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DMZ America Podcast #140: Super Tuesday Leaves Two, Euthanasia Comes to Illinois, Troops in Subways

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Ted Rall

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.

The first segment of this week’s offering covers some major developments in the 2024 presidential campaign. The US Supreme Court followed Ted’s lead, choosing democracy over the Constitution, ruling 9-0 to invalidate the 14th Amendment cases attempting to remove Trump from the ballot. Super Tuesday saw broad sweeps by Biden and Trump, Nikki Haley’s withdrawal and progressive discontent over Biden’s support of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Scott and Ted preview the State of the Union Address and detail what Biden would have to do there—it involves violating the laws of physics—to drive a stake through concerns about his mental acuity. Oh, and it’s definitely Biden versus Trump this fall.

The second segment takes a hard turn into Illinois’ move toward legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. Scott expresses concerns about whether God would approve and whether there might be a potential for abuse. Ted gets personal about a friend and colleague who recently decided to end her life after suffering from depression.

Finally, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has ordered state police and the National Guard to New York City’s beleaguered subway system to restore law and order…and search your bags.


Watch the Video version: here.

Bring Back New York’s Transit Police

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Ted Rall

            Visitors to Bath, England learn that the town’s namesake first-century spa deteriorated following the collapse of Roman authority in the fifth century. Unmaintained, the reservoir silted up and blocked the drainage system, burying the facility and surrounding buildings under yards of mud.

            Trained by the Romans, the local English initially knew how to keep the baths running after their imperial masters returned to Italy. Habits changed; the English didn’t bathe as often as the Romans. Time passed and knowledge faded. Eventually, even if the locals had developed a hankering for a hot-water dunk, no one was left who would have been able to get the system working again. Basically, the English forgot what they knew.

            The latest headline-making violent incident in New York City’s declining subway system, the choking death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused schizophrenic, at the hands of 24-year-old ex-Marine Daniel Penny, has me and other older New Yorkers pining for the New York City Transit Police.

            Like the denizens of Bath, New York forgot the Transit Police.

            From 1953 to 1995, the nation’s largest mass-transit system had its own police department, separate from the NYPD. By 1994, the force employed 4,500 uniformed and civilian members, making it the sixth-largest of any department in the United States. The 1974 version of “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” showcases the skills of the Transit Police, who were trained how to shut off third-rail power, conduct rescues of passengers trapped between stations and pursue suspects into tunnels, abandoned stations and subterranean emergency exits.

            We don’t know exactly what went down before Penny subjected Neely to the 15-minute chokehold that ended his life. As a New Yorker who has ridden the subway for more than 40 years, however, I can attest to the fact that New Yorkers can’t get assistance of any kind when things go sideways on the subway.

            You’re trapped in a narrow metal box a hundred feet below the street. Doors to the next cars are locked on most lines, including the one Neely and Penny were riding. There’s no call box in a New York subway car. Cellphones don’t work between stations. There’s no surveillance camera.

            And no cops.

            Never any cops.

            ’Twas not always so. The last time the subways were this dangerous and skeevy was in the 1980s: now there are more schizophrenic homeless people, back then there were more muggings. In the aggregate, the effect was the same: disquieting and anxiety-producing. But the Transit Police mitigated riders’ fears.

One or two transit policemen patrolled every train. They were a familiar sight, twirling their nightsticks as they gamboled from one car to the next. I’ll never forget the time a naked man sat next to me; a transit cop nearly walked past us before doing a double-take. “Yo,” the officer said, tapping Mr. Nude on his bare knee with his baton. “Forget something?”

The Transit Police deployed a sizeable number of undercover officers. One night I sat across from a young pregnant woman with a baby in a stroller. The crackle of a police radio emanated from somewhere beneath her clothes. Out came her badge and gun, she ditched her fake baby bump and stroller (the baby was a doll too) and off she went in search of glory and public safety. I’m not big on cops, but how could I fail to be impressed?

Citing redundancies and inefficiencies—the NYPD and Transit Police used different radio systems—then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani abolished the Transit Police and folded them into the NYPD. (His real motivation was consolidating his political power.) A new NYPD Transit Bureau was supposed to replace them; in real life, the police presence vanished from the subway system.

 We need more details, but at this writing I agree with the district attorney’s decision to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter. Neely didn’t touch anyone, including Penny. All Penny had to do was wait a minute, maybe three minutes, for the doors to open at the next station, and leave Neely to his rants. Restraining/choking him for 15 minutes cannot be justified.

At the same time, tragedies are inevitable in a situation where commuters are left unprotected, abandoned to their own judgement on subway cars that more often than not serve as rolling homeless shelters and lunatic asylums for the thousands of people our political class has determined do not deserve care. Neely was a victim. So, too, are the New Yorkers who deserve a safe, reliable trip from A to B for their $2.75 fare.

In an effort to make people feel safe, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has subway conductors announcing at each stop: “If you have any questions, concerns, reports, the NYPD is located at this station.” What a joke. Subway trouble is quick trouble—and it usually occurs on the train, not the station, as seen in the Neely-Penny confrontation. Stations, moreover, are big places, at least two full city blocks long with multiple entrances. Finding a cop is like hunting for a needle in a haystack.

There will always be crime and other problems in an urban subway system. But New York could go a long way toward making riders feel safer by bringing back the old Transit Police, with their officers patrolling each and every train, 24-7. Penny, for example, might not have maintained his chokehold of Neely had he known that his F train would pull into Broadway-Lafayette station and be boarded by a cop a minute later.

We have to unforget.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

A Fast-Track Plan for New York

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Ted Rall

Originally published by The New York Observer:

Dreaming of New Subways

Throughout New York’s history, change has been a constant feature of the city’s transportation infrastructure. Well, it used to be.

Aside from the long-delayed Second Avenue subway, civil engineers haven’t had much work to do in the past five decades. A time traveler from 1961 would find the city’s traffic patterns, street grid, highways, subway lines, river crossings and airports basically the same.

New York’s second-newest major bridge, the Throgs Neck, opened nine days before JFK delivered his “ask not what your country” inaugural address. The Verrazano came in 1964. Then that was it—unless you count the link between Rikers Island and Queens in 1966. Aside from a few extensions on the outer borders of Queens and the minor 63rd Street tunnel, the subway looks much the way it did during World War II. For many New Yorkers, getting to LaGuardia still requires a cab, despite the half-assed AirTrain. Ditto for JFK.

The Center for an Urban Future recently concluded that too much of our “essential infrastructure remains stuck in the 20th century,” posing a barrier “for a city positioning itself to compete with other global cities.”

There is little reason to believe things will improve. Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recently announced plan to add some ferry routes launching in 2017, his administration has reduced infrastructure spending from budgets under Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who devoted most of that money to new parks and schools.

New stuff? As the parking sign says, don’t even think about it.

But that’s a choice.

New York could fund big-ticket transportation projects through the imposition of a modest stock transaction tax on the $45 billion traded daily on the NYSE. Some liberal Democrats are floating a 3 basis point (.03 cent) tax on trades. That’s not enough. From 1914 to 1966—while America won two world wars and became the world’s dominant superpower—it was 10 basis points. Precedents include France, which has a 20 basis point tax and Taiwan (10-30 basis points).

A securities tax would generate an estimated $10 billion annually. Enough to pay for a slew of ambitious, and needed, projects over the next decade or two.

Let’s start using this money to expand subways.

The long-awaited extension of the 7 subway may open as early as this month. Nice start, but the old idea of running the 7 out to the Meadowlands to alleviate Lincoln Tunnel traffic and provide an alternative to Penn Station for boarding New Jersey Transit, is just as overdue.

Even after the projected 2019—yeah, right—opening of the Second Avenue line, Lower East Side residents will remain woefully underserved by subways. The MTA should add a train along the Harlem River waterfront to connect Avenue D and East End Avenue to the rest of Manhattan.

A major shortcoming of New York’s current subway configuration is its failure to adapt aspects of the efficient spiderweb or grid patterns urban planners favor in more modern systems like Paris, London, Seoul and Tokyo.

Any transit expert would look at a NYC subway map and ask with puzzlement: Why isn’t there a line running around the city’s outer perimeter along the Westchester and Nassau County borders? To get from the Jamaica section of Queens and to Flatbush, Brooklyn, you have to head halfway to Manhattan to switch subways, or endure long rides on local city buses. That’s stupid.

Huge swaths of Southern Queens, currently off the grid, should be connected via a new line arcing west-to-east through the Bronx, then north-south through Queens and Brooklyn, parallel to and east of the G.

No borough is more subwayless than the city’s redheaded stepchild, Staten Island. But it doesn’t have to be that way. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been blocking the century-old dream of running a subway line under New York Harbor from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, but half the idea would still be an improvement. Let’s revive the Staten Island-Saint George tunnel between Brooklyn, which the city abandoned in the early 1920s.

In most major metropolises, rail systems connect directly from the city-center to the terminals. Not here, mostly due to NIMBYism and highway-obsessed Robert Moses. Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently floated a proposal to build an elevated AirTrain to link LaGuardia to the subway system, but transportation blogger Ben Kabak would better solve the airport access problem by extending the N along the Grand Central Parkway.

Anyone who drives in New York knows we need to add bridges and tunnels. Crossing the Hudson River during rush hour, as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall back in the day, could become slightly less hellish by executing one or more of the numerous forgotten plans for bridges at 23rd, 57th, 70th and 125th Streets. I’d go with 70th Street, more or less splitting the distance between the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge; either bridge or tunnel would be fine.

Conventional wisdom among liberal transportation types dictates that highway construction begets increased traffic: Build them and they will come. I don’t buy it. Even old-timers who curse Robert Moses for destroying the Bronx recall with a shudder the horror of sitting for hours on Broadway in upper Manhattan, waiting to get to the Bronx as stuck cars overheated, making congestion worse.

Driving from Long Island to Western Brooklyn, and/or on to New Jersey via Staten Island, requires extremely circuitous routes: Via the congested LIE and BQE, or skirting around the bulbous outline of Brooklyn. The obvious solution is to extend the Jackie Robinson Parkway, which currently begins at the Grand Central and Van Wyck Parkways in Kew Gardens. Nowadays, it dumps that highway traffic at Jamaica Avenue in East New York (there used to be a major train station there). We should extend the Jackie Robinson west toward the BQE.

Last but not least, it’s time to replicate the success of forward-looking cities like Dallas, Seattle and Portland, Ore., by bringing back streetcars. They’re relatively cheap. They’re cute. When their tracks run in dedicated, carless lanes, they’re faster than automobiles. There are smart plans for new streetcar lines along the waterfront in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, 42nd Street in Manhattan and Astoria in Queens.

We have work to do. Let’s get New York moving again.

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Ted Rall is the author of the forthcoming book Snowden by Ted Rall

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