Life in New York City

thegrowlingwolf For Mayor of New York City
From allnewsheadlines.com:

New York, NY (AHN) - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg remains popular in the Big Apple, but a slim majority of voters would like to see someone else running the city.

A new Marist poll finds 58% of voters feel Bloomberg is doing either an excellent or good job in office while 40% say he is performing fairly well or poorly. Overall, 52% of voters think New York City is moving in the right direction, while 38% say the Big Apple is on the wrong path.

But when it comes to reelecting Bloomberg, 51% of voters say they would like new leadership at City Hall. Only 47% of voters would like to see Bloomberg win another term in office.

Nonetheless, New Yorkers are pessimistic about the chances of someone defeating Bloomberg in an open election. A full 73% of voters say that regardless of who they personally vote for, Bloomberg will win a reelection.

Racially, Bloomberg fares the best with white (68%) and Latino (64%) voters, but isn't as beloved by the African-American community, of which only 37% of voters feel as positively about their mayor.

Like Marist College, a lot of small-time New York State Catholic colleges are getting into the poll-taking business, i.e., Quinnipiac College and Sienna University. How these polls are conducted, the bias built into them, and the accuracy of them is questionable. The Quinnipiac polls have been called "flukes" by some critics. However, what's frightening to me about the above Marist poll is that it shows the problematics with NY City politics and the current mayor's race going on with Mike Bloomberg buying an illegal third term as mayor because as his ads are now blaring night and day, "Mike wants to keep the Middle Class in New York City"; "One way Mike Bloomberg has kept the Middle Class in New York City...." Insulting ads since the majority of New York Citians are not Middle Class. Bloomberg never openly defines what he means by "Middle Class." On my last job in New York City, I was a advertising agency copyeditor (a specialized Medical Editor I was called by the AMA). I made $75,000 a year. After taxes, I took home $1,000 a week! Not bad, you say. However, in New York City, that is a fairly low salary. The poverty line in this city is $26,000-a-year. The mayor's bottom line for defining his Middle Class is $80,000 a year for couples or $50,000 a year for a single person--that's the basis for his $2,000-a-month average single-room apartment rent base--which means, to be included in Mike's Middle Class, you must be making at least $24,000 a year just to pay your rent. These are rental prices mind you. Mike Bloomberg hates renters. He truly hates rent subsidies or rent stabilization. After WWII, with all these servicemen coming home loaded with muster-out pay and GI benefits and the Federal Housing Authority (why don't we still have a Federal Housing Authority (FHA)? [I just found out there is still an FHA.] It worked fine--government-backed mortgages and government handling of the whole shebang), New York City landlords saw a potential gold mine opening up to them and they jacked rents up to outrageous levels. As a result, the City of New York stepped in and put into law rent guidelines and regulated rental charges and increases, which also included subsidized housing and a rent controls board that put into practice rent subsidies and stabilization--to help lower-income families with their rent--and rent stabilized apartments based on when they were built--prewar or postwar! Ever since those times, the late 1940s and early 1950s (the Robert Moses era), landlords and real estate brokers and developers have totally hated and fought against a controlled rent base. Bloomberg since his becoming mayor, same as his hero and predecessor the ruthless Rudi "Mussolini" Guiliani, has done everything he can to wreck rent subsidies and rent stabilization. One way he's done it is by rezoning the city. The city was formally zoned to have hi-rise and low-rise neighborhoods with a limit of 50 stories on skyscrapers. Also there were hotel zones in the city. The hi-rise hotels centered around the Midtown area--the business district--or far downtown in the Wall Street area. Bloomberg's asskissing City Council does anything he wants, the head of the City Council in NYC, a woman from Queens, loves Bloomberg like she loves her poodle; I mean this woman kisses his old rich ass deep into the crack, her nose far up his rectum. The real estate industry in NYC runs NYC; they pour tons of money into City Council elections, into district politics, into redistricting promotions; you can't run for election in New York City without the backing of the real estate industry. If they back you with big bucks, then, yes, they expect some concessions! As a result, Mayor Bloomberg has rezoned the city, you can now build a 80-story luxury hotel in any neighborhood you please--or you can put a 50-story hi-rise condominium in a former low-rise neighborhood. Now, you ask, how does this affect rents! When you put a 50-story luxury condo building in a low-rise neighborhood that basically had rents that were at affordable levels either through rent controls or rent stabilizations, you change the whole rent base of the neighborhood. The new building will follow Mayor Bloomberg's rent guidelines: $2,000-a-month per room--3-room apartment: $6,000-a-month (or $70,000-a-year rent). You see, one of these buildings in your low-rise community not only raises rents but it also raises the tax base, which is Mayor Moneybags's meaning when he uses the word "Middle Class." Bloomie's Middle-Class are a late twentyish couple making $200,000-a-year (a very possible salary in certain NYC areas like Wall Street, advertising, or real estate sales--with the sale of a multimillion-dollar apartment to say a Japanese businessman with a suitcase full of cash, a real estate broker can easily clear a wheelbarrowful of bucks--don't tell anybody, but I have a close friend (like a relative) who sells high-end real estate--they only handle multimillion buck condos--and recently they set a new record for a condo sale (they already had the record--they broke their own record) in NYC to some Asian businessman, a deal from which they walked away with several million bucks commission in their pocket). This is Mayor Bloomberg's Middle Class. They make at least $200,000 a year. Do you know what it takes to own a multimillion buck condo in NYC? It takes mortgage payments--very high--it takes a very high maintenance fee (somebody has to manage the condo building)--it takes big bucks in terms of paying yearly property taxes. Mayor Bloomberg has raised property taxes every year since he's been in office--he's raised small business taxes, too; yet, when he gives away land to his real estate developer friends, he gives them huge tax breaks for tons of years--currently, as I've reported over and over due to the construction of a luxury hotel next to my building, construction sites are using not only nonunion workers but illegal immigrant workers--in the case of the site next to me, it uses poor dudes from South America, Peru one of the main countries of origin, who come to work every morning wearing the same filthy clothes--the clothes they've worn every day since this construction began back in November of '08--looking haggard, looking very poor, and either working or turned away with no pay, or when they work they're paid straight-out cash (they work for around $8-an-hour/union scale is around $27-an-hour) with no benefits, with no personal insurance or safety measures, and not able to collect unemployment compensation should they get canned. I have never seen an NYC building inspector on the site and though the union pickets the site every day, the work goes on, the union guys saying they have no power to right the wrong of the situation. You should see this site, too. It's basically a typical concrete and steel-beamed construction--these guys can build a floor a week with minimal workers easily--this building will be 18 stories when it's finished--it will be a hotel, a luxury hotel, with high floor suites going for thousands of dollars a night, the lower floor rooms, the shit rooms, going for $350 a night.

Mayor Bloomberg has lost more jobs in this city than HE has created! When he talks about bringing jobs to NYC, he shows the many construction sites--there are currently, I think I read, over 200 construction sites throughout the city, though 36 of those sites have been shut down and abandoned by developers. This city is currently losing thousands of jobs a day. Yet, Mayor Bloomberg tells us that one million new New Yorkers are coming to NYC soon and we have to kowtow to their whims and fancies. Mayor Bloomberg has declared the major industry in NYC now is tourism! Now we New Yorkers must bite our tongues as we walk our streets trying to avoid all these tourists with their huge maps out, their toehead kids stretched out across the sidewalk to the point where you have to say, "Excuse me, please, oh dear valued tourist, please forgive me for asking you to move out of my way so I can get to my job, which anyday now I could lose...." You catch my drift. Fifth Avenue, once the street of mansions, is now tourist packed, trashed up, garbage everywhere, Chinese junk shops all over the place, Subway sandwich joints, quaint little bistros, or junky pizza shops--and out on the street tour bus after tour bus cruising down the street with the tour guides calling out the sites as the bus whizzes past them--or how about these truly tacky little rubberwheeled trolley cars--god they are so fucking tacky--and the tourists on these conveyances are paying $25 to $35 a piece for these excursions. Tourists are tacky, polyester-wearing geeky nosey Parkers--dumb to the city yet traipsing about it as if this city is theirs--and Mayor Bloomberg says it is theirs!

Yet, Bloomberg is buying his way back into power. He's spent 33 million of his own unlimited bucks running for this illegal term as mayor. While he's mayor he's still receiving monies from his software firm of which he still owns 77%--or some such controlling interest--this having enabled him to rise from 65th richest man in the USA to 5th richest man while serving the citizens of New York! Nobody can afford to run against him. There's a droopy drawers Bloomberg ad running 24/7 on local teevee--with his bragging about how he's saved the New York City school system and grades are up--the Mayor believes test scores prove whether a child deserves promotion or not--I hate to bring this up, but the Mayor is a poor little Jewish boy from Boston, and poor little Jewish boys must make high test scores or else, that's traditional with them!

So, according to these Catholic college polls, old Mayor Bloomberg is the fav. Even though the percentages don't show him the fav that much--51% of us don't think he should have an illegal third term with only 47% saying the Mayor should be raised to divine status and hell be mayor for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, like the rest of the country, only a low third of the population actually vote. This way, the mayor controls bloc votes (the Catholic vote; the Jewish vote; the Upper East and West Side votes).

My big question is, who the hell are the mayor's opponents this year! I don't see them; I certainly don't hear them.

I do hereby throw my hat in the ring for mayor of New York City.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler