Here's why entrusting gov't to the care of benevolent billionaires may not be such a great idea

Mayor Mike: Hath Hell any fury like a grumpy billionaire?

by Ken

Boy, when billionaires don't get their way, things can get ugly. No, this time around I'm not talking about the imperial Koch brothers, though there's lots more to talk about in the newly released report, "The Koch Club," two years in the making, from the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. (The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, not surprisingly, has already picked up on one of the findings in a new "News Desk" post, "Koch Pledge Tied to Congressional Climate Inaction.")

No, this time I'm back to picking at New York City's own "Mayor Mike" Bloomberg, who's in a snit over a pair of bills aimed at getting back some measure of control over an increasingly out-of-control NYPD which were recently passed by the City Council by votes large enough to make mayoral veto overrides possible -- unless the little fella can make a bunch of councilmembers see things his way. And he has announced that he plans just such a campaign of persuasion, relying heavily on a favorite tool, the sledgehammer.

Bloomberg to Target Councilmembers Who Backed Stop-and-Frisk Restrictions

By Trevor Kapp

THE BRONX -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued Monday to blast the two City Council bills passed last week that would restrict the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk tactic, saying he would back candidates running against the councilmembers who supported the legislation.

"I'm telling you I'm going to support those candidates," the mayor said at an unrelated press conference in The Bronx. "Some of these things are life-and-death issues, like these two horrendous bills in the City Council. They're going to put our police officers at risk, and they're going to put the public at risk. And I've got an obligation to tell people that."

Bloomberg did not explicitly say that he would use his political action committee's funds to target the councilmembers, but he has previously poured millions of dollars into political races across the country on issues including gun control and education.

The City Council's anti-racial profiling bill, which passed 34 to 17 early last Thursday, would allow people who think they were stopped and frisked because of their skin color to sue the city.

The inspector general bill, which passed 40 to 11, would task the Department of Investigation with overseeing police practices.

Both pieces of legislation received more than 33 votes, making them veto-proof, but Bloomberg said he would try to persuade councilmembers to change their minds by saying he would support their future opponents.

If you consider the poorish-and-diminishing results we've been getting via most of the other angles we've taken on this democracy thing, especially as our politics has become increasingly focused on money, a case can be made that maybe our best bet is to entrust authority to benevolent billionaires.

So far the prime test has been our Mayor Mike, whose benevolence and billionarity have indeed borne fruit in a number of areas. Nationally as well as locally there's the work he has done to bring a measure of sanity to gun use. And in his mayoralty there have been a number of initiatives he's undertaken which genuinely rose above the constituency-vs.-constituency bickering that normally defines municipal political grubbing -- innovations in street use, the million-tree-planting program, the crackdown on smoking in public smoking, public-health initiatives like the restaurant grading system.

But when we turn over the authority for deciding what's in the public interest to one individual, and so heavily business-oriented a one as this one, we also get his tastes and whims in other matters, like the transformation of a number of sectors of the city via mega-projects that hugely benefit narrow sectors of the public and screw most everyone else (sometimes throwing in sops to the public that he has no intention of fulfilling, like the mysterious vanishing affordable housing promised to sell the Willets Point redevelopment plan), or his obsessive and highly dubious insistence that he knows how to transform public education, or his essentially fascist idea of public order that treats the Bill of Rights as, well, toilet-paper substitute.

And now we have him "protecting" the police in ways that to a lot of us seem dangerous to public safety. The notion that the two City Council bills -- establishing some form of extra-departmental oversight and trying to bring some control over the out-of-control use of stop-and-frisk -- are life-or-death dangerous is blatantly false and frighteningly demagogic. Is the guy just a liar, or could he be a little bit nuts? It has been kind of terrifying to watch the way he has turned the NYPD into an occupation paramilitary force, or even an imperial palace guard.

And now the mayor, in his guise as bully, seems to have it in mind to buy himself a City Council. It's at times like these that worry less about being nostalgic for the Good Mike once the son of a bitch is finally forced to get his carcass the hell out of City Hall.

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OMG, Anthony Weiner is now the NYC mayoral front runner!

Oh no, he's back! (Sorry, no penis pictures available.)

by Ken

Howie will have quite a lot to say about the Supreme Court ruling in the morning, and I'm happy to give the subject a pass. I'd probably just fulminate, and probably calumniate -- the Five Supreme Lunks, that is. (Howie's going to have some point-by-point on them too.)

Instead I thought I'd retreat into the political weirdosphere. From our local online news emporium DNAinfo.com this evening:

Latest Poll Shows Weiner Leading Democratic Mayoral Pack

By Jeanmarie Evelly on June 25, 2013 7:01pm

NEW YORK CITY -- A new poll shows Anthony Weiner leading the race for New York City's Democratic mayoral nominee, according to reports published Tuesday.

A Wall Street Journal-NBC New York-Marist survey of registered Democrats showed the ex-Congressman capturing 25 percent of votes, the Wall Street Journal reported -- edging out longtime frontrunner Christine Quinn, who scored 20 percent of votes.

The results show Weiner has surged in popularity since the last Marist poll in May, when he scored 19 percent of Democratic votes compared to Quinn's 24 percent.

Both Weiner and City Council Speaker Quinn remained largely ahead of their other Democratic rivals, according to the poll, which put former Comptroller Bill Thompson in third with 13 percent of votes, followed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio at 10 percent and city Comptroller John Liu at eight percent.

According to NBC New York, Weiner also polled slightly better among women: 22 percent of Democrats surveyed said they would vote for him compared to 21 percent who opted for Quinn.

Among registered Republicans, the new poll found former MTA chair Joe Lhota leading the race with 28 percent of votes, compared to rivals John Catsimatidis at 21 percent and George McDonald who scored 10 percent.

Just a couple of weeks ago, from the opposite coast Howie was asking me about the mayoral situation, and in particular whether Anthony Weiner really had a chance. AW had only had to enter the Democratic mayoral field to soar to second place behind the front runner, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. I said I thought he might if Quinn's support faded, and Howie seemed surprised to hear that I thought that possible. I tried to explain that I didn't see any of the candidates having especially solid support, and that no, I didn't imagine much of anybody voting for Quinn because she's a lesbian. A lot of us would be fine with that but don't see it as any reason to support her.

Or much of anyone else, either. It's not that the candidates are necessarily bad people -- though again, I was surprised to learn from Howie that Public Advocaate Bill De Blasio is supposed to be the "progressive" candidate. I suppose it's possible and I just didn't know it. After all, no one knows anything about the public advocate, least of all what he does. I suspect that the public advocate himself doesn't have much idea.

(You say who or what TF is the public advocate? This is actually an interesting question. Okay, maybe not an interesting question, but a question anyways. If you really want to know, I'd be happy to walk you through it, but let me warn you that you're going to have wrap your head around the death of the Board of Estimate, meaning that you'll have to find out what the hell the immensely powerful Board of Estimate was. You still want to know?)

So why not Weiner? At least people know who he is. You might think that that would work against him, but in a field where people don't have strong impressions of most of the candidates, maybe just being known gives you some stature.

The problem Christine Quinn has is that when your support isn't deep to begin with, and your the front runner mostly because people are used to seeing you near the mayor all the time, and kind of assume you're next, it's not easy to withstand having all the other candidates hacking away at you all the time -- the one issue all the other candidates can agree on.

I tried to explain to Howie that all the candidates are searching for an issue that will, well, make people care who they are. You might think, for example, that former City Comptroller Bill Thompson might have some cred considering how close he came to upsetting Mayor Mike in the last election. In all likelihood the only thing that stood between him and victory was the universal assumption that he didn't have a prayer. That turns out to have been Mayor Mike's baseline strategy: spend so much money that everyone would assume that nobody who ran against him had a prayer. Unfortunately for Bill T, that all seems like it happened in another lifetime. Now it's pretty much Bill Who?

One thing it didn't occur to me to say to Howie is that Mayor Mike seems to have kind of sucked the oxygen out of New York City's political life. Which is strange for a city that once had a candidate for one office or another on every street corner, all getting attention of some sort. It's going to be a strange readjustment when we don't have Mayor Mike to tell us what we think anymore.

Bear in mind that if no candidate gets 40 percent of the vote, there has to be a runoff. (This all goes back to 1969 and the primary victory of a not very funny clown of a man named Mario Procaccino with 32.8 percent of the vote. We can go into that too if you like, but trust me, you'd probably rather hear about the Board of Estimate.) The big news is that it looks like we're going to have our old manual-lever voting machines back for the primary and the runoff. Exciting!

The way I crunch the numbers, by the time we get to a runoff (which will be either September 24 or October 1, depending on whether the state legislature ever got around to pushing the date back -- apparently I wasn't paying close attention), the likely turnout should be in the hundreds. If Weiner can't cash in his celebrity at voting levels like that, well, then . . . um, I guess he won't win.

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Yes, There Are Still NRA Shills Among Congressional Democrats

Few are as blatant and tone deaf as John Barrow (New Dem/Blue Dog-GA), but there are Democrats firmly allied with the NRA in both the House and Senate. In fact, four of them in the Senate-- Mark Pryor (AR), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Mark Begich (AK), and Max Baucus (MT)-- just got unpleasant wakeup calls on the issue from Michael Bloomberg. He sent the letter below to hundreds of top Democratic donors urging them to stop writing campaign checks to NRA shills-- particularly these NRA shills. Heitkamp doesn't face the voters for another 5 years and Baucus is finally retiring. But Begich and Pryor are in tough reelection races for 2014 and if donors cut them off, they could be in trouble, although a case has been made that in both Alaska and Arkansas, being seen as someone not liked by the mayor of New York City does a candidate more good than bad in a general election. Last week we saw how billionaire Democratic donor Kenneth Lerer announced he would withhold contributions from NRA Democrats-- and possibly help fund primary opponents against them.

The move could inflame tensions that have simmered for weeks between Mr. Bloomberg, who blames the four Democrats for the defeat of the bill, and Democratic Senate leaders, who have privately told City Hall that the attacks can serve only to empower a Republican majority openly hostile to Mr. Bloomberg’s priorities.

By appealing to the Democrats’ financial base, Mr. Bloomberg is exploiting his relationships and prestige among wealthy New Yorkers to disrupt the flow of campaign money to key Democrats whose re-election next year will help determine whether the party retains control of the Senate. No state is more essential to the party’s fund-raising: Sitting Democratic senators and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised $30.4 million from New York donors in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than in any other state.

...Mr. Bloomberg’s strategy creates a tricky situation for Senate Democrats. They do not wish to alienate the billionaire mayor, who has become increasingly aggressive and outspoken on the issue. But they say he should be more sympathetic, given that their party, with its fragile majority, has tried to take on the difficult subject of increasing restrictions on guns in the face of hostility from Republicans.

“What they are doing,” said one senior Democratic aide who, like many people interviewed for this article, declined to go on the record criticizing the mayor, “is increasing the likelihood of a 100 percent A-rated N.R.A. Republican being elected.”

For Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who was an architect of his party’s takeover of the Senate in 2006 and has aggressively built up the Democratic donor base in New York, and who is a close ally of the mayor, the notion that Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts could cost Democrats their majority is not an abstraction.

He praised the mayor’s effort, but added, “We should be mindful that pro-gun safety laws have a much better chance of passing under a Democratic Senate majority than a Republican one.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s idea to use his formidable resources against Senate Democrats was enough of a threat to the majority leader, Harry Reid, that he raised the issue with the mayor in Washington in February.

According to a person with direct knowledge of their conversation, Mr. Reid told the mayor that he thought any efforts to attack Democrats would be shortsighted, and could ultimately result in a Republican Senate majority.

“Do you think you’d be better served by Majority Leader McConnell?” Mr. Reid said, according to this person, referring to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Mr. Bloomberg appears undeterred. In May, he financed a $350,000 blitz of tough television ads against Mr. Pryor, featuring the fatal shooting of a friend of the senator. Mr. Bloomberg said voters would reward the senators if they heeded the public-- which broadly favors background checks-- instead of the National Rifle Association and other groups opposed to the legislation.

“If Democrats want to keep control of the Senate, what I would suggest is that they have all of their members vote for things that the public wants,” he said in the interview. “And if they don’t do that, the voters should elect different senators who will listen to them. That’s what democracy is all about.”

If a background-check bill passes the Senate, Mr. Bloomberg said, he will seek to put similar pressure on the Republican-led House, including appeals to Republican donors in New York who favor more gun regulation. Some Senate Republicans have already found themselves targets of the mayor.

This is the counter-ad that Pryor ran in Arkansas. "No one from New York or Washington tells me what to do; I listen to Arkansas." (He mostly listens the Walton family-- and to talking snakes.)



Bloomberg's letter:

I am writing to ask you: the next time these four Senators want you to support them with donations to their campaigns, tell them you cannot. Until they show that they will stand up for the American people and not the gun lobby, tell them you cannot support their candidacy. These “no” votes were a slap in the face to Americans everywhere. Polls consistently show that 90% of Americans-- including 82% of gun owners and 74% of NRA members-- support requiring background checks for all gun sales. But instead of standing up for what’s right, and for a common-sense measure their constituents support, these Senators made a calculated vote designed to pander to the gun lobby in anticipation of their next election.

...Senators Baucus, Begich, Heitkamp, and Pryor sided with the minority, reminding us of why so many people are angry at Congress. Astonishingly, the four Senators did this even as they ask New Yorkers, who contributed a significant share of the funding for their last election bids, to donate to them once again. Their votes were an affront to the nation. Make no mistake: loopholes at the federal level undermine our efforts to keep our streets safe.

By voting against background checks, these Senators told us they would rather bow down to a special interest group than support a common-sense measure to help law enforcement fight gun crime. Now you can tell these Senators: by voting against background checks, they voted against your values and your family’s safety. And until they show they will stop bowing to pressure from the gun lobby, you should not support them.

Last year Bloomberg money defeated NRA shill Joe Baca in California. Baca is trying to get back into Congress next year. Bloomberg is likely to make sure that doesn't happen. He should also help end John Barrow's miserable, craven career in politics.

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How The NRA Prevents Law Enforcement From Catching Violent Terrorists

As voting patterns started emerging among the freshman class in the new Congress, I saw a lot of new Members who tried appealing to progressives during the election, voting regularly against progressive initiatives. Although Matt Cartwright (D-PA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) have 100% ProgressivePunch crucial vote scores, many more have abysmal scores. Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-CA), for example, has a dismal 52.63% score. Although she represents a solid blue district (CA-35- Pomona, Ontario, Chino, Fontana, where Obama crushed Romney 67.4- 30.6%), her conservative record in the state legislature predicted a conservative voting record in Congress. I asked one of her exasperated colleagues about her tendency to vote with Boehner and Cantor so often. He said she's old and feeble and probably wouldn't be around long. Small consolation! Mike Bloomberg, eager to rid Congress of one of the NRA's most dedicated shills, Joe Baca, financed the independent campaign against Baca that swept McLeod into office. Baca spent $1,162,457 in his failed reelection campaign, while McLeod spent $294,428. Bloomberg's Independence USA PAC spent $3,296,583 boosting McLeod and slamming Baca-- $3,036,181 in the last week. The NRA independent expenditure on behalf of Baca was $1,370. (The NRA also contributed $2,500 directly to Baca's campaign.) Baca wound up with a mere 44% of the votes.

What was odd about it, though, was that McLeod wasn't exactly an NRA enemy. In fact, she wrecked the plans of the Democrats in the state legislature to tag every bullet fired from an assault weapon so that they would be traceable (AB 352, Microstamping of Bullets) and earned a B- from the NRA that year. Tagging bullets makes a lot of sense. But did you know that there is also a way to tag the kinds of bombs that terrorists use-- and that the NRA has prevented that as well? Take a look at the Lawrence O'Donnell explanation in the video above. David Cay Johnston explained how the NRA hampered the police investigation in Boston last week.

The inability to quickly track the gunpowders in the Boston bombs is due to government policy designed and promoted by the NRA, which has found a way to transform every massacre associated with weapons into an opportunity for the munitions companies that sustain it to sell more guns, gunpowder and bullets.

The price for such delays was put on terrible display Friday morning when the two brothers, who had been caught on video placing the bombs, killed one police officer, wounded another and carjacked a motorist, creating conditions so unsafe that the 7th largest population center in America spent Friday on lockdown.

But for the NRA-backed policy of not putting identifiers known as taggants in gunpowder, law enforcement could have quickly identified the explosives used to make the bombs, tracking them from manufacture to retail sale. That could well have saved the life of Sean Collier, the 26-year-old MIT police officer who was gunned down Thursday night by the fleeing bomb suspects.

...Had the Boston bombers used a plastic explosive, it would have included identifiers that would have allowed a quick trace. Those taggants exist because the NRA does not oppose them.

Why is that? Why this breach in the NRA’s Maginot Line of defense against reasonable regulation of guns and ammunition?

The answer appears to lie in who makes plastic explosives like Semtx, which was used to bring down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The world’s main supplier was not a company that finances the NRA, but Libya under Moammar Khadafy.

That this one breach in NRA policy traces directly to the economic interests of the American munitions industry provides powerful evidence of what motivates the NRA-- profits.

That the gun makers have managed to turn each massacre into a spike in sales of both expensive rapid-fire weapons and ammunition adds to the evidence that the NRA should be viewed as the mass-murder lobby.

...Hobbling law enforcement, and attacking it, has long been an NRA strategy.

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, federal agents had a tough time tracing the fertilizer used to make the bomb that killed 168 people and injured 680 more because the NRA had fought using identifiers for explosives.

...Let’s not forget what Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, said shortly after that terrorist act in Oklahoma City. LaPierre went on the attack against law enforcement, comparing federal agents to the Nazis and calling them “jack-booted thugs.”

Former president George H.W. Bush then resigned from the NRA in protest, but LaPierre kept his job, which speaks volumes.

As for taggants, the “study” the NRA cites to show that good science found taggants would make gunpowder less reliable and would not work was in fact only a review of the literature.

Anyone who actually reads the 1980 report, “Taggants in Explosives,” will find this revealing line by the Office of Technology Assessment: “Due to severe time constraints, OTA did little original research.”

Technology has advanced since that report, which is so old that it was prepared on a typewriter.

We can get identifiers put in gunpowders because of technological advances, just as reports get prepared these days on computers.  And if “good science” says existing taggants fall short, then Congress can fund research to develop taggants that work without degrading the quality of the explosive charge in bullets.

But as the votes in the Senate killing modest gun regulation and controls on gun trafficking showed this week, what stands firmly in the way of reducing mass murders and bombings is one organization and its backers.

We can change that, once the public understands that the NRA is not so much a defender of Second Amendment rights as a lobby for enabling mass murder.

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Mayors Against Illegal Guns sets the NRA bullies in its sights

This "Message from Neil Heslin," father of Jesse, is being circulated by Mayors Against Illegal Guns as part of its Demand Action to End Gun Violence campaign.

"For too long, the only voice that has been loud enough to influence Congress has been the Washington gun lobby's -- that's how we've ended up with ineffective gun laws that have fueled our country's gun violence epidemic. Now we're working to make sure that the voices of the more than 900 bipartisan mayors in our coalition -- and the 90 percent of Americans who support commonsense reforms like background checks for all gun sales -- are heard loud and clear. It's time for Congress to take action to save lives and protect our communities."

-- NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns

by Ken

As I've had frequent occasion to note, I'm not a wild fan of New York City's Mayor Mike Bloomberg, though I also take the point my friend Peter makes that in the here and now he is coming to represent about the best we can hope for in our public "servants": an independently wealthy person who has enough sense of public obligation as to fight for at least some values that aren't of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

As he demonstrated as he developed his paramilitary response to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, he stands as four-square as anyone for the maintenance at just about any cost of the prerogatives of the economic elites. The rest of the country may have gotten a glimpse then of his new strategy of using the NYPD as shock troops and occupation forces for maintenance of the economic and political status quo. What the country may not know is that from the experience developed a now-standard strategy for "managing" demonstrations in the city, so that they may be safely contained and cordoned off from any meaningful engagement with public awareness.

Still, Mayor Mike is very different from your standard-issue plutocrat, who tends to view all issues through an updated version of the old saw that what was good for General Motors was good for the U.S.A.: What's good for the lordly plutocrat is good for the unwashed masses. Mayor Mike actually thinks, for example, that his municipal vision encompasses the best interests of all New Yorkers, and there are at least areas in which it does. His "million trees" initiative, for one, isn't the sort of thing that would ever have found political support with a normal pol in City Hall; there's just too little return for the people who wield decision-making clout in our fair city. But the massive tree-planting program in many areas of the city has already begun to reshape, in a more human direction, the physical makeup of the city.

The issue for which Mayor Mike has undoubtedly made himself most visible at the national level, of course, is his energetic campaign for a new sanity in national gun-regulation policies and enforcement, backing up his strong personal and organization support with the kind that really counts: financial support. Already in 2012 he began targeting visible local contests where an infusion of campaign cash targeted for sane gun policies changed the electoral game.

Today the group he has done so much to foster, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, raised the stakes today, and even commandeered a certain portion of the news cycle -- not an overwhelming portion, but even getting this much attention for advocacy for sane gun policies is a triumph, and very likely a highly upsetting development for the pro-gun-mayhem forces whose principal lobbying group is the National Rifle Association (NRA).

From a symbolic and possibly also practical standpoint, the most striking announcement in today's package is this news:

Mayors Against Illegal Guns to Score Congressional Gun Votes

Mayors Against Illegal Guns announced today that, for the first time, it will score votes and other official activity on firearms policy in the 113th Congress. In a letter that will be sent to all members of Congress today, the coalition states that it will issue a scorecard assigning members a letter grade on their gun policy records. The letter can be found at: www.demandaction.org/score.

Here, in case you're curious, is the letter about the new grading system sent to all U.S. senators and representatives. (You should be able to click on it to enlarge it.)

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