Bloomberg's Budget Cuts Kill Another New Yorker

This is awful:

A windswept, five-alarm fire that killed an elderly Brooklyn woman Saturday could have been contained much faster with more men on duty, union officials charged yesterday.

Retired guidance counselor Mary Feagin, 62, died in the powerful blaze that swept through her Flatbush apartment building on East 29th Street at around 6 p.m. Twenty firefighters and 11 civilians also were injured in the blaze.

Firefighters struggled to get water on the blaze because budget cuts left each of the first three responding units short a man, said union chief Steve Cassidy.

"It never would have gotten out of control the way it did," said Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association.

Sure, it's bad when people die as a result of the Bloomberg budget cuts.

But you know, money is money, and the rich just CANNOT be asked to pay higher taxes.

And if people die as a consequences of the cuts, well, as the Bloombergian Donald Rumsfeld once said, "So be it...stuff happens..."

And just wait until Bloomberg closes 20 more firehouses.

More people will die.

I don't understand why the headlines don't read: BLOOMBERG KILLS PEOPLE TO SAVE WALL STREET CRIMINAL CLASS FROM HIGHER TAXES.

Because that is exactly what is happening.

Michael Daly Continues To Hammer Bloomberg

A few days after NY Daily News columnist hammered Mayor Moneybags for calling parents and teachers who criticized NYCDOE polices an "embarrassment," he hammers him over his pension plans for cops and firemen:

Retired NYPD Detective Bob Gates wants to report an attempted robbery.

He describes the perp as a white male, 5-foot-7, medium build, 60- to 70 years-old, known to be tan even in winter.

The perpetrator is seen around City Hall on weekdays, where he is often addressed as "Mr. Mayor." He is said to frequent the Mid Ocean Club golf course in Bermuda on weekends.

Gates cannot confirm this, though he once visited the island on a cruise with pals from Park Slope back when the neighborhood was Irish. They did play an approximation of golf. He is not sure on which course. "Half of these guys were in the tank," the 72-year-old Gates explains.

Gates counts himself a victim of the attempted robbery, along with his son, retired NYPD Lt. Robert Gates; his brother, retired FDNY Firefighter Thomas Gates, and thousands of other retirees of our uniformed services.

The crime involves a $12,000 annual retirement benefit the victims receive under two agreements the city initiated with the police and fire unions, in 1968 and in 1988.

The deals accorded the city and the unions a Vegas-style "skim" of the profits from investing the fire and police pension funds in the stock market rather than in safer, but much less lucrative bonds.

The union skim was a percentage of the profits until 1988, when the city proposed formalizing it into a definite benefit. It grew as agreed by both sides in $500 yearly increments from $2,500 to a perpetual maximum of $12,000, in 2007.

Now, the perp at City Hall wants to stop paying anything at all even though the city came out ahead on the deals by $4 billion.

"Guys risk their lives and he just comes and tries to take it away," Bob Gates says. "He should have rode with us on some of the jobs we had."

Gates was at numerous shootings, including the 1973 standoff at John and Al's Sporting Goods in Brooklyn where a fellow officer was killed.

He made two rescues on the Brooklyn Bridge and two more in the East River. He rescued one nut from Lady Liberty's crown, another from atop the World Trade Center.

He risked a 12-story fall when he saved a man who was hanging upside down in an elevator shaft, suspended only by a foot wedged between the track and the wall.

He and his partner, Rick Mahoney, became Daily News heroes of the month in 1977 by rescuing a disturbed man from a swaying crane 240 feet over Times Square.

"I said, 'I know a guy ... in the ironworkers, I'll try to get you a job,'" Gates recalls telling the guy. "He said, 'Okay. Is there chance I could get a beer?'"

Gates agreed and proved himself somebody who honors a negotiated settlement even when it's with a psycho who almost gets you killed.

"We stopped at a bodega," Gates remembers. "He had a couple of beers in the car."

Too bad such honor does not rule City Hall. The shadowy perp seeks to justify stealing the duly negotiated $12,000 by calling it a "holiday bonus," as if it were akin to the Wall Street bonuses that fueled such public fury during the financial crisis.

This from a guy who considered Wall Street excesses good for the city because they generated tax revenue. Now he wants to use the lingering public anger over Wall Street to win support for grabbing money from cops and firefighters.

"He acts like it's a freebie," Gates says. "He knows how we got it."

Should the scheme succeed, Gates will receive only his $20,000 a year pension. His financial analysis sounds like what it is, a guy reporting an attempted robbery.

"They want to take my f-----g money!"

Moneybags has no honor, certainly doesn't care that these cops and firemen risked their lives for the city.

To paraphrase Charles Grodin from Midnight Run, "He's only about the f-----g money!"

It's a shame that some of the unions that Bloomberg is now trying to screw supported him for a third term.

Bloomberg Refuses To Honor 9/11 Hero

Wow. Just wow:

Mayor Bloomberg said the city won't back down from its refusal to put a retired fire captain's name on a memorial to firefighters who died on 9/11.

A judge had ordered the city to include Capt. James Corrigan's name on the kust of the fallen at the Ground Zero memorial that is under construction.

But Tuesday, Bloomberg said no.

"We'll fight this in court," he said. "The fire department has a reasonable decision they made a long time ago. You had to have been an on-duty fireman, an active firefighter or officer to be included."

"If you want to delay the memorial for a couple of years, you start opening it up and revisit everybody. You're never going to make everybody happy ...I just dread the thought if we've got to reopen every single issue down with the 9/11 memorial.

It'll never get done."

Corrigan, 60, retired from the FDNY in 1994 and was working as a life safety coordinator for the World Trade Center when the planes hit. He died in the south tower, aiding fellow firefighters in the evacuation.

The city says Corrigan's name doesn't belong among active duty firefighters because he was retired.

Corrigan's widow, Marie, sued to get her late husband's name listed on a wall of firefighting heroes planned by the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum.

She had told The News she hoped the issue was resolved.

"I wish it had never come to this, but I hope this is the end," she said. "This is such a no-brainer. It just shouldn't have happened."

According to this account in the NY Daily News, Corrigan was working side-by-side firefighters to save people when the south tower collapsed and killed him.

The FDNY has already treated him as one of the 9/11 fallen by giving his family death benefits reserved for firefighters killed in the line of duty and by reading his name aloud at a 2002 memorial service.

Yet they decided his name will not go on the Ground Zero memorial and Moneybags, ever the sensitive, caring, understanding individual that he is, has decided the FDNY is right.

And he's going to spend tens of thousands (and perhaps hundreds of thousands) of taxpayer money to make sure Corrigan's name does NOT appear on the memorial.

Amazing.

Simply amazing.

This is what happens when you give a little DICKtator with billions of dollars unbridled power.

Court orders? Fuck the court - I am Moneybags, owner of New York City. I DO WHATEVER I WANT!

The next time the fire department has to respond to something involving Moneybags, the individual firefighters might want to remember how he has treated James Corrigan and Corrigan's family before they rush over to put out the fire or administer CPR.

Bloomberg's NY: Cops Manipulate Crime Stats

From the Daily News:

A Brooklyn precinct is under investigation for manipulating statistics to make its cops look like better crimefighters, the Daily News has learned.

Two probes are centered around whether Bedford-Stuyvesant's 81st Precinct recorded felonies as misdemeanors and refused to take complaints from victims - all in an effort to drive down the crime rate, sources said.

And the allegations came from one of the precinct's officers.

Officer Adrian Schoolcraft shared his suspicions with the Internal Affairs Bureau and the Quality Assurance Division, the NYPD unit responsible for maintaining the integrity of crime stats.

Schoolcraft told The News the top brass are so concerned with numbers that one precinct lieutenant is known as "The Shredder" because he's often spotted destroying documents.

Just how did cops at the precinct manipulate the stats? Here are some of the ways:

- A man who said he was beaten bloody and robbed - and then told by cops he was the victim of a "lost property" case because he didn't get a good look at the suspects.

- Another man who said he was berated by the precinct's commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Steven Mauriello, for trying to report a stolen car.

- Another stolen car victim who said it took her a month to get a complaint taken - and that happened only when a supervisor realized she was a retired traffic agent.

- An elderly man who said cops would not take a report when he was burglarized, saying there was "no evidence."

- A 65-year-old woman who said she was crying with anger and frustration when she could not get precinct cops to take a report about her stolen car.

I have a couple of things to say about this.

First, when we live in a society controlled by the data fetishists where stats must show progress every quarter or people get fired, you're going to have this kind of manipulation.

We see it on Wall Street where corporations manipulate their debt, hold things "off the books" and otherwise make their balance sheets look healthier than they really are.

We saw the Bush administration do it with the war funding, always using supplemental bills to fund the Iraq and Afghan wars so that the federal deficit and budget would look smaller.

We it in education, from the state level where the tests are dumbed down to ensure test scores go up the city level where the "credit recovery" program is put into place to make the graduation rates go up.

And now we see it with the police having to manipulate the stats too, rather than honestly report crimes in a precinct and deal accordingly with reality.

Can't say I'm surprised. I wrote a few weeks back after Bloomberg bragged about having the lowest crime rates since Peter Stuyvesant and the lowest fire fatalities since fire was invented that these stats were most likely manipulated and horseshit.

The allegations against the 81st precinct have not been proven yet, but knowing how the data fetish has pressured everybody in education to massage the stats, I believe these allegations are true.

And I also believe the 81st is not the only precinct engaged in this kind of dishonesty.

When Mayor Bloomberg finally leaves town for good and independent analysis of his time in office can be done, I am certain many examples of manipulated stats, fake data and overall dishonest reporting will come to light.

Bloomberg's The Best At Everything!!!!

Bloomberg says fire fatalities are the lowest since 1918.

Last week he said murders are the lowest since Peter Stuyvesant owned the joint.

And of course we know we have the most edumacated students in all the land - with those high test scores and grad rates Bloomberg and Klein have brought us.

And we have the lowest levels of trans fats in the nation too!!!

And restaurants with low-sodium food!!!

And the best public parks located in the middle of traffic anybody could ever want!!!

What an amazing place to live, this Bloomberg's New York.

And this Bloomberg is just the best at everything!!!!

Wished I believed he wasn't full of shit on so much of this.

But I know better and I still say knowing how he screws with the education numbers, he's screwing with the fire fatalities and homicide rate too.

That's what a crook like Bloomberg - Wall Street trained like all good crooks are these days - does.

Screw with the numbers and know that the corporate-owned media won't call him on any of it.