This is an extraordinary article, not only because of what it reveals, but because it appears in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which has been a reliable cheerleader for our billionaire mayor.
Investigative reporter Tom Robbins details how Mayor Michael Bloomberg used his billions to silence critics and to win the support of or intimidate almost every civic and cultural group.
In other times and places, people worry that big money will buy the mayor’s support. In New York City for the past dozen years, the mayor has bought the support of almost everyone who might have been a critic or might have an independent voice. One of his favorite gambits was to cut the budget of a group that is heavily dependent on city funding, then make an allegedly anonymous contribution to the same group. The media often printed long lists of these “anonymous” contributions, acknowledging that they came from the mayor and were dispersed through the Carnegie Corporation.
This strategy made all the groups he “saved” dependent on his personal largesse. He was truly the Lord of the manor.
Robbins did not discover every trick the mayor used to buy support and silence critics. He has no way of knowing which influential intellectuals and power brokers are on the Mayor’s personal payroll, because the mayor is under no obligation to disclose his private spending.
It may be years before Mayor Bloomberg finds his Robert Caro. Caro writes in-depth biographies of famous people. In time, it will happen, and we will learn how Michael Bloomberg employed his vast fortune to win support, to intimidate once-independent critics, and to buy off activists from various communities.
Until then, Tom Robbins has pulled back the curtain in Oz. There is no magic; just a whole lot of money. Like, $27 billion.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And that is how they roll….
The Fellows, who have caused such havoc in New York State, were are privately funded by Tisch, Gates and company. Their $$$=their agenda.
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It’s not that money controls government, it’s that government controls the money. I heard that quote in a reference once regarding the spending in DC and find it easily applicable to Bloomberg.
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I don’t dare insinuate that historians may not be the right personality type to lead a revolution (or in our case the counter-revolution) but having Caro or anyone else write about Bloomberg years after the flood does us very little good. What we need are policy prescriptions that mandate charitable disclosure in real time similar to the direct political donation data in Los Angeles that clearly swayed enough voters before the decisive elections. In that case the largesse backfired and we saw disaster (potentially) avoided for now.
For example NY AG Schneiderman wants to increase disclosure requirements for 501c4 entities (the same type of Tea Party groups that the IRS was rightly scrutinizing) but it would only apply to New York tax exempt groups. Timely disclosure of donations by the “Related Entities” now controlled by the wealthy – meaning the in-real-time direct election donations, the charitable 501c3 donations, the bogus charitable 501c4 donations – should be proposed and passed everywhere. That would reveal each group’s spending including union or membership based groups but our side generally has less to hide than the plutocrats. This real time disclosure potentially could be passed as a School Board policy: where any entity that received public money dispensed by ABC School District must disclose and publish online the amount and source of any personal or charitable donations withing two weeks….
Hundreds if not thousands of well-intentioned NYC people on our side of this struggle knew what Bloomberg did with his money but since they took the filthy lucre they weren’t saying. So it’s hard to say what will be the next stage of our counter movement in NYC and that question is more important to me than the challenges of the next mayor who can’t pay off those same hundreds or thousands and stifle social discourse.
Our even larger challenge is to create a legitimate, professionally-run distributed donor model NGO that can fund raise online lots of small donations. The technology exists, the model has been proven (two Obama campaigns) and some believe the parent donor base exists.
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Down through history patronage is how the elite kept control of the masses and squashed dissent. Bloomberg is forcing patronage. Such actions are illegal when viewed as abuse of mayoral power to buy influence. Sure, the use of 501c4/c3 organizations to accomplish this are a well worn path (which should be eliminated), but it’s still buying clout, and is anything but charitable/humanitarian help nonprofit law demands.
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This article is an extension of the piece Sol Stern and Fred Siegel discussed and documented for City Journal two years ago about the formula Bloomberg has used to buy whatever advantages he needs. Money corrupts!
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The article appeared in Commentary Magazine not City Journal.
The title was “The Bloomberg Bubble Bursts” March 2011
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Thank you. I stand corrected for the wrong citation. Faulty memory corrupts.
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Tom Robbins article is spot-on about Mayor Bloomberg’s purchase of and manipulation, largely stealth, with his money. His tenure has been so destructive in other related ways – such as selling off of park space, libraries and schools for real estate development, enabling vast inequities in park space in Manhattan and other boroughs, vast rezoning and real estate development without any planning or real thought about infrastructure, underfunding of programs to ensure that they fail, millions and millions wasted in scores of rushed computer consultant projects and much more. His administration has focused on funding for the young, hip and rich and policies that increase stratification in the city and destroy any possible civic coherency. He has created a city that will be more chaotic, conflicted and unmanageable than ever before…..
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