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There always has been something very strange about the Manhattan trial involving $1.2 million of Mayor Moneybags’ fortune, but it is entirely consistent with his weird third term. If Bloomberg ever wants to spot the day it all started to go downhill, he should revisit Oct. 23, 2008.
That’s the day he invited a black cloud to dog him by getting 29 dimwits on the City Council to change the term-limits law. He was all for a limit of two terms — until he realized there wasn’t a chance in hell he wasn’t going to be elected president that year. Suddenly, he liked the job he had so much, he decided to keep it.
First, he would have to renege on a promise never to fight the law, then round up enough council quislings so he could seek a third term. It’s amazing what money can buy.
He got what he wanted, but his victory increasingly looks like a curse. Blame the cloud.
Rocked by scandals, snowstorms and a diminished legacy, Bloomberg now faces the indignity of having to explain publicly, and under oath, something he tried to keep secret. He and his campaign team are spinning like tops as they try to make the $1.2 million payment to the Independence Party seem honest.
It wasn’t. It was designed to be hidden from the public and the campaign-disclosure rules.
It also had an unsavory intent. Defense lawyers convincingly argued on the first day of the trial that Bloomberg made the payment secretly because he was embarrassed about its purpose.
Election Day “ballot security,” the purpose of the money, was called “voter suppression” by Fernando Ferrer when he ran against Bloomberg in 2005. The mayor’s team obviously wanted to avoid a repeat of the charge by Bill Thompson in 2009. The charge packs a special punch when leveled by minority candidates, as both Ferrer and Thompson were.
As third-term luck would have it, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office wondered where the cash went and ended up charging campaign operative John Haggerty (right) with stealing $1.1 million of the payment, with the Independence Party keeping $100,000 for its middle-man role. Haggerty allegedly used most of his take to buy a house, which is the basis of the larceny and other charges against him.
But it’s a crime in search of a victim. Bloomberg never complained about the money and would gladly pay it 10 times over to avoid the trial’s spotlight.
He should have thought of that before agreeing to try to evade the disclosure rules, an evasion which didn’t make any sense given that he was already spending about $100 million to buy the third term. It’s not likely a million more for this or that would have mattered much to voters.
But that’s always the way with hubris. Besides, there’s no point being one of the richest, most powerful men in the world if you have to follow the same rules as everybody else.
Haggerty may or may not be guilty as charged. For the mayor, the verdict of contempt for the public is already rendered.
Union has ‘no’ hope
Just when it seemed state labor unions finally were coming to their senses about the economy, a new case of mad tax disease breaks out.
Paging Dr. Cuomo.
The governor threatened thousands of layoffs if the Public Employees Federation, which represents 56,000 state workers, rejected the package of wage freezes and benefit concessions he negotiated with their leaders. But the members voted it down, and union boss Kenneth Brynien immediately started singing the “tax the rich” refrain yesterday.
“The state should not be demanding this level of sacrifice from us while it’s not demanding those same sacrifices from the wealthiest New Yorkers,” he said, referring to Cuomo’s refusal to extend the income-tax surcharge on top earners when it expires at the end of the year.
It’s a foolish challenge that leaves the governor no option other than to go forward with layoffs. Members of the state’s largest union, the Civil Service Employees Association, already approved the same package, so Cuomo can’t give the federation a better deal as a reward for saying no.
More to the point, with the economy stuck in stall, the state faces declining tax revenues. It still shows a net loss of more than 160,000 private-sector jobs from the recession, and cannot afford the unsustainable costs of state workers.
Maybe the union doesn’t understand the basic math, but the public does. And so does Cuomo.
What a Liu-ser
Say this for city Comptroller John Liu: He’s an equal-opportunity panderer.
Taking a break from buttering the bread of unions, Liu sent a mailing to what his office calls a “demographic list” of Jewish New Yorkers. On official letterhead, he mixes Rosh Hashanah greetings with a boast that the teachers’ retirement system invested $15 million in Israeli government bonds.
Although Liu holds only one of seven board seats, he makes it seem as though he alone made the decision, saying it “was my pleasure” to announce the investment.
He slobbers that “New York and Israel have a deep connection, and our investment reaffirms the commitment that the New York City Pension Funds have toward a prosperous and peace-filled Israel.”
Liu then mangles the traditional Hebrew greeting for Rosh Hashanah. Instead of L’Shana Tova, (“For a good year,”) he spells it LeShana Tova.
Maybe he’s French?
Free markets, Free People
The Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize honors authors whose work best reflects Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty. This year’s winner, Matt Ridley, whose latest book is “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves,” pulled no punches in his acceptance lecture Monday.
“Politically, I still see myself as a liberal, even a radical one, whose distrust of putting people in charge of other people is born of knowledge that government has been the means by which people have committed unspeakable horrors,” he said, citing despots from Nero to Stalin to Moammar Khadafy. “Not one of them used the market to repress and murder their people; their tool was government.
“I was at Auschwitz last month,” he continued. “People often talk about the horrifying ‘industrialization’ of death it represents. What struck me rather was the ‘nationalization’: the bureaucratic central planning and meticulous hierarchical organization of what was actually rather labor-intensive, unmechanized mass murder. It takes a government to do an Auschwitz. ”
U$ is home free
The White House is vacant again. With President Obama taking his nonstop campaign to the West Coast and Vice President Joe Biden tying up traffic in New York to visit “The View” and sneak in a campaign event, it’s fair to ask who is minding the store.
The answer is nobody, and that’s the good news. Each day they play hooky is another day Obama and Biden can’t do more harm to the economy.