NYC Con Edison customers protest rate hikes, call on state leaders to intervene
Demonstrators say the proposed rate hikes would devastate working-class New Yorkers. They are urging state leaders to stop the rate hikes and invest in a publicly driven energy system that lowers costs, meets climate goals, improves air quality, and creates green union jobs.
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The utility company's proposed hikes include 11.4% for electricity and 13.3% for natural gas. Gustavo Gordillo is a Con Ed customer who says a rate increase would hit him hard.
'It's going to affect me because I can't afford to pay more,' he said. 'I'm a regular working-class New Yorker. I came [to the rally] after my job. I work hard for my money, and I don't want to be giving more of it.'
Demonstrators held signs and chanted, saying the increases would stretch their finances to their breaking point. New York State Assemblymember and mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani says the hikes would burden already struggling New Yorkers.
'For Con Ed, there's never enough when it comes to their rate hikes,' said Mamdani. 'Just as recently as they got one, they want another, and what we are here to say is no.'
Protesters are urging Governor Kathy Hochul to reject the proposed rate hikes. Hochul has previously opposed the plan, directing the state's Department of Public Service to reject the increases and launch an audit of utility management compensation.
Meanwhile, Con Edison cites rising property taxes on energy infrastructure as a key factor behind the proposed hikes.
A spokesperson says they recognize the affordability challenges and have provided hundreds of millions of dollars in discounts to low-income customers in response. The spokesperson added, 'We also have a responsibility to continue to safely and efficiently deliver the nation's most reliable power. That means fortifying the grid against increasingly severe weather, supporting the state's clean energy goals and maintaining the workforce we need to conduct ongoing maintenance and swiftly respond to customer service calls.'
The rate hike proposal is now before the New York Public Service Commission, which will conduct a series of public hearings and reviews over an 11-month process. A final decision is expected by fall, with any approved increases taking effect in 2026.
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Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What Centrist Democrats Need to Learn From Zohran Mamdani
I covered New York City politics for quite a few years in my younger days, but instead of instilling in me a continuing passion about the city, it generally left me feeling as if I'd paid that check, as it were. New York politics hasn't interested me deeply for many years. This is partly because New York Democrats, once a mighty machine that set the direction for and helped transform the national Democratic Party, are a shadow of their old selves. The city once produced mayors who were, per the old cliché, larger than life. The last couple have been smaller than life. So Zohran Mamdani is the first interesting thing to happen in New York City politics for a long time. He's fresh, he's energetic, and he has swagger. I've been thinking a lot about that last word—swagger—because the national Democrats have none of it whatsoever. They have anti-swagger. They're as exciting as a knitting society. Mamdani makes for a breathtaking contrast with them collectively. I have some reservations about Mamdani, the assemblyman who topped Andrew Cuomo among many others in last week's Democratic primary for mayor. Questions about his lack of experience are entirely legitimate. I don't know how large a staff he has; I did see another New York assemblyman's website listing that that fellow has a staff of seven people. The mayor of New York runs a bureaucracy of more than 300,000. The mayor is also properly thought of as the CEO of several multibillion-dollar public corporations or trusts: one running housing, another schools, another colleges and universities, another hospitals, and a few (depending on how you categorize them) dispensing contracts and social services. If Mamdani wins this fall's general election—a contest that will include Mayor Eric Adams and possibly Cuomo, again—and becomes mayor, he's going to need to appoint highly competent and knowledgeable (more than ideological) people to run these operations, and he's going to have to be ruthless in ensuring that they do their jobs well. People see a mayor as the day-to-day manager of the city. Between now and November, Mamdani should be asked to speak in detail about these matters. Then there's the question of some of his rhetoric with regard to Israel-Palestine, most specifically around his refusal to renounce the phrase 'globalize the intifada.' He said recently on a Bulwark podcast that to him, the phrase means 'a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.' OK. But given that both intifadas did entail violence by Palestinians (in the face, of course, of constant Israeli violence against Palestinians), others, in a city with 1.3 million Jews, might reasonably hear the phrase more darkly. It's not a mayor's job to make foreign policy. It's a mayor's job, in a city with dozens of ethnic groups, to lead them all fairly, both in tangible terms—the awarding of community service contracts, which is a huge deal in New York—and rhetorical ones; to lower the temperature when things get hot through the force of his moral example. Mamdani has many prominent Jewish supporters. I've known Congressman Jerry Nadler and trusted his political judgment for 35 years, so when Nadler endorsed him, that got my attention. But Mamdani will need to go into Jewish neighborhoods between now and November and build some bridges. And having said all that … it infuriates me to see centrist Democrats, including the party's leaders in the House and Senate, keep their distance from him, or worse. The guy won (presumably—the official canvass is Tuesday). He did something absolutely stunning. He went from literally 1 percent to 43 percent. That never happens. When somebody pulls that off, people don't need to be fretting about it or attacking it; they need to ask why and see what they can learn from it. It didn't happen because he denounces Israel. And it didn't happen because New York Democratic voters are suddenly a bunch of Jeremy Corbyns. It happened because he focused aggressively and entertainingly on the only real issue, the issue that has a lot of perfectly normal people at the end of their ropes: the insane cost of living in New York. And he didn't just throw out a bunch of policies. He told voters a story that had good guys (everyone struggling to make ends meet) and bad guys (corporations and the overclass). He promised some things that will make their lives a little easier. No, Mamdani probably can't follow through on a lot of these things. He'll need the governor and the state legislature to agree on a number of them, and that's very unlikely. But let's judge that if and when he becomes mayor. For now, let's just consider how what he did worked. He told some very simple truths. He said: You're getting screwed. And it's not some invisible and undefinable hand of God that's screwing you. It's specific actors, and the politicians who are their handmaidens. He told people something that they already knew—but that they too rarely hear politicians, even Democratic ones, say. Right now in Washington, the Republicans are on their way to passing a bill that, as I wrote last Friday, will deposit $68,000 IRS checks into the bank accounts of people making more than $900,000 a year while it will cut billions of dollars in health care to Americans of few to moderate means. At every public university in the country right now with an in-state network of hospitals, the higher-ups are in a panic wondering how they're going to replace the many millions of dollars that are being picked out of their pockets—money that funds health care for those who can't pay, mind you—and dropped into the wallets of millionaires. The national Democrats talk about this at Capitol Hill press conferences and in cable news interviews. But they don't seem to be able to tell a story about it for the life of them. Why is it so hard? Democrats of all stripes, especially the centrist ones, need to think about this. Mamdani, like anyone, has flaws and shortcomings. But he has swagger. He's unafraid—unafraid of the 1 percent and their wallets, unafraid of offending those people once in a while, unafraid of maybe making a mistake, unafraid of taking a punch. His positions by all appearances are what he actually believes, not what focus groups told him to believe. He's not exactly in-cautious. He wants to win, so he hedges some bets. But he absolutely is anti-cautious: against caution as a first reflex. National Democrats should take note.
Los Angeles Times
41 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Zohran Mamdani's victory in an NYC primary has billionaires and Democrats in a panic. Here's why
That deep-bass rumble you may have been hearing since June 24 is the sound of heads exploding on Wall Street and in certain Democratic Party smoke-filled rooms, provoked by the victory of self-described 'democratic socialist' Zohran Mamdani in New York City's Democratic primary for mayor. Here's my personal response to the handwringers over Mamdani's convincing win: Now you know what some of us have been living through. To be precise, they're reacting to the sudden inversion of a political world they thought they had in hand; it resembles the feeling we've felt as Donald Trump runs rampant over political norms that have been in place since the 1930s, or longer. Partisan forces are already mustering to deny Mamdani what has been close to a Democratic birthright since 1945 — the New York mayoralty (with the exceptions of Lindsay, Giuliani and Bloomberg). The question is why? History offers some answers. First, a quick look at some of the proposals Mamdani advocated during his campaign. They include a freeze on rents in the city's million rent-stabilized apartments, paired with a commitment to build 200,000 new rent-stablized apartments over time. Mamdani proposed establishing city-owned grocery stores; that sounds like socialism, all right, but as John Cassidy explained in the New Yorker, Mamdani was talking about a pilot project of five stores, all to be located in 'food deserts' — low-income neighborhoods that established supermarket firms don't touch. Then there's free bus transportation and free universal child care for families with children 6 weeks to 5 years old. As for where the money for these initiatives would come from, Mamdani proposes a city wealth tax — 2 percentage points on individual incomes over $1 million — and said he would ask the state Legislature to increase the state corporate tax. With these plans on the table, Mamdani's victory provoked the city's billionaire class and its water carriers to rhetorical paroxysms, including forecasts of economic armageddon for the city. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, for example, pronounced himself 'profoundly alarmed' by, among other things, Mamdani's 'Trotskyite economic policies.' Summers didn't explain which policies he meant and what made them 'Trotskyite.' I asked him for a clarification but haven't received a reply. What I learned from my professors of post-revolutionary Russian history, however, is that Trotsky advocated a policy known as 'permanent revolution,' which meant spreading a culture of Marxism from the Soviet Union to other countries; this was a counterweight to Stalin's ideology of 'socialism in one country,' which was Stalin's way of chickening out on conflict with countries outside the USSR. In any case, the debate was settled in Stalin's favor, not through reasoned debate but via an ice axe buried in Trotsky's skull by an assassin in 1940. Anyway, the debate was over politics much more than economics. The coalescing of the anti-Mamdani forces, especially the alliance between billionaires and machine Democrats, bears curious similarities to the attacks on another self-professed socialist running for public office as a Democrat. He was Upton Sinclair, who ran for governor of California in 1934 on a platform he called 'EPIC,' for 'End Poverty in California.' Sinclair had become world-famous with the publication of 'The Jungle,' his bestselling expose of the meatpacking industry in 1906, when he was 26. He followed up with a series of investigative novels about the coal and oil industries and the Sacco and Vanzetti case, as well as militant tracts on religion, the newspaper industry, finance, and education. He moved to Southern California in the 1920s and twice ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature as a Socialist. He came out of political retirement in 1934 in part because the long-running GOP domination of California politics looked to have run out its string — the colorless Republican governor, Frank Merriam, was detested for upholding a sales tax that overburdened the middle class and vetoing an income tax, thereby leaving the upper classes in full possession of their wealth. Meanwhile, the Democrats had been left in disarray by their years in the wilderness. In the primary, Sinclair was opposed by seven challengers. But he was unique among the Democrats in speaking directly to the disaffected and dispossessed middle class. These voters 'gravitated to Sinclair by default,' observed Carey McWilliams, that indefatigable chronicler of California politics. Sinclair announced, in a campaign book titled 'I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty — A True Story of the Future,' proposals that included replacing the sales tax with a progressive income tax and estate tax, and providing a state pension for seniors and the needy of $50 a month. 'I say positively and without qualification we can end poverty in California … I will put the job through, and it won't take more than one or two of my four years,' he wrote in the book. The similarities to the present-day Democratic Party are inescapable. Despite their narrow loss to Trump in the 2024 election, the Democrats, with their sclerotic leadership, appear to have little clue about how to regain voters' favor. Mamdani's main rival in the primary was former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had resigned that office amid a miasma of sexual harassment accusations. Mamdani's victory was so complete that Cuomo conceded before all the ballots were counted. Cuomo says he will stay in the race until the general election in November. Sinclair's primary victory unleashed an immediate backlash from establishment Democrats, who made common cause with Republicans and industrialists. California's movie industry, which was led by some of the state's most reactionary businessmen, produced newsreels and still photographs depicting tramps and hobos surging over the state line to partake of EPIC's generous pensions, much of the 'documentation' drawn from feature films then in production. The daily newspapers, including the rock-ribbed conservative Los Angeles Times, lampooned Sinclair mercilessly. It was soon lost on nobody that his proposals, popular as they were, did not pencil out fiscally. Sinclair lost the 1934 election. Merriam was reelected with a 49% plurality. Sinclair returned home to Pasadena to write his campaign memoir, which he mordantly entitled 'I, Candidate for Governor — And How I Got Licked.' But he took solace in the fact that Merriam actually implemented some of his proposals, including replacing the sales tax with an income tax. A similar wave may be building against Mamdani, a native of Uganda who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018. (Trump has questioned whether Mamdani is a legal resident.) Establishment Democrats have seized on his appeals for fair treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and throughout the Middle East as though he is promoting anti-Semitism. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who represented an upstate New York district in Congress before moving to the Senate, accused him of having made references to 'global jihad' and called on him to denounce the phrase 'globalize the intifada.' In fact, he never used either phrase. She later apologized for 'mischaracterizing Mamdani's record.' Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen, who represents a suburban Long Island district, accused him falsely of calling for 'violence against Jewish people.' Neither of the two Democratic leaders in Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, has endorsed Mamdani even in the wake of his primary victory. Mamdani said, in a June 29 interview on NBC's Meet the Press during which anchor Kristen Welker pressed him to condemn the phrase 'globalize the intifada,' that 'that is not the language I would use.' He talked of his 'belief in universal human rights.... That includes the belief that freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians alike.' Among the differences between Sinclair and Mamdani — as Mark Twain is said to have observed, history doesn't always repeat itself but it does rhyme — Mamdani can make a plausible case for covering the costs of his proposals through a wealth tax. His chief obstacle may be politics, chiefly the state Legislature's resistance to the many proposals that require its assent. Given that money is the mother's milk of American politics, the greater threat to Mamdani's candidacy may come from Wall Street's denizens. 'It's officially hot commie summer,' billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb tweeted the day after the primary. Others predicted that Mamdani's election would drive wealthy people out of New York. Real estate executive Danny Fishman told the Wall Street Journal that Mamdani's mayoralty 'would be the death penalty for the city. And it would be the best thing to happen to Miami and Palm Beach since Covid.' Yet others question whether anything like a Mamdani mayoralty would really provoke millionaires and billionaires to decamp. High-rise New York apartments have acquired totemic significance for the superrich. Residences in Florida can't approach the bragging rights endowed by co-ops in the Manhattan clouds. Mamdani's overwhelming victory should give smart Democrats a road map to the way forward in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Plainly, he spoke to a deep-seated desire by voters for an escape from a domestic oligarchy's domination of politics. 'Taken together,' 31 economists wrote in an open letter supporting his candidacy, 'Mamdani's responsibly costed economic policies form a coherent agenda that rejects austerity and embraces the city's power to make life more affordable for New Yorkers.' As Republicans in Congress move ahead with a budget plan that will raise prices for ordinary Americans on healthcare, housing, child care, and so many other aspects of daily life, is that really a message that Democrats can afford to ignore?
News24
an hour ago
- News24
‘We shattered everyone's expectations': Mamdani is official Democratic candidate for New York mayor
Rising star Zohran Mamdani is officially the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. He beat former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in an upset. He would be the first Muslim mayor of the heavily Democratic city if he wins the general election. Rising star of the American left Zohran Mamdani is now officially the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, according to official primary election results released on Tuesday. The 33-year-old self-declared democratic socialist defeated his nearest rival by a strong margin, winning 56% to former New York governor Andrew Cuomo's 44% in the third round of vote counting. With neither candidate winning a majority in the 25 June primary, election officials eliminated lower-ranking candidates and recounted under the ranked-choice voting process. But after Mamdani earned 43% outright, Cuomo - aiming for a comeback after a sex scandal - did not wait for the full results and conceded defeat the night of the vote, a stunning outcome for Democrats. READ | Uganda born candidate Zohran Mamdani set to be first Muslim New York mayor: 'Tonight is his night' Staunchly pro-Israel Cuomo led in polls for most of the race, with massive name recognition and support from powerful centrist figures including former president Bill Clinton. 'Democrats spoke in a clear voice, delivering a mandate for an affordable city, a politics of the future, and a leader unafraid to fight back against rising authoritarianism,' Mamdani said on Tuesday. Born in Uganda to South Asian parents, New York state assemblyman Mamdani would be the first Muslim mayor of the heavily Democratic city if he wins the general election in November. Polling currently shows him ahead of current Mayor Eric Adams and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa for the November vote. Adams was elected in 2021 as a Democrat but is running as an independent. READ | Cape Town cheers as Zohran Mamdani wins New York City Democratic mayoral primary Mamdani and others have accused the mayor of allowing the Trump administration to conduct immigration raids in exchange for burying federal corruption charges against Adams. Cuomo is still weighing a possible run as an independent. The contest has catapulted Mamdani from an unknown to the national stage, with Democrats debating if he is too far-left - his proposals include freezing rent for many New Yorkers, higher taxes on millionaires and corporations, free bus service, and universal childcare - or just what is needed to beat back US President Donald Trump's MAGA agenda. Asked by NBC Sunday whether he was a communist, Mamdani responded in the negative. I don't think that we should have billionaires. Zohran Mamdani He added that he wanted 'to work with everyone'. Trump has led the Republican criticism of the man who has upended Democratic politics. 'Frankly, I've heard he's a total nut job,' Trump said on Tuesday. Mamdani - a hyper-adept social media user whose campaign clips showcased his accessibility and drew millions of views - posted a video on Tuesday explaining how he 'shocked the establishment and redrew the political map with a campaign relentlessly focused on the needs of working people'. He noted Trump drew surprisingly strong support in New York City in the 2024 election, and explained how campaigning relentlessly in neighbourhoods with minority, working class and immigrant populations, he was able to bring disaffected voters back to the Democratic fold. 'We can win back voters many have written off if we give them something to vote for, not just tell them what to be against,' Mamdani said. 'We shattered everyone's expectations - including our own.'
