Socialist mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio told students at Santa Clara University that income inequality has gotten so bad in America that its effects could usher in a second Great Depression.
America, according to de Blasio, has taken “the formula for success and threw it away.” As part of a nationwide speaking tour he told an auditorium filled with students, professors and university administrators:
You think about the history of this country you think about the greatest economic crisis and the years leading right up to it, the lust for wealth was out of control. There were no set boundaries or ground rules to stop us from veering into dangerous path going over the cliff. This year we once again have the level of income inequality we had in 1929. Now, this year, we have for the first time … the average American has literally been going backward.
Last year De Blasio lost total respect from his own police department when it became public that he had warned his bi-racial son to beware of NYC police because they are racists. Moreover, Breitbart News reported in December police officers staged a silent protest by turning their backs on de Blasio as he arrived for a press conference at Woodhull Hospital, where two New York Police Department officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, were brought after being assassinated in an act of revenge for alleged police brutality elsewhere.
The big government advocate slammed his own city saying that it is a bastion of highly exclusive and prohibitedly expensive apartments where rents go for $500,000 per month, while 46% of the population lives at or near the poverty line. “This is a city that could turn into a gilded city, a gated community,” de Blasio said. “But we don’t work as a gated community or a society with exclusion. What has made New York City so great was that it was open to everyone.”
The Contra Costa Times reported that de Blasio does not consider his nationwide tour a platform to advance his political aspirations, but instead he likened himself to former Mayor Fiorello La Guardia who helped launch the United States Conference of Mayors onto a national platform during the Great Depression. He maintained that his only political ambition is to run for re-election as mayor.