The pages of the Village Voice in the months after the Gingrich Revolution were full of alarm at the cruelty and extremism of the new congress, aware that the country was undergoing a monumental shift in its understanding of the purpose of government. Barrett’s articles focused on the racial politics behind the economics, from prison expansion to winnowing public hospitals. He raised an alarm on matters the country is grappling with now, a quarter century later. —Ed.
FOR TWO COLOR-BLIND GUYS, it’s uncanny how often the Republican mayor and governor keep hitting black and brown targets with their 9mm budget blasters. Elected with over 35 percent of the Latino vote, Rudy Giuliani would prefer no doubt to find a way to narrow still more the racial scope of his fiscal fire, but the interconnectedness of minority life in this town won’t permit it. The ethnic dimension of these punishing policies is only one of the plausibly deniable, yet nonetheless real, occurrences of a spring budget season in New York when nothing has bloomed but paradox.
Competing for months over who could take more shots at those cycling dependents riding out of the government bank with bags of Medicaid and welfare loot, Rudy and George {Pataki} pretended not to notice that the $800 million to $1.2 billion they were chasing was disproportionately going to minorities. In a last-ditch effort to get assembly Democrats to join this Medicaid/welfare assault, Rudy threatened to fire away at middle-class programs like libraries and the arts if he didn’t get what he wanted, but everyone seemed to know instinctively that his last white target was Mike Milken, two jobs and two campaigns ago. Sure enough, the mayor who constantly berates the Board of Ed for its worst-case-scenario menu of cuts dropped his “middle-class” contingency plan overnight and went back to the welfare well for tens of millions more in savage savings.
The new Rudy plan, just announced last Friday, also seeks another $100 million out of the blackest and brownest of targets, the Health and Hospitals Corporation. Even though the nurses’ aides collecting bedpans are camouflaged in white, it is the city’s most minority workforce, serving the city’s most minority patients, and ever since Rudy and George came to power, they and their cleaning and feeding cohorts in city hospitals have been sitting ducks for gunslingers at City Hall and in Albany. The same mayoral candidate who endlessly assailed the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation as the “only bookie” losing money (when it was in black hands) is so busy privatizing public health care he’s forgotten his pledge to get the city out of the patronage-producing (mostly white now) racehorse business.
Derided as if it were the city’s only “jobs program,” HHC has become the best example of the Giuliani administration’s “disaffirmative action” policies. In the mayor’s closely confined universe of all-white decision makers, it is just one more color-blind coincidence that police and fire are the city’s whitest agencies and that these jobs programs keep hiring.
Getting cops out from behind their desks so we can save money with cheaper civilians is such a no-no to the Tough Guy Mayor that all the editorial boards and auditors and observers who screamed for it last year aren’t even bothering to return to the still-true theme. Firefighters, too, have been hoisted on the untouchable “public safety” petard, so that even their attrited vacancies are slated for refilling, as if they, like cops, are part of the mayor’s elastic electoral mandate.
Also back on the butcher’s-block table in the mayor’s new wave of cuts, as well as singled out in one more discriminatory state appropriation formula, is the Board of Ed, whose per capita pupil expenditures are lower than Peekskill’s but still far too high for these partners in precision budgeting.
The kids at the turnstiles who may become the first in the nation to pay to travel to public school—perhaps more, with the MTA {Metropolitan Transit Authority} deficit, than the current transit fare of $2.50 a day—are disproportionately black and brown. (Lucky us, though, we have squads of quality-of-life cops ready to handcuff them if they try to jump the turnstile.) Art and music will vanish from public school classrooms; so will junior varsity sports. Referee Rudy will blow the whistle on the games that give so many kids a lift. He will not notice, of course, the color of the ninth-grade hand no longer going up with a jumpshot.
As a transparent distraction from the devastation of his school cuts, the mayor has also simultaneously launched a campaign to put the board’s sexually overactive security guards (minority) under the aegis of the only growing public or private enterprise in the city, the Billieboys at NYPD, who can be counted on to be white and to prefer a beer to a babe.
In all the tightfisted clamor about this proposal, the media has barely noticed that the outgoing school security chief, much quoted because he now favors the Rudy Remedy, has also quietly conceded that the main reason his unit failed is because he had only 60 supervisors for 3,000 guards. He said he begged for more but instead had to make a 20 percent cut as a result of last year’s Giuliani budget.
What happened to the Board of Ed’s legendary administrative bloat? Can it be that the only way to get enough supervision over this unarmed army in the schools is to annex it to 1 Police Plaza, where desk-job bloat is still beautiful? Could court officers and school crossing guards be next? What about those renegade Port Authority police or the Park Rangers? Is the Pentagon safe?
The City University is the blackest and brownest major public university system in America. The mayor who likes to tell us again and again how high our Medicaid and welfare benefits rank nationally—distorting the welfare figures when he does—never mentions that tuition at CUNY community colleges is higher than it is at 95 percent of similar institutions across the country.
While his and the state’s budget push community college tuition even higher, no one but City Comptroller Alan Hevesi mentions that it is already twice the national average. If picketed or questioned by angry or even pleading students, the-mayor-who-has-never-met-a-tax-on-wealth-he-didn’t-want-to-cut tells them sternly that paying more to get a college degree will be a good, reality-check lesson for them. Presumably, that’s what every injustice with a decided yet presumptively accidental racial edge is, at least in the Giuliani civic classroom.
The workforce reductions at the Human Resources Administration—the hardest-hit city agency—and the decimation of the Youth Services hit minorities harder than anyone else. The combined state and city blows at foster care, day care, and preventive care target the very households GOP rhetoric already maligns every day.
The extraordinary neighborhood-by-neighborhood analysis released weeks ago by Hevesi’s office specifies the exclusively minority communities that will lose tens of millions in economic activity as a result of these budgets, up to “about 20 per cent of their total neighborhood economies.” Yet George and Rudy rationalize every spending and tax cut they propose as an economic stimulus, oblivious to the reality that we are a city and state with two economies, and that the urban factory, for example, is now a hospital, and when you kill it, you kill a community.
As indifferent as he is to the collapse of Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods where health care is the largest employer, the new governor has no difficulty recognizing and refinancing the economic engine that drives many of the upstate communities that elected him. Though too short on cash to deliver much this year, Pataki manhandled the assembly into a secret, 10-year, sentencing-reform agreement that will, by the time he is seeking reelection, lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of more jail cells in counties where his votes are. A new or expanded prison to Oneida County is what a hospital is to the Bronx—a centripetal employer with a magnificent multiplier effect. He even wrote into the budget a requirement that the new drug treatment facilities required by the sentencing changes be built in his electoral heartland.
The wonder of Pataki’s economic stimulus package for upstate is that the bumper crop that feeds it are black and brown felons. The tighter the downstate crunch, shoving an increasingly desperate urban underclass toward crime, the bigger the upstate prison population explosion. Eighty-two percent white, the state’s 21,000 prison guards can be counted on to rush to the polls in 1998 to pull the lever for the policies that an assembly estimate indicates may produce $20 billion in new cells over the next two decades.
No one has any evidence that the tougher sentences for violent felons—the Citizens Budget Commission says the governor’s new sentences may double incarceration time for up to 30 percent of the population—will actually reduce crime. All we know is that it satisfies the hunger for punishment as surely as it shifts state resources regionally.
Combined with the Medicaid and welfare cuts, the coming prison boom, not expected to get fully underway for a couple of years, will accelerate the redistribution of state resources away from the city and to the already blessed upstate bastions of the supposedly antigovernment GOP. It follows and no doubt will repeat the “success” of the largest prison expansion in any state ever, pushed by Mario Cuomo and the Republican senate in the ’80s. Why is it that some Wars on Poverty, no matter how often they fail, can be tried again and again, with even bigger bucks?
There is, as well, no limit to the money even a broke governor can find to repave and rebuild upstate highways and bridges, even while he calls a halt to bonds for transit projects in the city and joins the mayor in an assault on the MTA budget that will undercut maintenance in a system already on a deadly collision course.
Pataki has even turned the racial legacy of his party’s last elected predecessor, Nelson Rockefeller, into a cynical joke, making the Urban Development Corporation the prime funder for suburban pools and upstate stadiums. Created in 1968, with Rocky twisting arms long distance while marching in Martin Luther King’s Atlanta funeral, UDC was supposed to be the single greatest force for housing and community integration in the country. Instead, the new gang in Albany plunders it for bond-financed booty, much of it targeted for the well-off. That they have to turn to UDC to pay for these projects is a paradox—launched at a time of such terrible cutback—because there will be no money in the 1996 state till for them once the first-year tax cut for the rich goes into effect.
What’s most astounding, after this roll call of discriminatory state and city choices, is that the mayor and governor can declare, with straight and even scolding faces, that their actions will have no or little effect. Rudy denounces as “doomsayers” those who merely want to hold him accountable for what he is doing to the scapegoated. He will not let truth enter the cocoon. He attacks the critics who suggest other ways to salvage the budget. He cozies up to the unions that may help reelect him, not adding a dollar to their expected budgetary contribution. He pretends he has an ideology when all he has is a scorecard. His fake friend Pataki screws up that pained country-boy grin and pats himself on the tax cut–death penalty back.
Neither of them may actually know a poor person. Neither has seen the sun go down in Brownsville, where all that was hopeful is dying. There are faces in this city that cannot be seen from where these men sit. But they know a bully when they see one. They know liars too. And Rudy is right about one thing: They do not need a CUNY degree to know when someone is coming after them.
Research assistance by Dierdre Guthrie, E. Assata Wright, Sheila Maldonado