Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, November 5, 2025 Real World News
It’s not like communism is a dirty word in New York City, home of the New York Times. Among its many Pulitzer Prize winners is Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty who famously denied the famine that impacted 70 million Soviet citizens, killing as many as 9 million in the 1930s under the yoke of Josef Stalin’s murderous ideology.
Few on Times Square were concerned, and the Pulitzer Board decide not to rescind his prize ruling that the articles it examined in making the award did not contain “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”
Now in the 21st century, people are saying unkind things about Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a proud Muslim and “Socialist” who has taken the “city that never sleeps” by storm.
Mamdani, also proud of his status as “immigrant,” has promised to make the financial capital of the entire world affordable at the expense of other immigrants who came to the “Big Apple” to get rich.
So who is more greedy? His needy supporters or the fat cats he expects to make good on his campaign promises? And what is to become of “Gotham”?
Did the New York Post front page get it right? [See below.]
The infallible Wikipedia maps out what many fear is the path forward:
Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organized through democratic centralism, would seize power on behalf of the proletariat and establish a one-party communist state. The state would control the means of production, suppress opposition, counter-revolution, and the bourgeoisie, and promote Soviet collectivism, to pave the way for an eventual communist society that would be classless and stateless.
The Wall Street Journal’s headline after socialist Zohran Mamdani won Tuesday’s New York City mayoral contest: “Wall Street Couldn’t Stop Mayor Mamdani. Now It Has to Work With Him”.
Some heavy hitters in the Big Apple’s financial corridor spent millions to elevate other candidates over Mamdani.
“Now, they have to work with the new mayor — and hope that their worst fears about his impact on the city’s business climate won’t come true,” Kevin T. Duggan wrote in a post-election analysis for the Journal.
“It’s about public safety and quality of life more broadly. Those go in the wrong direction, and any employer is going to have a hard time attracting and keeping good people,” said Ed Skyler, an executive at Citigroup who was a deputy mayor under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Mamdani has promised an additional 2% tax on millionaires and to raise taxes on businesses to pay for free buses, expanded child care, and city-run grocery stores.
Those policies are not popular on Wall Street.
After all, Mamdani had said during his campaign that there should be no billionaires (although he accepts money from and hangs out with billionaire Alex Soros, heir of billionaire George Soros).
“Firms such as Apollo Global Management and Citadel urged their employees to go out and vote,” Duggan noted. “The hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman spent more than $2 million to stop Mamdani.”
Billionaire hedge-fund titan Cliff Asness of AQR Capital posted a scene on X from “Planet of the Apes” in which Charlton Heston’s character spots remnants of the Statue of Liberty on the beach and realizes Earth has been destroyed, yelling, “You maniacs! You blew it up!”
Added the crypto evangelist and investor Anthony Pompliano: “It is insane that a socialist was just elected mayor of the financial capital of the world.”
Others, Duggan wrote, “worry about instability that could come from Mamdani’s dynamic with President Trump, who threw a last-minute endorsement to Mamdani’s key opponent, former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Trump has threatened an increased city presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and National Guard troops as well as impoundment of $18 billion in federal funds for infrastructure projects.”
Antonio Weiss, the former head of investment banking at Lazard, said the city’s relationship with Washington is likely to be the most immediate challenge: “I certainly hope that New Yorkers will band together in the interests of the city,” said Weiss, who unlike many of his peers in finance supported Mamdani in part for his focus on affordability.
On Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, JPMorgan Chase recently cut the ribbon on a new, $3 billion tower. The bank’s Queens-born chief executive, Jamie Dimon, “is about as close to an industry mascot as there is, and he vows to stay,” Duggan noted. “Those who can’t stomach the Mamdani era might have a different calculation.”
One of the financiers considering whether he will stay in New York is Michael Gontar, the CEO of InterVest Capital Partners, a real-estate investment company.
“His walk to work in Manhattan takes Gontar past a men’s homeless shelter, where he says people openly take drugs and occasionally have what appear to be episodes of mental distress,” Duggan noted.
“A higher tax bill won’t prompt Gontar to leave, but he is skeptical of Mamdani’s plan to create a new agency that would assign priority to mental-health services and violence prevention.”
“You’re going to call a social worker because you have a guy who took his pants down and started defecating in front of school?” he said. “Good luck.”
Was paving the way for a “society that would be classless and stateless” what Frank Sinatra had in mind when he warbled “if I can make it there I’m gonna make it anywhere”?
Guilty! ‘Financial capital of the world’ sentenced to Marxism-Leninism added by Editor Two on
View all posts by Editor Two →