How Bloomberg buys silence from criticism

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.’”

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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.