New York’s Mayor is Useless
by Oliver Seaman Contributor
Zohran Mamdani has a good reputation around here, and perhaps for good reason. His rhetoric as a candidate was loud and interesting, he angered those in complacent positions, and he spoke like a socialist against the cost of living crisis and foreign wars, proposing definite reforms and unmistakable symbolic action against warmongers. He was elected as mayor of New York because he treated working people authentically and advocated for them, a fine contrast to the conceited, blatantly corrupt persona of his predecessor Eric Adams. A year later, he and his DSA associates are the firebreathers of American politics whose rhetoric scares center-Democrats into anemic complacency and spurs Republicans to performative savagery. Republicans ought to despise him, and they almost entirely do. Yet last February Mamdani visited the White House and met with Trump and apparently they got along. Trump called him “a very rational person” and commented that “we agree on a lot more than I would have thought.” So what did they discover they had in common?
On the campaign trail Mamdani promised to increase government spending to attend to the needs of New York’s working class. Where would the necessary money come from? There are enough resources in New York to equip all its people with suitable food, clothing and shelter yet, in my own experience, one can find starving, ragged, homeless people on nearly every block of even the wealthiest neighborhoods. Social materials are being hoarded by billionaires and finance capitalists who waste food, impose exorbitant rents, and lock clothing inside insipid de - partment stores. Social wealth needed to be taken from the hands of the rich, and initially Mamdani seemed interested in doing that. In May he proposed a 9.5% increase on property taxes and the rich predictably started to make threats against him; instead of doubling down he did an about-face, and agreed to everything they wanted. He held a meeting with Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase and one of the city’s primary oligarchs; a JPMorgan Chase spokesman called the meeting “constructive” and noted that Mamdani’s “tone was friendly”. Fox Business reported that “the pair discussed reducing government waste, cutting red tape tied to development projects, and expanding public-private partnerships.” He then held similar discussions with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Blackstone.
‘Cutting government waste’ means revoking money that assists poor people, and ‘public-private partnerships’ are schemes for banks to profit on the publically-financed construction of unnecessary new housing. With regard to existing homes Mamdani has failed to freeze, let alone reduce, rents on the 70% of rent-stabilized units which are owned by “financially distressed property owners,” despite his campaign promise to do a general rent freeze. Why? Because struggling small landlords oppose rent stabilization and he sides with them against their more numerous, more impoverished tenants. This is a false opposition. The big owners can leave but renting workers have nowhere left to go, and the small landlords can be compensated with the public wealth currently in bank vaults.
Unable to touch the real money-pots, Mamdani has established a DOGE lookalike called COGE in order to cut municipal spending. He claims that the goal is to make the city government work “more effectively for the working people,” but all it has done is reduce a budget deficit of $5.4 billion by a few hundred thousand dollars of broken knick-knacks. Another possible source for government expenditure is the NYPD: back in 2020 he vigorously called for defunding the police but today they seem to terrify him. He has not swapped out Eric Adams’ billionaire police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. In June he proposed increasing the NYPD’s budget by $70 million and hiring 580 new officers, claiming that “the increase was necessary… to staff a new Bronx borough command.” The goal of this was to terrorize working people in the city’s poorest borough, and he was only forced to drop the proposal amidst serious pressure from his DSA allies.
The last way to protect the budget is to neglect the wages and benefits of public employees. When commuter-rail workers went on strike in May, he refused to acknowledge them and sent transportation officials to work out a deal which offered a one-time bribe instead of increasing the miserably-poor pay these workers receive. In April he proposed delaying payments on the pension funds of retired public employees to get quick cash. Clearly he has found that it is easier to steal from the poor than to inconvenience the rich, and this also applies at the national level. To obtain federal housing credits Mamdani visited the White House twice, once two days before the start of the Iran War, and sucked up to Trump. He will not oppose Trump’s authoritarian, oligarch-run government. In May ICE agents raided a Brooklyn hospital to arrest a battered Nigerian immigrant, and the NYPD assisted by “forming a wall of blue between protestors and the ICE officers” so that ICE could storm the inside. Last month Trump signed an executive order that nullified the green cards of Haitian immigrants and Mamdani duly mass-fired all Haitian city employees. Anyone who gives a damn about the increasing institutional repression in our society cannot condone such reactionary, collaborationist behavior.
What can we actually thank Mamdani for? A government-run grocery store scheme slated to start in 2029, a limited expansion of childcare designed to encourage parents to spend more time at their low-wage drudge-work, a rent freeze which most housing is exempt from, and increasingly meaningless pro-Palestinian statements. Not much. In July he reneged on his campaign promise to order the NYPD to arrest Netanyahu if he were to enter New York, claiming he spoke to NYPD officials who informed him that “we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this.” Perhaps they do not, but that is not a valid excuse; we must scrutinize laws designed to protect war criminals from punishment. There’s no justification for invoking the law as a divine tablet when it is unjust and can be concretely opposed on the ground.
As a New Yorker I voted for Mamdani. I don’t regret it. I was impressed by his attitude. Yet I cannot hold on to those hopeful illusions of last year which reality has proven false. Has Mamdani “betrayed” his supporters? Not willfully. If he had successfully imposed wealth taxes the rich would have fled New York with their fortunes in tow and appealed to either the governor in Albany or Trump to remove him from office and appoint one of their many flunkies instead. If he had gone after the NYPD, slashing officers and reducing funding, the cops may well have mutinied and detained him. When he became the mayor Mamdani became the representative of official authority, and that authority only exists so long as the economic power of billionaires backs it up. They put a heavy weight over his shoulders which is all the more noticeable because of his left-wing background. He has found that his position depends on satisfying the caste which hoards the wealth of society and foments war across the world to maintain this monopoly, and now he faces a simple, stark choice: either he obeys the bankers or is thrown out of political life. He has chosen to obey. If he is a socialist, I am a martian.
I don’t despise Mamdani; he is a well-intentioned man, if slightly clueless, who has been forced by his chosen circumstances to overturn the vast majority of his former beliefs. He is truly the best kind of politician we could possibly ask for, which teaches us that politicians are insufficient. The rampant inequality and suffering in our society cannot be addressed by voting this or that person into an office that will choke them, no matter how lucid they are on the campaign trail. There is only one way for the lot of the workers to improve, and irrevocable decisions need to be made in their interests. For actual social change to happen, New York needs advocates who eschew political parties, do not participate in elections, and instead directly communicate with the city’s millions of workers and encourage them to independently, self-sufficiently organize against the clique which hogs the fruits of their labor. The anti-ICE activity in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere shows the way forward. The DSA and Mamdani demonstrate a dead end. We are capable of much more.
