NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg Gets Scrutiny for His Good Deed

New York Times Columnist Cannot Let His Generosity Go Unpunished

As described in an earlier post, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stepped up to the plate and dropped $30 million of his own money into a program designed to help young men obtain jobs and stay out of prison.

 

Bloomberg's new program is
 aimed at helping young black

and Latino men in New York City.
 | AP Photo Close

the mayor put $30 million of his own philanthropic stash — along with $30 million more from that liberal Croesus George Soros — into an ambitious and indisputably compelling effort. He would reel in the tens of thousand of young black and Latino men who drift far from the shores of steady work and toward prison and dysfunction.

Now a commentary piece in the New York Times has examined Mr. Bloomberg’s gift, and was generally positive about it (ok, it is impossible not to be), but (and there is always the but) had to comment on some of the Mayor’s other possible shortcomings.  The writer finds, gasp, that the Mayor is not perfect.

And yet you cannot write of this mayor and his good works without reckoning with his personal and policy contradictions, and with the questions that might be raised about government by personal checkbook.

This same mayor runs a police department that stops and frisks record numbers of black and Latino men — half a million each year, sometimes at gunpoint. 



The Previous Mayor
Good for Minorities?



Maybe the author wants that other fellow back, the one who was Mayor before Mr. Bloomberg.  How was  his record with respect to the police and minorities?

And the writer finds out that cultural institutions to whom the Mayor made major donations supported his successful bid to change the city charter to allow him to run for a third term. 

When the mayor was in need of witnesses to pipe up about revoking term limits at a City Council hearing, the sound heard offstage was of nonprofit leaders tripping over themselves in the dash to the podium. Aides protest that this phenomenon is entirely voluntary — they simply love this man.

Yes, Mr. Bloomberg did use his donations to non-profit public institutions to further his mayoral election.  Welcome to “Real World Politics 101”.  At least some good was done with the money, and if New Yorkers object, then maybe next time they can get Karl Rove and his Conservative billionaires to just run “public service ads” poisoning the political waters.  Would that be ok?