"Wouldn't it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here [New York]?"
Yes, Mayor Bloomberg, it really would be just great.
The soon-to-be-Ex-Mayor of New York posed this question to New York Magazine's Chris Smith during an interview conducted for the Magazine in August 2013 (read the full article here). The mayor was posing the question rhetorically as part of his argument that the rich, read here as the top 20 percent of earners in NYC, pay for everyone else's services.
This seems like a standard observation of the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule, which states that, for any given system, 80% of observable effects are traceable to just 20% of the possible causes.
It also might be an insight into the gross economic inequality between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else in the economy that the bottom percentages have so little wealth to tax. Hence, instead of working to construct a solid rapport with the "regular" folks in the city, Bloomberg seeks to lure more Russian billionaires to the Upper West Side.
"Air-conditioning in the schools, the subways. Are you crazy? Now, by most of the world’s standards, you ain’t poor...I’m not being cavalier about it, but most places in the world our poor are wealthy."
It is instructive to pay attention to how the Mayor approaches issues like income inequality in the city. The implication of his statement is that there are actually no poor people in America, due to the fact that, as the world's most powerful nation, we have established something of a socioeconomic safety-net, to catch less fortunate citizens and at least slow their descent into personal catastrophe. We are undoubtedly lucky to live in a nation that has decided to mitigate the destitution of its citizenry, and it is likely better to be homeless and unemployed here in the States than in many other places around the globe - you will get no argument from me on these points. Yet I still don't see how any of that affects the observation of economic patterns WITHIN the socioeconomic framework that defines the lives of those of us who live and work here. Not to mention the validity of observations of the role of the American plutocrats and corporatists in the economic conditions observable around the world.
"...this city is not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other."
This is the culmination of a sequence the Mayor began by calling Mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio's election campaign, which feature his biracial son Dante and his Black wife, "racist" as well as an example of class-warfare. The Mayor goes on to defend the "stop-and-frisk" practice that has come under criticism and constitutional scrutiny.
"We have not racial-profiled, we’ve gone where the crime is."
The program has been shown to be minimally effective at removing weapons from the street, and again the implication here is that there is no crime in non-Black neighborhoods. I have it on good authority that a large robbery was committed by a group of men on Wall Street. Might want to check that out.
Seriously, the epidemic of gun crimes in the Black community needs to be addressed on several fronts, but the data shows that the stop-and-frisk tactics are not effective policy, and they certainly do nothing to address any of the core socioeconomic realities that create the situation on the ground in the ghetto. The para-militarization of urban police departments and the promulgation of an "us-against-them" mentality among "peace officers" denies the possibility of gaining support for community policing of a qualitatively different nature. If communities all too often have reason to view the police as shift-working mercenaries bussed in from outside the community to harass and detain, there is little chance of the reciprocal action that is so critical to understanding what is really happening in the streets. It is a fundamental difference in philosophy.
And that is the ultimate story with Bloomberg, and his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani; they have a fundamentally different philosophy than many New Yorkers, and they see the city very differently than many who grew up there. We don't all have a vision of the city as a mecca for billionaires, with the economy built around them.
There was dream called New York...once. A city where every imaginable race, religion and political persuasion rubbed shoulders on the subway, forming the backbone of a magnificent specimen of urban democracy. Messy? You better believe it. Worth the hassle? More so than any city in the solar system...
Thank you for you service, Mayor Bloomberg.
No comments:
Post a Comment