Democracy for Sale. New York City has disgraced itself in undoing a term-limits law enacted by the people in one referendum and confirmed in a second referendum. The City Council, knowing full well that the people favor term limits and have twice voted for them, unilaterally overruled the people! Think about that: the Mayor and Council of NYC have decided that they are not the servants but the masters of the people, and have the right to undo the will of the electorate expressed in direct elections TWICE. How can that possibly be permitted? What has happened to this country?
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A judge(tte) ruled that the Council could vote for their own re-election and that was not a conflict of interest! Now councilmembers as well as the Mayor can have three four-year terms in office. And in four years the City Council can make it four terms, and four years after that, five terms, or simply abolish term limits altogether — term limits the voters TWICE enacted in direct referendum. And no one, not the State Legislature in Albany, not the Federal civil-rights authorities, not the courts of the State of New York, has lifted a finger to stop this destruction of democracy in New York City. How could this happen? How can it possibly be legal to overrule the electorate and undo a referendum by legislative fiat?
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It happened because New Yorkers are the biggest bunch of sheep and wusses in the Nation, with not so much as 1/12th the guts of people in any other city. New Yorkers put up with more sh*t than the people in the next thirty cities put together. That may be largely due to the enormous proportion of New Yorkers who were born elsewhere, and are only legally citizens. They do not have the value system of Americans but of the various hellholes they fled. They brought ugly bits of the ugly cultures they came from, among the worst of which bits is toleration for dictatorship.
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Now, Michael Bloomberg, a BILLIONAIRE, has been spending tens of millions of dollars on ads for re-election, for months already on an election that will not happen till November, and even tho it would seem that not a single ad for anyone else has aired. I live in Newark, NJ, which receives NY television stations, and Bloomberg ads are all over the tube, at all hours of the day and nite, but I have yet to see even one ad for anyone else. That is corruption, bare-faced, bare-knuckled plutocracy using an enormous personal fortune to BUY election to an illegitimate third term for an evil little dictator, one of those mini-men who overcompensate by seeking power by any means. I haven't even seen so much as one nonpartisan ad urging New Yorkers to strike back at the people who overturned their vote in two referendums by voting against all of them, starting with Bloomberg in November.
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Why isn't anyone stopping him? There is apparently something about the office of Mayor of New York that drives people crazy. The last mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who was forced out by the term-limits law because he wasn't so brazen as to demand the City Council abolish it, wanted to stay on after his legal term expired, with the excuse that the then-recent 9/11 attacks had created an unprecedented emergency, and New York needed Giuliani's experienced leadership to recover from the disaster. Michael Bloomberg would have none of it, but forced Giuliani out of office promptly on time. What a HYPOCRITE! Now the bastard Bloomberg insists that a situation not one fortieth as difficult for New York as the post-9/11 era, a simple recession, requires the extraordinary measure of overruling TWO referendums so NY can 'benefit' from his 'experienced leadership'!
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If The System won't protect us from dictatorship by billionaires, there may be only three things that can stop the total destruction of New York's democratic civilization: (1) resounding defeat for Bloomberg at the polls, which seems most unlikely when a billionaire has drowned out all other voices in a constant barrage of propaganda in all media; (2) massive, unceasing demonstrations in the street, demanding not just that Bloomberg remove his name from the ballot but that he actually resign now, and demanding as well that every councilmember who voted to overrule the people also resign, now; (3) violence. One bullet thru the head of each would-be tyrant can speak hugely louder than the hundreds of thousands of ballots in TWO referendums that demanded term limits.
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The City Council vote that voided the people's term-limits initiative was 29 to 22. Surely there are 30 bullets in New York City, one for each councilmember and one for Bloomberg. Of course, there's no reason to stop with one bullet per tyrant. Lead is recyclable. We have guns today that can squeeze off dozens of rounds in a single minute, which would be more certain of killing the tyrants than a single shot. Naturally, there will be some wussy commentators who say that violence even against tyrants is never justified, and will even pretend that some fundamental legal principle is at stake, such as conspiring to overthrow the government. No, assassinating people who have hijacked the government is not overthrowing the government but restoring it. The mayoralty will remain, the Council will remain. There will just be new people in those political offices, people so chastened by what happened to their predecessors that they will at once both restore term limits and write new City Charter provisions barring any future Council from voiding the will of the people as expressed in a direct referendum.
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Thomas Jefferson, who adhered to the two-term limit for President even tho it was only a tradition established by George Washington, not a law nor constitutional provision, famously said:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Naturally, neither Michael Bloomberg nor any of the councilmembers who voted to overrule the people believe that any New Yorker has the guts to kill them, especially if s/he must risk their own life in the attempt. But we do have hundreds of thousands of young people in uniform risking their lives in distant countries for what they have been told is the defense of liberty. How bizarre it is that while they stand on the front lines, thousands of miles from home, the enemies of liberty are destroying democracy thousands of miles to their rear, right here at home. These soldiers will come home to find that while they were away, everything they were told they were fiting for had vanished. Might they then take up arms again to win it back? We needn't wait for the betrayed to come back. We can fite at home against the impending death of democracy, as one way to show appreciation for what our young people are risking in Afghanistan. Do them the favor of not making their sacrifice pointless.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,327 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:04 PM