Assemblyman Charles Barron made no secret that as a City Council member representing East New York Brooklyn, then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg saw him as his nemesis.
“I was not afraid to confront him on his record then. I’m even more motivated to expose his record now, as he has the gall to try and run for president knowing how he and his policies decimated the Black and Brown community. He’s got some nerve.”
In England, the term would be “He’s got some front… some neck,” as he boldly pushes his ad with former President Barack Obama, looking like it is an endorsement. The Baron–Bloomberg political feud was well documented in the New York media for over a decade. Neither pulled punches, verbal knock-down-drag-outs have occurred.
Barron represented the 42nd District on the New York City Council from 2001-2013, Bloomberg was mayor of New York City from 2002-2013. Hectic political times in the city indeed.
“He cut agencies to benefit the rich,” Barron told the Amsterdam News. The man who would be president didn’t have such a great agenda for labor either, Barron continued, “He’s anti-union. Over 160 unions were without contracts under Bloomberg. He threatened them to not have a contract unless they agreed to his pension and benefit cuts. He wasn’t gonna raise their wages and he didn’t for twelve years and many of those unions 1199, 32DJ, DC37 protected a lot of Black and Brown people. He eliminated the employee protection plan for the 8,000-city school bus drivers. He was against raising the minimum wage, we passed a living wage bill over in the City Council, he vetoed that.”
According to Barron, Bloomberg had little empathy for the working class, focusing instead on politics which benefited the wealthy. “He gave huge tax breaks, billions of dollars of tax breaks to rich developers to build luxury housing. He shut down 10-15 hospitals, he shut down schools in our neighborhoods, he opened up so many disruptive co-locations in public school buildings which is still causing problems. He had a record high number of homeless and built more shelters. He was advertising fingerprinting public housing residents and food stamp recipients; and then he hired Cathie Black, the most incredibly incompetent, chancellor of New York City Schools. She knew nothing about education,” Barron said of the former Hearst Magazine head. “She was pushing her magazines and paper company.” After a consistent and focused grassroots campaign from November 2010 to April 2011, Black stepped down. “We ran her out of town after four or five months.”
And during that exercise in political push-and-pull, the oft controversial Barron said Bloomberg “laid off school aid workers to balance the budget. Poor struggling lunchroom attendants, crossing guards, and school aid workers. He is a strong believer in standardized test charter schools. Our children were reduced to learning-to-a-test, but not being educated.”
And then there was the contract debacle he added, where Black and Brown business people were shut out of contract procurements with the city. “He had the largest contract influence in the history of New York City. He beat us out of millions of dollars in contracts that we could have competed for.”
Then the former Black Panther and Brooklyn self-proclaimed “elected revolutionary” added, “Then there was his devastating stop-and-frisk policy, in which 700,000 of our community were stopped and frisked. That number represents only one out of every ten officers who even filled out the form every time they stopped us. But, even that number means Black and Brown people were subjected to stops more than our numbers in the entire city––which must mean multiple stops of an individual. The majority of those people were let go without an arrest or ticket or anything.” Not to mention “he was responsible for 440,000 marijuana possession arrests.”
On a roll, Barron continued that under the 12 year serving Mayor Bloomberg, “The poverty rate was and is high in the Black and Brown communities, and the unemployment rate and the mass incarceration rate is high. He used factious brutal crackdowns on protests. He targeted the Occupy Wall-Streeters and the local Black Lives Matter movement. He supported the Iraq war, he refused to settle the Central Park Five case, and he made racist remarks about Black and Latino parents. He said they didn’t know what was good for them or their children relating to education. That’s the tip of the iceberg with this man.”
On Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020, as Bloomberg prepared for his first nationally televised presidential candidate debate in Las Vegas, N.V., Barron told the Amsterdam News that he was disappointed, but not really surprised that he did so using “Blacks for Mike,” as a disturbing campaign strategy
As dozens of politicos, activists, clerics and social commentators can be seen jovially throwing their support behind Bloomberg’s campaign for president, Barron concluded, “I don’t know how anyone in the Black community can support Bloomberg. They have to be out of their mind, or they are getting money put into their pockets. Either way they are selling their communities down the drain. I don’t believe in supporting the lesser of two evils, because either way our communities suffer. We need to be self-determining and not going for the old okey-doke. Shame on them.”
Michael Frazier, national spokesperson for Bloomberg 2020, told the AmNews, “There’s no debate whatsoever that for people of color, and others, America has failed to deliver on its bedrock principle of equality of opportunity in the workplace. Everyone knows that, but few are able to address at least part of it in a meaningful way as Mike did through his administration’s ‘Young Men’s Initiative,’ which Mike is discussing and which became the national blueprint for President Obama’s ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ program.”