Saturday, November 3, 2012

Marathon Man Pulls Up Lame

Mike Bloomberg blinked! Faced with the wrath of almost the entire city the miniature mayor pulled the plug on the marathon to avoid being tarred and feathered and run out of New York on the rails: "Mayor Michael Bloomberg and organizers of New York City Marathon cancelled the race Friday amid growing concerns that holding the event would divert resources from cleanup efforts in the wake of superstorm Sandy."

Just in the nick of time-right before the vigilante posse could saddle up and bundle L'l Mike into a sack and toss him into a wading pool to drown. Could NYC possibly have a more tone deal leader than Mike? WNYC allows a beleaguered New Yorker named Karol Markowicz to eloquently vent about the clueless chief executive:

"Let me tell you a story about a group of buildings in Brooklyn called Amalgamated Warbasse Houses. It's a series of 15 Mitchell-lama buildings in Coney Island. There is a high concentration of elderly people in the Warbasse buildings, many of them of Russian descent, as I am. The buildings are 20 stories high each.


If you look up the Warbasse in the news from the last few days, you won't find any mention of it. But it is in dire straits. In addition to no power, they also have no gas. It's one thing not to have heat, another to not be able to make any food. Elderly people are trapped on the high floors with no way to get out."

What gets Markowicz is that the marathon would have been conducted right in the face of all those outer borough sufferers-something the Manhattan-centric Bloomberg was blithely unconcerned about:

"His comment on Friday was, "Rudy had it right, you have to keep going and doing things...you can grieve & cry & laugh all at same time." I'm not against people living their lives just because other people remain in a state of trauma. Go watch the Giants game at the stadium in New Jersey. Go see a Broadway show. I would have supported the Village Halloween parade proceeding as planned, if we had the manpower for it. I get it: life goes on.

But to have 40,000 people run through boroughs which are still suffering, still flooded, still destroyed, still without power was just unconscionable. The pictures of the generators ready to heat the tents of the runners in Central Park can, and should, be used in places like Warbasse Housing."

Pretty callous when you think about it, but par for the course with the Mayor Mike who told people to chill out and go see a Broadway show during the blizzard of 2010. The attempt by Mike to appeal to authority-in this case Rudy Giuliani's decision in 2001 to hold the marathon two month after 9/11 struck a particularly discordant note-as the NY Post pointed out:

"But unlike on 9/11, which happened two months not one week before the marathon, Hurricane Sandy victims continue to suffer through freezing-cold weather, blackouts and life-threatening conditions — some of which will be alleviated with the much-needed marathon supplies."

As the mayor enters into the final year of his uninspiring third term he should be asking himself why the hell he used his strong arm tactics to bogart an illegal third term-that is if he has any ounce of self reflection which we seriously doubt.

What all New York is finally seeing is what  the property owners at Willets Point have known for years: Mike Bloomberg is a callous and arrogant billionaire who believes ,in spite of all the credible evidence to the contrary, that he is a competent manger who really understand WTF is going on.