The 90,000 New Yorkers who control 99% of the city’s wealth are completely segregated, geographically and intellectually, from everyone else in the city and the nation at large, so its no surprise that they tend to be tone-deaf and blind to the inequities and frustrations and resentments of Regular Folk, but billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his charming and powerful partner Diana Taylor are really out-doing themselves in terms of blinkered elite thickheadedness these days.
Let’s start with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is at the moment clearly struggling with his natural impulse to throw every protester in jail without charges for the crime in interrupting the business of the city’s truly important people. His impassioned plea to the people currently participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest: The banks are our friends!
“The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line,” Bloomberg said, presumably meaning service workers on Wall Street, adding that “we all” share blame for taking on too much risk, not just the financial industry.
“And people in this day and age need support for their employers. If the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economic problems, we will not have jobs so anything we can do that’s responsible to help the banks do that is what we need.”
Wonkette’s Kirsten Boyd Johnson correctly notes that every single word the mayor says here is utterly nonsensical, unless you are, say, a billionaire mogul with deep ties to the financial industry.
Everyone else knows that the banks exist to make huge amounts of money by screwing everyone over, but banks are generally run by human beings (with the exception of Goldman Sachs, a Lizard Person From Outer Space operation), and those human beings have largely convinced themselves that they are very good and productive members of society. Hence, this sort of talk.
Which working-class people making $50,000 a year are the protesters protesting against, exactly? I’m not sure. The people who clean the offices of the financial firms that are actually being protested, maybe? The people who sell them fancy coffees? (This is just a slightly confused version of the old hostage argument against attacking the pillars of the vast, corrupt financial industry — if you hurt the banks they’ll hurt everyone else in America in retaliation.)
Still, Mayor Mike is to be commended for his political acumen. Desperate, terrified fealty to “employers” is a great, inspiring message. That should be his independent presidential campaign slogan. “SUPPORT YOUR BETTERS, OR ELSE.”
Diana Taylor, the mayor’s partner (in a personal/romantic sense, not in terms of business), gives an interview to Elizabeth Spiers, the editor of the New York Observer, boy real estate magnate Jared Kushner’s newspaper of record for New York’s media and real estate elite. Taylor manages to be less astoundingly dense as the mayor, but she still illuminates the mindset of the Gotham’s ruling class.
They hate democracy, or at least they hate the decisions made by voters (and who among us doesn’t, much of the time), but she is positive that everyone would see the light and support people like her (or her, specifically) if only those damned left-wing nuts and right-wing nuts who control the political parties hadn’t rigged the whole system.
Here’s the classic “I WOULDA WON IF I WANTED TO!” cry of the elite centrist who declines to messy themselves with an actual run for office, after flirting with the idea:
Last year, Senate Republicans approached Ms. Taylor about the possibility of running against incumbent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and for a while she considered it. “The Senate Republicans basically asked me to run and I thought about it, talked to a lot of people,” she said. “But then when I really thought about it, what attracted me to the idea was the race because I knew I could win that race. It was the thought of actually having to go and do that job, that was really not all that appealing.”
I bet Taylor would’ve been just as successful as her handpicked ridiculous Congressional challenger to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the hilarious Reshma Saujani.
Taylor explicitly defines herself in the traditional “centrist” way: socially liberal (she is pro-choice!) and “fiscally conservative” (she is pro-corporatist!). Contrary to popular belief, this is basically the opposite of how “most Americans” — especially genuine swing voters — actually feel. (To drastically oversimplify, your generic “swing voter” is uncomfortable with changing social mores and thinks the government should soak the rich to pay for regular folks’ schools and healthcare, basically.)
Of course, Taylor identifies as a Republican, but her platform is basically the same as that of the “moderate” wing of the Democratic party, which Barack Obama mostly belongs to, despite occasional liberal rhetorical flights. But it is those liberal rhetorical flights that Taylor deplores about him, because she doesn’t think he’s polite enough to her class:
She was even less sanguine about Obama. “I think that he’s a very intelligent man,” she said carefully. “And he has a lot to learn.”
Her voice took on a sharper edge. “For somebody’s who’s going to come in and be the great unifier—you know, that hopey-changey stuff—it hasn’t worked very well. The country is more divided now than it’s ever been. And he doesn’t appreciate other people and what they do. “
He doesn’t… “appreciate other people.” If only he knew how much the world’s top 1% had done for him!
Having given this some thought, she had a three-pronged list of his biggest mistakes. “There are probably more,” she said, but here were three. He wasn’t supporting business, Ms. Taylor said. “He should be a champion for this country and he’s not. Because that’s where the jobs are going to come from. They’re not going to come from government; they’re going to come from the private sector.” The second: Obamacare. He basically told Congress, ‘you know what? I want a health care bill, do something.”
“The last time I checked, the president was supposed to sit down and figure out what he wanted and then get Congress to go along with it. And we got a mess. And exactly the same thing with financial regulation and regulatory reform.” This was number three. “And we have a mess.”
This boilerplate center-right political analysis is self-evidently stupid to anyone who’s been paying attention to the legislative process over the last, say, 20 years (it is the “magic president” school of analysis) but it is always useful to understand how our betters think about the world. In Diana Taylor’s mind, the unemployment crisis is a result of… Barack Obama being insufficiently respectful of business, or somehow not “championing” business. The jobs will come from the private sector, once… Obama thanks them, profusely, for their goodness.
Next: Barack Obama mistakenly allowed Congress to craft legislation, a clear violation of the Constitution, which holds that Congress should sign or veto bills sent to it by the president. That’s what the Constitution says, right? I seem to have misplaced by pocket copy.
“The last time I checked, the president was supposed to sit down and figure out what he wanted and then get Congress to go along with it.” What a wonderful line! The last time you checked what, Ms. Taylor? Your email? “Doonesbury”? The Thursday Styles section?
Taylor goes on to decry “uncertainty,” claiming Dodd-Frank is somehow stopping banks from lending money to people who need money, and throws in this exasperated cry to the heavens:
“And this whole business of the FHFA suing all the banks around Fannie and Freddie; it’s crazy!” Inasmuch as Mr. Taylor would ever be inclined to pound her fist on a table to make a point, she seemed on the verge of it. “I’ve never—I mean, it just makes no sense at all to me!”
They’re suing the banks because the banks committed mass fraud, basically? It’s pretty easy to understand! (And don’t worry, they’ll let your bank friends off easy, probably.)
But Taylor doesn’t blame the banks for what the banks did. No, she places the blame where her class knows it belongs: On All of Us.
“I think it’s a problem with Congress. I think it’s a problem with the ratings agencies. I think it’s a problem with the banks. I think it’s a problem with the population at large. Everybody’s going like this” she threw her hands up in the air. “And at the end of the day, everybody’s responsible in some way or another.”
Everybody! Did you know that you, citizen, are responsible for the financial disaster and the ensuing mass unemployment crisis? You should probably call up Diana Taylor and apologize personally. You are making her so upset!
Mitt Romney yesterday had a “private” (well-publicized) meeting with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that was a pretty obvious attempt by Romney to win the for-some-reason “coveted” Bloomberg endorsement. Mayor Bloomberg is not actually the hugely popular and universally respected national figure that anti-partisanship zealot pundits think he is — only around 20 percent of Americans viewed him favorably in 2010, and a 2011 poll says he’d get a mere 10 percent of the vote in a three-way presidential race — but those anti-partisanship zealots represent an important constituency of “rich people who run the media,” so a Bloomberg endorsement would be a strong signal that Romney is moderate and wise and prudent and so on.
The Obama administration would also like the Bloomberg endorsement, and both campaigns are trying very hard to win the mayor’s support, as Michael Barbaro writes in the New York Times today.
But as his mayoral term winds down, he has told advisers that he is willing to back a candidate this time around, touching off an intense competition for his support in the general election.
“I’ll see down the road,” the mayor said coyly on Tuesday when asked about an endorsement. Describing his impressions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, he made clear that he sees a wide gap between them. “They’re very different, and they give the public a real choice,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that you can’t tell the difference, if you will. They run the spectrum on lots of different issues.”
I would be surprised if Bloomberg ended up endorsing anyone. He loves the attention he receives as a potential endorser, but he cherishes his “non-partisan independent” label much more, and an endorsement of a major-party presidential candidate would sully his carefully maintained brand. He is leading both campaigns on, just as he did in 2008.
In 2007 and 2008, Obama tirelessly wooed Mayor Bloomberg, meeting with him multiple times and showering him with public praise, and he never received an endorsement. McCain also tried to win the mayor’s support to no avail. There was even (dumb) speculation about each campaign considering offering Bloomberg the running mate gig. Since Obama took office, he has continued attempting to win the mayor over, inviting him to golf and lunch at the White House and so on. When Bloomberg was running for his third term, in 2009, Obama did no campaigning for his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson. (Though then-press secretary Robert Gibbs did allow, in a cagy response to a direct question, that the president “would support the Democratic nominee” in his position as “leader of the Democratic party.”) The mayor has returned the favor by repeatedly, quietly undermining Obama, dismissing him as arrogant to his good pal Rupert Murdoch and trashing Obama’s deficit reduction proposals as, you guessed it, class warfare.
The absurd thing is that there is, policy-wise, practically no daylight between Obama and Bloomberg. The president is a moderate Democrat who believes in the importance of deficit reduction and comprehensive tax reform. The mayor is a liberal Republican who believes the exact same thing. Both of them are “education reformers,” both want immigration reform, both support carbon emissions reduction, both are pro-choice, and the list goes on. They don’t agree on everything, of course. Bloomberg is more strictly anti-gun than the president, and openly supports gay marriage. You know, just like Mitt Romney.
The only reason Bloomberg would have, from a policy perspective, to back Romney over Obama would be over Dodd-Frank, which Bloomberg opposed, and Obama’s plan for a millionaire’s tax bracket, which Bloomberg thinks is a “silly” idea. But the mayor’s stated position is that all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, which is the opposite of the Republican position. His other disagreements with the president are solely about rhetoric — the mayor finds any whiff of economic populism or Democratic partisanship distasteful — and personality. Not that Mayor Bloomberg, the wise technocrat who always carefully weighs the evidence before making his rational decisions, would support a candidate whose entire platform is wildly at odds with Bloomberg’s stated positions, simply because the candidate is nicer to billionaires like Mayor Bloomberg. That would be absurd!
The White House’s attempts to win Bloomberg over seem to me perpetually doomed to failure, though I imagine they’ll continue to embarrass themselves seeking his support, as he continues flirting with Romney.
Thomas Friedman, globe-trotting superstar New York Times columnist and America’s foremost Big Thinker, noticed recently that America is Broken, and by “America” he means an escalator, in a parking garage, at the train station in Washington. There is only one man who can fix this escalator that represents America: Famed escalator repairman and billionaire mogul Mike Bloomberg.
I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal.
And that is why I still hope Michael Bloomberg will reconsider running for president as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs.
Sure, yes, that is a very logical progression. “I had crappy cellphone service on the train because of the two-party system. Save me, Mayor Bloomberg.” In Bloomberg’s America, calls wouldn’t be dropped! Under Bloomberg’s aegis, every single escalator in New York is operational. Men are escalated to and from basements and mezzanines like kings in our shimmering parking garages that are an inspiration to the world.
Because he is a sophist and a fool, Friedman takes mild inconveniences suffered on a trip from one enclave of wealth and power to another to be proof of national decline and his prescription is based primarily on clapping really hard for Tinkerbell.
Bloomberg doesn’t have to win to succeed — or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election and, most importantly, the course of the next administration, no matter who heads it. By running on important issues and offering sensible programs for addressing them — and showing that he had the support of the growing number of Americans who describe themselves as independents — he would compel the two candidates to gravitate toward some of his positions as Election Day neared. And, by taking part in the televised debates, he could impose a dose of reality on the election that would otherwise be missing. Congress would have to take note.
THE NEAR FUTURE: Mitch McConnell picks up the day’s Washington Post. A1 headline: “BLOOMBERG CALLS FOR SENSIBLE SOLUTIONS ON IMPORTANT ISSUES.” McConnell gasps! “Get me Boehner,” he shouts. “It’s time to get serious on comprehensive revenue-raising tax reform, and escalator repair.”
What I enjoy most about this column is that it comes as the Times’ grown-up columnists were having a debate about the merits and goals of “centrism” that had at least some sort of connection to observable political reality. Then little Tommy Friedman arrives with his touching plea for the magical third-party man to solve all of America’s problems (broken escalators) with his centrism wizard staff. You can’t even refute his argument, because there is no argument. “America needs leaders who share all of the priorities of the current administration but who have Big Ideas like fixing this broken escalator with tax reform.”
On Wednesday, accomplished table tennis player Greg Smith announced in a New York Times Op-Ed that he was quitting his job at investment firm Goldman Sachs, because the firm’s “culture” has become, at some point in the last 12 years, “toxic.” Goldman Sachs responded with a spirited P.R. campaign in which it claimed that Smith was not actually a very important person to the firm, and a leaked memo from Lloyd Blankfein in which he argued that Goldman could not possibly be evil because a recent internal survey proved that Goldman employees enjoy working at Goldman.
Despite that very good spin, Goldman Sachs lost $2 billion worth of market value as its shares fell 3.4 in trading over the course of the day (“oh man, some guy says Goldman Sachs is evil? I HAD NO IDEA” — the market). Thankfully, one hero stands ready to defend Goldman Sachs from public scorn: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg actually visited Goldman Sachs headquarters today to personally cheer up very sad bankers. Bloomberg met with Goldman head Blankfein and various other members of the 1 percent, in order to reassure them that they are good people who do good work, even though that is a ridiculous delusion that only fellow members of that class still believe.
“The mayor stopped by to make clear that the company is a vital part of the city’s economy, and the kind of unfair attacks that we’re seeing can eventually hurt all New Yorkers,” Bloomberg’s spokesman said. Bloomberg is a billionaire mogul who owns a financial information company, so Goldman Sachs and other major financial institutions are a vital part of his economy.
After his visit, Bloomberg continued his “stop piling on Goldman Sachs” tour on the radio:
“I don’t know whoever said what,” Bloomberg said on WOR Radio’s John Gambling Show.
“But even if it was said, it’s a few people and, you know, Goldman Sachs is a firm that’s been around for well over a hundred years and it’s a great firm.”
“It’s my job to stand up and support companies that are here in the city that bring us a tax base that employ our people and I’m going to do that.”
He called news coverage of the letter “ridiculous” and “not something we should do.”
We mustn’t cover bad things about Goldman Sachs, because if we do they might get mad and leave us, and then we will have no more Goldman Sachs! They are so important to our tax base that New York City gave them hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax concessions and grants and benefits after they unconvincingly threatened to move to the suburbs.
“Bloomberg View,” the opinion arm of Mr. Bloomberg’s media company that operates out of the offices of his charity, also defended Goldman in an unsigned editorial mocking Smith for failing to realize that Goldman exists to make money by any means necessary, which is obviously a self-evident Good Thing for The Economy and The Country. “If you want to dedicate your life to serving humanity, do not go to work for Goldman Sachs,” the Editors write. Then: “Goldman and other investment banks do perform an important role in our economy, and Goldman bankers — most of them, at least — can hold their heads up high.” I am sure they are relieved to hear they have Bloomberg View’s vote of confidence. (Meanwhile, Bloomberg-owned Businessweek magazine offered this article documenting some recent “heads I win, tails you lose”-style Goldman malfeasance. When will these unfair attacks end?)
That’s the essentially contradictory message currently being offered by defenders of Wall Street: Only a naive fool thinks Goldman doesn’t rip off suckers, and also Goldman performs an important service. And as always the richest and most powerful people in finance turn out to be extraordinarily concerned about their public reputations, but basically unable to actually stop doing things that make people hate them.
[UPDATED BELOW]
On Tuesday, one lucky group of New York City journalists were treated to an evening of drinks, pizza squares, and funny gift exchanges at Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s annual Holiday Party for local press.
In attendance this year were reporters from the New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, CBS, Fox, and other outlets. The journalists, no doubt straining to retain their “objectivity” throughout, were able to schmooze with dignitaries such as Bloomberg’s longtime partner Diana Taylor (who sits on the Board of Directors for Brookfield Properties, the retail firm that partially owns Zuccotti Park) and Paul Browne, spokesperson for the New York City Police Department.
Bloomberg made sure to crack a few jokes at the expense of Occupy Wall Street, whose encampment he ordered forcibly cleared on November 15, by way of a surprise paramilitary style raid. Reporters attempting to cover the police action were harassed, assaulted, and barred from viewing the area — for their own protection, Bloomberg later claimed. (Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who represents the Financial District, has since called on Attorney General Eric Holder to launch an investigation.) All told, police arrested at least ten journalists.
In response, the New York Times, along with The Associated Press, the New York Post, the Daily News, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones & Company, WABC, WCBS, and WNBC sent a strongly worded letter to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly denouncing the NYPD’s conduct during the raid.
None of this stopped New York City’s press corps from laughing it up with the mayor last night.
“I know only five of you in here have actual press credentials,” Bloomberg reportedly quipped, a reference to his office’s assertion that a mere five of the twenty-six journalists arrested overall displayed city-issued press passes.
“There were so many little jokes” about OWS over the course of the night, Nida Khan, a reporter/producer who attended told me. “You could see the awkward reaction from people in the room. Some laughed at these jokes, others were just uncomfortable.”
Bloomberg bestowed “gag gifts” upon a number of journalists, quipping that they “are reserved only for ‘the one percent,’” according to Fernanda Santos, an education reporter for the New York Times. Santos herself received a fake Department of Education “VIP Security Pass.”
“I had no reservations going to the party,” Santos told me. “It’s a good time and a fun tradition the mayor’s press office started some years back.”
In return, Dave Seifman, a longtime columnist for the New York Post, presented Bloomberg with gag gifts on behalf of “Room 9” — the group of journalists who regularly cover City Hall. Rich Lamb, of CBS Radio, served as his “Vanna White,” according to an attendee.
One of the gifts was a tarp that Seifman said “they picked up from the Sanitation Department on the West Side,” Khan recalled. This, of course, was a mocking reference to the NYPD’s forced seizure of tarps, tents, laptops, and many other items in Zuccotti Park, which were thrown into sanitation trucks and dumped in a massive pile at a warehouse-type facility on West 57th Street.
Bloomberg draped himself in the tarp and posed briefly with it, attendees said. Todd Maisel of the New York Daily news tweeted a photo of Bloomberg smiling from ear-to-ear.
The meeting is presumed to be off-the-record, though no formal guidelines are unstated, according to several journalists who were there. Maisel, the photographer, described the mood as “light-hearted.”
“The mayor sometimes deals with tough issues with humor,” he said. After taking the photo, Maisel told me, one of Bloomberg’s aides came over and expressed concern to him about the optics. “They try to deflect bad press from the mayor. But the mayor — he doesn’t care that much.”
And on the menu, according to an attendee?
“Pulled pork on tortilla chips, shrimp dumplings, pizza squares with sausage, pizza squares with mushrooms, and some kind of spicy (buffalo?) chicken stew, served in small white cups with a slice of jalapeno pepper on top.”
Sounds delicious!
UPDATE: This article originally stated that 26 journalists were arrested during the Nov. 15 raid on Zuccotti Park. In fact, 26 journalists have been arrested since the beginning of the movement, while at least 10 were arrested on that particular day. The article has been changed to reflect this.
Billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his own army! No, it’s not a private security firm, like Blackwater. It’s actually, according to the mayor, the New York City Police Department.
Bloomberg, again threatening vaguely to make that presidential run that the American people are decidedly not calling for, told MIT last night that he doesn’t even need to be president, because all of his autocratic desires are fulfilled by running America’s most populous city as his private fiefdom.
“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.
I’m not entirely sure what he means by having his own “State Department.” The city’s independent nonprofit tourism agency, maybe? But he didn’t mention that his army also comes with its own international (and questionably legal) intelligence-gathering apparatus, just like the CIA and FBI, except without any sort of oversight, congressional or otherwise.
Bloomberg, of course, is being a touch ironic, but he’s also not wrong. The NYPD has a 1,000-man army within its increasingly militarized ranks. It has tanks, combat rifles, anti-aircraft weaponry, non-lethal anti-terror sound cannons, and, supposedly, a submarine. And it’s all under the command of one guy, Ray Kelly, who answers solely to one other guy: Mike Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s conception of the NYPD as “his army” explains a lot. Like why he thought it’d be OK to deploy them to Bermuda to help police his weekend home. (That plan was scuttled … once it leaked to the press.) Or why he thought it appropriate to use the NYPD to prevent demonstrators from … drumming on his block, one night.
If you want a sense of precisely how distanced from accountability NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly is, his response to being interrupted by a protester while addressing a Columbia class is illuminating. Faced with footage of police brutality, Kelly grinned and joked around.
A few minutes later, another student asked Kelly why most people who are arrested are incarcerated for “drug crimes.” Dinkins said he didn’t understand the question, and things got confrontational between the student, Kelly, and Dinkins pretty quickly. The student’s SIPA colleagues were not pleased—a few students and a TA asked if she was registered for the class. “No,” she said, “but I do have a question.”
Commissioner Kelly, still grinning, leaned over to another guest for today’s class, New York District Attorney Cy Vance, and loudly whispered, “Says something about the security of this school, doesn’t it?”
(Yes, that’s former Mayor David Dinkins, who himself once faced a revolt of entitled police officers chafing at the prospect of being held accountable for law-breaking and corruption.)
In case Kelly is unfamiliar with the easily available data regarding what his massive army actually does most days, the NYPD makes more arrests for possession of marijuana than for any other crime. Marijuana possession is used as a pretext to sweep up and arrest tens of thousands of black men every year. And the commissioner pretends he’s totally unaware of that fact, even as his department defends the practice as necessary for our safety.
Powerful (and popular) commissioner Kelly has basically escaped every NYPD scandal with his reputation unsullied. Mayor Bloomberg is generally treated by most of the local press as though the fact that he surely means well excuses all manner of illegal activities, lax oversight, and contempt for civil liberties and the law.
Harry Siegel, in a good recent piece on how the recent scandals of the NYPD are actually generating some negative ink for once, actually undersells the recent revelations:
The overly-aggressive response to the Wall Street “occupation”—which began with arresting dozens on the Brooklyn Bridge, proceeded to involve the pepper spraying of protesters, and concluded with a forced media blackout and the arrest of several reporters during the final, middle-of-the-night militarized “clean up” and Thursday’s “day of action”—may yet tip the scales toward a more normalized relationship between the city and the NYPD. It is the culmination of a scandal-ridden year. A partial list of the past year’s troubles includes the trial of two cops accused of rape; a leak-hindered internal affairs investigation into a ticket fixing conspiracy that some rank-and-file officers responded to by spitting on lawyers in the courthouse; a belated outcry over the frequently intrusive stop-and-frisk policy focused on poor and minority neighborhoods; revelations of the department’s secret intelligence program to collect information on Muslims; and the rough arrest of a black City Council member at a parade.
This leaves out, to name one major recent scandal, the 14-year NYPD veteran recently found guilty of planting drugs on an innocent subject. (It also leaves out a third cop credibly accused of rape.) (And the eight officers recently charged with smuggling guns — and cigarettes! — into the city.)
At the crooked narcotics detective’s trial, a retired cop claimed the practice of planting drugs to inflate arrest numbers was widespread, yet another unintended consequence of our data-driven mayor’s insistence on an NYPD that measures success by the number of people — predominantly young black people — subjected to the criminal justice system. The mayor has, in the past, dismissed serious criticisms of his “CompStat” system with ad hominem attacks on police unions.
In New York City, of course, each bad cop, or ring of bad cops, or unruly mob of bad cops is treated as an outlier. This is a press — especially the tabloid papers — that has long simply not cared that the NYPD routinely lies to journalists as a matter of departmental policy. It is widely known, for example, that arrest and ticket quotas exist, NYPD denials being approximately as worthless as a summons mistakenly issued to someone with Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association connections. Police statements on violent incidents are routinely contradicted by video evidence. Kelly feigns ignorance of his department’s methods of maximizing marijuana arrests.
But an army thinks differently than a simple civilian police force. They’re accountable only to their commanders, and not to the citizenry.
New York's First Couple(Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts) 
Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama (Credit: AP) 
Thomas Friedman (Credit: AP) 
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Credit: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters) 
Michael Bloomberg yucks it up (Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar) 
Michael Bloomberg (Credit: AP/Richard Drew) 
