Dear Commons Community,
The NY Times has a hard-hitting analysis of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 3rd term in office. In essence, he should have left after the 2nd term when the going was good. Here are examples of why:
“City contracts to computerize the time-card and personnel systems have imploded, leading to a billion dollars in cost overruns and indictments in the time-card case. Hundreds of police officers have been implicated in a ticket-fixing scandal. A campaign consultant stands accused of skimming $1 million from the mayor’s last re-election effort. And when a blizzard buried subways and highways last year, the mayor advised New Yorkers to use the down time to take in a Broadway play(presumably after residents outside Manhattan strapped on snowshoes and trudged across bridges)…
The mayor appointed Cathleen P. Black, his Upper East Side neighbor, as schools chancellor. She lasted 95 days before he signaled that her expiration date had arrived. The mayor’s education record suffered other indignities, even before Ms. Black’s appointment. When state officials recalibrated test results, the former Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s heralded great leap forward in state test scores became a modest hop… In August, a group gathered to debate the city’s gains in education. The city’s chief academic officer laid claim to substantial advances, and Meryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the State Board of Regents, cast him a look somewhere between quizzical and disbelieving. Seventy-five percent of those youngsters who go to community colleges need remediation, she noted. And only 24 percent eventually get a degree. “Are you kidding me?” she asked to loud applause. …
Perhaps the conclusion to his third term may rest with how he handles the Occupy Wall Street protest. As the protest accelerated yesterday in Times Square, I think that it is inevitable that the Mayor and the protesters will have a reckoning and it will not be pleasant and may in fact be tragic.
As the article indicates:
“The mayor had spoken with disdain of the demonstrators’ demands and defensively of his former Wall Street comrades. In his visit, though, he declared his allegiance to free speech even as he made a housekeeping argument for letting his sanitation people give the plaza a good cleaning. Demonstrators sounded unconvinced of his good will, and after a flurry of angry phone calls from elected officials to the park’s owner, Brookfield Office Properties, the cleaning was put off. ..His problem, and there’s nothing he can do about it, is that he embodies everything they detest,” said a former administration aide …”
This article is well-worth a read.
Tony