On Nov. 21, the New York Sun revealed that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s net worth could be as high as $22 billion. The article estimated that Bloomberg has made $1 billion annually while serving as the city’s top decision-maker.
The same day, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger released its newest data: one in six city residents lack
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Something is wrong here. After all, the United States is supposedly based on the equal possibility to succeed. Hard work, talent and personal responsibility are to be rewarded in kind with a life of material comfort.
But it’s hardly conceivable that Bloomberg has worked a billion times harder, is a billion times more talented or is a billion times more responsible than the city’s 1.3 million people who are “food insecure.”
We hear that such open displays of inequality belong to the bygone eras of kings and queens, lords and serfs. At best, we might hear about the decadent lifestyles of the country’s elite at the turn of the 20th century, when the railroad tycoons, oil moguls, and kings of the steelyards ruled without legal or government regulation.
So, how is it possible that, in 2006, New York City’s richest resident is also its mayor? How is it possible for a “public servant,” who publicly declined the mayor’s salary and only accepts $1 annually from the city treasury, has made over $4 billion since taking office?
Capitalists get rich without working
It does not appear that Bloomberg has stolen anything from the city’s coffers. There have been no allegations of widespread fraud, and he hasn’t taken any time off as mayor to go make money. No, Bloomberg is engaged in a lucrative enterprise that permits him to make billions legally even while he’s not working—an enterprise known as capitalist ownership.
Mayor Bloomberg owns a 72 percent stake in the financial software and media company Bloomberg LP. The company makes the bulk of its profits from the Bloomberg Terminal, a computer system that financial organizations use to follow real-time market movement and trades. Bloomberg LP also runs television and radio stations dedicated to financial news.
The vast majority of working people—including the majority of the 1.3 million people in New York City who have insufficient food—get money in return for our work. It comes as a wage; it’s what we use to purchase the things necessary to survive.
For capitalist owners like Bloomberg, however, their money is used to purchase resources, machinery and other people’s labor power. These things work together to produce additional goods and services that are sold for a profit. This type of money—money that makes more money through the productive process—is called capital. The financiers and the owners get the profit at the end of this process, regardless of what they have put in personally.
When Bloomberg won his first mayoral election in 2001, his company had 156,000 Bloomberg Terminals in use. Today, that number is up to 260,000. In all likelihood, Bloomberg himself has not produced, updated or sold a computer system since taking office. But, by virtue of his ownership, he has earned $4 billion nonetheless.
The Nov. 21 New York Sun investigation put the worth of the company at $22.5 billion and estimated Bloomberg’s personal wealth at around $20 billion. This would put him within the top 10 of the Forbes 400 richest Americans, “up there with the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune.”
Under capitalism, there is no need for Bloomberg to commit fraud to make a fortune off of other people’s work. It is completely legal. In fact, because Bloomberg has given approximately $400 million to various charities, he is actually characterized as a leading contributor to the greater good!
People often say that money rules the world. But the world market is not called “moneyist”—it’s called capitalist. It is the people who have the capital—that special type of money that uses other people’s work to make more money—who run the show. Bloomberg’s capital allowed him to finance his two mayoral campaigns to the tune of $150 million.
The days of the decadent rich living on top of millions of people suffering the intolerable anxieties of poverty have not passed. Last year, the number of billionaires in New York City nearly doubled.
At the same time, in the Bronx, just a subway ride away from Wall Street, the Benedict Ave. Food Pantry announced it will serve—despite reduced funding—twice the number of people that it did in 2005.
The phenomenon of luxury amidst misery is not attributable to corruption or individual greed. It stems from private ownership and the rule of accumulating capital under the capitalist system. To the 130 million people who work every day in the United States to ensure their survival, capitalism is nothing more than legalized parasitism and theft of the fruits of their labor.
