The Mayor and the U.N.

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The New York Sun

Mayor Bloomberg is maneuvering behind the scenes to get a deal through the Legislature that would involve the taxpayers allocating debt and land and assuming risk so that the United Nations, which many New Yorkers see as a nest of champagne-swilling, caviar-slurping spies, anti-Semites, and scofflaws, can expand its base in our city. That may sound harsh, and we recognize that there are many decent idealists in the world body. But all to often it lives up to its stereotype.


The mayor is plunging ahead, despite a forceful decision by the Senate majority leader, Jos. Bruno, not to bring the United Nations deal to the Senate floor in the special session and early signals from a number of New York legislators that, in the midst of a state budget crisis, they don’t see this as a priority. He is ignoring even stronger statements from a number of legislators, like State Senators Golden, Marchi, Padavan, and Maltese and Assemblyman Hikind, who are standing on principle. Given what New Yorkers have gone through since September 10, it strikes us that the mayor is setting off on a trajectory that could cost him dearly in his campaign for a second term.


A matter, we don’t mind saying, which we find dismaying. It has seemed to us that the mayor has been mellowing in an attractive way of late. We date this from the defeat of his scheme to outlaw political parties from using the primary system to select their candidates. That was a case in which he plunged ahead despite all kinds of warnings that the people weren’t with him. The fact is that even before September 11, huge numbers of New Yorkers had begun asking themselves why they had to suffer the presence of the United Nations in New York. Since then, as America began to fight back, the U.N. has all too rarely been with us and all too often against us. It has also come under a devastating investigation for the corruption of its oil-for-food program, which became a method of propping up Saddam Hussein and enriching his corrupt cronies.


The mayor’s aides are ignoring all of these types of concerns and putting it out that the United Nations is a big economic contributor to the city. The president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, Andrew Alper, who is part of the scheme to get this real estate deal past the Legislature, told our Dina Temple-Raston that he sees his job as “to make sure the legislature understands the economic importance of the United Nations. I don’t want to get involved with the geopolitics of it. But I just want to make sure they understand the economic impact.” He predicts the impasse in Albany will get broken and says “it is hard to imagine New York City without the United Nations.” But one doesn’t have to listen to many real estate developers to learn that there is another side of the coin – namely that whatever economic impact the United Nations represents to the city could be increased many times over if development of the site were left to the free market.


It looks to us like New York may have the opportunity to get rid of the United Nations once and for all. Let it go somewhere else – France or, as Mr. Hikind put it the other day, Mozambique – while our national leaders work on building a new in situation of democratic countries. That is a project on which conservatives as well as liberals, such as Secretary Albright, ought to be able to agree. But if the mayor wants to spend his political capital on behalf of the United Nations and its so-called benefits to New York, let him have it out in the open – and find a way to put the matter on the ballot, where the best view could be had of whether New Yorkers really see all the benefits to the city that the mayor claims.


Fernando Ferrer, a Democrat who wants Mr. Bloomberg’s job, told us of the United Nations, “they don’t need our money.” When Mr. Ferrer starts getting to the right of Mr. Bloomberg on an issue, it’s usually a pretty good indicator that it is time for Mr. Bloomberg to recalibrate. In his fine remarks at the Republican National Convention, the mayor thanked President Bush “for leading the global war on terrorism.” The United Nations has been out of that war. It has even, as in the oil-for-food scandal, been funding America’s enemies. Our enemies in the war – including the terror-sponsoring and harboring nations of Syria and Iran – sit as full members in the United Nations. Now the United Nations wants the backing of $600 million in bonds issued by a state-controlled authority, and it wants to take scarce Manhattan parkland to use as office space for U.N. apparatchiks. Mr. Bloomberg selects nearly half the appointees on that state authority; one of them is his sister. It’s a chance for the mayor to show some leadership of his own in the global war on terrorism.


The New York Sun

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