The Manhattan Times

Let’s Say No To Injustice

by Luis Miranda

Injustices make me ill.  Injustice can take many shapes and be visible in many forms.  Injustice is the homeless man my nephew Miguel and I see each morning on 79th Street on our way to school.  Seeing him leads us to talk about poverty and the injustice of someone who doesn’t have a roof over his head.  Injustice is waiting 10 hours in a hospital emergency room because you lack health insurance and waiting is the only way to get medical care.  Injustice is living in fear in the shadows because you don’t have immigration papers.

Injustice is also that Mike Bloomberg has broken his own spending records for a political campaign and has spent $85 million on his mayoral re-election.  In his first campaign, Bloomberg told us that he had to spend a fortune because nobody knew who he was.  And we believed him.  The second time around, he told us that he had to spend a fortune because as a republican in a Democratically-dominated city he needed to get his record accomplishments out to the voters.  We gave him the benefit of the doubt.  But the more than $100 million that he will spend to win a third term, when everyone knows who he is and what he’s done, is nothing more than the wasteful spending of a rich man who will do anything to buy an election while distorting his opponent’s record.

Yesterday I received four pieces of mail from Bloomberg, I opened Facebook and there he was, and the radio and television stations are running so many of his ads that it’s obscene.  My God, I even received a piece of mail in Chinese!  The New York Times reports that the Bloomberg campaign has 100 employees, more than 97% of all businesses in New York City.  They have spent $176,000 in furniture, $40,000 in parking, and $322,000 in food.  

You may be thinking to yourself, “what does it matter to you, Luis Miranda, how Bloomberg spends his money?”  People should be able to spend their money however they please, so long as it doesn’t break the law.  Maybe you’re thinking, “your newspaper has benefitted from his advertisements; and organizations with which you work have benefitted from his philanthropy.”  But wasting money, whether you made it or plucked it from a tree, to attempt to buy a political position, and the highest such position in the city, at that, is so unjust that it deserves our condemnation.

At the start of this column I said that injustices make me ill.  I hate feeling this way and I need a cure.  That’s why next Tuesday, November 3rd, I’m waking up nice and early in the morning and casting my vote for Democrat Bill Thompson for Mayor. 

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood