Bloomberg Says Billionaires Are A "Godsend"

That is actually the word he used:

So what if there’s an income gap? Mayor Bloomberg says the glaring disparity between the city’s rich and poor only exists because of the city is lucky enough to attract the world’s super-wealthy.

“You picture this income inequality measure, but if we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend,” he said in his weekly radio show Friday morning.

Bloomberg, whose $31 billion net worth last year put him 10th on Forbes Magazine’s annual list of wealthiest Americans, said billionaires keep the city running.

“They are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes,” he said.

“They are the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy. And we take the tax revenues from those people to help people throughout the entire rest of the spectrum.”

New York has the largest income inequality gap of any city in the country, according to a census report this week. But Bloomberg says that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“While there are still people at the bottom struggling,” he said, “we’ve made a lot of progress, the problem in the income gap is not at that end. The reason it’s so big is at that higher end we’ve been able to do something that none of these other cities can do. And that is attract a lot of the very wealthy from around the country and around the world.”

Oftentimes those same billionaires Bloomberg is aggrandizing own big chunks of corporations that pay no taxes, receive tax breaks from the city for 20, 30 or even 40 years, and enjoy all kinds of corporate welfare benefits that helps put those billions in those billionaires' accounts.

Sometimes those billionaires or multi-millionaires own companies that pay slave wages to their employees, forcing those employees to seek help from the government (i.e., food stamps) in order to feed their families.

Think Ken Langone, who owns Home Depot, or the Walton Family, which owns Walmart, or the Koch Brothers, who own all sorts of industries and companies that hire exploitable labor.

These same billionaires often use tax shelters to make sure they don't have to pay their fair share of taxes.

Take Mike Bloomberg, for example, who uses the Cayman Islands as a tax shelter for Bloomberg Philanthropy.

So Mayor Bloomberg can talk his Ayn Rand fantasy about how the billionaire "movers" and "creators" are letting the riff raff live off them all he wants.

The truth is, nobody makes a billionaire dollars honestly.

Nobody.

Not Ken Langone, not the Waltons, not the Koch Brothers, not anyone in the financial world and certainly not Mike Bloomberg.

Mario Puzo opens up The Godafather with a quote from Balzac:

"Behind every great fortune is a crime."

These billionaires Bloomberg is sanctifying with his religious gloss today are no better than organized crime kingpins Puzo writes about in his novel who make their wealth living off the blood of others.

In fact, they're all part of the same crew of capitalist vultures - gangsters and bankers, industrialists and billionaire mayors of NYC.

The only difference is, Puzo gave his criminals more charm.

Tax Cap Is Meant To Put Districts Into Crisis

From a commentary by Fred LeBrun in the Times-Union:

It is irrefutable that the effect of the incomplete tax cap passed in June 2011, while politically popular and a contributor to the governor's high standing, has been disastrous for school districts and local governments. School districts have two sources of revenue: state aid and local taxes. The share of school budgets that is state aid has declined nearly 10 percent over the last decade, and the tax cap makes it far more difficult, especially in poorer districts, for localities to make up the difference from property tax levies. One of the arguments in the lawsuit is that because 60 percent of voters are needed to override the tax cap in a local school budget election, 41 percent of the voters saying no have more power than 59 percent who want to spend more. That totally distorts local control.

Sadly, we are watching a catastrophe unfold that will deeply affect many of our children at their most vulnerable ages, and which will have consequences for the rest of their lives.

The State Education Department has warned that between 100 and 200 school districts will be insolvent within two years.

That's up to a quarter of the state's school districts, with more predicted to follow. That means those schools won't be able to meet their obligations and will very likely be broken as teaching institutions as well. The multi-year highway to insolvency for many of them will be already littered with discarded teachers and administrators, dropped programs and advanced placement courses required for college admission, and cuts, cuts and more cuts impacting the core teaching mission.

I think the tax cap has been devised, in part, not just to keep taxes down, but to bring about the destruction of many schools districts.

Even as Cuomo and the state (and the feds) are ratcheting up the mandates, the state is cutting the aid to districts and keeping localities from increasing funding by raising taxes.

In the end, once they go belly-up financially, some of these districts look ripe for the kinds of takeovers we've seen in Michigan, where entire districts are put into receivership and handed over to some state-appointed administrator who brings in the education management organization to run the thing.

 

Just another example of neo-liberalism at work from our Wall Street-funded governor - and just another example of disaster capitalism at work.

Create the disaster, declare the disaster, sell the pieces off.

The same thing is happening in city after city across this nation - from Detroit to Philadelphia.

And of course Barack Obama's former right hand man, Rahm Emanuel, is trying to pull the same thing off in Chicago.