How Bloomberg buys silence from criticism

[Bradshaw3]

The plan was shocking even in Mike Bloomberg’s New York: At the height of the Great Recession, with the number of homeless people approaching record highs, the city had quietly begun charging rent from working families living in its rundown shelters.

“People were just outraged by that policy,” said Patrick Markee, then a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless. Social services advocates had already found a lot to dislike about Bloomberg’s personal responsibility approach to homelessness, and Markee figured that organizing a swift and unified backlash would be no problem.

But almost immediately, reliable allies in the nonprofit world declined to take a public stand against Mayor Bloomberg, for fear of alienating their most important donor: Mayor Bloomberg.

“We would find it very hard at times to get these other groups to stand up with us,” Markee recalled in a recent interview. “When we were doing a press conference in front of City Hall, or engaged in a legal action, or whether we were doing rallies, I talked to my colleagues and pretty frankly they would say, ‘Look, we agree with you, we’re on your side. But he’s a critical donor. We can’t afford to lose that kind of money.’”

snip
As Markee’s experience shows, Bloomberg’s vast extracurricular philanthropy bought him not only allies in key political moments, but the illusion of political consensus and a lack of serious opposition to the billionaire’s personal policy preferences.


https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-bloomberg-philanthropy-silence_n_5e4c23fbc5b65f25da502fa5

It is just so obvious how this guy operates. I can't believe how many people are either falling for it, or just don't care (you know because he's not as bad as drumpf). We not only can do better, we can do a LOT better.

[dchill]

1. "We can't afford to lose that kind of money."

Yes We Can!

[jalan48]

2. Sounds like a Republican to me.

[Gothmog]

3. Leaked Bloomberg NDA Protects Abusive Bosses

Bloomberg and trump both have all of their campaign staff sign NDAs https://politicalwire.com/2020/02/19/leaked-bloomberg-campaign-nda-protects-abusive-bosses/

“A Bloomberg campaign non-disclosure agreement obtained by The Nation contains language that could prevent staffers from reporting workplace abuse.”

“The NDA totals 9 pages and forbids employees from discussing ‘any and all non-public information’ and ‘activities’ by the campaign.”

“And while it’s understandable that a campaign would want to keep things like internal polling under wraps, transparency advocates say that the NDA is overly broad to the point of preventing sexual harassment, as well as other forms of workplace abuse like racial discrimination, from being reported.”

[Garrett78]

4. And buys support. Decades-long pattern.