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By Root 1144 0

If New York accepted the excuse that it was solely a victim of outside forces, there would be little impetus to alter past habits. Again, as in the South Bronx, the city would fail to confront cold reality or make choices. If it’s not New York’s fault, how can it be our responsibility? Therefore, if vast new federal assistance is not forthcoming, if federal loans are not renewed indefinitely, if the banks don’t open their vaults, if the immutable laws of capitalism don’t change—if the city continues to avoid radically restructuring its budget and service delivery system—bankruptcy is almost inevitable. An unelected federal judge will then be empowered to make the budget cuts refused by the city—perhaps choosing to cut social programs for the poor, perhaps deciding that debt obligations to creditors rank ahead of people services.

As long as liberals and many New Yorkers assume that the answer to the $1 billion budget deficit lies in Washington or bank vaults, they shall lack the political will to balance their budget, as other local governments must. They will probably lack the ammunition to sell Washington and the rest of the country on the need for further assistance. They will lack the drive, and pressure, to reform the management of the government bureaucracy. They will, like Senator George McGovern, rail against the “undertones of racism” lurking beneath the populist tax revolt, ignoring the public’s legitimate anger at government waste.

Ironically, by railing against “racism” and villainous outsiders, those on the left often behave like “conservatives.” They come to protect their programs, their traditions, their record. To favor the status quo. To stress the pain and what’s already been accomplished, rather than what remains to be done. Some warn that attacks against government are aimed at democracy itself. In his book The Limits of Legitimacy, Alan Wolfe, a self-proclaimed Marxist, suggests, “The attack on government activity has become … a not particularly well disguised attack on democracy itself.” By this logic, the two-thirds of California voters who supported reduced property taxes in 1978 were not just anti-poor but antidemocratic. An act is democratic only if Mr. Wolfe agrees with it. Others warn that change must come gradually and not be disruptive. Echoing Robert McNamara, in late 1977 Mayor Beame declared he saw “light at the end of the tunnel.” Governor Carey and the municipal unions stated similar views about “the progress” made. Symbolizing their status quo approach, most of the municipal unions endorsed Beame’s reelection bid. “The Mayor is the only candidate able to maintain a relationship with public employees,” said Barry Feinstein, head of Teamsters Local 237 and Treasurer of the Municipal Labor Committee. Teachers’ union president Albert Shanker also endorsed Beame, declaring he was “best equipped to continue to lead the city out of its fiscal crisis and toward economic and social health.” Jack Bigel, perhaps the single most powerful labor official because of his brains, lined up support for his friend Beame, as did John DeLury, chief of the sanitation union. One of the few major union holdouts was Victor Gotbaum—who called Beame “a disaster” but remained neutral.

In May 1976, when then MAC Treasurer Donna Shalala penned an Op-Ed page article for the Daily News suggesting the city would have to make further cuts and cease “business as usual” if it were to avoid bankruptcy, Bigel lashed back. “It is a call for confrontation,” he wrote on the same page, “confrontation between the city and its employees. But even worse, it is a call for confrontation between the city and all New Yorkers.” We must, cautioned the wealthy “conservative” who claims he is a socialist, “thwart the hotheads like Ms. Shalala, and avoid confrontation.…” These former allies of the underdog protested not a peep when the city, as required by a union-promoted state seniority law, laid off a disproportionate number of blacks, Hispanics and women. The United Federation of Teachers, in 1977, displayed full-page newspaper ads headlined