Mike Bloomberg launched an ad campaign last spring to stigmatize and slut-shame teen mothers, yet our billionaire Mayor vigorously opposes Mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s proposal for a tiny tax increase on New York City’s 400,000 millionaires that would raise $532 million to help pay for universal all-day pre-kindergarten and after-hours middle school programs that would benefit low and moderate income families, which is now nearly half of the city’s population, where 50,000 men, women and children sleep in homeless shelters every night, more than any time since the Great Depression. As John Nicholson notes in his piece in the latest Nation Magazine, de Blasio ought to bone up on his Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“Noting that his 1936 reelection campaign was opposed by the forces of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering,” the 32nd president said: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”