 Michael Bloomberg is a genuinely nauseating human being - a union-bashing royalist who enjoys flaunting his obscene wealth in a city that seems intent on running its middle class into the ground and becoming the world's first city-sized gated community. Case in point is his insistence this week that there's absolutely nothing wrong with taxpayer-subsidized ballparks trying to charge taxpayers $2,500 per seat:
WASHINGTON - Mayor Bloomberg on Tuesday shrugged off the sky-high ticket prices fans are paying at city's two new baseball parks, built largely with tax-free government bonds.
"Don't ever think sports is anything but a business," Bloomberg said when asked about the prices for primo seats that can top $2,500 at the $1.5 billion new Yankee Stadium.
"These are great additions to the skyline of New York," Bloomberg said of the Bronx stadium and the new $875 million Citi Field home of the Mets in Queens...
"We put next to nothing into these two stadiums," Bloomberg said of public funding to support the ballparks, even though tax-free bonds paid for most of the construction costs.
Critics have charged that city spent hundreds of millions for neighborhood and transportation improvements around the ballparks.
To a billionaire, $2,500 is an affordable price to take in a ballgame. To the Rest of Us? Well, not so much.
That might be swell in a free market, but again, those stadiums weren't built by the free market - they were built, in part, with taxpayer cash. That's not "a business," as Bloomberg insists - when taxpayers pay for something, that's usually called "government" (or at least it used to be called that). And yet, now taxpayers are being rewarded for their investment with some of the highest prices for ballgame tickets ever charged (tickets that, btw, aren't even selling).
So even beyond the disgusting nature of a city spending taxpayer dollars that could go to, say, health care on sports stadiums is the even more disgusting image of a billionaire mayor defending those stadiums' attempt to continue fleecing taxpayers - a billionaire mayor who says that hundreds of millions of public dollars that could go into priorities like health care is "next to nothing."
Bloomberg is a guy Establishment pundits/reporters fawn over - likely because many of them worked for (or want to work for) his media empire, and because Establishment pundits/reporters generally worship money and power. He is billed as some sort of visionary progressive-conservative hybrid because every now and again he talks about "independence" and aims a few social/environmental policy speeches to the Upper West Side's limousine liberal crowd (and frankly, I'm sure more than one "progressive" blog reader will get upset at this characterization of Bloomberg out of a sense of limousine liberal solidarity with him - after all, let's just be honest, the Netroots hasn't exactly shown itself to be all that interested in working-class economic issues).
But despite the billing, if you listen to Bloomberg and watch what he actually does, you quickly realize he's an old-school royalist who should always be wearing a tophat, tuxedo and a monocle, a guy who doesn't give a shit about regular middle class taxpayers, except when he can buy their votes for reelection and force them to cough up cash for his corporate welfare scheme du jour.
Maybe that's perfectly fine - and even predictable - in a city whose paper of record claims that it's hard to live on a $500,000-a-year salary. But if it is fine to voters in New York, then the Big Apple is indeed a sad place that is quickly waving goodbye to the very middle- and working-class roots that made it so vibrant.
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