If Michael Bloomberg didn’t take New York City in his third mayoral win this month, he probably could have just bought it. Or at least a few city blocks- whatever his estimated net worth of $17.5 billion should afford him. Bloomberg is a fabulously wealthy man. The New York Times reports that he will have spent upwards of one hundred million dollars getting re-elected this year and as such has now spent more out of his own pocket than any other individual in United States history in the pursuit of public office.
The Merrill Lynch alumnus’ hefty fortune has been a major strategic asset in his past political pursuits. Over the course of his term, he has tossed more than two hundred million dollars cash at charitable organizations for health, education, and the arts, nearly half of them New-York based. The charity circuit and patronage of the arts involves an impressive headcount of the city’s power élite, whose fervent support Bloomberg enjoyed in his machinations to overturn the voter-mandated law that would have barred him from running for the third term in October 2008.
So Mayor Mike got the thumbs up from his twelve hundred beneficiary organizations, and, as is apparent after this month’s win, the narrow majority of his publique. And why shouldn’t he? Though the record is mixed, it’s largely positive, with leaps and bounds made in education, gun control, health and welfare during his two terms to date. Yet the whole affair has been somewhat unpalatable for the public. The suggestion is that it’s got something to do with disenchantment over his successful 2008 campaign to undermine term limits and run for a third subsequent election. Albeit in small majority, New Yorkers went to the polls on November 2 and pulled the lever in his favour nonetheless.
The discussion echoes a larger and increasingly public post-2007 discussion on the sordid ‘love affair’ of finance and politics. Tersely, the argument goes that City and Wall Street heavies have politics in a headlock, both by way of the flow of individuals between Big Board and bureaucracy and the amassing of a kind of ‘cultural capital’. American economists Simon Johnson and James Kwak conjecture that financiers now enjoy exorbitant political privilege on top of their exorbitant paycheques, having successfully perpetuated the idea that the maintenance of large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets (and, by proxy, obscenely large salaries) are of crucial importance to the fate of the world. Their British colleague, John Kay, has made urgent pushes for the restructuring of the relationship between the financial sectors and government. It could be they’re on to something – it’s worth taking heed when centrist economists blog about Pierre Bourdieu.
Following this strain of French post-structuralist thought, we might chalk up the bad taste Bloomberg’s win has left in our mouths to, well, ‘bad taste’. The flagrant excess of his campaign and his profligate philanthropic spending may have been un peu de trop considering widespread popular contempt for excessive executive pay and bonus and politicians’ propensity to prop them up post-crisis.
Bloomberg’s unapologetic pecuniary peacocking goes against the ‘ethic of sobriety’ Bourdieu says we associate with the real ‘upper crust’, which considerately conceals its wealth and privilege. Florid displays of affluence are the domain of social climbers and class impostors, like your National Lottery winner or overweight, bejeweled and barbiturates-popping Elvis Presley.
Given the present popular scorn of the uber-salary, tripartite tensions among politics, finance and the rest of the population and the current state of the economic affairs, it was probably just as blasé of Bloomberg to be writing blank cheques as it was for MPs to be blowing their allowances on refuges for water fowl. That we have come to expect leaders to be of a certain station, the stuffed-shirted custodians of the status quo, is no secret: novelty aside, celebrities in politics has made Americans feel dirty and Brits feel superior and parliament seems to have a convenient allergy to academia. The boring, self-effacing privileged and influential we tend to vote in have thus far proven to be satisfactory, at least tolerable, as public servants and administrators. Isn’t it a necessary corollary that we have come to expect a certain degree of savoir vivre?
No related posts.
Pingback: BY PUBLICATION « My CPU Runneth Over