Hardly a surprise, though it’s always a relief to be reminded of what a tone-deaf yutz Bloomberg is:
BLOOMBERG: The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street or on the finance sector. [...] People in this day and age need support for their employers. We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs. And so anything we can do to responsibly help the banks do that, encourage them to do that is what [sic] we need. I think we spend much too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward. [...] Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of it, but so were Frddie Mac and Frannie Mae and Congress.
Think Progress helpfully informs us that Bloomberg was in fact absolutely right in claiming that Wall Streeters are scrimping by on 40 to 50k—in the sense that he was completely wrong, I mean:
[T]he median salary for stockbrokers is approximately $88,000 a year. But that is besides the point. The demonstrators are not targeting the individuals who work on Wall Street, they are targeting the financial institutions and practices they represent.
That last point is true, though. It’s best not to make this about targeting a specific number of individuals rather than the institutions themselves. It’s the system, maaaaan. In any case, this is good stuff for the movement. The Mayor is not an especially popular man right now, for good reason, and foot-in-mouth comments like these, implicitly asking the rest of us to shed a single tear for our poor, embattled Masters of the Universe will only raise Occupy Wall Street’s profile and harden its members’ resolve.
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