Michael Bloomberg’s America
By Speaking of the New Gilded Age, Michael Bloomberg sure is the perfect plutocrat/political leader for it:
It was only a matter of time — assuming Michael Bloomberg couldn’t run out the clock for two more weeks — before a reporter managed to ask the mayor about the New York Times’ five-part, lose-your-faith-in-humanity story on Dasani, a homeless 11-year-old, and her Brooklyn family. And so it was only a matter of time before Bloomberg delivered at least one tone-deaf line among a larger defensive response.
Based on Bloomberg’s past callous answers to questions about the city’s homeless problem, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that he said today, “This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not.”
Sometimes that’s the way God works. Other times you have a billionaire that is mayor for 12 years with the open goal of making his city the international playground of other billionaires, eliminating affordable housing, and creating a class divide unseen in the city in the last century. You know, it’s one or the other. But Bloomberg knows the real reason New York’s homeless population has gone up:
Mayor Bloomberg, who asserted earlier this year that “Nobody’s sleeping on the streets,” has attributed the rise in shelter populations to their superb quality. “We have made our shelter system so much better that, unfortunately, when people are in it — or fortunately, depending on what your objective is — it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before,” he’s said.
I guess the only answer is to make homeless shelters incredibly dangerous places. Like they already are. That will show those lazy, shiftless 11 year old girls!