Billionaire Bloomberg buys New York’s City Hall again

“Paris is worth a Mass,” declared King Henry IV, after becoming a Catholic so he could ascend the French throne in 1589.

New York City is a lot more expensive. Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent at least $100 million of his $16 billion fortune to get re-elected on Nov. 3.

That’s capitalist democracy for you. Under the Stars and Stripes, billionaires are guaranteed the same right to become mayors as, supposedly, homeless people.

But Bloomberg actually wants to charge homeless people rent. Vanessa Dacosta, a single mother of a 2-year-old, has been told she has to pay $336 in rent to sleep in a shelter. This is out of her $800 monthly wages. (New York Times, May 8)

During three election campaigns Bloomberg spent more than $250 million of his loot. (NYT, Oct. 23) This obscene expenditure could have provided $6,410 to each of the 39,000 women, men and children who fill New York City’s homeless shelters every night.

Thousands more sleep on the streets while Mayor Moneybags has residences in Bermuda and London, in addition to his Manhattan mansion at 17 East 79th Street.

Estimates of Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign expenses run as high as $140 million. (Reuters, Oct. 24) That’s about $250 for each of his votes. That’s like the amount of money a boss spends per employee to defeat a union-organizing drive.

While 72 percent of voters making more than $200,000 voted for Bloomberg, 54 percent of those earning less than $50,000 voted for his opponent, William Thompson. (NYT, Nov. 4) Now when Bloomberg tries to impose cutbacks, he might provoke a fightback instead.

Socialist Cuba is infinitely more democratic than capitalist New York City. Under Cuba’s system of people’s power, elections are held in which candidates are chosen by their neighbors and fellow workers.

Even if wealthy Cubans hadn’t fled to Miami, they couldn’t buy elections in Cuba like Bloomberg does in New York City.

Racist Giuliani rescued Bloomberg

Despite Bloomberg’s deluge of dead presidents, he beat African-American Democrat Bill Thompson by just 50,000 votes. Only one out of 15 New Yorkers voted to keep the city’s richest man as their mayor.

Bloomberg’s 557,000 votes were the lowest in decades for a New York City mayor to win re-election. Forty years before, John Lindsay got over a million votes when he ran against both Democratic and Republican challengers.

It was the racist vote that elected Bloomberg. Thompson won Brooklyn and the Bronx, while some white neighborhoods voted 75 percent or more for Bloomberg.

When all his money wasn’t assuring Bloomberg’s re-election, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was brought in to mobilize the bigots.

On Oct. 18, 16 days before the election, Giuliani appeared alongside Bloomberg in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Giuliani told the crowd, “The city might be turned back to the way it was ... before 1993. And you know exactly what I’m talking about.” (New York Observer, Oct. 19)

Everybody there knew that Giuliani defeated David Dinkins, the only Black mayor in New York City’s history, in 1993.

Later the same day Giuliani and Bloomberg marched together in notoriously racist Howard Beach, where a Black man, Michael Griffith, was lynched on Dec. 20, 1986. Griffith was hit by a car after a mob of white youths chased him onto a highway.

Bloomberg wound up the day in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where he said New York City was in danger of becoming like Detroit. (NYT, Oct. 19) Detroit has a majority Black population.

None of these blatantly racist appeals prevented the New York Times—a Democratic Party newspaper—from endorsing Republican Bloomberg.

Even the judiciary aided Bloomberg. Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik was allowed to plead guilty to eight felony charges after the election. Winding up the trial earlier might have reminded voters that this sleazy character spent 16 months as Giuliani’s last police commissioner. Kerik turned down Bloomberg’s offer to continue as top cop.

None of the charges against Kerik mentions how he was able to get $6.2 million in profits from selling stock options in Taser International without investing a single cent. (NYT, Dec. 10, 2004) The outfit makes electric torture devices that allow cops to zap people with 50,000 volts. Amnesty International estimates that at least 245 people have been killed by Tasers.

Kerik was also a bodyguard for Giuliani during his 1993 campaign. So were police detectives Patrick Brosnan and James Crowe, who killed Anthony Rosario and Hilton Vega on Jan. 12, 1995. The two young Puerto Rican men were shot 22 times, including 11 times in the back. Afterwards Giuliani called the two white cops to congratulate them.