Massive wealth redistribution

Bloomberg has so much to give. And there are so many needs.

This transactional, corrupt favor-trading is as unacceptable as anything we see in Trump’s Washington. It’s abetted by an orgy of spending unseen in modern political history, a corporate-run, corporate-marketed Potemkin village of a campaign (where the talking points are so road-tested they’re plagiarized). Bloomberg has perfected an unrebutted, unsoiled image outside the primary fray (“I'm not running against the other Democratic candidates,” he has said at his canned, catered events, “I'm running to beat Donald Trump”). It calls to mind television networks’ unfiltered broadcasts of Trump’s speeches in 2016, only Bloomberg, unlike Trump, is paying for the time. And unsurprisingly it works; corporations use advertising for a reason. At the same time that he’s deluging the airwaves with his own dollars, he’s also leaning on his pals in the plutocracy to starve competitors seeking big-money dollars. He’s paying Instagram influencers to say nice things about him, and paying meme-makers to boost his image. Fake social-media content to cultivate support? Mike will get it done.

I'm still trying to get a bead on how many of the sudden Bloomberg employees are just in it for the cash windfall. You hear the occasional  anecdote about this or that person who is getting the $6,000 a month and the free computer from Mike but is actually out knocking on doors for Warren or whatever.  But you have to figure that can't be most of them, right?

Anyway we'll know more when the mayoral endorsements come rolling in.  A few have already but there are some we're watching with particular interest.

In spring 2018, the Jackson mayor held a town hall with Sanders before the Vermont senator announced his intentions to again seek the presidency.

Although Lumumba has not signaled whether he will make an endorsement, several Bloomberg staffers have ties to the capital city’s mayor.

The people for whom none of this means a thing

Speaks volumes about the Democratic Party in Louisiana. 

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has selected a team of prominent Louisiana campaign veterans to work on his 2020 efforts.

The Bloomberg Louisiana team includes Richard Carbo, who just ran Gov. John Bel Edwards’ re-election campaign; Ryan Berni, a longtime aide to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu; and Bill Rouselle, a long-time strategist who worked on campaigns for Edwards and New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell, among others.

The pinnacle of success for your most influential political consultants is about electing a meal ticket. Anyone who is in this because they actually care about things is a chump. 

Why do so many people want to burn it all down? It's a mystery.

Meme watch: Nobody could have predicted

First, the obvious one.

For nearly a decade, scientists have told city and state officials that New York faces certain peril: rising sea levels, more frequent flooding and extreme weather patterns. The alarm bells grew louder after Tropical Storm Irene last year, when the city shut down its subway system and water rushed into the Rockaways and Lower Manhattan. 

On Tuesday, as New Yorkers woke up to submerged neighborhoods and water-soaked electrical equipment, officials took their first tentative steps toward considering major infrastructure changes that could protect the city’s fragile shores and eight million residents from repeated disastrous damage.

And then, Kevin points out in an earlier comment thread, some fine foresight on the part of Mike Bloomberg on Sunday. 

President Obama asked Craig Fugate from FEMA to call me earlier in the day and offer any help. I assured him that we had, we think, everything under control but we appreciate the effort.

No thanks, we're all good here!

All of these health care facilities are taking additional precautions to prepare – including bringing in more staff. A lot of them do have backup generators and any outages are not expected to be more than hours or at most a day or so, so they'll be fine, they think

They thought wrong. 

At a news conference Monday night at the city's Office of Emergency Management in Brooklyn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the back-up power at the hospital had failed, prompting the emergency evacuation of patients.

"The one thing that we had not counted on, New York University's hospital back-up power—in spite of them making sure, ensuring us that it's been tested—stopped working. And we're working with them to help move people out," Mr. Bloomberg said

The one thing they hadn't counted on was the one thing nobody could have predicted. Oddly, they seem like they're still kind of counting on it even today.

The failed backup power generators that led to the evacuation of the New York University Langone Medical Center in Manhattan are adequate, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

"Our generators are fully compliant with all state and federal regulations and, using good prudence, we test them all the time as we have to do anyway," Lisa Greiner told HuffPost.

So they stand by their failed generators. How long before they admit they were "generators in name only"?

Anyway despite what Bloomberg says above, this was not the "one thing they hadn't counted on." There was also this.

"We have visited every crane site and every construction site in the city, and with the winds that are expected we think they have appropriately tied down all of the equipment. But if there's a gust that's a lot more than anybody had counted on, things could start to blow."

The gusts must have been "a lot more than anybody had counted on"

A partially collapsed construction crane dangling ominously from the top of a unfinished New York City skyscraper is "stable," but the site's construction company and a crane expert worry that its heavy boom could smash to the street below.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that "the Department of Buildings has determined that the crane is currently stable," but winds remaining from superstorm Sandy remained too high at the top of the 90-story luxury high rise building for crews to work on it.

There's an awful lot here that Bloomberg said he was on top of just a few days ago and yet is suddenly turning out to be a heavy load of nobody-could-have-predicteds. Why isn't Bloomberg being subjected to the same heavy (and unfair) criticism others have received?

"Privately owned public spaces"

Weird legal territory we're getting into with this stuff.

When the Occupy Wall Street demonstration began on September 17, protesters were quickly blocked from Wall Street and settled into nearby Zuccotti Park for their occupation. But as this morning’s near-eviction by New York Police at the behest of owners Brookfield Properties made clear, Zuccotti isn’t a public park with all the free speech protections that come with public property; rather, it’s a privately owned public space.

Privately owned public spaces have proliferated in the past several decades—there are almost 550 in New York City—as a result of zoning concessions the city grants to real estate developers: in exchange for setting aside a nominally public space, property owners such as Brookfield are allowed to bypass height or setback restrictions on their buildings.

But the problem with privately owned public spaces is that they’re no substitution for purely public spaces, because First Amendment protections don’t really apply when the owners of a space are non-governmental.

I don't think any private enterprise owns Duncan Plaza which means, then, that the #OccupyNOLA protesters haven't been faithfully emulating their New York counterparts. Where could they relocate such that they are more in sync with the movement? Where are New Orleans' "privately owned public spaces"?

Piazza D'Italia is interesting in that it is more or less the inverse of what we're looking for. It is owned and maintained by a city run "Development Corporation" but mainly serves as an adornment to the Lowes Hotel making it more of a publicly owned private space.

Our beloved Mr. Peanut Park comes close but it's really more of a billboard than an amenity.

K&B Plaza is just a privately owned office park. Also nobody ever goes there.

Then there's Champions Square which is mostly a state-financed operation through the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District and overseen by SMG. All of which is to say it's a free-money-for-Tom-Benson machine and therefore a publicly financed public space producing a private profit at a vast public expense.

So I'm still kind of stumped here. Is there a local analog to Zuccotti Park's "public-private" partnership? Where in New Orleans do we find the appearance of a public space except with no real obligation to respect the rights of citizens a public good carries with it? That sounds sort of like what Mike Bloomberg is paying Kira Orange-Jones to do to our public schools. The concept is being imported from New York after all.