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| Our Teamster Brother Steve Malone. |
Unfortunately, that person is the new mayor of New York City, Bill deBlasio.
DeBlasio says he'll replace the iconic carriages with electric replicas of antique cars. (We're not kidding.) Teamsters Local 553 is fighting to save the jobs of the 100 carriage drivers who, by all accounts (except for obsessed animal rights activists) treat their horses very, very well.
George Miranda, Teamsters Joint Council 16 president, said:
Our members in the iconic Central Park horse drawn carriage industry are proud of their heritage, take tremendous care of their horses and support their families with good blue collar jobs. The Teamsters will fight for their survival.Demos Demopolous, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 553, is leading the fight. He told Politico:
We are against the thought of the electric car replacing the horse carriage industry.
These are all horse people. This is what they do.(To help save the jobs of our equestrian brothers and sisters, click here.)
Here are just some of the people who think Mayor deBlasio has, um, the wrong priorities.
Actor Liam Neeson:
I was in the stables today and many days over the past few years, I know some of these guys, and I just hate how they’re — the horse-drawn carriage industry is being attacked nowadays...these are the fittest, well-fed, best kept horses I’ve ever seen. I’m a horse rider and lover for many, many years.Jimmy Fallon:
He wants to get rid of horse-drawn carriages in Central Park because they're inhumane. Meanwhile, thousands of unemployed New Yorkers said, 'I'll pull the carriage.'American Spectator writer Robert Stacy McCain:
Defenders of the carriage industry point to a real-estate executive who is one of de Blasio's major campaign donors as the driving force behind the effort to abolish the carriages.Journalist Michael Gross, writing about real-estate executive Steve Nislick:
What are the odds that good neighbor Nislick, the out-of-state real estate developer, simply covets those valuable, underdeveloped New York lots — and has teamed up with ambitious pols to use the emotions of animal rights activists as fuel for their own agendas?The Daily Beast columnist Nick Gillespie:
A hundred-plus years of tradition and a hundred-plus jobs (for humans) gone, just like that, because de Blasio believes that horse-drawn carriages “are not humane.”New York Times writer Andrew Rosenthal:
Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio ... has a problem prioritizing. While we wait for him to appoint his team (oh so slowly) and we wonder what his policies are going to be, exactly, on things like schools, Mr. de Blasio announced yesterday that one of his first acts will be … to ban carriage horses from Central Park.Conservative Washington Examiner columnist Judson Phillips:
De Blasio is starting his term as dictator by dictating. He is dictating a group of people out of their jobs. These are the iconic horse drawn carriages in New York.Christina Hansen, carriage driver and liaison for the Horse and Carriage Association of New York City:
De Blasio has never visited our stables,” , told FoxNews.com. “This really has nothing to do with the welfare of the horses. If it did, we could sit down with Mayor de Blasio or the City Council ... and have a discussion. This is about radical animal rights ideology, it’s about money power, politics and real estate.Dr. Harry Warner, former chairman of American Association of Equine Practitioners' (AAEP) Equine Welfare Committee, who examined the horses:
I didn't see a single horse that didn't show all the signs that we associate with contentment.James Baussmann, a senior account manager with Text100 Boston, a global communications firm:
It should be left alone! My wife and I just moved from NYC after 10 years of living in Manhattan/Queens. A hansom cab ride was/is on our ‘NYC bucket list’ that we created before we moved. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to it before we moved … and now we’re afraid we’ll never get the chance.Father Brian Jordan, Rabbi Gershon Tannenbaum and Maryam Kashmir, president of the Muslim Student Association at St. Francis College, writing in the New York Daily News:
Many of New York City’s horse carriage drivers ... have followed a calling to work with animals, and they have been denied basic respect by those seeking to ban their carriages. These drivers must be permitted to continue their good work and carry on the tradition of caring and respecting the horses that help provide them a fair living.Rush Limbaugh:
...these people think that automobiles and fossil-fueled vehicles are destroying the climate and would love to take us back to the horse and buggy days, except the new mayor of New York thinks it is cruel and inhumane for horses to pull carriages with people in them.Once again, help our brothers and sisters out. Click here.
