Bloomberg for President

mrussel1

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

So in full context, considering he's funding programs to help them, is it racist?  There's certainly no argument that minorities are over represented in jails and under represented in the productive work force.  Is that racist to point out if you are contributing millions of your own money to try to solve that problem?

If we can't agree that the last paragraph is racist then I don't know what is. This is also the same guy who said they were overpolicing whites and underpolicing minorities in regards to stop-and-frisk. You then read his other quotes through that lens.

The sentence around behaving in the workplace certainly walks the line.  But what do you think about the entire discussion?  Is it racist when evaluated in the whole, rather than parsed at the sentence?  Certainly many of those sentences would be considered racist individually, and without the knowledge of the money he was donating.  

The Juggler

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

So in full context, considering he's funding programs to help them, is it racist?  There's certainly no argument that minorities are over represented in jails and under represented in the productive work force.  Is that racist to point out if you are contributing millions of your own money to try to solve that problem?

If we can't agree that the last paragraph is racist then I don't know what is. This is also the same guy who said they were overpolicing whites and underpolicing minorities in regards to stop-and-frisk. You then read his other quotes through that lens.

The sentence around behaving in the workplace certainly walks the line.  But what do you think about the entire discussion?  Is it racist when evaluated in the whole, rather than parsed at the sentence?  Certainly many of those sentences would be considered racist individually, and without the knowledge of the money he was donating.  

I don't think he is interested in the whole discussion. He is only interested in little snippets that fits his narrative.

The Juggler

Real racist behavior right here...

Bloomberg to Use Own Funds in Plan to Aid Minority Youth

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a blunt acknowledgment that thousands of young black and Latino men are cut off from New York’s civic, educational and economic life, plans to spend nearly $130 million on far-reaching measures to improve their circumstances.

The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed.

To pay for the endeavor in a time of fiscal austerity, the city is relying on an unusual source: Mr. Bloomberg himself, who intends to use his personal fortune to cover about a quarter of the cost, city officials said. A $30 million contribution from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation would be matched by that of a fellow billionaire, George Soros, a hedge fund manager, with the remainder being paid for by the city.

Starting this fall, the administration said it would place job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes where many young black and Latino men live, retrain probation officers in an effort to reduce recidivism, establish new fatherhood classes and assess schools on the academic progress of male black and Latino students.

Mr. Bloomberg plans to announce the three-year program in a speech on Thursday morning in Manhattan, in which he will declare that “blacks and Latinos are not fully sharing in the promise of American freedom.”

Even as crime has fallen and graduation rates have risen in New York over the past decade, city officials said that black and Latino men, especially those between ages 16 and 24, remained in crisis by nearly every measure, including rates of arrest, school suspension and poverty.

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Although the populations of young white, black and Latino men in New York are roughly the same size, 84 percent of those in the city’s detention facilities and nearly all of those admitted to children’s and family services facilities are black and Latino youth, according to data from the Bloomberg administration. “The magnitude of the disparities is stunning,” said Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services. “It’s tragic.”

Mr. Bloomberg has put the weight of city government behind large-scale social change before, with public-health campaigns against smoking, sugary beverages and fatty foods.

But now, he is confronting a problem whose intractability and deep-seated causes have bedeviled policy makers for decades. And by focusing so heavily on a subset of city residents, he risks angering those unlikely to be helped by the new resources.

“The success rate, in general, is not that promising,” said Elijah Anderson, a professor of sociology at Yale, who has written extensively about urban issues.

The challenge, Professor Anderson said, will be persuading New York’s businesses to embrace these young men and offer them permanent employment after the city’s work is completed. “Companies have to be much more receptive to these young people and meet people like Bloomberg halfway,” he said.

The administration’s plan, developed after a year of study and debate, spans much of the city’s bureaucracy and multiple stages in the lives of the men it is trying to reach, beginning in middle school and ending with career counseling.

Robert Antioco, left, and Louis Green-Gonzalez look for jobs at the program office.Credit...Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

In interviews, aides to the mayor said the new measures emphasized the practical needs of the city’s most impoverished black and Latino men, many of whom are unable or unwilling to enroll in time-consuming education and training programs unless they are compensated, according to the officials.

So to promote remedial math and literacy classes in the morning, for example, the city would link them with paid internships in the afternoon. The internships would pay $7.25 an hour, but students would be paid only if they participated in the class.

“Working is a big motivator for these kids,” said Kristin Morse, the director of programs and evaluation at the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity.

For the first time, the Education Department would specifically tie the success of black and Latino boys — measured in part by test scores and graduation rates — to the grades the city gives schools each year. Those grades can determine whether a school remains open.

Much of the program is intended to prevent young men from entering or returning to the criminal justice system, which has long been a revolving door for many black and Latino youth.

Under the plan, the city’s Probation Department would open five satellite probation offices in neighborhoods with the highest crime rates — like East New York, Brooklyn; Jamaica, Queens; and the South Bronx — and inside community organizations that offer services from which the young men might benefit, like computer classes to help them prepare for a job or yoga classes to help them control anger. Currently, the city’s 524 probation officers work out of central offices in the five boroughs, often disconnected from the communities where the men whom they monitor spend most of their time.

To provide role models for the men on probation, the city said it would recruit from those neighborhoods 900 paid mentors, many of whom used to be troubled themselves, and promote a range of community service programs, like cleaning parks, removing graffiti and painting community centers, said Vincent N. Schiraldi, the city’s probation commissioner. He said the goal was to help New Yorkers see these young men “not as the scary guy in a North Face jacket hanging at the corner, but as men who can have a positive impact in their neighborhoods.”

Aides to the mayor described several of the measures as common-sense solutions that would cost little, if anything, to put in place. The city will try to reduce the barriers to employment for men with criminal convictions by instructing managers not to ask job applicants about those records in the first stage of the interview process.

The city would also encourage men to obtain driver’s licenses or state identification cards, after focus groups suggested that a large number of young black and Latino men did not have them, making it difficult for them to apply for jobs. “They didn’t know why they should have it or how to get it,” said Andrea Batista Schlesinger, a special adviser to the mayor, who organized the program.

Now the city plans to promote such identification in the paperwork given to high-school graduates and during interviews for summer jobs with city agencies.

Mr. Bloomberg urged his aides to study the experiences of black and Latino men in 2010. The aides said he was especially surprised and unsettled by statistics showing how frequently many of the men returned to the city’s prisons — an issue that became personal for the mayor after a stranger pulled him aside on the subway and told him his story: he was 45, black, a convict and unemployed. Mr. Bloomberg asked Dennis M. Walcott, now the schools chancellor, to check in periodically with the man, who was later arrested again.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Bloomberg called Mr. Soros, who has spent millions of dollars on programs to help black men in Baltimore and other cities, and invited him to lunch. The mayor asked the financier to match his donation for a program in New York, and Mr. Soros quickly agreed.

“When the mayor approached us,” Mr. Soros said, “he was knocking on an open door.”

pjl44

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

So in full context, considering he's funding programs to help them, is it racist?  There's certainly no argument that minorities are over represented in jails and under represented in the productive work force.  Is that racist to point out if you are contributing millions of your own money to try to solve that problem?

If we can't agree that the last paragraph is racist then I don't know what is. This is also the same guy who said they were overpolicing whites and underpolicing minorities in regards to stop-and-frisk. You then read his other quotes through that lens.

The sentence around behaving in the workplace certainly walks the line.  But what do you think about the entire discussion?  Is it racist when evaluated in the whole, rather than parsed at the sentence?  Certainly many of those sentences would be considered racist individually, and without the knowledge of the money he was donating.  

When you know he feels that way about an "enormous cohort" of young black and Latino males, I don't know how that doesn't reflect on the rest of what he says.

Also, did you read from The Juggler's own link about some of these programs being funded? "Retraining probation officers" and "establishing fatherhood classes." Cooooooooome ooooooooooon.

pjl44

The Totally Not Racist guy has a plan to heal the inner city by retraining probation officers and allowing cops to randomly search minorities on the street

The Juggler

Guy cites a problem with young minorities. 
Guy puts forth $130 million dollars of his own money to fund a program to help said minorities get ahead. 
Guy gets labeled a racist for citing the problem. 

America 2020 in a nutshell.

The Juggler

pjl44 said:

The Totally Not Racist guy has a plan to heal the inner city by retraining probation officers and allowing cops to randomly search minorities on the street

Hey look! More random things out of context!
America!

mrussel1

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

So in full context, considering he's funding programs to help them, is it racist?  There's certainly no argument that minorities are over represented in jails and under represented in the productive work force.  Is that racist to point out if you are contributing millions of your own money to try to solve that problem?

If we can't agree that the last paragraph is racist then I don't know what is. This is also the same guy who said they were overpolicing whites and underpolicing minorities in regards to stop-and-frisk. You then read his other quotes through that lens.

The sentence around behaving in the workplace certainly walks the line.  But what do you think about the entire discussion?  Is it racist when evaluated in the whole, rather than parsed at the sentence?  Certainly many of those sentences would be considered racist individually, and without the knowledge of the money he was donating.  

When you know he feels that way about an "enormous cohort" of young black and Latino males, I don't know how that doesn't reflect on the rest of what he says.

Also, did you read from The Juggler's own link about some of these programs being funded? "Retraining probation officers" and "establishing fatherhood classes." Cooooooooome ooooooooooon.

See that phrase doesn't give me pause.  "Cohort" is common term used in the data analytics world and does not carry a negative history.  Bloomberg was essentially a software developer of analytical market products, so "cohort" would be very commonly used when discussing groupings of data.  The closest thing to racism I see in there is the assumption that they can't work collaboratively, and that's because it's a statement that cannot be proven empirically, whereas everything else he says can.  

Regarding fatherhood classes, if you have generations of absent fathers, then why not have the classes to encourage young men to stay in their children's lives and help those children?  It's possible they've never had a mentor and don't know how a father should be.  I don't think that's racist by definition.  

Look, I haven't studied Bloomberg in depth, but many of these cut outs that are being shown are clearly out of context.  I'm not saying all of them are, I just dont' know at this point.  But this particular paragraph does not put him in the same category as Trump by any stretch.  

Spiritual_Chaos

The Juggler said:

pjl44 said:

The Totally Not Racist guy has a plan to heal the inner city by retraining probation officers and allowing cops to randomly search minorities on the street

Hey look! More random things out of context!
America!

What would you do if Bloomberg shot someone in the middle of 5th avenue? 

pjl44

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

So in full context, considering he's funding programs to help them, is it racist?  There's certainly no argument that minorities are over represented in jails and under represented in the productive work force.  Is that racist to point out if you are contributing millions of your own money to try to solve that problem?

If we can't agree that the last paragraph is racist then I don't know what is. This is also the same guy who said they were overpolicing whites and underpolicing minorities in regards to stop-and-frisk. You then read his other quotes through that lens.

The sentence around behaving in the workplace certainly walks the line.  But what do you think about the entire discussion?  Is it racist when evaluated in the whole, rather than parsed at the sentence?  Certainly many of those sentences would be considered racist individually, and without the knowledge of the money he was donating.  

When you know he feels that way about an "enormous cohort" of young black and Latino males, I don't know how that doesn't reflect on the rest of what he says.

Also, did you read from The Juggler's own link about some of these programs being funded? "Retraining probation officers" and "establishing fatherhood classes." Cooooooooome ooooooooooon.

See that phrase doesn't give me pause.  "Cohort" is common term used in the data analytics world and does not carry a negative history.  Bloomberg was essentially a software developer of analytical market products, so "cohort" would be very commonly used when discussing groupings of data.  The closest thing to racism I see in there is the assumption that they can't work collaboratively, and that's because it's a statement that cannot be proven empirically, whereas everything else he says can.  

Regarding fatherhood classes, if you have generations of absent fathers, then why not have the classes to encourage young men to stay in their children's lives and help those children?  It's possible they've never had a mentor and don't know how a father should be.  I don't think that's racist by definition.  

Look, I haven't studied Bloomberg in depth, but many of these cut outs that are being shown are clearly out of context.  I'm not saying all of them are, I just dont' know at this point.  But this particular paragraph does not put him in the same category as Trump by any stretch.  

I cannot believe that on an ostensibly liberal message board in 2020 that the statement "This enormous cohort of black and Latino males that don't know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively" has to be parsed based on the use of "cohort"

Gern Blansten

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

So in full context, considering he's funding programs to help them, is it racist?  There's certainly no argument that minorities are over represented in jails and under represented in the productive work force.  Is that racist to point out if you are contributing millions of your own money to try to solve that problem?

If we can't agree that the last paragraph is racist then I don't know what is. This is also the same guy who said they were overpolicing whites and underpolicing minorities in regards to stop-and-frisk. You then read his other quotes through that lens.

The sentence around behaving in the workplace certainly walks the line.  But what do you think about the entire discussion?  Is it racist when evaluated in the whole, rather than parsed at the sentence?  Certainly many of those sentences would be considered racist individually, and without the knowledge of the money he was donating.  

When you know he feels that way about an "enormous cohort" of young black and Latino males, I don't know how that doesn't reflect on the rest of what he says.

Also, did you read from The Juggler's own link about some of these programs being funded? "Retraining probation officers" and "establishing fatherhood classes." Cooooooooome ooooooooooon.

See that phrase doesn't give me pause.  "Cohort" is common term used in the data analytics world and does not carry a negative history.  Bloomberg was essentially a software developer of analytical market products, so "cohort" would be very commonly used when discussing groupings of data.  The closest thing to racism I see in there is the assumption that they can't work collaboratively, and that's because it's a statement that cannot be proven empirically, whereas everything else he says can.  

Regarding fatherhood classes, if you have generations of absent fathers, then why not have the classes to encourage young men to stay in their children's lives and help those children?  It's possible they've never had a mentor and don't know how a father should be.  I don't think that's racist by definition.  

Look, I haven't studied Bloomberg in depth, but many of these cut outs that are being shown are clearly out of context.  I'm not saying all of them are, I just dont' know at this point.  But this particular paragraph does not put him in the same category as Trump by any stretch.  

Agreed....these things pop out (kind of like the "grab them by the pussy" stuff) and everyone freaks out prior to the accused being able to explain themselves.  

pjl44

Also, "hey it's not racist, I'm just quoting crime stats" is quite literally a Breitbart move

mrussel1

pjl44 said:

Also, "hey it's not racist, I'm just quoting crime stats" is quite literally a Breitbart move

Except he's using them to define a problem that he's trying to solve.  There's a difference.  Do you think Soros is racist?  He was in partnership and presumably agreed with the problem statement. 

pjl44

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

Also, "hey it's not racist, I'm just quoting crime stats" is quite literally a Breitbart move

Except he's using them to define a problem that he's trying to solve.  There's a difference.  Do you think Soros is racist?  He was in partnership and presumably agreed with the problem statement. 

I can sorta get to what you were saying about fatherhood classes if you look at it in a generous light. If a program is aiming to lift up the inner city, what do you think about "retraining parole officers" as one of the planks?

mrussel1

pjl44 said:

mrussel1 said:

pjl44 said:

Also, "hey it's not racist, I'm just quoting crime stats" is quite literally a Breitbart move

Except he's using them to define a problem that he's trying to solve.  There's a difference.  Do you think Soros is racist?  He was in partnership and presumably agreed with the problem statement. 

I can sorta get to what you were saying about fatherhood classes if you look at it in a generous light. If a program is aiming to lift up the inner city, what do you think about "retraining parole officers" as one of the planks?

Without knowing anything, but assuming it is a positive training, then it would be training the officers to be more advocates for their personal growth and mentors.  So you're not there to just check in and be sure they aren't committing crimes, you're training them to be mentors, not an extension of the prison system. 

oftenreading

There's a big issue that is being missed here that is leading to people arguing in circles. There seems to be an assumption on the part of some posters that if someone is in some way "trying to help" that means by definition they are not racist, but simply put, that's hogwash. History is rife with racist do-gooders who were "trying to help". It's quite possible that Bloomberg was both genuinely trying to help Black and Latino individuals and still harboured significantly racist ideas. 

mrussel1

I would also hope your hiring strategies target members of the community that walked in those shoes, not some white kids from Long Island who don't know how they lived. 

Ledbetterman10

I’m starting to think the whole Bloomberg as a savior idea might not work. Couple reasons....

1) Voters already know the good stuff about him. More and more negative things that either are or can be construed as racist/sexist/elitist will come out. Trump weathered that storm in 2016, but I’m blot sure Bloomberg will. 

2) He seems very boring. The constant ads are one thing, but holding rallies and participating in debates is another. 

3) His late entry might piss off the supporters of the currant candidates. Are the supporters of Biden, Amy, and Pete going to get behind him if he vanquishes them? From the perspective of those supporters, they’ve been in the fight with their candidates for months now. Now some rich asshole is basically buying the primary?

4) Nobody is going to be passionate about Bloomberg in a way they’re passionate about Sanders (or on the other side, Trump). Most people that support Bloomberg will do it under the notion of “Trump is bad, I want Trump gone, Bloomberg can do it.” That’s fine, and it might beat Sanders in the primary (probably via shady superdelegates lol). But Trump? As we saw with Hillary, just being the better option than Trump might not be enough. The winning candidate needs excitement and passion surrounding him (as Obama did, or as Sanders and Trump do) and I don’t see that happening with Bloomberg. 

Spiritual_Chaos

oftenreading said:

There's a big issue that is being missed here that is leading to people arguing in circles. There seems to be an assumption on the part of some posters that if someone is in some way "trying to help" that means by definition they are not racist, but simply put, that's hogwash. History is rife with racist do-gooders who were "trying to help". It's quite possible that Bloomberg was both genuinely trying to help Black and Latino individuals and still harboured significantly racist ideas. 

Waingro in Heat had sex with a black prostitute. So he can't be a nazi scumbag.

The Juggler

Moving on up...