So it’s come to this: Would we better off if Walter Moore or even Zuma Dogg bad beaten Antonio a year ago?
I can say with certainty that we wouldn’t be worse off.
Think about it: The Mayor with 10 times the money as the other nine candidates narrowly won re-election and then spent the next 11 months traveling the world, wining and dining in restaurants only 1 percent of the people can afford, and living the life of a multimillionaire with bodyguards and servants nursing to his every whim.
Time and again, he was told the city’s finances were in desperate shape and yet he paid no attention and kept on spending the public’s money as if there were no tomorrow on sweetheart deals with unions and subsidizing luxury hotels and entertainments, expanding social welfare programs.
And all he’s offered is a blueprint for disaster, a strategy to do the bidding of Wall Street so he can borrow billions of dollars to conceal his failure while perpetuating the decline of the city for decades to come.
Tomorrow has already come and the bills are already coming due and all we get is a City Council following along this road to ruin like sheep. Their solutions are to fire 4,000 workers on top of the 2,400 handsomely paid off to retire — and all of them coming out of the 12,000 city workers who provide services to the general public at libraries, parks, community planning, building code enforcement.
City Hall is in chaos, our elected officials are in a panic and thinking only of themselves and their own luxurious lives even as poverty rates are soaring, unemployment is among the highest in the nation, property values declining, storefronts empty, homes being foreclosed with parks and libraries shutting down after fortunes were spent to build them.
They have betrayed the public trust but are without shame because we still treat them with a measure of respect they do not deserve when we should be storming City Hall by thousands and demanding a new deal because the one on the table stinks.
So I ask again: Would we better off if the Mayor and the Council were gone and we started all over again with a new set of faces drawn? You certainly could not be worse off.