How the Working Families party is coming to power.
John Fund
National Review Online
1/15/2014
…Mayor de Blasio isn’t going to have to negotiate with Working Families, because he is in large part their creation. He helped found the party, used the discounted services of their grassroots organizers to win election to the city council in 2001, and then won the citywide office of public advocate with their backing in 2009. Their agenda might as well be his: a new city-wide “living” minimum wage, tax hikes on upper-income New Yorkers, requirements that developers build “affordable” housing units on a massive scale in exchange for building permits, tougher rent controls, retroactive wage hikes for public employees, and severe curbs on the growth of non-union charter schools.
“None of this should surprise anyone,” Steve Malanga, an urban-affairs expert for the Manhattan Institute, says of the party’s policies. Working Families, he points out, was founded in 1998 by hard-core union activists, from the Communications Workers of America, the United Federation of Teachers, and the New York chapter of the ACORN “community organizing” group.
New York political operative Bertha Lewis was the head of national ACORN when its employees were convicted of voter-registration fraud during the 2008 presidential campaign. She presided over its collapse in 2009 after a series of undercover tapes showed its employees in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., giving advice on how to hide prostitution activities and cheat the tax system.
But now, thanks to de Blasio’s victory, she’s back in the saddle…
Read the complete article at National Review Online.
H/T Richard C. Young
