Mike Bloomberg is Trying to Brush the Billion$ in IT Tech Fraud and Corruption Under the Rug of TBA Political Fall Guys
Angry that huge IT projects were exposed to be sources of billions of dollars of corruption, the Bloomberg administration has found a political escape hatch : they are going to outsource all scandalous IT projects to a new quasi-governmental entity that will operate free of regulation and oversight. How is this going to fix corruption ?
The new entity, being described as a new “NYC Technology Development Corporation” by The New York Times, will become responsible for all the IT projects [like CityTime, NYCAPS, and the new 911 emergency dispatching system, which is also called the Emergency Communications Transformation Program (ECTP)], which have "raised questions about one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s perceived strengths as a billionaire who made his money through technological innovation," The NYTimes reported.
Deputy Mayor Caswell F. Holloway, who spearheaded a review of the city’s technology woes, is hoping that the new entity would shift political responsibility away from Mayor Bloomberg for some of the mega-huge corruption scandals, which have been being investigated by U.S. Attorney Preetinder Bharara.
Harvey Robins, who was operations chief for Mayor David N. Dinkins and who reorganized several city agencies, told The NYTimes that the immediate effect would be to distance Mayor Bloomberg from future technology problems. “It’s a headache,” Mr. Robins said, “and he doesn’t want the headache anymore.”
According to YouTube videos and bloggers, there are as many as 15 million Mexicans, who have been participating protests in different cities around Mexico. Critics of the Mexican government charge that there is a deliberate media blackout of the protests. Activists and protesters are tired of the corruption with government officials, organized crime, drug trafficking, gun violence, and taxation, among other crimes.
NYDaily News : John Haggerty was sentenced to 1 1/3 to 4 years on each of two counts of supposedly "stealing" money from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. After being sentenced, Mr. Haggerty was taken into custody.
The Queens political operative who stole nearly $1 million from Mayor Bloomberg is heading to the slammer.
A judge dismissed pleas for leniency and sentenced John Haggerty to one and a third to four years in state prison.
Probation was not enough, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel said, “in order to restore the public confidence in the electoral process and to serve as a deterent.”
Also, Haggerty will have to return the $900,000 or so he stole from Bloomberg, the judge said.
That means Haggerty will likely have to sell the $1.6 million Forest Hills house he grew up in — and which he ripped off the mayor to buy out his brother’s share. ...
Mayor Bloomberg's shady campaign finance scandal is an outrage, not to mention the fact that Mayor Bloomberg was hiring political operatives to suppress the vote through "thinly-veiled ballot security operations," but, just like the Watergate scandal, only the aids to the executive politician go to jail, not the crooked politician, who gets blanket immunity/pardon.
New York City Housing Official Is Accused of Taking Bribes
'' ... Wendell B. Walters, the assistant commissioner at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development responsible for new construction, was arrested on charges that he took money from developers involved in building about $22 million in moderately priced housing overseen by the agency in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn since 2002,'' reported The New York Times.
It was alleged that Mr. Walters awarded contracts to developers in exchange for cash. He was charged with racketeering conspiracy, extortion, bribery, wire fraud, and money laundering, according to The NYTimes.
The charges against Mr. Walters further calls into question the pattern of corruption under the Bloomberg administration. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, we have seen multiple cases of fraud and corruption, from the overbilling of several high tech deals, most notably in connection with CityTime, in addition to the investigations and indictments under the City Council slush fund scandal.
Not only that, but The NYTimes reported that the charges against Mr. Walters ... ''represented another black eye for the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose third term has been clouded by controversies involving senior officials. They include the tumultuous tenure of Cathleen P. Black as schools chancellor and the abrupt departure of Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who said in August that he was leaving to work in municipal finance, but had been arrested in Washington on a domestic violence charge days earlier, a fact that neither he nor the mayor had mentioned in their announcements.''
After all these cases of corruption or official misconduct, you would think that we would need to protect the progressive era reforms, not roll them back, the way that Mayor Bloomberg has been trying, ever since he came into power.
From one political boss to another, Mayor Bloomberg to Assemblyman Vito Lopez :
''Who's your money honey ?''
In the midst of several investigations into fraud, mismanagement, and possible corruption at the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that taxpayer money from New York City will continue to be paid to the questionable organisation, The Brooklyn Paper has reported.
New York City will pay taxpayer money in the amount of $135 million to Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council for home attendant services that the organisation reportedly provides in Brooklyn and Queens, wrote Aaron Short, a reporter for The Brooklyn Paper. The outlandish amount of money comes under two contracts with New York City, and the performance of such contracts have to be called into question if there is illegality involved by Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council. Here are some additional facts from Mr. Short's article :
'' Last month, the city delayed pending contracts to Ridgewood Bushwick in light of a city investigation that found fraudulent billing for nonexistent programs and clueless board members who approved huge raises for the nonprofit’s top executives.
'' The state then announced that it would halt all new and existing contracts to Ridgewood Bushwick amid two federal investigations, as the attorney general’s office conducts a thorough review of its most recently submitted audit.
'' The nonprofit has also drawn scrutiny for its workers’ role in allegedly encouraging voters to [pull] the lever or fill in their ballot bubbles for the charity’s founder, Assemblyman Vito Lopez, who is also the Brooklyn Democratic Party chairman. ''
Meanwhile, community reaction has been one of outrage, disbelief, and anger.
Mr. Short reported that Elaine Boardman, who is associated with the Jewish Association for Services of the Aged, said that she was ''outraged'' that, during the financial scandal investiations, New York City would continue to pay money to Ridgewood Bushwick.
A courageous politician, Doug Biviano, is campaigning for election to the New York State Assembly, and he has produced a YouTube video in which he asked the mainstream media to report on candidates challenging New York State incumbents.
In his video, Mr. Biviano celebrated the spirit of the father of modern journalism, John Peter Zenger, to solve the dysfunction and corruption that is evident in New York State government. Mr. Biviano is challenging Joan Millman in Brooklyn's 52nd Assembly District. His main campaign promise seems to be to ''fight corruption,'' but no mainstream media outlet seems interested in his platform.
Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Goldsmith want to unwind the improvements in checks and balances that were instituted in response to the political corruption during the Tammany Hall era.
At a July 20, 2010 breakfast meeting, Stephen Goldsmith, the new Deputy Mayor of New York City, was compared to Jane Jacobs for the way he applied ''urban renewal'' to Indianapolis. (Meanwhile, Ms. Jacobs fought ''urban renewal'' when Robert Moses tried to ''apply'' it to Greenwich Village, but accepting the comparison to Mr. Goldsmith would have meant we were talking about historical facts, which doesn't seem to ''apply'' to what Mr. Goldsmith has learned about New York City's history.) Now that he is in New York City, Mr. Goldsmith has joined forces with Mayor Michael Bloomberg to transform New York City.
In the presence of political reporters Erik Engquist and Michael Scotto, the new deputy mayor described his political beliefs, which serve to underpin his worldview and approach to government.
Mr. Goldsmith said that a progressive form of government developed after the political corruptions scandals associated with Tammany Hall, and Mr. Goldsmith credited progressive reforms with professionalising the way that cities work. He said that we don't hire ''buddies'' anymore. Neither do we award government contracts in ways that would be questioned, he said. (Again, whether the hiring of, and awarding contracts to, ''buddies'' no longer happens is a matter of historical fact, and we'll let you decide the truth.)
But now, Mr. Goldsmith said, all the rules that made government free of corruption have worked to make government more complex. He cited as an example that all these rules have created a lack of authority in the city, and the city needs to get rid of the requirement of having to need permission from another level of bureaucrats before anything could be done if city officials hope to bring efficiency to the way the city government could be run. He seemed to say that he believed that the rule-based system needed to be changed, so that city employees could be ''liberated,'' and that this would result in civil workers being able to be creative while also being held accountable.
The way that he sees things, Mr. Goldsmith said, public service used to attract people, who were interested in helping the public. Instead, he said, public service is now only about enforcing the rules.
To Mr. Goldsmith, rules may be problematic to the kinds of changes he envisions bringing to New York City government, but rules have a reason for being : they are needed, because people are apt to have lapses in integrity. Anytime that politicians have an opportunity to privitise government services, there is a temptation to award government contracts to their well-connected friends or political allies.
The model of how he privatised government services while he was mayor of Indianapolis would be difficult to do here, in New York City, because he believes that the progressive rules in New York City give no discretion to the city's workers.
According to Wikipedia, ''Keeping corruption out of politics was a main goal of the progressive era, with many Progressives trying to expose and undercut political machines and bosses.''
To be fair to Mr. Goldsmith, his opinions about reforming the rules that govern city employees extend to ''unlocking'' the potential of the existing city workforce. He said he believes that progressive era rules were set because one could not trust the discretion (or judgment) of government employees. But once you begin to give higher level government employees discretion, one very quickly creates a situation, where political leaders begin to misuse that discretion. Political bosses are often associated with dishonesty, self-dealing, conflicts of interest, profiteering from government, and other forms of corruption.
Take, for example, the way that Mayor Bloomberg came to win a th3rd t3rm as mayor.
Before the end of his second, and what should have been his final, term in office, Mayor Bloomberg advocated for an extension of term limits, which would have resulted in the possibility that he could have run for a th3rd t3rm as mayor. With help from the City Council and a secret deal with Ronald Lauder, Mayor Bloomberg won the change in term limits through a vote by the City Council instead of through a voter referendum. (The New York Times even reported at the time that the mayor was ''pressing many of the community, arts and neighborhood groups that rely on his private donations to make the case for his third term,'' and the newspaper of record has just reported that at least one of those charity organisations, the Doe Fund, received millions of private monies for, what amounts to, its support for changing the term limits law.) What the mayor did was rely on the discretion of the City Council to change the law governing term limits, and, in a clear case of a conflict of interest, he urged the charities, which have depended on his private donations and government contracts, to support the controversial change in term limits law. Last year, Mayor Bloomberg was elected to a th3rd t3rm ; it was reported that he had spent approximately $109 million only to win by an unexpectedly slim margin of less than 5 per cent. Meanwhile, nobody knows whether electioneering payments amounting to $1.2 million that were made from the mayor's personal accounts to the Independence Party were intentionally not made from the mayor's campaign account in order to circumvent campaign disclosure requirements.
To get the new kind of ''better, faster, cheaper'' governance structure that the mayor wants, for example, the CityPragmatist blog has reported that there is a current movement by the 2010 Charter Revision Commission to, among other things, increase the mayor's discretion over city agency reports. If we had a City Council that could collectively do an honest thing, then the increase of the mayor's discretion would come at the cost of City Council's ability to review and ''extend or enhance'' any city agency report. But the reality is that right now, we have a City Council that has compromised its own integrity, because it is currently involved in a scandal over the disposition of discretionary slush funds.
Research and history published on Wikipedia indicate that some of the reforms of the progressive era brought more transparency to government. ''Progressives moved to enable the citizenry to rule more directly and circumvent political bosses ; California, Wisconsin, and Oregon took the lead. California governor Hiram Johnson established the initiative, referendum, and recall, viewing them as good influences for citizen participation ....''
What were the motives of City Council members,
who supported Mayor Bloomberg's extension of
term limits ?
Artist and social media commentator Suzannah B. Troy was also present to witness Mr. Goldsmith's speech at his July 20, 2010 breakfast meeting. She has described the vote by City Council to allow an extension of term limits a conflict of interest, because the same extension of terms limits was self-serving : it allowed many council members to run for, and win, a th3rd t3rm, including Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Ms. Troy has criticised the mayor for denying voters a referendum on the change in term limits.
Two months after the questionable City Council vote to extend term limits, a judge affirmed the mayor's tactic, The New York Timesreported. (It was in the 1990's when terms limits had originally come into being in New York City after having twice been approved by, ironically, voter referenda.) We are now so far removed from progressive sensibilities that not even judges appreciate or respect voter referenda that are concerned with checking the power on politicians (in other words, to prevent the rise of political bosses). Going back to the history about past political corruption in New York City, the term ''Tammany Hall'' is "used to refer to a corrupt system of buying or controlling votes." Wrestling away from voters the control over term limits is precisely what the mayor, City Council, and now the judicial system have done. Surely, all these signs indicate that we are returning to a modern-day ''Tammany Hall'' era.
"Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of his ideal of a government of the people, by the people and for the people. He didn’t mean government of the fat cats and by the fat cats. With all due respect to the feline family -- and I happen to love cats -- Lincoln was an apostle of democracy in a purer sense. ¶ The machinations of millionaires and billionaires are foreign to what he believed. The lack of strict laws governing campaign expenditures continues to be a disgrace to our country."
Meanwhile, in a recent blog post on The New York Times, somebody commented, "How many times do we have to vote for term limits before they become permanent law ?" While we may still think that history shows us that we can count on established legal precedents and codified progressive reforms for how our votes get counted and how our government works, Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Goldsmith believe otherwise. And it is their twisted and warped sets of beliefs, which are not based on facts, that seem to carry the day.
Thousands of residents have been ordered to stop using their apartment balconies after the Department of Buildings has found that the balconies at 16 high rise buildings to be unsafe. The Department of Buildings, a New York City agency, has no credibility in the area of public safety, because it always seems to wait until after cranes collapse or balconies give way before it begins to act. And where is Mayor Michael Bloomberg in all of this ? In her latest YouTube video, Ms. Troy concludes that, "No one's holding him accountable." In fact, Ms. Troy has invented a new nickname for the mayor, "Teflon Mike."
Since its release, Ms. Troy's ''Teflon Mike'' video has been carried by at least the SoHo Journal and this blog.
' The tapes also aired on one of the city's TV stations, where they ran in endless loops, similar to the way leaders are promoted in places like North Korea. '
From The Village Voice via Queens Crap on FaceBook, but quoted entirely from Queens Crap, comes this shocking report about Bloombo Dicto's costly obsession with his self-image :
Shortly after his re-election in November 2005, Mike Bloomberg decided to raise his national profile several notches. He began traveling widely, making speeches and accepting awards. We later learned this was mostly about setting the stage for a potential run for president. He ultimately passed on that race, without giving up hope that he might get lucky next time. But one of the interesting features of this publicity push was that—despite his own fabulous wealth—the mayor wasn't shy about using city resources to promote his image.
Starting in February 2006, the Bloomberg administration began assigning a team of video camera operators from the city's television station — NYC-TV — to follow the mayor on his far-flung voyages. The mayor flew on his private jet; the city crews followed behind on commercial airlines.
At taxpayer expense, city workers traveled to Shanghai, Beijing, Bali, Paris, London, Mexico City, Belfast, Berlin, and Jerusalem. They also covered his cross-country jaunts to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Boca Raton, and Fort Lauderdale. The crews shot the mayor as well as he made his less glamorous, workaday trips to Washington and Albany.
This fascinating footage was then routed back home for use by local commercial television stations seeking to show viewers their mayor in action. The tapes also aired on one of the city's TV stations, where they ran in endless loops, similar to the way leaders are promoted in places like North Korea. Much of it was also posted for posterity on the mayor's website...
The Voice was hoping to bring this information to readers much earlier. The subject of the mayoral video teams was raised last spring by NYC-TV employees complaining how their agency was being used as a playpen for the mayor and his pals. Their complaints were sparked by a wide-ranging scandal, broken by the Voice, in which top executives at the station—all Bloomberg appointees—were forced out after they were caught abusing their posts; the financial director was arrested when it turned out he had taken advantage of his boss's frequent absences to steal some $60,000.
A Freedom of Information request for travel and expense records was filed last May. As requests go, this one was standard, plain vanilla. But DOITT officials instantly said it would take six months to compile. Why six months? Heavy traffic in the FOI department, they said. This also conveniently ensured that the information wouldn't be available until after voters had decided on the mayor's third term bid in November. Even then, six months stretched into nine. The documents finally emerged a couple weeks ago, after a lawyer was retained to get the agency's attention.
About 10 years ago, we would have expected to read this story in the NY Times.
"Mr. Bloomberg knows that his reputation has taken hard blows in the fight over term limits. But he is apparently betting that the passage of time will restore whatever he may have lost in respectability." -- Clyde Haberman, The New York Times, October 27, 2008.
"Mr. Bloomberg's popularity is high, but his handling of protesters to the 2004 Republican National Convention, when thousands of demonstrators were swept off the streets and detained, is a black mark on his record for many New Yorkers and civil libertarians." -- The New York Times
"For more than a year before the convention, the Police Department monitored Web sites and sent undercover detectives around the nation to collect information on Bush opponents planning to demonstrate in New York. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the operation helped keep order. " The New York Times, April 3, 2007
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