Single digits. As Bill Thompson said in his concession speech tonight, it’s important that the all the issues we’ve highlighted during the last few months doesn’t disappear into the shadows of public discussion.

Returns Via NY1:

Via Pareene and Gawker:

Tomorrow is Election Day! You will probably not vote, because there are no contested races for anything important in 90% of the nation. But if you are a New Yorker, we have one message: don’t vote for Michael Bloomberg.

You know those idiots who don’t know anything about politics but think it sounds smart to say “I am a social liberal and an economic conservative?” Bloomberg is the candidate for them, if they love a liberal nanny state and a conservative religious fervor for the eternal goodness of private enterprise.

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he’s been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn’t literally buy off. Like Sheldon Silver, who (thankfully) killed the West Side Stadium and (annoyingly) ended all that “Congestion Pricing” talk. And those unions and special interests were just bought off, which worked fine back when the boom whose end Bloomberg never saw coming was in full swing.
Read rest of story…

Via Comedy Central:

November 7, 2001: Indifference 2001 – New York Mayoral Races

[For the rest of the videos, visit Comedy Central]

With the leaves turning and the mayoral race down to its final paces, William C. Thompson Jr., the Democratic candidate, sketched out a liberal policy agenda Friday, saying he would fight to repeal laws that allow landlords to charge market rents for regulated apartments.

He promised to appoint pro-tenant members to the Rent Guidelines Board to oppose higher rents and pro-rider members to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to oppose raising fares. He said he would keep subway station agents on the job, and try to place all rent-regulated middle-class apartments that are part of the Mitchell-Lama program since 1973 under rent stabilization laws.

He also said he would give the homeless priority for Section 8 rental vouchers and allow homeless families who now are required to pay for shelter to instead put that money into escrow to be used for a permanent apartment.

Michael Powell, New York Times, October 30.

Powell continues:

These are some of the positions that would place Mr. Thompson to the liberal side of the political mainstream in New York City, and open up some — although perhaps not a lot — of ideological space between him and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

We haven’t seen the polls that suggest a candidate who opposes higher rents, who wants to keep subway fares down and subway agents on the job, who doesn’t want to charge rent to homeless families living in shelters, but instead would give them a Sec. 8 priority, is on the “liberal side of the mainstream.” (We’ll discuss Mitchell-Lama in our next post where we will describe how the Mayor and The New York Times combined to perpetrate the conventional bait and switch fraud on tenants and voters.)

Then again, maybe the mainstream media’s coverage of Michael Bloomberg’s eight years and the support of so many civic leaders for another term has rotted the brains and hardened the hearts of average folks. I can’t say Powell is wrong. I’d just like to see the evidence. What I do know is that he’s wrong that there isn’t a lot of ideological space between Thompson and Bloomberg. And “wrong” is as charitable as we can be.

The facts have been buried beneath Bloomberg’s billion dollar legalized bribery and political propaganda operation in which newspaper owners and editors have turned their papers into megaphones for Bloomberg’s message, which, although occasionally delivered in the more modest language appropriate to a candidate is I’ve been a great manager for all New Yorkers – New York needs me—I don’t quit when the going gets tough. Term limits? I legally overturned a bad idea—get over it.

Thompson’s campaign operation has been less effective than we had hoped. Voters were never going to learn the truth through messages mediated by a pro-Bloomberg press or 30-second spots. They certainly weren’t going to read campaign literature. We and others have tried to put the information into voters’ hands in digestible form (See the Spin v. the Facts pamphlet), but we didn’t have the troops. Thus, unless voters have directly experienced the consequences of Bloomberg’s policies, and here we just don’t know how many there are, it appears that many, if not most don’t understand the iron fist wrapped in the velvet glove rhetoric. Truth be told, many don’t want to know.

There isn’t much that small bloggers can do about it, except tell our story, call out the New York Times when we can, and hope that others will do the same. Here’s Michael Powell again

Mr. Thompson declined to attach a dollar figure to his proposals Friday, saying that his staff had often done that in the past. He promised to lobby the Obama administration for money and predicted that his other proposals, including converting Mitchell-Lama apartments, would come at little or no cost.

Many of Thompson’s proposals would cost the taxpayers nothing. Instead, the firing of the notorious Marvin “Markup” Marcus, the Goldman, Sachs partner whom Bloomberg appointed to chair the Rent Guidelines Board, would cost rent-gouging landlords their greatest ally and would slow the rapid rise in rents that are driving out the middle class. True, less revenue for landlords means less property tax revenue, but the tax breaks and tax avoidance schemes of New York’s real estate barons rather than the ratcheting up of rents should be the focus of the next four years. Bloomberg, who charges rent to homeless working people forced into shelters and vetoes lead paint bills, doesn’t agree.

Other Thompson proposals require action in Albany. Bloomberg finances the New York State and City Republican operations, and has put a considerable amount of money into Washington as well. His standard explanation for pouring so many millions into the Bush-Pataki-Bruno-Tom DeLay cesspool has been that it buys him influence, and indeed it does. Never mind what he does with it.

The parallels between the arch of Bloomberg’s career and that of Nelson Rockefeller have been fascinating to watch. The massive debt, the megalomania, the dominance of the New York Republican Party, and much else would make a good doctoral thesis. This is where it ends though.

Rockefeller, it will be recalled, got out of town as Gerald Ford’s Vice-President just before the stuff hit the fan in 1975. Bloomberg’s money was unable to leverage him onto the McCain ticket. It is a measure of how far the country has gone off track since Ronald Reagan’s presidency that Republican politicians have painted themselves into such a narrow ideological corner that to the Republican base Bloomberg and Giuliani both look like liberals.

Bloomberg’s failure was perhaps a blessing for him. Better to be a king in your own realm than to help a Republican win and have to stand by while a befuddled president McCain adds to the mess that Bush left behind.

I am reminded of what a well-known black political figure once said to me—“Neil, they’ll never let a black man run New York unless it isn’t worth having.” He might have been wrong about that, although it was long ago, and at the time I thought he was probably right. I wonder though whether that principle might not apply to the presidency.

I digress. As for what comes next in New York, no matter who wins, poor, working and middle-class New Yorkers are going to suffer the most, but under Bloomberg, they will suffer more. The Bloomberg business model, New York, the Luxury City, doesn’t work. It’s a variation on the theme of the trickle down economy. Had it succeeded it would have sharpened the class divide even more. In this environment, it won’t work for anyone. We see no evidence that Bloomberg is prepared to rethink it. And there is nothing that we know of his character that gives us hope. Far from it, if he wins, he will attempt to suck up whatever modest resistance remains in Albany.

Here is one, not so fanciful scenario for a Bloomberg third-term.

Bloomberg will finance the Republican gubernatorial and senate candidates. It appears that Giuliani is getting ready to run. With complete ownership of New York City, the mayor-who-would-be-king will have a very large piece of everything and everyone in the state.

If they hold onto their majority, he would have to throw a few more dollars in the pot to acquire the remaining senate Democrats. It would be a simple negotiation: The real estate industry is already pushing substantial political money in that direction. Democrats want more of it. The Albany Democrats have been passing one-house tenant bills for years; confident they would die in the Republican-controlled, Bloomberg-financed state senate. Now that they control all three branches of state government, they are dithering and slithering their way out of doing anything meaningful for tenants.

It wouldn’t even be a rounding error on Bloomberg’s personal balance sheet to contribute whatever the Democrats ask to ensure that they continue screwing their constituents. The model is well-established and only recently reinforced in Bloomberg’s purchase of the Republican ballot line.

The acquisition of Albany is the direction we’re headed in a post-election world in which Bloomberg The Bloodless sits firmly on his throne in New York and sends out his tax and toll collectors to take the last few assets that his subjects have managed to hold on to. Financing a class war is easy when so many of the victims are too defeated to resist and many who could offer some resistance don’t even know they’re in one. As for the politicians, who can doubt they would take the money?

Good government groups have called for reforming Albany by dispersing the power of legislative leaders in various ways. Not that we think it will happen any time soon, but ironically, the only person in a position to resist Bloomberg is Sheldon Silver, and from time to time, he has. The rape of the Soviet Union by the oligarchs had me rootin’ for Putin for a time. Now I fear the law of unintended consequences might kick in should Silver’s power be diminished. So, while I’m not quite ready to go that far, who knows? If Bloomberg wins some of us might be shillin’ for Shelly.

- Neil Fabricant

* Bloomberg asked Lance Armstrong to ask Daily News reporter Celeste Katz if she will vote for him on Tuesday:

* A Marist Poll released today shows Bloomberg leading Thompson by 15 percentage points. An internal poll the Thompson campaign released last night showed Bloomberg leading by only 3 to 7 percentage points.

* Meredith Kolodner reports that a study by the Dept. of Education shows charter schools performing worse than public schools, and is doing a poor job of reaching out to special-education children and English language learners. Mayor Bloomberg has called for the state to lift its cap of 200 charter schools.

* Yoav Gonen reports in the Post that the National Center for Education Statistics, which compared state testing standards between 2005 and 2007, found that New York has set its benchmarks for student proficiency in math and reading well below of a gold-standard national test. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said states are setting the bar too low and are “lying to our children when we tell them they’re proficient but they’re not achieving at a level that will prepare them for success once they graduate.”

* Elizabeth Benjamin reports that SEIU 1199 is officially staying neutral in the mayor’s race, despite opposing Bloomberg’s term limits extension and voting in favor of giving Bill Thompson the WFP nod this summer. Another union staying neutral? The UFT — just when the teachers’ contract is set to end.

* David Chen: “A Mayor Thompson would be likely to focus on quality of life concerns, like water rates or parking tickets. Major decisions on schools, housing and other issues would probably be an exercise in consensus, with more participation by advocates and citizens.”

* Suzannah B. Troy is capturing some of the protests today, and interviews Brenda Stokely:

Via Andrew J. Hawkins and City Hall News:

This year, the powerful United Federation of Teachers skipped endorsing in the mayor’s race.

But a small, dissident faction within the union has decided to break ranks, calling the UFT’s silence a sell-out.

So who did the group of rabble-rousers lift up their voices for?

None-of-the above.

“The decision to sit out the contest between Michael Bloomberg and his opponents speeds us to the brink of more disasters,” the dissident group, Independent Community of Educators (ICE), said in a statement, adding however, “It is difficult to offer [Democrat Bill] Thompson unqualified support when he has thrown support to mayoral control and supports much of the underlying corporate agenda for education.”

Their advice? Vote for anyone on the ballot. Anyone not named Michael Bloomberg, that is.
Read rest of story…

Rob Bennett for The New York Times

Via Nicholas Confessore and Michael Barabaro in The New York Times:

A few weeks ago, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, the influential pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, came to a difficult decision, one he had wrestled with all summer.

He would not endorse William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller and a longtime friend and ally, for mayor, as he had promised Mr. Thompson last spring. Instead, he would endorse Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Mr. Thompson was furious at the betrayal. But what he did not know was that Mr. Bloomberg gave a $1 million donation to the church’s development corporation — roughly 10 percent of its annual budget — with the implicit promise of more to come.

“What could I say to a man who was mayor, and was supportive of a lot of programs that are important to me?” Mr. Butts said in an interview before he endorsed Mr. Bloomberg.

In his quest for a third term, Mr. Bloomberg has deprived Mr. Thompson of what many once regarded as his political birthright: the blessings of the city’s most powerful black ministers, who together preach to tens of thousands of congregants each week. And to win them over, he has deployed an unusual combination of city money, private philanthropy, political appointments and personal attention, creating a web of ties to black clergy members that is virtually unheard of for a white elected official in New York City.

Some prominent ministers have been appointed by Mr. Bloomberg to influential city boards and committees. Others have enjoyed the administration’s help in buying city property or winning zoning concessions for pet projects. A few of the largest institutions, including Abyssinian and the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens, have taken in millions of dollars in contracts to provide city services during Mr. Bloomberg’s eight years in office.

Looming over it all is Mr. Bloomberg’s dazzling wealth, whether already bestowed — as in the case of Mr. Butts — or hoped for down the line.

“We have to come to his foundation sooner or later,” said the Rev. Timothy Birkett, pastor of the Church Alive Community Church in the Bronx, who is backing the mayor this year. “We hope that he will be receptive.”

Those who support Mr. Bloomberg say that the mayor has earned their endorsements strictly on the merits of his record in office, especially on education and crime. But some critics say the outpouring of support owes more to the dependence of many black churches on a friendly ear at City Hall.

“Some of these endorsements that we see are indicative of a faith statement by some of our religious leaders,” said the Rev. Clinton M. Miller, a protégé of Mr. Butts and the pastor of Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn. “The statement is, who do I trust more, in terms of how I am going to get my projects done?” Mr. Miller said. “The choice is between a municipality and God.”

Aides to Mr. Bloomberg say that mutual respect, not financial ties, binds the mayor to the clergymen; they point out that some of the churches also received large contracts before Mr. Bloomberg took office.

Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott said the relationship “really goes beyond contracts,” adding that it is based on “an ongoing line of communication we have with important individuals who have important constituencies, and we’re very proud of that.”

At moments of racial tension that might have swamped a different white mayor, Mr. Bloomberg has rarely faced the kind of personal criticism from prominent black ministers that wounded his predecessors, like Rudolph W. Giuliani, whom Mr. Butts once publicly branded a racist.

That contrast was on display last week when Mr. Bloomberg appeared at a campaign event with Mr. Giuliani, who suggested to a mostly white, Jewish audience in Brooklyn that “the wrong political leadership” could return New Yorkers to the days of “fear of going out at night and walking the streets.”

Several black elected officials immediately denounced the comments as race-baiting. But no prominent black pastors demanded that the mayor disavow the comments.

[See the rest of the story at The New York Times]

The leaflet below can be downloaded and printed on a single double-sided page, and handed out before the election. Please do, if you are so inclined.

Bloomberg Leaflet