City businesses, many of whom again do not keep their doors open while running the air conditioner (why are we even having this discussion?).

As with all things Communist, the eco-fascists on the NYC Council have labeled keeping a door or window open with air conditioners running, “the co-mingling of indoor and outdoor air” and, therefore, illegal.

The law which will be enforced by the NYC’s Department of Consumer Affairs goes into effect next summer with fines ranging from $250 to $1,000 is an attack on small business owners.

New York Times by Michael M. Grynbaum

Starting next summer, nearly all shops and restaurants in New York City will be required to keep front doors and windows shut while their air-conditioners and cooling systems are running.

The requirement, which became law on Wednesday, is intended to address a ubiquitous, if environmentally unsound, summer sensation: the beckoning blast of chilled air that lures sweaty passers-by into the cooler confines of an enterprising merchant’s store.

“It’s always been a pet peeve of mine,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a City Hall ceremony on Wednesday before signing the bill into law.

“It’s the middle of the summer in New York City, it’s 90 degrees, you walk by a store, and the door is wide open and the air-conditioning is blasting,” the mayor said. “That’s wasting a lot of energy. That’s having its own impact on global warming.”

Shop owners who violate the rules would face fines, ranging from $250 for a first offense to as much as $1,000 for an egregious violation. The measure is an expansion of an earlier law passed by the City Council…

Read full article

Counter-type stores and businesses with outside cafes are exempt (so far); and on that note, I ask, what are the odds of Commie Bill regulating New Yorkers from their homes, dispatching drones and/or police helicopters for the purpose of issuing fines to those of us who have air conditioners and might keep a window or door open?

Don’t laugh its right up this bastard’s ally, i.e., one out of a thousand de Blasio’s many scams pet peeves.

P.S.: The owners of the Empire State Building had better watch out. NOT! “The Empire State Realty Trust is owned by Democrat fundraisers, Democrat contributors, and a Democrat Senator from Connecticut.”

LINKS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/nyregion/most-stores-in-city-will-have-to-close-doors-and-windows-if-air-conditioning-is-on.html
http://menrec.com/empire-state-building-owners-donate-heavily-owned-democrats/

Rahm Emanuel to propose massive property tax increase.

Tags

ILLINOIS, Rahm Emanuel, social engineering, Tax Hikes

 

Chicago Tribune By Hal Dardick and Bill Ruthhart

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is set to call for the largest property tax increase in modern Chicago history to raise enough money to make a major pension payment for police and firefighters next year, the mayor’s City Council floor leader and a City Hall source told the Chicago Tribune late Wednesday.

The mayor also plans to push a new garbage collection tax, a new per-ride fee on taxis and ride-hailing services such as Uber and a new tax on electronic cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products….

Continue Reading

Emanuel wants a tax hike of somewhere between $450 million and $550 million to pay for police and fire pensions and another $50 million for a Chicago Public Schools construction program.

In other words, as long as Emanuel appeases big labor, who cares about the burden of these tax increases on the middle class.

 

LINK:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-emanuel-property-tax-hike-met-0903-20150902-story.html

 

Detroit Residents turn sinkhole into fishing hole. (VIDEO)

Tags

bankrupt, Detroit, failure, Michigan, social engineering

ABOVE PHOTOGRAPH – Top image: sinkhole per Google Earth; Bottom image: sinkhole after residents transformed it into fishing hole. In the meantime, the city of Detroit says repairing the sinkhole is not their responsibility and is pointing the finger at the utility company.

New York Daily News

Residents in a Detroit neighborhood were shocked when a sinkhole opened up on their street — so they turned it into a fishing hole.

Locals claim the hole first appeared on Hull Street and McNichols about four years ago and, after getting frustrated as authorities failed to fix it, they decided to turn it into something they could enjoy instead.

They started by putting blue gill, goldfish and carp into the sinkhole….

Continue Reading

The city of Detroit, another failed social engineering project, because of all the crooked politicians, the fact that the city is broke and the fact that the sinkhole is located in a poverty-stricken community will not even consider repairing the sinkhole.

The odds are that the city feels that since they are barely collecting any property taxes if at all from that area, it is not worth the effort.

At the same time, a huge sinkhole opened up three weeks ago in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn. I suggest the City close it up immediately before we learn that it is actually a tunnel from Mexico. That would undoubtedly explain mass insurgence of illegals in that area of Brooklyn from the southwestern part of the continent and below.

 

LINKS:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/massive-sinkhole-12-feet-deep-opens-brooklyn-article-1.2314050
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sinkhole-turned-fishing-hole-detroit-residents-article-1.2336384

History Lesson For Today – Lysenkoism

Tags

Common Core, controlling the message, Education, Josef Stalin, Redistribution of Wealth, RUSSIA, social engineering, Trofim Lynsenko, Ukraine, Utopia

Grumpy Opinions

Special tip of the hat to Cleetus whose comment on a piece in The Federalist got me looking into Lysenkoism. I may be late to the party in knowing about this, but I offer today’s post for anyone else who doesn’t know this important historical figure.

Meet Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, born 1898 in what today is the Ukraine to peasant parents. He obtained a doctorate in agricultural science at the Kiev Agricultural Institute in 1925 and rejected Mendelian genetics, the kind most of us know today as the classical genetics of inherited biological features, in favor of pseudo-scientific hybridization theories. In short, he believed that species and environment were entwined in such a way that, given the proper environmental conditions, any species could be changed, e.g. a wheat plant could produce rye seed under the right conditions. He was beginning his working career just as the Soviet Union was suffering a terrible famine while Stalin was in power. The famine was greatly due to Stalin’s collectivists policies which had confiscated farms from the peasants, took seed stock for future plantings and used it as feed stock, and cause many of the peasants to retaliate with poor quality work. The Communist Party was desperate for a savior to step forward with a solution from science. Enter Trofim Lynsenko.

The short version of his meteoric rise and fall comes from Wikipedia (and is confirmed in other sources, but copied here for expedience.)

“Lysenko emerged during this period by advocating radical but unproven agricultural methods, and also promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year-round work in agriculture. Lysenko proved himself very useful to the Soviet leadership by reengaging peasants to return to work, helping to secure from them a personal stake in the overall success of the Soviet revolutionary experiment.

Lysenko’s theories did produce some increased crop yields but nothing close to what he had predicted. However, in a time of crisis those kinds of details can get lost. More importantly….

Read full article

LINK:
http://grumpyelder.com/2015/07/history-lesson-for-today-lysenkoism/