Bill de Blasio’s latest crazy, no-good nepotistic job for Chirlane McCray
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Sigh: Mayor Bill de Blasio just named first lady Chirlane McCray to head his task force on ensuring New York is more racially just when it reopens. Are you laughing, or crying?
The mayor says his wife’s record running the ThriveNYC initiative makes her perfect for this new job. We guess that means the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity will spend a ton of money to no obvious effect, with half its component programs closed down after a year or two because they never made sense in the first place.
That was the story of Thrive, which was supposed to boost New Yorkers’ mental health but mainly seemed to hire people without ever figuring out what they should do. And which mainly steered clear of the city’s most urgent mental health problem, the huge portion of the homeless population that faces major psychiatric issues.
With roughly a billion dollars out the door, Thrive is on its third or fourth “reimagining.” The next mayor is sure to close it down, if the city council doesn’t do so first.
Of course, the idea of a racial justice unit as a core part of city government’s work on restarting the local economy is as misbegotten as Thrive ever was. Just as Thrive was the wrong approach to mental health, this will focus on peripheral (or patronage) issues rather than the clear but hard-to-address reasons why lower-income black and Hispanic New Yorkers have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus.
De Blasio claims that the crisis is an opportunity to fundamentally remake New York City economically and socially. In fact, the main challenge is to revive it at all. The chance that the virus will remain an ongoing threat for years poses a huge challenge to New York’s whole way of being: Density is now an enormous vulnerability, rather than a competitive advantage. If we can’t figure out how to make the subways safe, merely getting to work becomes a nightmare.
Even if you buy the mayor’s radical talk, his wife is the last person to put in charge: It’s impossible to manage your spouse as you would anyone else — you can’t fire her for incompetence for starters. (As Thrive proved.)
Indeed, the rank nepotism here suggests that de Blasio doesn’t even believe his own line: He’s just working the same old platitudes to justify putting his wife forward as a leader in hopes it will make her electable come 2021, as he seeks to install her as the next Brooklyn borough president.
Don’t laugh or cry, actually: This idiocy is cause for a primal scream.
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