Fear And Loathing: Bloomberg Edition

On Friday, Mayor Moneybags threatened to lay off 21,000 teachers if he doesn't get changes to seniority rules that allow him to lay off veteran teachers.

Today he says, "Yeah, I really didn't mean that. I was just talking shit to stir up fear":

After spreading fear across the city by saying he'd have to fire as many as 21,000 teachers if Gov. Cuomo guts education funds, Mayor Bloomberg admitted Monday that he won't go through with it.

"We just cannot go and fire 25% of our teachers, even if the economics say you should," Bloomberg said of the 75,000-teacher force. "We'll have to find another way to mitigate the pain."

It's not the first time the mayor has warned of sky-high layoff numbers that never materialized, but this warning - packaged with a political push to change seniority rules - struck teachers union President Michael Mulgrew as reckless "political posturing."

"You don't put out a number like that unless you're trying to create fear," Mulgrew said. "The political posturing is creating anxiety and pitting one community against another."

The mayor made the layoff threat on his weekly radio show Friday as he called for Albany to shake up seniority rules so schools could choose which teachers to keep instead of firing just those most recently hired.

Sunday, he ramped up that effort by telling parishioners at an influential black church in Brooklyn that he'd have to fire all teachers hired in the last five years - 19,500.

He said this would deeply affect poor, minority communities where many of the younger teachers work.

Mulgrew said teachers are "sick and tired" of the mayor blaming teachers for the city's woes.

"Everything they do seems to be a political campaign rather than running the city," Mulgrew said. "This guy is going out there, disparaging teachers ... He's going out and creating fear when we know at this point that every layoff is hurting children."

I can't believe I am going to write this - but Mulgrew's right.

Everything Bloomberg does IS a political campaign to push through his corporatization policies.

This was NEVER about actual governance or helping the school system.

This has ALWAYS been about busting one of the last powerful unions - the teacher union - and ridding management of work rules like tenure and seniority that they see as "onerous."

So now that Bloomberg has publicly admitted he was full of shit when he threw out the 21,000 layoff number (and as Accountable Talk noted, this wasn't the first time that Bloomberg has done this), maybe the news media can stop promulgating the fear and loathing Bloomberg tries to spread regarding teachers and the school system by calling him to account for his reckless, fear-ridden rhetoric.