MANHATTAN MUSINGS: NYC to America: Happy Birthday, and Drop Dead
Get a Desk Job
MANHATTAN MUSINGS
By Stephen MacDonald
Much has already been written about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s somber July 3rd speech, entitled “An Address Marking America’s 250th Birthday.” In what I guess we should call his “Birthday Address,” Mayor Mamdani pointed out that he was sitting at an old piece of furniture which was at his disposal in City Hall, to wit, “George Washington’s desk”. The comfortably seated Mayor shared with New Yorkers, and with all Americans, some of his reflections, as an Ugandan immigrant and self-proclaimed “Socialist”, about his adopted country.
As a lifelong New Yorker and with a few days now to ponder my Mayor’s Birthday Address, I recalled a newspaper headline from October 30, 1975–shortly after I had returned to the City after law school. The New York Daily News—now running on fumes but decades ago a major leaguer in American news media, was unhappy that NYC politicians had driven America’s financial capital to bankruptcy. What to do? The answer was quite obvious! Since Democrat politicians had been pushing the City over a financial cliff for decades, screaming headlines were needed. The Republican President, Gerald Ford, was reluctant to just ship garbage cans of cash to New York without a plan to restore fiscal sanity. So: Time to Blame a Republican:
Beame, like Mamdani, was a Democrat who knew a stern face could be used when begging for—or demanding—garbage cans of cash from American taxpayers.
I will return to the subject of a New York City bankruptcy in a bit, but before doing so, I think a few of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hostile comments on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence deserve a bit more attention.
In 2026, not a living soul pays attention to any Fourth of July addresses that may have been made by Abe Beame or any of the other 11 chaps who have presided as NYC mayors during my lifetime. But it was a clever touch for Mayor Mamdani to sit at the desk used by George Washington in New York at the start of his presidency in 1789. Although Mayor Mamdani has a few anodyne sentences about the British reaction to the Declaration and about New York’s role in the Revolutionary War, his Birthday Address focused on the sad plight of America since the fight for independence concluded. A few days earlier, former President Barack Obama had lambasted the Founding Fathers by declaring “The founders fell terribly short of the Declaration’s promise.” (My Unreported Stories post on this can be read here.) In effect—with his July 3rd Address—Zohran is saying to Barack: “Hold my Hammer and Sickle!”
Per Zohran’s address, immigrants to New York faced “tenements rife with squalor” and “nativism” and “abject labor and living conditions”. Immigrants “saw men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage.”
The Birthday Address flows on. “When we look at America, what do we see?” Per Mamdani, we see a twisted version of “American exceptionalism” from those “with power and influence and wealth.” Mamdani takes a clear swipe at someone from whom the Mayor may—like Abe Beame’s insolvent City government did with Pres. Gerald Ford in the 1970s—soon be seeking alms: President Trump. NYC’s stern-faced Mayor states that “For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best.” In their twisted version of exceptionalism, America’s powerful and wealthy types have led us astray: “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.”
Who can save us from the clutches of the powerful and wealthy and their twisted ideas? Who can save us from the “squalor”? The Birthday Address can guide us: “The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.” (A prominent Socialist in the last century expressed it this way: “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich, that is the democracy of capitalist society.”—V.I. Lenin) Mayor Mamdani can show his “friends” the way to triumph: “The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.”
Even before his Birthday Address, the Mayor took a firm hand with thousands of NYC landlords by freezing rents for two years for about 1 million apartments. NYC landlords might have invested in apartment buildings with the idea of getting a return on investment, or at least with the notion that rising costs of fuel, labor, repairs, insurance, etc. would allow for rent increases—but, under NYC’s self-proclaimed “Socialist” mayor, “nothing is fixed into place.” (Well, except for what you can charge a tenant to occupy a building you purportedly “own.”) Those on the receiving end of the rent freeze are just “corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model”. (Perhaps needless to say, if you want to find out about real dilapidation and “squalor”, just ask any of the 511,384 people currently living with the Mayor’s NYC Housing Authority as their “landlord.)
But what of the numerous other problems identified in the Birthday Address? Let’s just take two of them. Mamdani on two key perils for America: “We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections.” Firstly, a sensible response to the Mayor’s claim of universal monopolies in every industry: Name one! Rather than observation of on-the-ground data about actual businesses in the U.S., Mamdani is undoubtedly going to his 20th century mentors to understand capitalism:
Turning to “oligarchs who buy elections”—the first major party candidate to abandon the American scheme for federal government campaign funding was…Barack Obama. It is a truth universally acknowledged that most of the millionaires and billionaires are funding Democrats, not Republicans. The absolutely lowest estimates of Kamala Harris’s fundraising lead over Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election is that the Democrats had three times what the Trump campaign had.
Contemporaneously with his Birthday Address, Mayor Mamdani unveiled a colossal $125 billion City budget packed with gimmicks that will all but insure that New Yorkers will face another insolvency crisis. Fiscal experts see New York heading to another disaster like the one Abe Beame orchestrated in the 1970s. But never fear—Mamdani’s here: “Socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before, but . . . we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles.”
In his mayoral campaign last year, Zohran Mamdani told New Yorkers that he wanted “the warmth of collectivism” to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism.” The fun and the warmth are just getting started in New York. But for the rest of America, if folks like Mamdani get the power they are lunging for—then, as Mamdani’s Birthday Address prophesies for the entire country: “nothing is fixed into place.”