New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) – New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is waiting on $9 billion in coronavirus relief funds before he will restore essential services to the city because he says COVID-19 caused that hole in the budget – a decision Fox Business Network host Dagen McDowell called “a steaming pile of horse manure.”
“Mornings with Maria Bartiromo” host Maria Bartiromo noted on Friday that the CEOs of more than 160 companies from all five New York City boroughs – including Con Edison, Etsy, MasterCard, Morgan Stanley, the Related Companies, Sotheby’s, WeWork and the WNBA – wrote a letter to the mayor, asking him to create a workable plan to restore essential services to the city so that their employees can return to work.
“There is widespread anxiety over public safety, cleanliness and other quality of life issues that are contributing to deteriorating conditions in commercial districts and neighborhoods across the five boroughs,” they wrote on Thursday.
“We urge you to take immediate action to restore essential services as a necessary precursor for solving the city’s longer-term, complex, economic challenges,” they added.
Bartiromo noted that the mayor won’t restore essential services until he gets billions of dollars in COVID-19 aid to plug the hole in the budget caused by the pandemic.
“We know that’s a steaming pile of horse manure, because this is a lack of law enforcement. That is one of the biggest issues. The Manhattan district attorney for about four and a half years has not prosecuted quality-of-life crimes, and so what you have is … people who are in the streets, they are not prosecuted. They are not even issued tickets for creating what is essentially an open sewer in New York City,” McDowell said.
“You had in kind of a knee-jerk reaction the NYPD disbanded the plain-clothes units that for many years had gotten illegal guns off the street and had also targeted violent crime. Well guess what? Arrests for gun play are down 13% but shootings just over Labor Day weekend were up 50%,” she said.
“To all these CEO’s, this is a lot of talk. What about the walk? What are they going to do? Because the mayor and the DA in Manhattan and the governor most assuredly will do nothing in regard to this letter. So what are they going to do to fix New York City? Are they going to take those jobs and move them somewhere else? Because quite frankly, if you’re asking the employees to come back to New York City and work here, that is unfair,” McDowell said.
“They deserve to live in places where they’re not stepping over human excrement in the street, and by the way, I’ve been talking about all week. I’m just gonna say it. It’s almost 6:30, don’t care. I went to CVS on Saturday morning, and there was human excrement smeared all over the entrance to the drug store, and I asked the police officers, ‘Did you arrest the guy? Did you give the guy a ticket?’ They’re like, ‘Nope. What are we going to do? Even all those looters we arrested earlier this year, they were right back out on the street to rob again.’ That’s the environment we live in,” she said.
“Putting the disgust aside” in terms of what McDowell described, Bartiromo said the safety issue is the most important issue for families and men and women everywhere.
“You don’t want to come back to a city where you feel afraid to put your key in the door, afraid to get into a car that someone is going to hold you up, but you’re seeing crime skyrocket. So number one, first issue, he needs to be focused on is security,” Bartiromo said.
James Freeman, assistant editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal, agreed with Bartiromo, saying, “The mayor has tolerated a lot of lawlessness, especially this summer, and that’s why you’ve seen recently bidding wars for houses in the suburbs in the New York area, because you have a lot of people who are just not comfortable being in the greatest city in the world anymore, and you hope that it doesn’t have to get as bad as it was in the pre-Giuliani days in terms of crime, lawlessness for the political leadership to get the message, but this letter from the CEO’s is another effort to say, you know people want the excrement-free CVS, and they want to be safe when they walk down the street.”
McDowell noted that quality-of-life offenses like people relieving themselves in public” are all part of the same thing.
She said the district attorney stepped away from prosecuting these types of crimes years ago.
“That sends a message to people that, oh, it doesn’t matter. We don’t really care about what the streets are like. We don’t care that they are covered in filth. We’re not really going to stand up for law enforcement. It’s all part of the same problem, and it’s the downward spiral I talked about for years here, and this is where we are,” McDowell said.
Twice this morning while trying to walk her dogs, McDowell had to run into her building in New York City twice, she said, “because there were people in the street who were out of their minds and dangerous, and so that’s where we are, and there’s nobody to protect people who can’t defend themselves.”
Bartiromo said the issue is not just confined to New York City.
“The New York situation is personal for all of us. We live there. We work there, but look at San Francisco. Look at Los Angeles. Look at Chicago, same issues, all of the cities. You’ve got to point to policy, because it’s all the Democrat-run cities that are crumbling right now,” she said.
Dagen suggested that the CEO’s who wrote to the mayor should move their employees to another city like “Nashville or Raleigh, North Carolina or Charlotte or somewhere in Texas.”
“Nashville is already getting crowded from all the New York refugees,” Freeman noted.
“Yeah, look, we are seeing a flight, by the way, we are seeing it happen right now,” Bartiromo said.
