Mike Bloomberg’s White Collar Racism Exposed ... No Wonder Obama Loves Him

Feb. 11, 2020 (EIRNS)—As expected, the billionaire’s well-documented racism and disdain for the lower working classes is now making its way to the public. The audio recording of an Aspen Institute tape, featuring Bloomberg speaking candidly among hoity toity friends at that venue in 2015, has leaked, despite Bloomberg’s fervent efforts to prevent it from ever being published. The leak comes at a most inconvenient time, as Bloomberg’s latest ad barrage features Barack Obama sucking up to the elites’ now favorite candidate.

The leak is also complicated for President Donald Trump, who got sold on the stop-and-frisk policy by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. As subsequent mayor, Bloomberg drastically and dramatically expanded Giuliani’s initiative into a virtual police occupation policy for whole sections of New York City. Those sections of New York City were simultaneously being completely marginalized by Mayor Bloomberg’s economic policies aimed at attracting and stroking the very rich while promoting the information age service economy that made him rich.

In the audio excerpt released, Bloomberg says,

“95% of your murders, 95% of your murder victims fit one MO [modus operandi]. You just xerox a copy of the description, male, minority, 16-25, and hand it out to the cops. You put the cops in those neighborhoods because that’s where the crime is.... [To get rid of guns] you just throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”

According to other accounts of the speech, he also said, “These kids think they are going to get killed anyway, because all their friends are being killed.... So they just don’t have any long-term focus on anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”

In 2015, Bloomberg recognized that his remarks were a problem. He secured an agreement from the Aspen Institute to ban any video reproduction of the tape, despite prior Aspen policies.

There is no doubt that in the nation’s cities, minorities are the primary victims of crime, most often committed by other minorities. But the policing policies of Michael Bloomberg have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that that crime rate and the crime rate overall dropped in New York City. According to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York City’s crime rate began to drop, dramatically, as the crack epidemic faded after a rampage that specifically targetted minority communities in the 1990s. It has continued to drop at almost the same rate ever since.

Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policies were held unconstitutional by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Floyd v. City of New York in 2013. That case documented that 2.4 million Black and Hispanic New Yorkers were stopped on such pretexts as furtive gesture, suspicious bulge, in high crime area, during the Bloomberg administration, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Some 150,000 arrests resulted from these stops producing a conviction rate of 3%. Less than 0.01% of those arrests involved crimes of violence. In 2011 alone, the New York Police Department recorded a record 685,724 stops. Fully 84% of those stopped were Black or Latino, and 88% of the people stopped were neither arrested nor received summonses. Despite Bloomberg’s incredible boasts about throwing them against the wall and frisking them as the means to eliminate guns, weapons and other contraband were recovered less than 2% of the time.