Bloomberg to the Rescue

As Jill Gardiner points out today in the NY Sun today Mayor Bloomberg is continuing his tireless quest to protect the robustness of the city's financial markets. We applaud the mayor's steadfastness in this regard but continue to point out that Mayor Mike never exhibits the same kind of concern when it comes to the taxes and regulations that threaten the profitability of the city's neighborhood retailers.

Maybe its unfair but we can't help but think that it's not only the importance of the financial sector to NYC's economy that drives the mayor so hard. After all, these are his folks and they work in a place where the mayor made his considerable fortune. We haven't, for example, heard any rachmones from the mayor about how the city's commercial real estate tax hike hit all store owners right in the center of their rental pocketbooks. And we haven't heard that the city, flush with cash, is going to rebate the taxes to these beleaguered retailers.

So much for all of the "above politics" rhetoric that we have heard used to describe the mayor's immunity from the special interests. As the mayor's spirited defense of "his boys" underscores the mayor is the apotheosis of the special interests that nurtured his meteoric rise to billionaire status.