Here's why entrusting gov't to the care of benevolent billionaires may not be such a great idea

Mayor Mike: Hath Hell any fury like a grumpy billionaire?

by Ken

Boy, when billionaires don't get their way, things can get ugly. No, this time around I'm not talking about the imperial Koch brothers, though there's lots more to talk about in the newly released report, "The Koch Club," two years in the making, from the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. (The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, not surprisingly, has already picked up on one of the findings in a new "News Desk" post, "Koch Pledge Tied to Congressional Climate Inaction.")

No, this time I'm back to picking at New York City's own "Mayor Mike" Bloomberg, who's in a snit over a pair of bills aimed at getting back some measure of control over an increasingly out-of-control NYPD which were recently passed by the City Council by votes large enough to make mayoral veto overrides possible -- unless the little fella can make a bunch of councilmembers see things his way. And he has announced that he plans just such a campaign of persuasion, relying heavily on a favorite tool, the sledgehammer.

Bloomberg to Target Councilmembers Who Backed Stop-and-Frisk Restrictions

By Trevor Kapp

THE BRONX -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued Monday to blast the two City Council bills passed last week that would restrict the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk tactic, saying he would back candidates running against the councilmembers who supported the legislation.

"I'm telling you I'm going to support those candidates," the mayor said at an unrelated press conference in The Bronx. "Some of these things are life-and-death issues, like these two horrendous bills in the City Council. They're going to put our police officers at risk, and they're going to put the public at risk. And I've got an obligation to tell people that."

Bloomberg did not explicitly say that he would use his political action committee's funds to target the councilmembers, but he has previously poured millions of dollars into political races across the country on issues including gun control and education.

The City Council's anti-racial profiling bill, which passed 34 to 17 early last Thursday, would allow people who think they were stopped and frisked because of their skin color to sue the city.

The inspector general bill, which passed 40 to 11, would task the Department of Investigation with overseeing police practices.

Both pieces of legislation received more than 33 votes, making them veto-proof, but Bloomberg said he would try to persuade councilmembers to change their minds by saying he would support their future opponents.

If you consider the poorish-and-diminishing results we've been getting via most of the other angles we've taken on this democracy thing, especially as our politics has become increasingly focused on money, a case can be made that maybe our best bet is to entrust authority to benevolent billionaires.

So far the prime test has been our Mayor Mike, whose benevolence and billionarity have indeed borne fruit in a number of areas. Nationally as well as locally there's the work he has done to bring a measure of sanity to gun use. And in his mayoralty there have been a number of initiatives he's undertaken which genuinely rose above the constituency-vs.-constituency bickering that normally defines municipal political grubbing -- innovations in street use, the million-tree-planting program, the crackdown on smoking in public smoking, public-health initiatives like the restaurant grading system.

But when we turn over the authority for deciding what's in the public interest to one individual, and so heavily business-oriented a one as this one, we also get his tastes and whims in other matters, like the transformation of a number of sectors of the city via mega-projects that hugely benefit narrow sectors of the public and screw most everyone else (sometimes throwing in sops to the public that he has no intention of fulfilling, like the mysterious vanishing affordable housing promised to sell the Willets Point redevelopment plan), or his obsessive and highly dubious insistence that he knows how to transform public education, or his essentially fascist idea of public order that treats the Bill of Rights as, well, toilet-paper substitute.

And now we have him "protecting" the police in ways that to a lot of us seem dangerous to public safety. The notion that the two City Council bills -- establishing some form of extra-departmental oversight and trying to bring some control over the out-of-control use of stop-and-frisk -- are life-or-death dangerous is blatantly false and frighteningly demagogic. Is the guy just a liar, or could he be a little bit nuts? It has been kind of terrifying to watch the way he has turned the NYPD into an occupation paramilitary force, or even an imperial palace guard.

And now the mayor, in his guise as bully, seems to have it in mind to buy himself a City Council. It's at times like these that worry less about being nostalgic for the Good Mike once the son of a bitch is finally forced to get his carcass the hell out of City Hall.

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