Whatever happened to building “a society that works for all of us, not just the wealthy and well-connected?”
Councilmember Letitia James [D, WFP-Fort Greene], who won her 35th District Council seat on the Working Families Party ticket because she wanted to fight “for a more just world,” is also an equal opportunity browbeater who has slapped 61-year-old Texas laborer David Day — a fellow African-American, no less — with a lawsuit after illegally jaywalking into his legally-operational trailer hitch in Fort Greene, July 11.
As a former lawyer, James should know that walking between cars is a crime punishable by one dollar to nearly $200 depending on the state.
Even begging wasn’t enough for the implacable, $122,000-a-year lawmaker who rebuffed the senior’s poignant plea for leniency by hiring a team of legal heavies for her juggernaut-of-a-lawsuit in a shameless attempt to extract unspecified damages for the “great physical and mental pain” she suffered from her shin scrape.
James contradicted any anguish she may have suffered by cruising through her re-election campaign without limping, or using crutches, or sacrificing any of her usual snap, according to her City Council colleagues, who can be none too pleased that yet another wind-bag elected official has heaped shame upon the venerable office of public service with their flatulence.
Letitia James has reneged on her duty as a public steward, and morphed into every taxpayer’s nightmare of a puffed-up, perked-up pol who thinks herself above the law.
Evidently, after seven years as the elected grassroots gladiator of Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, parts of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant — all areas that could use more David Days in their flailing communities — James has forgotten how to be nice.
Tish-for-tat’s vicious and idle campaign to mow down a humble breadwinner in tough economic times — just because she can — is inviting bad karma. Make no mistake.
Letitia James should ditch her fishwife blubbering and revisit her job, whose goal she once declared was “to fight to hold politicians accountable on the issues working- and middle-class families care about, like good jobs.”
Now, whatever her future accomplishments will be, she will always be known as the City Council member who harassed a poor old man trying to eke out a living— for no good reason.
