Mamdani and the Dreaded NGO

On this day:
565
St. Columba reports seeing a monster in Loch Ness, Scotland.
1485
The Battle of Bosworth Field, the death of Richard III and the end of the House of Plantagenet.
1642
Charles I calls the English Parliament traitors. The English Civil War begins.
1780
James Cook’s ship HMS Resolution returns to England (Cook having been killed on Hawaii during the voyage).
1831
Nat Turner’s slave rebellion commences just after midnight in Southampton, Virginia, leading to the deaths of more than 50 whites and several hundred African Americans who are killed in retaliation for the uprising.
1910
Korea is annexed by Japan with the signing of the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, beginning a period of Japanese rule of Korea that lasted until the end of World War II.
1922
Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army is shot dead during an Anti-Treaty ambush at Béal na mBláth, County Cork, during the Irish Civil War.
1963
American Joe Walker in an X-15 test plane reaches an altitude of 106 km.
1992
FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi shoots and kills Vicki Weaver during an 11-day siege at her home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

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The owner of OnlyFans was paid $701m (£523m) in dividends last year

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I’ll not grant the proposition that an effective means of harming a rival nation is to engage in so-called “dumping.” If the Chinese really are selling goods to Americans at prices below the costs the Chinese incur to supply these goods, they are impoverishing themselves as they enrich us. --Bordeaux

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Barring death, in 2029, the queen (consort) of Malaysia will be an Ulsterwoman. Her bio reads like she's the queen of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuanku_Zara_Salim

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Mamdani and the Dreaded NGO

Zohran Mamdani first reached elected office in 2021. He defeated four-term Democratic incumbent state assemblywoman Aravella Simotas, a 46-year-old former lawyer, City Hall staffer, and Community Planning Board member who belongs to the century-old Greek immigrant community of northwestern Queens. Mamdani, then 29 years old, had been rejected from The Nation’s internship program after graduating from college. He then tried to launch a rap career and worked as a music coordinator on a Disney-produced film directed by his mother, Mira Nair. His sole qualification for public office was his relatively brief time as a housing counselor for Chhaya Community Development Corporation, an organization that works with low- and middle-income South Asian communities in Jackson Heights, in central Queens.

To dismiss this résumé as a multinational trust-fund kid’s laughable excuse for a career is also to misunderstand how power is now organized within Democratic Party verticals in major cities. Groups like Chhaya have become one of the primary instruments of public policy in New York, where social programs are often carried out through the public subsidy of nonprofit private-sector partners—groups with the freedom to be less accountable, more sectarian, and more ideological than government tends to be. In New York City, nonprofits received $20 billion in public money in 2021. Billion. In 2019, Chhaya got $595,000 in government grants, accounting for one-third of the organization’s revenue. This public largesse didn’t mean Mamdani was drawing a large salary at taxpayers’ expense—though, as the son of a renowned historian and a globally famous director, he didn’t really need one. According to the group’s 990 form from 2019, Chayya split $729,000 in nonexecutive compensation between 27 employees.

The public-private trough would prove even more helpful to Mamdani when he entered politics. In New York City, a taxpayer-funded matching program pays candidates eight dollars for every one dollar they raise from city residents whose donations are $250 or lower. This is twice what New York’s public match rate was in 1998, and a generous multiplier by national standards. Actually, by any standards. The taxpayer actually funds the ambitious politician. And this is without regard to his beliefs.

So far, Mamdani’s campaign for mayor has received $2.5 million in private funds and $9.8 million in public funds.

A lot of New Yorkers now have jobs and backgrounds very similar to Mamdani’s. New York is thought of as the sink-or-swim epicenter of American capitalism, but that’s not true anymore. The city is home to more than 600,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector and a roughly equal number of jobs in the government sector. Read that again. Nonprofits now employ nearly 17 percent of the city’s total private-sector workforce. 17%. And nationally, the rate is 10%. How much is lost to the economy when those guys call off sick?

Wage growth in the nonprofit sector healthily outpaced the rest of the private sector statewide in New York between 2017 and 2022, 29.3 to 25.3 percent.

Nonprofit-dominated sectors are also adding jobs at a far higher rate than any other part of the city’s economy. Of 67,000 new jobs added in New York City in the year before May of 2025, 63,800 were in “private education and health services.” During the same period, the city created an anemic 600 jobs in trade, transportation, and utilities and lost 4,900 jobs in manufacturing and construction.

Between 2010 and 2015, the time when leadership of the city shifted from the centrist liberal patrician Michael Bloomberg to the progressive Bill de Blasio, the city added 158,000 total jobs in the nonprofit-heavy health care, education, media, and arts sectors, compared to 58,400 total in traditional outer-borough industries like construction, transportation, wholesale trade, manufacturing, and real estate.

The subsidized classes rose in power as the city’s productive industries faded. New York has gone from about 1 million manufacturing jobs in 1955 to fewer than 45,000 today, with construction and wholesale seeing a similar decline during the same period, from 750,000 to a shade under 500,000 jobs. The NYPD, a longtime source of lower-middle-class employment and social mobility, has gone from 40,000 active officers in 2000 to 34,000 today. The multigenerational working class—the remnant of the city’s mid-to-late-20th-century mix of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Irish, and Italians—has shrunk in relative size and power. New York’s Black population has contracted this century, from 1.9 million in 2000 to 1.7 million in 2020. Similarly, the city’s Puerto Rican population plunged from 715,000 to 574,000 between 2017 and 2022 alone.

This is culled from a recent Tablet article and is not presented to be particularly critical of Mamdani. The non-profit world might be an occupation of last resort, but it is also a source of highly leveraged political influence, an influence that many underestimate. And this world, unlike most of the world, is not self-correcting; it fosters isolated and peripheral personal notions and projects--like the inept Mandani and his goofy ideas--that we poor working folks will be forced to subsidize, then clean up.

One wonders, with the government shutting down the economy for eighteen months, subsidizing the economy with unsustainable debt, and redoing failed social and economic experiments, how long the beleaguered working culture can do this.