New York: The Liberals' Vietnam

...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...

...The right moral posture became the wrong governmental position...

...While many from my postNew Deal generation may reject the 1 i b era 1 la be 1 -preferring “p rogres - sive”-they would plead guilty to a bias in favor of the less fortunate, an emphasis on what remains to be done, a commitment to seek change...

...But many of its wounds were ideologically self-inflicted...

...Echoing Robert McNamara a decade before, Mayor Beame declared in late 1977 hk saw “light at the end of the tunnel...

...It was assumed that the nation’s taxpayers would pay more in taxes but city taxpayers wouldn’t...

...In partnership with private enterprise in the sixties, President Johnson initiated the National Alliance of Businessmen to attract jobs for the hard-core unemployed...

...They will probably lack the ammunition to sell Washington and the r&t of the country the need for further assistance...

...They are not positive...

...But building factories that employ New Yorkers in the creation of material goods that can be sold to other people...

...If “politics” is the melody of the fiscal crisis, liberalism is the chorus...

...In their 1977 mayoral campaign, liberal candidates Bella Abzug and Herman Badillo urged a public takeover of Con Edison, the giant utility...

...Taking negativists to task-“nattering nabobs of negativism...

...It didn’t matter...

...Governor Ca,ky and the municipal unions stated similar views about “the progress” made...

...So when Jimmy Carter visits the South Bronx and offers a money cure, the city leaps to accept, forgetting that tne amount of money Carter offered is inadequate to the task, that there are still viable neighborhoods that could better use limited resources...

...The status quo...

...The welfare state was invented in this state...

...Similar voices opposed advances in civil rights and women’s rights, the antiwar struggle, tax reform, antitrust, consumerism...

...For stopping the blight of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, the liberal answer, again declared with absolute certainty, is more jobs, more housing, more government, more money, more inputs...

...and whether it worked...

...More important is what the city must do tor itself...

...I’m gonna lead a national policy, a national urban coalition...

...Long before FDR or the New Deal, we learned a different lesson from the one taught by our skeptical, a r i s t o c r a t i c Founding F a t h e r s : government could be a friend, an ally, an agent for social reform...

...After the blackout rioting and looting of 1977, there were loud demands for the federal government to do something...

...Democracy failed in New York...

...Government is too big...

...We worried about rip-offs, the rich soaking the poor, the inequality of wealth...

...If Ntw York accepted the excuse t h a t i t was solely a victim of outside forces, there would be little impetus to alter past habits...

...Ellen Willis, in Rolling Stone, described the municipal unions-whose pension funds make them the city’s primary bankers -as “ p o we r les s . ” Be f o re union leaders consented to withdraw a few of their fringe benefits in 1975, writer Nat Hentoff condemned Councilman Robert F. Wagner, Jr., as “anti-labor” for suggesting such blasphemy...

...When the budget was u n b a l a n c e d , we obeyed Mayor Wagner’s dictum-‘‘I do not propose to permit our fiscal problems to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city”-and borrowed or tricked the budget...

...Or fewer teachers’ prep p e r i o d s , sick days, paid sabbaticals...

...Liberalism’s appeal has always rested on a big heart...

...This article is udupted from his book, The Streets Were Paved With Gold, to be published bji Random House...

...They sprang as well from a genuine sense of compassion, a desire to help people...

...liberal politics dominated sound economics...

...The New York crisis teaches the limitations of what government can do...

...But when public expectations I rose and the economy began to decline in the late 1960s, that strength of conscience became a vice...

...New York was not compelled to create a vast municipal hospital or the City University system, to continue free tuition, institute open enrollment, ignore budget limitations, Ken Auletta is a NeM, York Miriter...

...Led by Governors AI Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, and Herbert Lehman, New York pioneered social legislation to help poor people...

...Liberals could both do good and feel good, could keep their moral edge...

...Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not about to fall for it...

...What if citizens, who pay the freight, demanded performance standards for city employees...

...Bella’s belief was central to the liberal faith...

...Neglect of our cities is a new form of racism...

...Bella Abzug is what we need...

...When Bella complained about the poor education system, she was not wondering what taxpayers get for the $2,600 the Board of Education spent on each child...

...Those who, loosely, subscribed to the liberal label, refused to recognize that there were now limits to what the city could spend, borrow or tax...

...I want to warn you, my friends, that when people turn their back on our family, your heritage...

...to learn from, rather than embrace, past mistakes...

...critics of union contracts were dismissed as “antilabor...

...Not only did New York liberalism believe too little in profits, they believed too much in money...

...Fewer layoffs would have been necessary if all workers volunteered to forgo some of their bloated fringe benefits...

...Rather than questioning which candidate was the most realistic or what policy would work, we often asked who or what was most liberal...

...In 1968, their first full year, they created but 100,000 jobs in the entire nation...

...impose the steepest taxes in the nation, borrow beyond its means, subsidize middle-income housing, continue rigid rent c o n t r o l , rewaid municipal workers with lush pensions, pay, and fringe benefits, graduate kids who couldn’t read, pay too much attention to “issues” and too little to management and the delivery of services...

...Leave them alone and they’ll recover...

...by hiring more cops rather than getting those on the force out from behind their desks or inducing sergeants to sacrifice any of their 46 vacation and chart days off...

...New York has been the laboratory for social innovation in this country,” observes urban historian Richard Wade, a City University professor...

...This may be the real danger-not that liberalism will be discredited but that government will be...

...New York would get it from a “Marshall Plan for cities,” from “reordering national priorities,” from a new president, from new spending by Washington...

...The ‘less government’ theme is just a code word for neglect, a code word for ignoring our cities...

...Goaded by liberalism’s compassion and ideological commitment to the redistribution of wealth, New York officials helped redistribute much of the tax base and thousands of jobs out of New York...

...I think it’s fair to say,” economist John Kenneth Galbraith told a New York Times symposium in July 1975, “that no problem associated with New York City could not be solved by providing more money...

...Billions for national welfare reform or health insurance would, somehow, be free...

...Teachers’ union president Albert Shanker endorsed Beame, declaring he was “best equipped to continue to lead the city out of its fiscal crisis and toward economic and social health...

...When private jobs began to disappear, it expanded the public payroll...

...The money and the programs are there in Washington,” boomed Arnold Weiss, former chairman of the liberal New Democratic Coalition, introducing Bella...

...Much of what we have to get is from the outside,” she declared...

...Yet most liberals were silent...

...To comfort black and Hispanic immigrants from the South, it offered the most generous welfare benefits in the nation, encouraging more immigration...

...Over the last 20 years or so, New York often has thought with its heart...

...For while the old liberal litmus test issues-Vietnam, McCarthyism, domestic spying, unionism, dump LBJ, McGovern vs...

...those who spoke of incentives for private enterprise worried lest they be labeled “pro-business...

...They will lack the drive, and pressure, to reform the management of the governing bureaucracy...

...During periods of growth and expansion, these choices were easier to avoid...

...There are some people today who are running against Washington...

...This preoccupation with money leads, as the social scientists would put it, to a preoccupation with “inputs” rather than “outputs...

...a not particularly well-disguised %tack on democracy itself...

...Because Bella’s the one person who can break those doors open...

...Profits were somehow wicked...

...Despite the evidence to the contrary, the left continues to treat most labor unions as if they remain the cutting edge of reform, a beleaguered rather than sometimes privileged class...

...In a sense, Bella wasn’t really running for mayor...

...Our true sin, in the eyes of P h i l i s t i n e s k i n f l i n t s and neoconservative ideologues,” writes lrving Howe, editor of Dissent magazine, “has been the decency-if not sufficient, still impressive-with which New York has treated its poor...

...Ignored in this tumult of liberal and left posturing is a glaring fact: 23 per cent of each citizen’s Con Ed bill is a1read.y earmarked to pay city and state taxes...

...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...

...By opposing more local “sacrifices,” the chances of bankruptcy grow, as do the odds that the Huns will step in and demand the wrong kinds of cuts or much deeper slashes in worker pay and benefits...

...Who would pay the wages of the transit workers...

...to stress what’s already been accomplished, rather than what remains to be done...

...bad guys, liberals vs...

...But many liberals try to have it both ways: claiming they believe in private enterprise-yet condemning business profits...

...we’re gonna have creative managers, we’re gonna have manager-managers...

...Whether money is spent becomes more important than how it is spent...

...Larkin, like other liberals, now knew that HEW’S budget dwarfed the Defense Department’s...

...In their book, The Abuse of’ Pocc!er, Jack Newfield and Paul Dubrul summoned the city to sock Con Ed with higher taxes...

...But the thrust of my argument is practical, not ideological...

...Mayor LaGuardia’s truism, “There is no Republican or Democratic way to clean streets,” was ignored...

...Candidates who talked about “the causes of crime” were good guys, even if they ignored the eflects of crime...

...Humphrey was getting into the old rhythm, cranking up the old-time religion, whacking the podium first with his right hand, then with his left...

...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...

...Though labor allies say it represents a return to the sweatshop, the Koch administration did say taxpayers potentially could receive 20 million extra hours of service if all city employees worked a 40-hour week, as most other Americans do...

...When labor unions asked for more than the city could afford, they were viewed not as another special interest but as the underdogs of another era...

...There was wild cheering...

...Righteousness infused our politics...

...Early in the 1976 presidential campaign, Hubert Humphrey, the knight-errant of American liberalism, tore into critics of big government while attending a dinner at the Americana: “Ronald Reagan is setting the rules for this campaign...

...Spending money was assumed to equal the delivery of service...

...Less is good...

...If you’ve ever covered or attended a national Republican convention, perhaps you know what I’m trying to say...

...The liberal compact would break down as growing numbers of New Yorkers join other Americans in viewing not just libCralism, but government, as the enemy...

...Yet most liberals were silent...

...The city would fail to confront cold reality or make tough choices...

...The peeling paint and wall posters of past l i b e r a l glories-McGovern For President, Kretchmer For Mayor, Abrams For Attorney General-were an appropriate backdrop for Bella’s old-time religion mayoral campaign...

...As was true for America in Vietnam, in New York liberalism has been identified with the wrong side...

...If that happens, the nation’s foremost liberal city will flash to the rest of the country a message liberals want to avoid: liberalism doesn’t work...

...1 must confess, I’ve been wrong...

...Inspired by a New Yorker, FDR, the federal government helped put people back to work and saved the country f r o m the c h a o s of u n f e t t e r e d capitalism...

...The assault on the welfare state is an assault on the poor, the deprived, the blacks, the Puerto Ricans...

...In truth, New York will not be able to dig itself out of its hole without additional federal help, particularly restructuring its growing debt burden...

...Even when government tax or training subsidies are a v a i l a b l e , whitedominated business is not adept at dealing with the minority-dominated unemployed...

...Like Lindsay, she was campaigning for something else: a “ n a t i o n a l urban p o l i c y . ” The unglamorous task of governing more t h a n 60 agencies, policing the expenditure of almost $14 billion, balancing budgets, economic development, fighting for productivity improvements and changes in union work rules...

...That is the voice of a comfortable inan...

...And since the absence of money was defined as the cause, it logically followed that more money would be the cure...

...Essentially nonideological local questions-how to balance the budget, provide services, retain and attract jobs, educate kids, control crime-were transformed into moral questions...

...Therefore, if vast new federal assistance is not forthcoming, if f e d e r a l l o a n s are not renewed indefinitely, if the banks don’t open their vaults-if the city continues to avoid radically restructuring its budget and s e r v i c e delivery systembankruptcy is almost inevitable...

...Why Bella...

...you will lose, and deservedly so...

...These decisions were not just to win votes-although there certainly was a good deal of that...

...No doubt, many conservatives use the New York example as a weapon to bludgeon liberalism-a central thrust of William Simon’s book, A Time for Truth...

...Such passionate politics leads, inevitably, toa Manichaean view of the world-good guys vs...

...The solution, Dai/v News columnist Pete Hamill briskly declared, was to “ask Congress for immediate authorization to create 200,000 goods-producing jobs to be located in New York...

...Money was free...

...The challenge to progressives-both nationally 2nd locally-is to think a little more clearly...

...New York state’s liberal Medicaid law was “good” because it promised money and “free medicine,” though, as some warned, it led to inflated medical costs and outrageous abuses...

...The Risk of Bankruptcy Rather than accept blame for at least part of what happened to New York, the liberals too often portray the city as a victim of a giant right-wing conspiracy...

...But liberals’ very humanity led t o a n overheated conscience, to demands for instant solutions...

...as local and state taxes climbed, people were free to move--or go out of business...

...As the child of a working-class home, 1 know that while liberals may be bleeding hearts, at least they bleed...

...Not make-work jobs, shoveling sidewalks or cutting grass...

...Others warn that change must come gradually and not be disruptive...

...1 am not ashamed to tell you I am a New Dealer,” he proclaimed...

...Suffused with a commitment to help people when the federal or state government wouldn’t, the city tried to do’the job alone...

...Battlin’ Bella Bella Abzug had not, as her visit to the VID Club demonstrated...

...Ironically, by railing against “racism” and villainous outsiders, those on the left often behave like “conservatives...

...In his book, The Limits of Legitimacy, Alan Wolfe suggests, “The attack on government activity has become...

...New York: The Liberals' Vietnam by Ken Auletta New York City’s fiscal crisis is 1 i be ralis m ’s Vietnam . Li be ra 1s ’ traditional firepower-more money, more programs, more taxes, more borrowing-didn’t work here, just as more troops, more bombs, more i n t e r d i c t i o n , m o r e p a c i f i c a t i o n programs didn’t work there...

...1979 by Ken Aulerta...

...The emphasis was on the “outrage” rather than whether the city could afford it...

...It’s important to the union that parents not think otherwise...

...Wagner wanted to do what he thought was right, sealing his eyes to the many jobs that would shift to other states with no such laws,just as the Lindsay administration, also with widespread support, didn’t believe Wall Street firms would flee to New Jersey when the stock transfer tax was imposed...

...Until the courts blocked him, Mayor Wagner, with widespread support, ignored the nation’s policies and unilaterally tried to raise the city’s minimum wage to $1.50 an hour...

...To dismiss policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, park employees, and teachers is not an alternative when the greatest need of a city is for more police protection, more fire protection, better recreation and competent ed uca t i o n, ” Gal b ra i t h exhorted Times op ed page readers in 1977...

...Businesses came to be viewed as a source of taxes, not jobs...

...In the spring of 1978, the city’s labor unions demanded raises, though the city faced a huge four-year deficit and was asking Congress for a federal bailout...

...I used to say, ‘Get it from the Defense Department,”’ Jean Larkin, an early foe of the Vietnam war and a supporter of businessman Joel Harnett for mayor, told an audience of the reform-oriented Village Independent Democratic Club (VID) in 1977...

...Unlike many cities and states, New York discouraged tax and other incentives for private enterprise...

...The army can do that work...

...As the West incubated an individualistic frontier spirit, New York incubated social idealism...

...This is a free country...

...not whether New York often tried to do the right thing, but whether, alone, it could afford to...

...When more revenues were needed to pay for mushrooming costs, the city assumed it was the obligation of the wealthy to pay and hiked business and personal income taxes...

...This is six times greater than D e t r o i t ’ s t a x r a t e , five times P h i l a d e l p h i a ’ s , four times Los Angeles...

...to favor the status quo...

...If it’s not New York’s fault, how can it be our responsibility...

...Enter Bella, sliding a cape from her shoulders, adjusting her hat, letting loose on “the issues”-her issues...

...in a word, hope...

...Perhaps New York’s experience will finally rob liberalism of its innocence...

...People who talked about balanced budgets were “fiscal conservatives...

...When mayoral candidate Bella Abzug strayed and tentatively questioned generous municipal pension benefits, Geoffrey Stokes wrote in the Village Voice that she was “union-baiting...

...But I’m gonna fight for this city...

...And as that miserable war should have instructed military adventurists on the limits of American power, New York’s fiscal war, unavoidably, teaches the limits of government intervention...

...conservatives...

...The government can do that in partnership with private enterprise . ” Just like that-presto!-200,000 jobs...

...The assumption, commonly shared, was that better services come from more money, not b e t t e r management...

...Nixon-have receded, what tends to separate those on the left (loosely defined) from those on the right (also loosely defined) is a commitment to use government as an eflective tool to help people...

...Labor leaders and the prevailing wisdom in the city held that it would be “an outrage”if raises were not granted...

...When the transit fare was raised in 1975, a city hall rally attended by a cross-section of political and labor leaders urged citizens to resist...

...We learned to identify with the underdog...

...All of t h i s h a s an Alice-inWonderland quality to it...

...What was of interest...

...Raising rents to cover inflationary costs is also a giveaway...

...She had become a realist...

...The Depression taught Americans the limitations of unfettered free enterprise and the more important role government could play in solving social problems...

...Although Bella was speaking on Manhattan’s West Fourth Street, her mind was in Washington...

...More programs, more money, the hidden pot of gold in Washington...

...All this recent right-wing talk about austerity and fiscal responsibility and management and productivity and what the city must do for itself--these were not her issues...

...It was easy to attack George Meany’s blatherings abotlt communism or the war in Vietnam, but when it comes to many local issues, people genuinely committed t o reform a d o p t a conservative pose...

...The domino theory did work in New York...

...They come to protect their programs, their traditions, their I record...

...Open enrollment at the City University was instituted to achieve a more egalitarian society, with scant attention paid to cost or academic standards...

...When landlords urge a fuel bill to pass on increased fuel costs to tenants, City Council members, galvanized by a bleacherful of critics, blast it as a giveaway...

...The proposition that the rich should pay more doesn’t work unless it’s uniform national policy...

...the union admonished, “But what the public doesn’t see or hear is the enormous success [emphasis in original] story of the New York City public schools...

...God, what if they demanded a better education for the $2,600 spent annually per pupil...

...The city was the victim of federal policies, of historical and migratory patterns beyond its control, of local and state decisions whose origins were political, not ideological, of the breakdown of checks and balances...

...All great discoveries,” C. H. Parkhurst once said, “are made by men whose feelings ran ahead of their thinking...

...The same people who favor strengthened consumer protection and oppose monopolies blindly support municipal labor monopolies against growing consumer demands to get what they pay for...

...By this logic, the two thirds of California voters who supported reduced property taxes in 1978 were not just anti-poor but antidemocratic...

...Wagner, Lindsay, Beame, and Rockefeller got away with their budget and borrowing tricks partly because they were trying to do the “right thing...

...The Mayor is the only c a n d i d a t e a b l e t o m a i n t a i n a relationship with public employees,” s a i d Barry F e i n s t e i n , head of Teamsters Local 237 and Treasurer of the Municipal Labor Committee...

...of their faith in compassion, their desire to right wrongs-immediately...

...These are the people who tend to agree with neo-conservative cynics like Irving Kristol, who urges what he calls “benign neglect” for cities: “The cities are bottoming out...

...There’s no way to restore the city to solvency without encouraging the private sector to create jobs...

...It’s not easy to induce profit-making institutions to make socially desirable decisions...

...She lugged a copy of the new city budget-but only to point out those programs she helped navigate through Congress...

...The assault on the city is an assault on maintaining, let alone extending, the welfare state...

...An ideological view of the fiscal crisis-either from the right, whichjust blames the left, or from the left, which blames Washington or capitalismbroadens the risk of bankruptcy...

...boring...

...Humphrey’s enthusiasm was always infectious, but this time he reached his audience because he reminded them of their faith in money and programs...

...As long as liberals and many New Yorkers assume that the answer to the $ I-billion budget deficit lies in Washington or bank vaults, they will lack the political will to balance their budget, as other local governments must...

...Instead, she wondered why we didn’t spend more...

...Here, labels do matter...

...The ultimate problem is money-or rather, the problem of not enough money,” intoned John Lindsay’s 1969 book, The City...

...Yes, landlords can be predators...

...Syrhbblizing their status quo approach, most of the municipal uniqns endorsed Beame’s reelection bia...

...She would seek this club’s endorsement by spouting the same message she had for years...

...When businesses moved, many liberals charged they were “immoral...

...New York leaders often acted as if the city were a nation unto itself, its walls sealed...

...limits to providing more...

...It isn’t...

...Consequences were less important than speaking out, than takinga “mora1”position...

...That is what the liberal tradition is-and partly what it should be...

...Who would subsidize the deficit-ridden Transit Authority...

...The United Federation of Teachers, in 1977, displayed full-page newspaper ads headlined NEW YORK CITY’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THE UNTOLD STORY...

...People who take “moral” positions don’t like to make unpleasant choices...