Posted on 11/05/2025 11:33:05 AM PST by PJ-Comix
A lot of people are depressed in the wake of Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayor's race. Perhaps they are thinking short term. In the long term, his victory will just speed up the Democrat party collapse as, in the French Revolution, they eat their own. It's bound to happen and sooner rather than later. However, the biggest upside to Mamdani's victory is that his win inspired an HILARIOUS meme in the form of some very angry New York person screaming and cursing about Curtis Sliwa splitting the vote leading to the defeat of Andrew Cuomo. Check out this guy's angry rant because it sure gives off strong Sam Kinison vibes. I'm guessing that his anger will end up inspiring at least a thousand memes. And we might as well start the ball running with the comparison to Sam Kinison.
This is the part many people miss: The money has been fleeing NY City for several years already.
The large multi-national bank I work for has uber-high wealth clients in NYC, at least those that remain having not fled during COVID for Florida already and having gotten there, deciding they liked it, STAYED.
We have clients worth half a billion to tens of billions in NYC. They've been planning their escape for two years. Mamdani just escalated that.
48% of New York State's entire tax revenue comes from the top 1% which live mostly in NYC.
When they leave (and they are...) the money leaves.
Without those who pay 48% of all NY State Taxes living anywhere in New York State, New York City is no longer "too big to fail."
It then becomes this:
the post rants against sliwa... not sliwa’s fault. NY will be destroyed.
Years back a buddy of mine and I were in Houston at a comedy club.
Yea, there had been some drinking.
My buddies father was a bit sexually confused at the time and had been having parties at their big house. Parties of all men. You get the idea.
We were sitting right next to the stage and the comedian on stage made some kind of joke regarding being gay to my buddy. Suddenly, my buddy and the comedian were rolling around on the floor next to me trying to beat the hell out of each other and not doing a very good job of it. Me? I was just trying to not spill my drink when they knocked the table over.
The manager of the place kicked all three of us out, or rather the bouncers did.
The comedian decide to go across the street and climb up a ladder on to a catwalk in front of the convenience store. It was a 7-11 sign.
Somewhere along the way he had found some rope and was able to tie a piece around each wrist and tie himself onto the sign. He was screaming “they are f’ing crucifying me! Just like Jesus! Arg! Arg! Arggggg!”
This lasted about 5 minutes until the cops showed up and started laughing. The comedy club manager came out and told us we could all come back inside and we did. Had some more drinks and made a friend.
Sam was a very funny guy.
THAT was KINISON?! Wow!
Got the cops laughing 😆
Great story!
Another story involving cops and convenience stores......
In the past Houston cops have been a bit different compared to cops today.
In grade school there was a convenience store not far from school. We would walk over there almost every day. The fellow that ran it was formerly in the Marine Corps. We called him “Pops”. He was a gentle old guy.
This was back in the days of the old cash registers. In the store Pops had a very big register. It was a huge metal thing with two huge drawers that made a heck of a noise when they extended out.
One day a fellow came into the store. He walked up to the counter with a drink then suddenly pulled out a pistol and told Pops to give him “all the money”.
Pops would later say that he just knew “in his bones” that the guy was going to shoot him.
The fellow has a .38 wheel gun. As he holds it he lays it down on the counter, it’s pointed right at Pops’ belly.
“Give me all the f’ing money! Now” Says the guy while banging the butt of the pistol grip on the counter. Pops sees that the pistol is cocked and the guy has his finger on the trigger while he is banging it on the counter.
Pops hits the buttons on the register and both of the large drawers open. As the drawers open Pops who is still thin and in Marine Corps shape steps behind the two drawers.
As he steps behind the cash register drawers Pops reaches to the right of the old cash register and comes up with a .45 Colt he had had for many years.
The bad guy still has his weapon on the counter and starts pulling the trigger, he gets off two shots that slam into the big metal drawers. Before the fellow can pull the trigger the third time pops puts a single round from the .45 right above the top of the guys nose into his forehead. The bad guy drops like a sack. It would be his last robbery.
Back to the Houston police. They show up and investigate the scene and clear Pops of any wrongdoing. As they are leaving they come into the store and hand pops something wrapped in a towel. They tell Pops to be careful.
Pops opens the towel and inside is a box full of .45 cartridges. There is a note scribbled in pencil on the box, the note says “good shooting - HPD”.
Epilogue - Pops would continue to work at the store for many more years even as the area was getting rougher and rougher. Nobody ever tried to rob him again. The cash register had two pretty good dents in the drawers but still worked fine. The store owners tried to replace it with one of those cheap plastic electronic registers. Pops never let them install it.
Wow!
Good for Pops!
A little bit of banking history for you, since I've been working in it for over 25 years now:
Chicago, IL used to be the center of the financial world for the USA in the 1970's, 1980's and into the early 1990's. The overwhelming majority of banking and financial services were located here.
The Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Merchantile Exchange rivaled NYC's trading in its importance not just to the United States of America, but the entire trading world. CBoT (Chicago Board of Trade) and CME (Chicagh Merchantile Exchange) were the envy of the world in technology, trade, and importance.
That all began to change in the mid 1990's with one bank after another, and one financial services firm after another getting purchased and their HQ's moved to New York City.
By the early 2000's, a period of just 5-6 years, Chicago's importance in banking, financial services, trading, etc.. was literally gutted.
First Chicago became Bank One, then Chase.
LaSalle Bank became LaSalle/ABN AMRO and then divided up and purchased by Bank of America, Santander, and several smaller European Banks with USA HQ's in NYC.
Harris Bank was bought by BMO (Bank of Montreal) then went through several name changes to finally become BMO.
Chicago Board of Trade became highly automated and HUNDREDS upon HUNDREDS of traders were replaced by automated systems and then absorbed by a New York City Firm who's name escapes me at the moment.
I can go on and on, I think I've made my point which is this: the technology and planning has only gotten better since the mid 1990's and early 2000's - especially after 9-11-2001.
I work in the industry and have talked about this at length over the years. I've known Lazamataz for 25 years, he knows my history so I pinged him to chime in if he so desires.
The history of what happened in Chicago, and a big chunk of it driven by Chicago's own political instability, is important to understand because history is already repeating itself in NYC.
It started repeating itself during COVID as financial services firms DID NOT LIKE the lockdowns in NYC (or Chicago, or elsewhere) one bit and sought other more open states like Florida, Texas, North South Carolina (Bank of America's HQ) and other southern states as examples as more welcoming.
More welcoming meaning tax friendly, business friendly, reasonably well educated population, etc..
What happened in Chicago in 5-6 years which GUTTED its significance as a financial services powerhouse, WILL HAPPEN and IS HAPPENING to NYC RIGHT NOW.
I know this, because I'm deeply involved in where the large, multi-national bank I work as an SVP, Sr. Principal Cloud Architect is moving all our compute to, in preparation for exiting a highly taxed, non-business friendly state that is quite literally, sucking every dollar it can away from taxpayers and businesses as I type.
I'm only on my second cup of coffee for the day and not used to going into so much without at least three cups of my favorite coffee drank by now, so my apologies if I ramble.
Blue States such as Illinois for example, where I'm escaping from TOMORROW for the Free State of Tennessee, are building literal Financial Berlin Walls around their states.
Here's what I mean by that: Illinois residents are taxed SO MUCH on EVERYTHING THEY DO, that so many cannot afford to vote with their wallets and LEAVE like I'm doing.
Property (home) taxes are the second highest in the country.
Income taxes are the second (or third) highest in the country AND GOING UP AGAIN, making Illinois the 1st highest taxed in the country. Illinois will also start taxing RETIREMENT INCOME, trapping more people in the state.
Sales taxes are the #1 highest taxes in the country, depending on where one lives. In Cook County for example, the minimum sales tax on everything but food and medicine is 10%. Many municipalities such as the one I'm in right now add another quarter to half percent to that.
Energy utilities are highly taxed, as are wireless services, streaming services and almost every other service one can think of.
Gasoline and Diesel fuel taxes combined (State & Federal) are @ 80 cents/gallon and to add insult to injury, Illinois has a sales tax ON TOP of the cost of fuel and all other taxes. Yes, that's double-taxation and "taxing taxes" which is technically illegal, yet goes unchallenged here in IL thanks to Democrats having a super-majority in the State Legislature FOR DECADES.
The current Governor, Governor Fatso (JB Pritzker) boasts he's passed six "balanced budgets" in a row for Illinois. Those "balanced budgets" included 54 tax increase packages without a single cent of the budget being cut.
Here's the point: All these taxes when combined, become a Financial Berlin Wall, designed to suck every dollar possible away from Illinois Citizens making it as difficult as possible to LEAVE the state, due to not being able to afford to do so.
New York State and New York City are repeating in many cases, the history of Illinois. Mamdani's election mirrors the turmoil in Chicago in the late 1970's to current day. Go look that political history up which starts with the original Mayor Richard Daley's death all the way through the current mayor.
History IS REPEATING ITSELF. I know, because I witnessed the same history here in Chicago already, and you see the trouble Chicago is in.
I spent my last day working downtown two weeks ago and spent my lunch hour walking around the parts of the city I used to work in, primarily Chicago's "Loop". It's a shell of its former self. Vacant storefronts, 33-35% office space vacancies and climbing, once great and famous restaurants that have been gone for several years now sitting empty and boarded up, and more.
Yes, the pictures of Chicago that Gov. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson put out are beautiful. They're from a small part of Chicago's lakefront using the city skyline as a backdrop. That's literally it. They don't dare show Chicago's "Loop" or financial and legal district. They don't dare show State Street which is largely boarded up and vacant, or the vacant stores on what's called Chicago's Mag(nificient) Mile which was one the envy of high-end shopping in the city.
Again, the history of what happened in Chicago is important to understand because it's repeating itself in NYC. Given today's technology and a highly mobile business environment that can literally move seemingly overnight, it's going to happen EVEN FASTER in NYC than it did in Chicago. It already is happening!
When Ken Griffin uprooted Citadel from Chicago and moved to Florida, he took a $10,000,000,000 (ten billion) chunk of tax base AWAY from Chicago. That was huge. Other large companies such as United Airlines is leaving, Boeing has left, Caterpillar has left, McDonalds which moved from Oakbrook, IL (just up the road from me) to Chicago is going to be leaving Chicago soon and that list goes on, and on, and on.
In New York, 1% of the population pays 48% of all taxes to the state. The overwhelming majority of that 1% live in NYC. If just half of them leave NYC for another state, that's a 24% hit on the tax revenue of NYC. That's a financial disaster for the entire state and NYC.
Mark this post and come back in a year. You'll see what I said above about Chicago is already happening in NYC. My role for the large multi-national bank I work for is involved in getting out of NYC. Those plans started being formulated in 2022 during COVID. We can literally "flip a switch" and exit NYC any time. We're currently helping our remaining uber high-wealth clients in NYC with their tax and exit strategies. They're leaving. The only reason we're even still there is to provide personal, face to face meetings with them to finalize and help them execute their exit plans before we flip the switch and leave too.
Financial Shock and Awe is coming to NYC and the financial Berlin Wall I referenced above is already largely built, trapping so many in that city and state. Mamdani's going to complete it, and has already said he cannot provide all the "free stuff" he promised without more taxes.
Time for more coffee and to finish packing for my move to Southeast Tennessee tomorrow. Good riddance Illinois, Gov. Fatso and MayorBJ. May you and your families suffer famine, pestilence, and eternity in the lake of fire for what you've done.
As a kid we lived south of Gary, IN. Anyone could drop out of high school and get a high paying job in the steel mills. Then the cheap Japanese steel happened and the mills began shutting down. People with a big house payment and not even a high school education were left scrambling for any job. This affected everything around there from car dealers to department stores and the whole area began collapsing financially. I foresee the same happening in NYC.
I surprised that nowhere in NYC they could find a candidate suitable for mayor. ZM is inexperienced and surely incompetent, no knowledge (could not read a balance sheet) and no wisdom.
Everyday the 49.6% that did not vote for him needs to remind the people ZM who s incapable of fulfilling his promises
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