Aww, C'mon. Bloomberg wasn't THAT bad.
You're right. He was much, much WORSE.
We were treated to relentless apologia and revisionism in the pages of the NYT and the.... ugh.... WSJ as the year drew to a close. Not to mention in Murdoch's NY Post and the ever-amiss NY Daily News. Billionaire media types are known to have a squishy-soft spot for billionaire media types. Esp when the latter decide to RUN ....as opposed to simply OWN ....the government.
Now Raging Horse assesses the *actual* damage.
>>>Bloomberg: Good Riddance to the Corruptor And All He Stands For
January 1, 2014
The seemingly interminable mayoralty of Michael R. Bloomberg has at last come to an end. Bloomberg, it should be recalled, arrived on the scene as a political novice and ran on the notion that his business savvy was just what the city needed and that immense wealth would keep him above the corruption which had periodically stained other administrations, most recently that of the now sanctified Ed Koch. A rich man, so the thinking went, was beyond corruption. An immensely rich man, such as Bloomberg, was that much the more above corruption. That may or may not be true. But what is certainly true is just as riches might place one beyond the temptations of more traditional forms of corruption – financially enriching oneself — it simultaneously provides the means to corrupt others and to bend them to your will with promises of a life on permanent Easy Street in exchange for implementing ones policies, even if such policies bear only a nominal relationship to previous ways of doing things. All you needed to do was surrender your principles, sell your soul and submit to the will of Mike Bloomberg.
Many did.
Bearing that distinction in mind, I submit with no fear of contradiction that Bloomberg, who, as the plutocrat politician is something new and horrific in the American political reality, is far and away the most corrupting mayor in the history of New York City. Indeed, as most clearly evidenced in the disgraceful machinations that led to his third term, machinations that ignored the will of millions of New Yorkers who twice voted for term limits and revealed much of the City Council to be Bloomberg’s valets, corrupting was Bloomberg’s modus operandi. And a highly effective method at that.
more: http://raginghorse.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/bloomberg-good-riddance-to-the-corruptor-and-all-he-stands-for/
The method was most effective and most evident in Bloomberg’s radical restructuring of the public school system, meant to lead, intrinsically, to a radical reconfiguration of labor relations.
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