I like Bloomberg as much as the next guy. And I think Corzine is getting the inevitable flack of trying to solve the very problems people he elected him to solve, which is a shame. You certainly can't say he's simply doing the politically popular thing, but I'd argue that he's doing the responsible thing in the big picture sense.

However, I think the notion that elected office is only for the elite, wealthy, self-financed politicians is pretty terrifying, made all the more terrifying by the knee-jerk responses in this thread instantly dismissing the author's thesis. I agree that maybe we should pause a moment before handing over all of government to the wealthy, as though they are by virtue of their wealth any more honest or responsible.

I also find it remarkable that it's taken until right now for Fulop's name to be mentioned in this thread.

[/ducks]

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Well when Bloomberg is off being New York's next Governor - NYC might have this billionaire as its new Mayor.

I am sure if you follow things like the Ratner/Bloomberg Brooklyn stadium history or the attempt at the West Side stadium you might get a glimpse at corruption.

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The World's Richest People
Buying City Hall

Matthew Miller
Forbes
03.24.08

John Catsimatidis built a fortune in supermarkets, real estate and oil. Now he wants to become the next billionaire mayor of New York City.

On a recent dreary morning in Manhattan John A. Catsimatidis was gobbling a breakfast of egg whites, spinach and toast at Midtown's Harry Cipriani, a joint that gets its prestige from its prices rather than from its cuisine. Between bites the grocery magnate rattled off a few things he wants to accomplish this year: "I need to improve my public speaking, I need to know all of the problems voters are facing, and I need to lose 30 pounds to look better on television." Catsimatidis ("cat-si-ma-TEE-dees") wants to succeed Michael Bloomberg and become New York City's second billionaire mayor.

Why? The chairman of Red Apple Group--a holding company for the Gristedes supermarket chain, commercial real estate, an oil refinery and gas stations--doesn't have a snappy answer. "I don't want New York to turn into downtown Detroit," he says. "If we lose our middle class by allowing New York to be a place where only the rich and the poor live, it will be a disaster." He has built up his $2.1 billion net worth through dumb luck and shrewdness, and he says he's willing to spend perhaps $100 million of it to win the office, $15 million more than Bloomberg spent to win reelection in 2005. The primaries are a year and a half away.

Catsimatidis has no press secretary and one political adviser; that's about to change. The newspapers have given him a little play, most of it dismissive. The only public position he's held: president of the Manhattan Council for the Boy Scouts of America. Then there's the flip-flopping. A supporter of Reagan "who fell in love with Bill Clinton," Catsimatidis, a lifelong Democrat, says he will run as a Republican candidate. He is an admirer of Bloomberg, an Independent with a socialist streak.

Does the grocer stand a chance? "There is nothing unique about him, except that he is rich," says Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy at New York University and a onetime adviser to Bloomberg. "He won't be able to turn owning oil and supermarkets into votes."

Born on the island of Nissyros, Greece, Catsimatidis, 59, settled in uptown Manhattan as an infant. His father, who 'd been a lighthouse operator, found work as a busboy. John attended high school at Brooklyn Tech and received a congressional nomination to West Point. But instead of becoming a cadet, he studied engineering at NYU. During his senior year a friend convinced Catsimatidis to become his partner in a fledgling family supermarket. For his share Catsimatidis agreed to work off $10,000 at $1,000 a month once they were profitable and to forfeit his stake if he missed a payment. They cleaned up the store and were quickly generating $1,000 a week in profit. Catsimatidis soon went it alone, opening his first Red Apple grocery store in 1971. He never borrowed from banks.

By the time he was 25 Catsimatidis owned ten stores debt free and was grossing $25 million a year. In 1977, when everyone in New York was selling real estate, he bought up $5 million in Manhattan property. (Five years later, he says, the investment was worth $100 million.) "A total accident," he says. "I wasn't smart, I just needed a place to put all the money I was making with the supermarkets."

Approaching 30, Catsimatidis got his pilot's license, then bought his first plane, a Cessna 206. His obsession with flying led to a new investment: the airline business. When gambling was legalized in Atlantic City in the late 1970s, Catsimatidis noticed that the big customers from New York City were arriving via limo; fellow gamblers from Connecticut and Massachusetts tended to stay put because of the long drive. Sensing opportunity, Catsimatidis built a small fleet of corporate jets to shuttle players from New England, a business that grew to 40 planes flying executives around the East Coast. He ran this business under three different names until 1990 and eventually sold out to Richard Santulli, who went on to create NetJets.

Then he overreached. In 1984 Catsimatidis bought regional airline Capitol Air, which operated half of what is now the British Airways terminal at JFK Airport. Capitol soon went bankrupt. "Airlines are a pricey business," he says. "I was really in it for the love of flying."

While trying to salvage the airline in bankruptcy court, Catsimatidis stumbled on the Chapter 11 proceedings of a fledgling oil outfit called United Refining Co., which was selling assets just to make payroll. In 1987, for $7.5 million in cash, Catsimatidis bought all the shares and renegotiated with creditors, repaying $120 million in debt over the next decade. Today United operates a refinery in Pennsylvania that processes 70,000 barrels of oil a day and will generate $2.9 billion in sales this year. Additionally the company owns 372 gas stations under the names Kwik Fill, Country Fair and Keystone. In December Catsimatidis created a unit, United Refining Energy, and took it public on the American Stock Exchange, raising $450 million as a blank-check company. There's not much float, and the units have barely budged from their $10 offering price. No matter. It was a cheap way to lever up in order to hunt for another refinery.

The bid for Gracie Mansion is Catsimatidis' biggest gamble. He is grooming several executives to take over Red Apple in the event of a run, since a win would force him to give up operational control of all his businesses. It gets messier. Catsimatidis owns a parcel of land on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn and plans to build on it. The condo-and-office project, close to mogul Bruce Ratner's controversial Atlantic Yards development, will cost $175 million to build, though it's proceeding piecemeal in a dicey market. If he were mayor, he'd have to steer clear of the project.

A big if. Catsimatidis says he has always been interested in politics, but got more involved after meeting George H.W. Bush. During Bush's term Catsimatidis, a devout Greek Orthodox, helped fund the construction of a new chapel at Camp David. He later raised funds for Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection, for Hillary Clinton's first run for the Senate in 2000 and for her current presidential campaign.

Last year Catsimatidis crossed party lines. He had to register as a Republican, he argues, because no pro-business candidate could ever earn the support of the New York Democratic Party. Fair point. First, though, he must convince the GOP he can win--against such possible luminaries as Richard Parsons, the former Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ) chief, and current New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0324/116.html

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Under our system, there is some truth to that. Bloomberg being the perfect example--he's not very exciting, but competance is the hallmark of his administration. When he took office, he owed nobody, had no stack of favors to pay back.

As a result, he was able to fill city government with people who could do their jobs instead of hacks who knew how to fundraise.

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Of course not but this article holds no weight. Where should one begin a list of wealthy people who did great things for this country? Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt? Where should one start a list of not so wealthy people who have bilked the people just in this area alone? Frank Hauge, Sharpe James, Willie Flood, most of our current city council?

I don't think Bloomberg has any interest in kickbacks from local business owners.

So are you saying "super rich" people ( people with hundreds of millions or billions ) are much more honest then everyone else?

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Yeah, I like it better when poor people get elected and then start getting rich by taking pay-offs. What a joke this article is.

Rich Guys in Politics

By Thomas Fleming
History News Network
George Mason University
http://www.hnn.us/articles/48423.html

(( By Thomas Fleming author of Mysteries of My Father, a memoir about growing up in Frank Hague?s Jersey City. He has also written a seven novel cycle about the experience. ))

With New York?s Governor Eliot Spitzer in his political grave, what are we to think? The revelation that this self-advertised reformer was paying tens of thousands of laundered dollars to a prostitution ring surely tells us something about the current political scene. beyond banal psychologizing or arguing that it was a ?victimless crime,? as several letter writers to the New York Times and other newspapers maintain.

I suggest we look on Mr. Spitzer as a new phenomenon ? a rich guy in politics. We have more and more of them, thanks to the provision in the McCain Feingold Campaign Finance law which permits the rich to spend their own money in an election, while the rest of us are limited to contributing two thousand or so dollars to their opponents. If Mr. Spitzer and his neighbor in New Jersey, Governor Jon Corzine, are typical, maybe we better think about some much needed changes in our electoral laws.

Spitzer and Corzine are both Democrats. As someone who was born into the party of the common man and had a grandfather who could not write, I imbibed with my mother?s milk the notion that the Democrats were the party of the poor and lower middle class and their leaders were seldom if ever rich. My father, who served eight years as Sheriff of Hudson County, New Jersey, died with $16,000 in the bank.

Later, as I matured into that creature called an historian, I discovered the party was a lot more complicated. It was started by a rich man who lived in a spectacular mansion on a hilltop in Virginia and perfected by a wealthy general from Tennessee who led an army to a breathtaking victory that saved the country from dismemberment. In the 20th Century the party was led by a well-heeled master politician from New York who was described to me by the vice president who succeeded him as ?the coldest man I ever met.? Then there is Frank Hague, the boss who dominated New Jersey in my salad days. He died worth $80 million in today?s depreciated dollars.

So what?s so shocking about these rich guys taking over the Democratic Party in New York and New Jersey? They do and say all the right Democratic things. They condemn greedy Republicans as apologists for the privileged class, they gulp ethnic food, they pose for pictures with blacks, Latinos, grinning kids and vacuous looking senior citizens. The shock comes from the way they seem to have emerged from nowhere. They have no previous political experience worth mentioning and their pathways to instant success have been paved by wads of hundred dollar bills.

Eliot Spitzer ran for attorney general of New York on four or five million dollars from his real estate tycoon father, Bernard Spitzer, who is reputedly worth $500 million. The money was a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the campaign finance laws. Jon Corzine elected himself to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey by all but buying the state?s Democratic politicians with showers of cash from his three hundred million dollar Goldman Sachs fortune. Bored in the Senate, Corzine decided that the governorship might be more stimulating and switched jobs. It was as easy as spending another twenty or thirty million.

No one kept track of the gifts. One that sticks in my mind was two or three hundred thousand dollars given to the Democratic leader of one of the New Jersey?s more populous counties - -- by Corzine?s mother! Because both these rich guys are Democrats, the media of both states rolled over and more or less gasped: ?Ohhhhhh, aren?t they wonderful??

The only critical remarks came from fellow politicians who were used to raising money the old way ? from the people. My favorite is a story by New Jersey?s wittiest pol, former Governor Brendan Byrne. He claimed he had a dream that Governor Corzine awoke one morning in a bad mood, looked out his bedroom window and said to himself: ?This isn?t the state I meant to buy!?

How these rich guys got elected is worrisome enough. Much more troubling is the way they?ve operated in office. As attorney general, Spitzer prosecuted with special zeal prostitution rings ? while presumably being one ring?s most spendthrift customer. This must be a new low in official hypocrisy. As governor he ordered the state police to get dirt on Joseph Bruno, the recalcitrant leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, a tactic worthy of Richard Nixon in his prime. When leaders of both houses of the legislature balked at his program, Spitzer roared: ?Don?t you know I?m a --------- steamroller?? The pols went straight to the nearest reporter and the outburst swiftly became one of the legends of Albany.

In New Jersey, Governor Corzine was startled that Republicans disapproved of him negotiating a labor contract with Carla Katz, an attractive brunette with whom he had lived for some time after he divorced his wife. She heads one of the state?s largest public employee unions. When Republican legislators asked to see the emails the Governor had exchanged with Ms Katz, they were curtly told these were privileged communications. Meanwhile, to guarantee Ms Katz?s silence about their relationship, the Governor gave her various gifts totaling $6 million.

One of my New Jersey friends describes Governor Corzine as ?a transactional personality.? He assumes that everyone can be bought, one way or another. A top aide reportedly has $5 million in a Florida bank that he will collect if he does exactly what he is told on the job and of course never never writes a line about how the governor operates.

Last year Governor Corzine was in an automobile accident in his official limousine. The car was going 90 miles an hour and he was not wearing his seatbelt. By a miracle he survived. A reporter asked the state policeman who was driving why he didn?t tell the governor to put on his seatbelt and obey the speed limit. The policeman could only shake his head in astonishment at the naivete of the question. No one talks that way to a man worth three hundred million dollars.

A few years ago I wrote an article about the history of campaign finance legislation for American Heritage Magazine. I came away convinced it was the phoniest, dumbest idea that has come down the political pike since prohibition. The antics of Messrs Corzine and Spitzer have convinced me that this latest example of American do-goodism should meet the same legislative fate: oblivion.