Incoming New York City Mayor Eric Adams Already Showing Off His Authoritarian Bent

 Eric Adams, who isn't actually the mayor until January 1st, 2022, is already barking at city lawmakers like a tinhorn dictator. 

Mayor-To-Be Adams announced a cancellation of the putative policy of his predecessor and current mayor, Bill "Big Talk" de Blasio to eliminate solitary confinement on the huge city jail complex on Rikers Island, itself just part of the vast city jail gulag spread over all fie boroughs and including a floating jail barge in one of the city's rivers. (A policy only partially implemented.)

In response, 29 members of the City Council, the elected 51-member legislative body of NYC, wrote a civil letter objecting to this, which they also released to the media.

In reaction to this, Adams burst forth in a public verbal tongue lashing of the letter writers, calling them "disruptive," asserting they had NO RIGHT to weigh in on the issue of solitary since none of them were police, as he had been, and vowing to ignore them. He was especially missed that they had released their letter to the media. In the letter, they cited expert and official opinion as to how solitary confinement can constitute torture.

Thus did Adams, a man with a very inflated sense of self-regard, deemed the council members who objected to his diktat as worthless people to be ignored.

Adams, an arrogant man with a grotesquely swollen ego, is a former NYPD police captain, a high rank. (NYPD is the gang sign for the New York City police department.) Adams ran on a "law and order" platform (i.e. promises of increased repression) during his campaign. (His Republican opponent, the egotistical career vigilante and reactionary radio "personality" Curtis Sliwa, did the same- some choice for voters! Appropriately, Sliwa whole-heartedly congratulated Adams on his election victory and eagerly pledged support to him.) Among other things, Adams specifically promised to reinstitute so-called "anti-crime" units, notorious plainclothes police cells that committed sufficient atrocities, including the murder of a harmless, unarmed immigrant, Amadou Diallo, who was slaughtered in a hail of 41 bullets by four of these hunters of human prey while standing on his own doorstep, which resulted in the abolishment of these units (though not of plainclothes police work per se). 

The fact that Adams couldn't restrain himself from contemptuously degrading the city council before he is even mayor is an ominous portent for the future.

"NOBODY can criticize ME!"

A note on solitary confinement in the U.S.: the UN deems imprisoning a person in solitary for more than 15 days to be torture. In the U.S., it is routine to subject people to such imprisonment- including people who haven't been convicted of crimes but are awaiting trial in jail, such as at Rikers- for months, years, even decades. Political prisoners such as members of the Black Panther Party have been imprisoned for up to 40 years in solitary, as happened in Louisiana. And of course the U.S. imprisons more people as a proportion of its population than any nation on earth. (Only China, with four times the population, imprisons more, counting the million Uyghurs China has locked up in slave labor-brainwashing prison camps.) With 4.5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of the world's incarcerated people.  Medical care in U.S. prisons is abysmal, beating and murders by guards are rampant, the food is unhealthy. Communications between lawyers and inmates are routinely and illegally surveilled. 

The United States is a savagely repressive nation. In the greatest feat of propaganda gaslighting in history, the U.S. has brainwashed literally billions of people around the world into believing the U.S. is a "free" country, indeed the "freest" country ever, a beacon of human rights. 

Nothing, nothing, could be further from the truth.

The tragic fact is that from its (waning) position of world domination, unparalleled in world history, the U.S. COULD HAVE BEEN a force for good, for the advancement of democracy, human rights, and freedom, like it only PRETENDS to be.

Talk about a squandered opportunity in the history of homo sapiens.

Eric Adams trying out for the part of African-American strongman.