Billionaire Presidential Candidate Mike Bloomberg is disdainful of ordinary people, disrespectful of their freedom and arrogantly convinced he can run their lives better than they can. So far, he sounds like a model Democrat. Unfortunately, he did something in his past that was such a violation of party rules it may cost him the nomination: he told some truths about black Americans.
Even before Elizabeth Warren smacked him around during Wednesday’s debate like he was a john in a kinky dungeon, Bloomberg had been forced to apologize to Democrat minority voters. They are so used to being lied to by their party, the simple truths he told struck them as an insult.
To be sure, Bloomberg has a contemptuous way of expressing himself. But black voters shouldn’t hear that as racism. He’s like that with everyone who doesn’t happen to be himself. As for the rest of what he said, he was giving it to them straight.
In 2015, the former New York City mayor spoke to the Aspen Institute about Stop and Frisk, a policy designed to let cops find and confiscate illegal guns.
“You want to spend the money, put a lot of cops on the streets, put those cops where the crime is, which means minority neighborhoods,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25.”
New York leftists — who seem to oppose all guns except those in the hands of criminals — took the city to court and a federal judge high-handedly ruled Stop and Frisk unconstitutional. But before that error, the policy was doing exactly what it was designed to do. In the course of a decade, it removed about 8,000 illegal guns from the street, and, along with other tough policing measures, helped prevent an estimated 7,000 murders. Most of the lives saved were black and Hispanic because, yes, theirs are the neighborhoods where most murders take place. Now that socialist mayor Bill de Blasio is going soft on crime, New York violence is on the rise again.
Bloomberg’s 2008 comments on the financial crash were also blunt but also true.
“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg said at a forum at Georgetown University. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas. And then Congress got involved — local elected officials, as well — and said, ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”
The accusation that banks avoided neighborhoods because of race was false. According to reporting in the New York Times, the policy was based on economics, as Bloomberg said, though because of racial economic disparities black people bore the brunt.
Once the banks were hectored into making bad loans by Democrats like then-Congressman Barney Frank, those loans worked their way into the financial system through Wall Street. When housing prices dropped, the whole system crashed.
Again, in 2011, while pushing a 127-million dollar plan to help minorities in the workplace, Bloomberg said, “There’s this enormous cohort of black and Latino males, age, let’s say, 16 to 25, that don’t have jobs, don’t have any prospects, don’t know how to find jobs, don’t know what their skill sets are, don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.”
Would any honest American of any color say this wasn’t true?
Bloomberg’s dismissive tone is a problem, and one conservatives could learn from. The troubles in some poor minority communities — and in poor communities in general — are not just statistics. They have to be addressed with compassion and creativity. Even when tough policing is required, it is not a sin against honesty to remember that the kid being arrested is some mother’s son who may have had some tough breaks in life.
But how can we address the problems at all, if we’re not allowed to acknowledge their existence?
I’m no Bloomberg fan, but he was a decent mayor who managed to preserve the miraculous transformation of the city wrought by Rudy Giuliani and his great top cops. If in order to be a Democrat, he has to start lying to black people, he should find a better party.
And so should black people.