Eric Adams, mayor of New York City, launches re-election campaign
Eric Adams, the New York mayor, launched his reelection campaign on Thursday, days after socialist Zohran Mamdani sent political shockwaves through the New York and national Democratic party by winning its mayoral nomination for November's election.
Adams, who did not mount a campaign for the Democratic nomination as his popular support cratered due to a corruption scandal, will now run as an independent candidate. Mamdani's decisive win against the former governor Andrew Cuomo, could see Adams get wider appeal in his, though much will depend if Cuomo also runs in the November race.
'I will fight for everyday New Yorkers who just want their city to darn work for them,' Adams said at a press conference on the steps of City Hall, contrasting himself with Mamdani who he attacked as a 'silver spoon' socialist.
'It's a choice between a candidate with a blue collar and one with a silver spoon,' he said. 'I'm not interested in slogans, I'm not interested in solutions. I don't work with special interests, I work for the people.'
Adams said his record as mayor stands above the noise of politics, and his record surpasses his critics. 'There are some critics who spend more time attacking than achieving. They have a record of tweets, I have a record on the streets, a record of results.'
Adams' formal entry into the race comes as the city's business community has reacted harshly to Mamdani's nomination and policy proposals that include a freeze on rents, free bus services, city-run groceries and higher taxes on the wealthy. They may now shift their support from Cuomo to Adams.
The business community is 'struggling to understand the implications of Mamdani's victory', Kathy Wylde, CEO of Partnership for New York City, said in an interview with Semafor.
Wylde acknowledged that Mamdani's focus on affordability tapped into 'the financial insecurity young people feel and their anger that the established political class has done nothing to fix it. It's not an endorsement of socialism but rather a rejection of the status quo, which threatens to bring on the kind of political instability that business hates.'
But Adams' reputation took a beating when he was indicted on federal corruption charges – charges that were later dropped in an apparent deal with the incoming Trump administration. Since Trump returned to the White House Adams has developed an ever closer political relationship with the US president – dismaying many Democrats.
In any second term, Adams promised to continue to bring down crime, launch a citywide mental health initiative, advance vocational training and expand affordable housing. He promised that the campaign 'is going to be the most interesting political campaign in the history of the city'.
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Fred Smith was near the end of his junior, or third, year at Yale in 1965 when he dashed off an essay proposing a 'hub-and-spoke' system for parcel delivery. His plan involved collecting parcels from local depots and transporting them to a central hub for overnight sorting before delivering them to their destination the following day. 'If a hospital in Texas needs a heart valve tomorrow, it needs it tomorrow,' he said, recalling a time when American parcel deliveries routinely took days or even weeks. The idea was not original. 'It had been done in transportation before: the Indian post office, the French post office. American Airlines had tried a system like that shortly after the Second World War,' he said. However, his professors were lukewarm and supposedly awarded his paper a C grade, although the essay itself was lost and its author later claimed not to remember the details. Smith turned his paper into Federal Express, making its headquarters in the centrally located city of Memphis, Tennessee. On the first night of operations, April 17, 1973, the company shipped 86 packages to 25 US cities using 14 Dassault Falcon 20 jets, one of which, called Wendy, is now at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington. It was far from an overnight success, quickly burning through investors' money. An oft-told tale is that Smith once flew to Las Vegas to gamble the company's last $5,000 on blackjack and won $27,000, enough to cover that week's fuel bill. Air crew were asked to delay cashing their pay cheques; one courier in Cleveland pawned his watch to pay an aircraft fuel bill; and a pilot in Indianapolis paid for his hotel room with a personal credit card. Under the mantra 'People, Service, Profit', Federal Express grew steadily, expanding more rapidly after the deregulation of US air cargo in 1977. 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Although Smith lobbied hard for President Trump's first-term corporate tax cuts, which reduced FedEx's tax bill from $1.5 billion to zero, he did not see eye to eye with the president on international trade. 'An increasing percentage of manufactured goods are high value-added and technology products and these tend to be easy to transport,' he once told The Daily Telegraph. 'Because of that, globalisation continues inexorable. My guess is that the vast majority of manufactured goods will cross at least one border in the future.' Frederick Wallace Smith was born in Marks, Mississippi, in 1944, the son of Sally (née West) and her husband James Smith, also known as Fred, who had made his fortune with a regional bus company that became part of the Greyhound line and the Toddle House restaurant chain, but died when Fred was four. He was raised by his mother and several uncles who 'were very good to me in terms of teaching me a few things about life'. 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