You Think @realDonaldTrump’s a Danger to Democracy? Get a Load of @MikeBloomberg
BEWARE MAYOR MIKE
thedailybeast.com/you-think-dona…
BEWARE MAYOR MIKE
thedailybeast.com/you-think-dona…
Bloomberg represents, in a way never seen in modern American politics, the melding of oligarchal power with political willfulness.
His campaign is a wild long shot, but ask NYC how that can play out—and how difficult it is to dislodge this oligarch once he’s in office, even when the law demands that he leave.
Just as Caesar used the wealth of Gaul to finance his takeover of the Republic, Bloomberg can use his private fortune to bribe, cajole and promote his ascendancy. In 12 years as ruler of NY, he showed his willingness to “buy” elective office, spending 1/2 billion $ on his 3 runs
To match the $174 per vote he spent to win his final term, Bloomberg—who’s has already spent $200 million on TV ads—would need to spend an unheard of $12 billion. He could afford it.
🔴 In 2009, when, after he reluctantly gave up a run in the 2008 presidential election, he CHANGED CITY LAW AND OVERRODE THE WILL OF THE VOTERS to allow himself to run for a 3rd term...🔴
... after he personally met with the owners of the city’s three major papers to get their editorial boards to reverse themselves and endorse that undemocratic move. Rules, in the Bloombergian universe, only apply to people with less than ten zeros in their net worth.
He spent $102M, not counting off-the-books hush money to quiet activist groups, among other things, for a 15-1 spending advantage to eke out a narrow win in a city so sick & tired of him that it elected corrupt Bill de Blasio once Bloomberg’s name was finally off of the ballot.
Bloomberg is a man of undisguised arrogance. As mayor, he already saw himself as a sort of little president, once boasting that “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh largest army in the world… I have my own State Department, to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance.”
“We have the UN in New York, so we have entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have. I don’t listen to Washington very much, which is something they’re not thrilled about.”
Should he gain access to the real Army and State Department, he’ll use them as he sees fit, and with little concern for the will of the voters.
Unlike Trump, or some of his leading Dem rivals, Bloomberg is not playing the populist card but seeking to bury “the great revolt” that has overturned elite control of the country.
A fierce defender of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the corporate elite, he is hoping, as a recent editorial in Bloomberg Opinion suggested, that “populism will probably just fade away” so that the ruling class can again “relax.”
Bloomberg is a friend to many owners of mainstream media properties, and an owner himself, as we were reminded when Bloomberg News announced it would no longer aggressively cover his Democratic rivals, though Trump would remain fair game...
... an absurd standard that poured news on the fire of Trump’s attacks on “fake news.” The executive staff of Bloomberg Opinion, meantime, left their positions to join his campaign.
What would a Bloomberg regime look like? In contrast with Trump, Sanders or Warren, Bloomberg is offering the politics of the gentry liberals who have dominated the party’s big-dollar fundraising in recent decades.
This means strong support for combating climate change, advocating ever more mass immigration, free trade & banning guns—positions that don’t cost the plutocracy money.
Bloomberg’s “big” idea is that rather than buy a candidate, he can be the candidate.
Bloomberg’s “big” idea is that rather than buy a candidate, he can be the candidate.
Even his aggressively “progressive” stances, for example on climate, would likely benefit the plutocracy. His calls to have 80% of America’s electricity, up from 17% today, come from renewables this decade, is a blatantly unrealistic gambit that sounds good in a campaign ad.
More important, it offers a golden opportunity for Wall Street to make windfall profits while imposing higher prices on ordinary rate payers.
Bloomberg hopes that his money can liberate him from political gravity: while other candidates put scarce resources into a handful of states ahead of their caucuses and primaries, he can afford to spend nationwide.
Then, if none of his rivals breaks all the way through, put himself in a position to be the powerbroker at a brokered convention.
As mayor of New York, Bloomberg’s approach—in addition to building on Rudy Giuliani’s law-and-order regime—was to shape the city as “a luxury product” shaped by the interests and investments of his fellow billionaires.
Under his watch, the city moved to the tune of oligarchy, constructing ever more expensive apartment structures, often encouraged by heavily discounted property taxes and with lots of breaks for new lavish new corporate offices.
He steadily weakened the city’s once diverse, if chaotic character into plutocratic-driven monoculture.
His disinterest in the will of the voters (see his jihad against sugar and insistence of ever more stop and frisk policing even as popular opposition to it grew), was in many ways policy made possible by the power implicit in his wealth, a function of his fortune.
Another mayor with such an agenda would have faced major opposition.
But as Sol Stern and Fred Siegel wrote in 2011, "the most discomfiting aspect of the Bloomberg mayoralty” was his ability to curb criticism by handing out ”protection money” to the city’s many nonprofits, activist groups, religious and community associations.
Bloomberg even cleverly uses his largesse to win over journalists, offering hugely remunerative salaries to those willing to follow his party line.
If there’s a good parallel to Bloomberg it would be Silvio Berlusconi, the media magnate who served, somewhat disastrously, as Italy’s prime minister between 1994 and 2011. Like Bloomberg, Berlusconi used his own media to promote his political ascendancy.
While the media, including Bloomberg’s own mouthpiece, has compared Trump to Berlusconi, holding up a mirror might be more accurate. With his existing web of information providers, Bloomberg, like Berlusconi, has some power to create his own political reality.
Bloomberg’s touch may be lighter, but the Bloomberg-controlled media tends to follow the “boss’s” party line; as a long-time writer for the magazine now called Bloomberg BusinessWeek told me, “we’re not even allowed to use the word ‘oligarch’” in their articles.
A Bloomberg presidency would be very different from this one. Trump has scaled back the power of the administrative state.
Bloomberg would likely seek to expand federal power to dictate the minutiae of everyday life in terms of diet, how we use energy, the kind of houses we live in and how we get to work.
Bloomberg recently made the preposterous claim that China’s Xi Jinping is “not a dictator.” He portrays the communist regime, noted New York magazine as “ecologically friendly, democratically accountable, and invulnerable to the threat of revolution.”
Of course, this is the same Bloomberg whose news operation gave up on reporting on corruption in China when that reporting started damaging the terminal sales that made his fortune.
If Bloomberg somehow manages to buy this election, we would not see a repeat of the Trump presidency, but rather a softer version of Xi’s rule here in America— dictatorial, intolerant of dissent, controlling, and friendly to the oligarchy so long as it produces economic growth.
Having made themselves hysterical about our current tin-pot petty authoritarian president, progressive Americans could look forward to experiencing the real thing under the all-knowing guise of Michael Bloomberg.
via @joelkotkin
via @joelkotkin
