For people who worry about the collapse of the mainstream media and its impact on Democracy, the silver lining is the collapse of the mainstream media and its impact on Democracy. We speak, of course, of the New York Times and how it has conspired with Michael Bloomberg to further corrupt our political system, Bloomberg by bribing and bullying his way onto the ballot, and the paper not only for failing to hold him accountable but for rooting him on.

The front-page piece on Bloomberg’s golf game and the front-page photo op of “Mike,” standing alongside Colin Powell at the counter of a hot dog joint, gloved hand clutching a few dollar bills, treating Powell to a hot dog could have been prepared by Howard Wolfson. Digging out from under the mountain of rubbish that the old gray lady spews forth daily has become too tedious and our shovel too small to do much more than scrape away at the surface.

This past Thursday, the paper offered a more serious account of Bloomberg’s “stalled vision.” His massive rezoning and multibillion development schemes, the report says, have yielded “uneven results,” an observation that might be likened to “Bush did a pretty good job but left behind a few problems for Obama to clean up.”

The piece bounces back and forth between the good and the bad, but readers who actually get through the dueling quotes and competing interpretations of how and why we got here and what the future will bring are likely to come away with the idea that a well-intentioned, non-political visionary would have pulled off the renaissance of a great city mired in political paralysis but for the financial meltdown; we’ll just have to wait a bit longer—there is a time to sow and a time to reap.

Books will be written about the disastrous legacy of the Bloomberg/Doctoroff era, but for now, readers and voters should keep in mind these few facts:

By 2008 Bloomberg had increased operating expenditures from $43.6 billion to $65.3 billion, a total increase of 50 percent. His 2008 budget was nearly 45% larger than the last Giuliani budget in 2001. He is now using debt to fund operating deficits, and he is financing much of his capital program through off-budget entities.

Debt service will grow from $4.7 billion in 2009 to $6.5 billion in 2013, an annual average increase of 8.4 percent. Much of the debt is variable rate. That means the debt burden will keep rising—think sub prime and variable rate mortgages. The Citizens Budget Commission projects that total debt outstanding will be over $100 billion by fiscal year 2012, compared to $56 billion when Bloomberg assumed office. The debt burden is unsustainable. No matter who is elected, deep budget cuts and higher taxes will follow before the year is out.

The Times account raises questions about the wisdom of Bloomberg’s development policies and the financing of all those sports stadiums and luxury condominiums. In that, the reporters have been more even-handed than most of the junk reporting we’ve been reading in the mainstream media. But readers will not understand just how much worse post-election New York is going to be for average New Yorkers as a consequence of the massive debt burden and the purposes for which it was incurred.

The New York Times: Under Mr. Bloomberg, the city drastically increased the low-cost financing it made available to developers, in part because Mr. Doctoroff, a former investment banker, recognized the unrealized potential in some of the city’s balance sheets. Most of the infusion cost little or nothing to taxpayers. It came in the form of low-interest loans to developers, with money raised by issuing bonds….

“For all practical purposes, if H.D.C. went belly-up, there would be some expectation of the city making good on it,” said Doug Turetsky, a spokesman for the city’s nonpartisan Independent Budget Office.

We haven’t examined the bond covenants and are not in a position to know just how much debt the city is legally on the hook for, but much like the 1975 crisis, where so-called “moral obligation” bonds triggered a meltdown, the debt that Bloomberg piled up in the name of “development” will be paid by working and middle-class New Yorkers.

The insiders walked away with a fortune then and we paid in the form of layoffs, City University tuition, higher subway fares, reduced municipal services, and much more. Thirty-five years later, that debt still hasn’t been fully repaid. Unlike the 1975 fiscal crisis, neither Washington nor Albany can bail us out. Bloomberg the Brazen has brought fiscal and political ruin to this city, and he spends a few days a week playing golf in Bermuda.

We’ve already written extensively about the loss of affordable housing and the bogus statistics surrounding the Bloomberg affordable housing claims. Bloomberg has presided over the largest increase in rents and the most severe loss of affordable housing in New York City history. But even that is only a part of the story. In Bloomberg’s world where pharmaceutical executives who earn tens of millions a year “don’t earn that much,” our idea of “affordable” may seem a bit cramped. Only 10.6 percent of housing in the metro region is now affordable to people earning the median area income, the lowest share of anywhere in the country. New York City rents are the highest in the nation.

We are reminded of Governor George Pataki’s remarks as he laid the cornerstone at the Solaire, a 293-unit development that he had financed through tax-exempt bonds. (The developer, of course, was a major Pataki donor.) Pataki said, “We’re sure we’re going to be able to bring down the rents to affordable housing.” As of June 2006, a two-bedroom apartment at the Solaire rented for $6,895 per month. We haven’t checked lately.