From Phil DePaolo:

Bloomberg’s Net Worth

1996 - $1 billion
1997 - $1.3 billion
1998 - $2 billion
1999 - $2.5 billion
2000 - $4 billion
2001 - $4 billion
2002 - $4.8 billion
2003 - $4.9 billion
2004 - $5 billion
2005 - $5.1 billion
2006 - $5.3 billion
2007 - $11.5 billion
2008 - $20 billion
2009 - $16 billion (interim March figure)*
2009 - $17.5 billion
(Annual figures published by Forbes in September of each year)

It seems to be inadequately appreciated that Bloomberg’s Bloomberg LP does business with almost every major company in the city. Most of Bloomberg’s wealth comes from the sale of the Bloomberg financial terminals, not from his media company activities. A lot of media companies are not doing well these days. It is Bloomberg’s terminal sales that are likely financing his recently announced acquisition from McGraw Hill of “Business Week,” competing business publication that like a lot of others has not done very well recently.

Michael Bloomberg emerged from the primal ooze that is Wall Street to dominate New York as nobody else ever has, not even the Rockefeller brothers. We are told repeatedly that he is headed for certain victory. Well that’s why we still have elections.

People understand Wall Street’s culture of greed and corruption far better today than they did before the meltdown, but few of us who aren’t in the game understand the mechanisms by which they leverage their political power to avoid regulation—the better to steal our money. Sure, we get the big picture, the fraudulent credit default swaps, the fraudulent credit ratings for the worthless securities, the collaterized debt obligations, and all the rest of it, but we haven’t read anything quite as revealing and frankly, quite as scary as this piece in Rolling Stone.

If you can bear it, read it. We promise you’ll come away with a deeper understanding of just how crooked and menacing and yes, treasonous this crowd really is, and how hard it will be to take back our country, let alone our city.

By Neil Fabricant

“Michael Bloomberg is the most corrupt politician New York has seen in our generation.”

Isn’t it about time that someone said that? Well, I just did.

Hyperbole?

In the past eight years Bloomberg has paid millions of dollars to the Republican Party and ended up with its ballot line three times. He did the same with the Independence Party, which also received sole source contracts from the Bloomberg administration. As far as I know, these contracts have never been questioned, let alone investigated. Is nobody interested? Taxpayer money aside, Bloomberg simply says:

It’s my money and I can spend it any way I want. And it’s all legal. And you’re a disgrace to even question it. I stand for progress, not politics.

Giving public officials cash in exchange for favorable government action is of course a crime. Granted, the real estate lobby, the hedge fund operators, the predatory equity crowd, and to be bipartisan about it, the trial lawyers do it all the time. If the exchange or the promise is explicit and can be proved, people go to jail. But the quid quo pro is rarely contemporaneous. Instead, the players carry around ledgers in their heads, political due bills. But it’s corrupt and everyone knows it. It’s just that the beneficiaries have made so much of it legal.

Via The New York Post:

By the end last night’s debate between incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg and challenger Bill Thompson, the city comptroller, we had the answers to numerous pressing questions. We knew if the candidates had ever had a manicure, where they stood on the Roman Polanski affair and whether they exercised regularly. But we still awaited the first adult discussion on our imperiled economy.

The economy came up only in passing, when the candidates referred to the homeless, crime or subsidized housing.

Amazingly, none of the questions in the debate — sponsored by NY1 and radio station WNYC and held at The Museum of the Barrio — spoke to the looming economic and fiscal dangers ahead.

The Observer’s Steve Kornacki says funny things are happening in this year’s mayoral election. The mainstream media has been acting like it’ll be a decisive victory for Bloomberg, but come November, the mayor may be surprised:

Lest I be accused a month from now of having had my head buried in the sand while this turned into a real contest, let me state for the record: Bill Thompson could end up making this a much tighter affair than we think.

Since he muscled a term-limits extension through the City Council last year, and especially since he and his P.R. machine intimidated Anthony Weiner out of the race this spring, the media has treated Michael Bloomberg’s re-election as a fait accompli—even as the gaping, dominant pre-election polling advantages that marked the run-up to his 18-point 2005 victory over Fernando Ferrer have failed to materialize. (I include myself in this company.)

CBS News reports that Mayor Bloomberg has spent $64.8 million of his own money on his campaign for a third term. Much of the money has been spent on television ads, which have been running practically every day for several months. Campaign finance laws allows Bloomberg to spend as much as he wants as long as he files all of his expenses. Forbes recently listed Bloomberg’s net worth at $17.5 billion.

Democratic Challenger Bill Thompson has spent about half of the $8 million in donations and matching funds he’s raised for his campaign so far, and has been outspent by Bloomberg at a ratio of 20 to 1. Thompson will use the rest of his funds to make a big push against Bloomberg during the final weeks of the election, but won’t be able to do it without raising his profile now and without the help of supporters.

WNYC’s Brian Lehrer has a chat with The New Yorker’s Joyce Purnick, the author of the new Bloomberg biography, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics.

Lehrer also asks listeners to post their top two and bottom two Bloomberg moments. Listeners listed term limits, the mayor’s behavior during the 2004 Republican National Convention and exaggerated progress in education as some of Bloomberg’s bottom two moments.

We have a very big problem in New York City. An extraordinarily wealthy man holds virtually every source of private and public influence and power and is employing it to pursue a personal vision of what the city should look like, and who should live and work in it far into the future. He also conceives his vision as a model for other cities and for the country. He has bulldozed over obstacles, including elections that constrain all other elected officials. He is often compared – and compares himself favorably – to Robert Moses, the iconic master builder (and destroyer). Only the global fiscal meltdown, a crisis brought about primarily by Bloomberg’s investment banking colleagues, has slowed the 20-year timetable.

Thanks to Queens Crap for sending:
Via Restless

And “Mike” Bloomberg harasses voters! Sure, anyone can spend $37 million from their own pocket to run nearly unopposed for mayor, but how many can do it so efficiently? Bloomberg Campaign Is Juggernaut of Detail

Why doesn’t he just buy the immortality he seeks directly, instead of going through this long charade? With a net worth of $16 billion, and figuring 8 million people in New York, he could give us $2000 apiece!

Someone Should Develop A Walking Tour Around The City and Tell the Stories Behind the Buildings—A Good Way to Explain New York Politics to the Uninitiated.