Mayor Bloomberg DID try to raise taxes…But only on New Jersey and Connecticut commuters into the City who don’t get to vote the pols out of office who tax them unmercifully.

He cut taxes and cut spending and made sure HIS streets were plowed while lying about the conditions in the other boroughs.

I keep saying this: Snow removal is a government service that most immediately affects people, especially when it fails.

There is no “We” in “We the people” anymore. The death of this newborn should make this point astonishingly clear even to those who have not been paying attention to the ongoing gang rape of the poor and middle class by the elites and their sock puppets, formerly known as government officials.

The dismissal of the starving French with “Let them eat cake” shows more compassion than Bloomberg’s ” The city is going fine”. To Bloomberg there is no “them”. “Them” have been disappeared. They do not exist in his world. As long as the rich elites can get to the theater without tripping over the bodies of “them”, as long as their revelry can go on uninterrupted by reality and as long as “them” do not rise up and demand to be seen, Mr. Bloomberg et all can rest assured it will be business as usual for them - cutting taxes on the rich and gutting much needed services, one of which would have perhaps saved this newborn’s life.

I see none of this scenario changing. There will be no refunds given for loss of life. To Bloomberg, that life never existed.

Bloomberg should not be taken as an enemy of high taxes.  At the beginning of his mayoral career, he raised taxes very steeply, at least on Real Estate, and earned the sobriquet ‘Doomberg’ from some.  However, he probably thought it ill-advised to raise taxes in a recession.  Also, the rich can now fly away anywhere and take their money with them, so one dare not offend them.  What the hell—it’s what my fellow citizens wanted and voted for.  ‘You asked for it, you got it,’ as General Toyota would say.

The overall thrust of the article is indeed on the mark.  The weather is getting more severe.  We can no longer keep our streets clear of snow because we don’t have the money to hire enough people to do it.  Our leaders don’t want to think about emergencies with snow, flooding, garbage, disease—those are for the scrungy lower orders to worry about.  Even New York City, beneficiary of large bundles of Federal funny money, is in decline.  Hoth the ice planet, indeed.

Remember….how CONservative pseudo/secular ‘saint’ R. Reagan liked to tell the rubes, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”?  They’re sure getting a good look at it now, though ‘the-least-of-it’ (less than nothing?) is still roaring hell-for-leather toward the hapless “huddled masses.”

The Great Spirit helps those who help each other.

HokaHey!

A baby died? How many of the ill suffered still more? How many went hungry? Lost wages? No ambulance service? How many others perished?

    Only fools would gamble their lives and future on the whims of financial thugdom. It’s a rigged game and cities are death traps. The rich have decreed a new “WORLD AUSTERITY” to preserve their wealth, at your expense. In a serious collapse they’ll murder you in the streets without a second thought. Did they lie in the faces of the 9/11 Heroes about the toxicity of Ground Zero and then fight tooth and nail to deny benefits? What about the New Orleans diaspora? How about the Gulf—business as usual? Oh yeah, there is no Global Climate Change. Natural resources aren’t failing and the exploding World Population doesn’t spell doom.

      Bloomberg and the like are moral cripples who’ve made fortunes through exploitation of the lives and labor of millions. Your life and future is over because they say it is. “Systems” and “isms” are a dead distraction. World evolution vs. Apocalypse is now a moral not a political question. They are monsters. Sirota only hints at the nightmare.

      To take the “if a tree falls” question one further: Consciousness requires a knower and a known. If there is no Consciousness to experience it, is there a Universe?

      Save yourself.

Bloomberg is a business man, a wealthy boy who had everything but wanted
the thrill of being NYC’s mayor. He invested in getting himself into office while
preaching that big business was the answer to the city’s problems.  Under his
anti-tax and other corporate-friendly policies, big business -from financial
institutions to developers- thrived. Then came the budget cuts, and it’s now up
to the average new yorker to deal with that.

The mayor has been a big contributor to various institutions involved in
medical research and public health. The irony is that he now thinks that
hospitals, not the city, should pay for emergency ambulance service. The
answer from hospitals has been that ambulance service will suffer if they have
to carry that financial burden.

He was elected to office three times. When you asked new yorkers why they
wanted to vote for him, a common answer was: “He’s a business man. He knows
what he’s doing.”

The difference is that 100 year storms are coming every 5 years.  Get it?

For my pal, Fat Freddy:

“Like so many wealth-worshiping politicians across the land, Bloomberg spent the last few years focused on two priorities: He campaigned against proposals to replenish depleted public coffers via slightly higher taxes on Wall Streeters, all while citing those depleted coffers as a rationale for massive municipal layoffs. Those job cuts, which were particularly acute at New York’s snow-removing sanitation department, have now predictably translated into an immobilized metropolis. “

and

“But with New York still resembling the ice planet Hoth, it’s clear Mother Nature can’t be spun”

Finally:

“his declaration that “the city is going fine” during the blizzard because “Broadway shows were full” demonstrates what plutocracy means in practice. It means that when an emergency does not hurt the Bloombergs of the world, our government does not see any emergency at all.

Yes, as long as the Bloombergs’ streets are plowed (as the mayor’s was), as long as the all-important rich are enjoying their theater engagements, the plutocrats think everything is A-OK. They don’t care that, say, an outer-borough newborn died because EMTs couldn’t get to the baby’s home for nine hours. They don’t care that another outer-borough woman had to wait 30 hours for an ambulance after breaking her ankle. And those plutocrats certainly aren’t about to change the conservative economic policies that help make these crises so horrific for the non-rich.”

This seems a bit wild and hysterical to me.  Okay, some bad weather - there’s always going to be a worst day of the year / year of the century, isn’t there?