Billionaire mayor mocks poor New Yorkers

It was a display of arrogance that made even politicians’ jaws drop, brought more than a thousand posts to media around the state, according to Google News, and even drew condemnation from some of the most reactionary media corporations in New York, like the Wall Street Journal.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his state of the state speech Jan. 4 had called for eliminating the requirement that food stamp recipients be fingerprinted in New York City because this practice makes it harder and more onerous for poor people to get the food they need. Most people associate being fingerprinted with the stigma of being arrested. It also costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to pursue each suspected food stamp “fraud” case, far more than the amount actually received in food assistance.

Billionaire New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, speaking at a news conference after the governor’s speech, said fingerprinting was “a prophylactic measure.”

“There are always people who want to game the system, unfortunately — it’s just society,” Bloomberg stated, completely ignoring the fact that food stamps are “society’s” way of ensuring that people get to eat.

The day before, the Wall Street Journal had written: “On Friday [Dec. 30], during his weekly radio show, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said advocates for the homeless and low-income New Yorkers tend to focus on the negative: “ ‘Oh, it’s terrible. The economy is terrible,’ ” the mayor said, mimicking critics.’” (Jan. 3)

In contrast to his mocking derision of workers and the poor, this arrogant billionaire has been curiously silent about how to prevent fraud and extensive money loss in the high-tech outsourcing the city uses. For example, updating the CityTime payroll system, originally budgeted for $63 million, has cost the city over $600 million, with massive alleged fraud and multiple indictments. (Information Week, June 21, 2011)

Bloomberg likes to keep quiet about details of the deals he makes. The city announced Dec. 19 that its competition for a new high-tech graduate school had been won by a partnership of Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Bloomberg didn’t explain why the city’s investment was going to private institutions instead of its public university, which has been systematically starved of funds.

In all the press coverage of this new deal, there was no mention of the role Technion plays in the Israeli apartheid state. According to a report by Tadamon (Solidarity), which is a Montreal-based collective, “a good part of Technion’s work is linked to weapons development for the Israeli military. Technion faculty and students are involved in helping develop combat and surveillance drones and medium range missiles. … Then there are the spy cameras perched on Israel’s illegal Apartheid Wall. Technion had a hand in developing those too.”