2020-02-20 WHO WON THE NEVADA DEMOCRATIC DEBATE? OUR PANELISTS’ VERDICT
Mike Bloomberg demonstrated tonight that, in his life as a billionaire, he must not have had to deal with any character-building pressures in a very long time. All of the money in the world could not purchase charisma enough to make up for the dull and glum presentation he gave tonight.
Bloomberg was an existential threat to our democracy because of his ability to purchase everything from talent to silence. But no one could look at the debate tonight and honestly believe that the former mayor would stand a chance against Donald Trump. No one could look at Bloomberg’s performance and believe that this man could inspire the movement necessary to win in November.
Who won the Nevada Democratic debate? Our panelists’ verdict
2020-02-07 BLOOMBERG’S BID TO BUY THE PRESIDENCY
In a recent national poll, Bloomberg tied for third place with Elizabeth Warren with 14 percent of support among potential voters. With Bloomberg’s rapid ascent as a major presidential contender, Donald Trump, the Democratic establishment, and the mainstream press are all taking notice.
According to the ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics, Bloomberg has already spent an unprecedented $300 million of his own money on TV, radio, and digital advertising. Bloomberg, who is self-financing his campaign, is basing it on his self-proclaimed success as a technocratic, data-driven mayor and global business leader.
2020-02-07 Bloomberg’s Bid to Buy the Presidency
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2020-02-06 OF COURSE BLOOMBERG’S AN OLIGARCH—AND HE’S COMING FOR YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY
By any common definition, Bloomberg’s an oligarch. He wants to buy your vote. Based on his record, he’s also coming for your Social Security. With Democrats celebrating Bloomberg’s return to the Democratic Party, his candidacy, and his pledge to up to a billion dollars to defeat Trump. (Few, if any, of these Democrats are repeating a line of attack often used against Sanders—that he’s not really a Democrat—despite the fact that Bloomberg is a former Republican who only rejoined the Democratic Party two years ago.)
With an estimated net worth of more than $60 billion, Bloomberg is the twelfth-richest person on the planet and the ninth-richest person in the United States. That’s a pretty small group of people. But do they control the country?
As Bloomberg told Face the Nation in 2013: No program to reduce the deficit makes any sense whatsoever unless you address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payment on the debt, which you can’t touch, and defense spending. Everything else is tiny compared to that. Bloomberg has called for raising the retirement age, a move that would cut Social Security benefits for all retirees and create physical hardship for many older workers.
Bloomberg has sometimes embraced tax increases, but he has long opposed tax hikes that reduce inequality by targeting the wealthy. In fact, he called the idea “class warfare” in a 2012 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
Given his virtually unlimited resources, Bloomberg could theoretically win both the nomination and the presidency for $12 billion.
Democrats should also be troubled by Bloomberg’s authoritarian streak. As mayor, Bloomberg had a history of suppressing peaceful demonstrations, sometimes with brute force. His police spied on Muslim gatherings and engaged in racially biased “stop and frisk” tactics that expanded sevenfold under his leadership. He took advantaged of privatized public spaces, including Zuccotti Park, to suspend basic liberties within them, while renting out his police force to the banks the movement was protesting. His unconstitutional suppression of Occupy even included the needless destruction of the movement’s library.
2020-02-06 Of Course Bloomberg’s an Oligarch—and He’s Coming For Your Social Security
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2020-02-05 THE WINNER: MIKE BLOOMBERG HE WASN’T EVEN IN IOWA, BUT WITH THE PREDICTABLE COLLAPSE OF JOE BIDEN, MAYOR MIKE HAD A BETTER NIGHT THAN MAYOR PETE.
He wasn’t even in Iowa, but with the predictable collapse of Joe Biden, Mayor Mike had a better night than Mayor Pete.
Bloomberg is doubling his paid staff to 2,000, and doubling his anticipated campaign spending to unheard-of sums approaching a billion dollars. Bloomberg’s hunch that Biden would crater paid off. So the center lane will now be a contest between him and Buttigieg, with Sanders and Warren contending for the left.
2020-02-05 The Winner: Mike Bloomberg
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2020-02-01 ‘DEFINITION OF A RIGGED SYSTEM’: SANDERS CAMPAIGN HITS BACK AFTER DNC CHANGES DEBATE RULES FOR BILLIONAIRE LATECOMER MIKE BLOOMBERG
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced Friday afternoon that the criteria for making the debate stage will no longer include a requirement about individual donors—allowing Bloomberg, whose campaign is largely self-funded, to join the candidates if his polling numbers reach the new threshold.
The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim, citing Federal Elections Commission data, noted Bloomberg donated $325,000 to the DNC in November 2019.
How much money did candidates like Julián Castro and Cory Booker have to spend chasing donor thresholds that could have been spent building organizations in early states?” “Remember when they wouldn’t even think of changing them for like Cory Booker “This is what we mean when we talk about the DNC cheating, obviously and out in the open.”
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2020-02-01 DNC SHOWING ITS TRUE COLORS (AGAIN)
The Democratic elites so fear Bernie’s political revolution they are changing the rules to promote a Wall Street centrist.
On Friday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showed it has learned nothing from the 2016 election disaster. The same DNC that recently complained it could not change the rules to allow the candidates to debate the gravest challenge facing humanity—the global climate emergency—has now rigged the rules to make it easier for Michael Bloomberg—a billionaire—to qualify for the Feb. 19 Nevada debate. This is an outrage.
Here’s what else scares the Democratic establishment: allowing a climate debate where the two most progressive candidates in the race will shine. They’re afraid of a debate where the climate emergency candidate will dominate.
All of the candidates who have qualified for the Feb. 7 New Hampshire debate have said they want a nationally televised, prime time climate-specific debate. The American voting public needs such a debate to help separate the Earth defenders from the pretenders. We need to know which candidate is best prepared to lead a climate emergency response.
A few short months ago, more than 11,000 scientists from 153 nations sounded the latest worldfire alarm by declaring we are in a “climate emergency.” The scientists wrote: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”
Humanity is foolishly playing with fire. Meanwhile, the DNC keeps dithering, while the world keeps burning.
2020-02-01 DNC Showing Its True Colors (Again)
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2019-12-24 MIKE BLOOMBERG EXPLOITED PRISON LABOR TO MAKE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN PHONE CALLS
Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma.
Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.
People incarcerated at the Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security women’s prison with a capacity of more than 900, were making calls to California on behalf of Bloomberg. The people were required to end their calls by disclosing that the calls were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign. They did not disclose, however, that they were calling from behind bars.
“The use of prison labor is the continued exploitation of people who are locked up, who really have virtually no other opportunities to have employment or make money other than the opportunities given to them by prison officials,” said Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News and an advocate for incarcerated people’s rights.
The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.
2019-12-24 Mike Bloomberg Exploited Prison Labor to Make 2020 Presidential Campaign Phone Calls
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2019-12-11 WILL THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION BE BOUGHT BY THE OLIGARCHS?
From three different vectors, the oligarchy is on the march to capture the Democratic presidential nomination. Pete Buttigieg has made big gains. A timeworn ally of corporate power, Joe Biden, is on a campaign for his last hurrah. And Michael Bloomberg is swooping down from plutocratic heights.
Those three men are a team of rivals—each fiercely competitive for an individual triumph, yet arrayed against common ideological foes named Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The obvious differences between Buttigieg, Biden and Bloomberg are apt to distract from their underlying political similarities. Fundamentally, they’re all aligned with the nation’s economic power structure—two as corporate servants, one as a corporate master. Bloomberg!
Writing for The Nation magazine this week, Jeet Heer aptly noted that Bloomberg “is utterly devoid of charisma, has no real organic base in the Democratic Party, and is a viable candidate only because he’s filthy rich and is willing to inundate the race by opening up his nearly limitless money pit.”
More powerfully than any words, Bloomberg’s brandishing of vast amounts of ad dollars is conveying his belief that enormous wealth is an entitlement to rule.
2019-12-11 Will the Democratic Presidential Nomination Be Bought by the Oligarchs?
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2019-12-09 BLOOMBERG CONDONED SEXUAL ASSAULT BY NYPD
Some of the perverts among the NYPD used Stop and Frisk as an excuse to invade the intimate body areas of black and Latinx women.
In a 195-page decision, Judge Shira Scheindlin found that the New York Police Department had resorted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” in the way it stopped people in minority communities, and she ordered that sweeping reforms be imposed on the department and that a monitor oversee the process.” This upset Michael Bloomberg.
Despite the protests of Bloomberg, Bratton and others, her ruling has stood. She ended this Nazi practice, which was used against the Jews in the streets of Paris and Berlin during the 1930s and 40s and during the early 1900s when Irish cops picked on New Yorkers who looked Jewish.
2019-12-09 Bloomberg Condoned Sexual Assault by NYPD
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2019-12-02 SAY NO TO BLOOMBERG
Bloomberg says he wants to stop Donald Trump but he’s really running to stop Bernie Sanders. “Bloomberg targeted black people for political gain with whites and he created great suffering in the process.”
In 2002 Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as mayor of New York City. In that same year the men known as the Central Park Five had their sentences vacated. They all served between 6 and 13 years in prison for a rape they did not commit. They sued New York City for the wrongful convictions but the Bloomberg administration refused to pay. They had to wait until he left office in 2014 to receive their $40 million settlement.
Bloomberg has an estimated net worth of $55 billion, a figure which makes him among the richest people on the planet. Like the old joke about the 900 pound gorilla he can do whatever he wants, including prevent a progressive from getting the nomination.
Bloomberg says he is “Running for president to stop Donald Trump and rebuild America.” In reality he is running to stop Bernie Sanders because he knows that given a level playing field Sanders would emerge triumphant.
He described New York as “a luxury product” and he acted accordingly by accelerating the displacement of black people through gentrification. In order to make sure that black New Yorkers got the memo and quickly left town he instituted the notorious stop and frisk police program. At the height of stop and frisk terrorism nearly 700,000 people, nearly all of them black and Latino, were stopped without probable cause.
Bloomberg’s approach of buying off opposition allowed him to get away with doing far worse. Al Sharpton was among those who took Bloomberg’s hush money. The National Action Network was a recipient of Bloomberg’s philanthropy and Rev. Sharpton was silent while every black person in town was a potential target for police abuse.
The corporate media always follow orders from the ruling elites. They were instructed to promote Joe Biden as being more electable but his campaign has been a gigantic embarrassment. Other “centrist” Democrats wring their hands because they can’t agree on a candidate while Bloomberg has decided that if he wants this thing done right he had better do it himself.
2019-12-02 Say No to Bloomberg
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2019-11-27 MICHAEL BLOOMBERG’S PRESIDENT RUN RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT DEMOCRACY AND A FREE PRESS
The 77-year-old former Republican has decided that he is the perfect candidate to prevent president Obama from achieving a second term. Bloomberg has a long history of support for conservative positions, including endorsing George W. Bush’s War on Terror and defending Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza.
With a net worth of nearly $55 billion and he owns a huge eponymous media network, one of the largest in the world. It was noted that if someone had made half a million dollars per day since the United States’ founding in 1776, they would still be far poorer than Bloomberg himself is. Hackett concluded, “that kind of wealth shouldn’t be allowed to leverage success in our primaries.”
Yet Bloomberg’s run for President highlights another danger: that of freedom of the press. As the New Republic warned, the 2,700 journalists working directly under him in his extensive media network are in an impossible position. Can they truly report fairly and in an unbiased manner on the presidential race when their owner has such an obvious and important stake in its proceedings? If history is any judge, the answer to that will be “no.” Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, used his vast media empire to propel him and keep him in power as the Prime Minister of Italy for nine years.
2019-11-27 Michael Bloomberg’s President Run Raises Questions About Democracy and a Free Press
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2019-11-08 MIKE BLOOMBERG SIDES WITH FOSSIL FUELS AND FRACKING
Food & Water Action Climate & Energy Program Director Mitch Jones issued the following statement: “As mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg opposed efforts to ban fracking. He also supported the Keystone pipeline. Earlier this year he confirmed his support for continued use of fossil fuels.
It is clear that Bloomberg’s reputation as a climate warrior is drastically overblown. He has been and he remains a pro-fracking, pro-pipeline, pro-nuclear billionaire who favors half measures and false solutions because he’s more interested in protecting his friends in the C Suite than he is in stopping climate change.
2019-11-08 Mike Bloomberg Sides with Fossil Fuels and Fracking
2019-10-18 THE FIERCE URGENCY OF LESS, THE THREE B’S (BIDEN, BLOOMBERG, BUTTIGIEG) OF CAN’T-GO-BIG
The new moderate meme is that big proposals are not only unenactable but also disqualify those who make them from the presidency. That was the attack that Pete Buttigieg delivered last night against Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Beto O’Rourke. “Why unnecessarily divide this country over health care when there’s a better way to deliver coverage for all?” he asked Warren. “We can’t wait” for more comprehensive programs to be codified and implemented, he told O’Rourke, swatting down Beto’s proposal to outlaw assault weapons.
“The presidential aspirants are not short on big ideas,” Bloomberg wrote. But voters must demand they explain how they intend to move from proposing plans to actually implementing them, including passing them through Congress. Those who dodge the question by speaking of revolution and the bully pulpit aren’t up to the job. (Apparently, Bloomberg thinks neither Theodore nor Franklin Roosevelt was up to the job.)
And despite the objections of Bloomberg and Buttigieg, if you don’t mobilize voters for ambitious change and use the bully pulpit to build support for major reforms, you can’t even get incremental fixes.
At bottom, though, the aversions of Mayor Pete and Mayor Mike to the ambitious plans of Sanders and Warren aren’t strategic; they’re ideological and self-interested. Neither believes the American economy needs the upending it requires to produce a more egalitarian economy and politics. Mayor Pete’s campaign funding depends too much on those at the top who don’t wish to relinquish a share of their wealth and power; Mayor Mike is the very personification of the funders Mayor Pete relies on.
So when the three B’s of Fighting for Less—Biden, Bloomberg, and Buttigieg—tell us to demand less, they are laying the groundwork for winning nothing.
2019-10-18 The Fierce Urgency of Less, The three B’s (Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg) of can’t-go-big
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2014-05-28 IN LEAKED BLOOMBERG INTERNAL NEWS MEMOS, “THERE IS NO SUCH COUNTRY” AS PALESTINE
According to New York Times coverage on the weekend, Bloomberg “called the growing international movement for a boycott against Israel ‘an outrage’ that is ‘totally misplaced,’ but ducked a question about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Maybe because Bloomberg’s operation in Dubai is a cash cow.
The earlier Bloomberg memo says there “is no such country” as Palestine. MAY 16, 2002 Avoid referring to Palestine, as in “Israel’s incursion into Palestine,” because there is no such country. Instead, describe the occupied areas by their names, as in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Palestinian people or Palestine Authority is OK.
It seems like an attempt to avoid using the term Palestine in any way that would signify that it ought to be or can be a country on its own. In ’02 the policy was to call Palestine the WB and or Gaza. The ’10 directive is even stranger. It looks like something out of an AIPAC primer. The land historically belonged to ancient Israel and Judah? It also belonged to a lot of other people. Plus, no reference to partition, ’48, ’67 occupation or millions of human beings living under Israel’s boot that have no vote.
2014-05-28 In Leaked Bloomberg Internal News Memos, “There is No Such Country” as Palestine
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2010- 11-18 FREEDOM RIDER: PRESIDENT BLOOMBERG
If the United States is going to be run for the profit of Wall Street and the super-rich, why not dispense with all the groveling intermediaries? Let the plutocrats rule, directly. Multi-billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg personifies government “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich,” and hopes to take the model nationwide. (This is the guy who told Rupert Murdock that Barack Obama is the “most arrogant” man he ever met.)
The prospect of a president whose only qualification is the ability to amass great wealth would mean that America has become a full fledged plutocracy, with no pretense of representative democracy. Government will be of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.
Bloomberg has his own wealth to use as a bottomless pit of campaign funding. His last mayoral election cost him $70 million and with an estimated net worth of $20 billion, money would literally be no object.
Bloomberg will also face an electorate which is disgusted by both parties and overly enamored of wealthy people. Uninformed Americans want rich politicians who won’t be “beholden” to other interests, unaware that the people’s interests are more likely to be addressed if politicians have an obligation to some constituency. If not they can act without any checks and balances, and that would be an absolute disaster for what is left of our democratic system.
It isn’t clear if Bloomberg could win outright or be just another Ross Perot, and act as a spoiler depriving one of the two major party candidates of election victory. If Obama and the Democrats actually worked for the benefit of working people, money wouldn’t be enough to defeat them.
But the Democrats have bailed out Wall Street, escalated wars and watched as millions lose their jobs and their homes. Now they bring the year to a close with a deficit reduction commission, dubbed the “cat food” commission, which has presented proposals that will destroy the small safety net which exists in this country.
In the absence of a Democratic Party that works for the public’s interest, it wouldn’t be surprising if voters looked to a rich man to solve their problems. The two major parties differ only in the details, but are locked in a pitched battle to continue enriching individuals and corporations.
2010- 11-18 Freedom Rider: President Bloomberg
