Excerpts from Mayor Bloomberg’s WOR radio show on Friday about New York politics:
The system is broken.
It’s like the school system. It’s designed for the people that work there and not the people they’re supposed to help.
I have lots of friends who’d love to do public service — and when they look at this bloodsport of destroying people’s lives and going after totally irrelevant things and trying to embarrass them because it gives them a good headline — they say why should I go into public service?
And so you don’t get people that have knowledge. The average legislator who has to make policy on things that influence our lives, our kids’ lives, our future — would they ever get a job in the private sector making policy on big things? No. Not a chance.
And yet those are the ones we keep re-electing. You’ve got to ask yourself why.
The parties control the mechanism. The Board of Elections has to be half Republican and half Democrat, and more than a third of the city says they’re not a member of either party and they have no say. And they just set rules to keep themselves entrenched in power and keep the patronage jobs that they want to give out to their friends.
Go take a look at a legislator and see who his or her employees are. They’re all inside the Beltway, you would say, helping each other. Most of it is not done in open competitions where you say “Let’s find the best and the brightest.”