Bloomberg Is the Crisis, Not the Cure

WOW! Excellent article!!! I’m hoping that this will be read and shared widely. And as my husband also states — "An excellent piece. Enlightening and very much worth the time to read." So true! And this is what we need to understand: "Bloomberg doesn’t care about the overall alignment of power in American politics, because his own power has never depended on it. The only thing threatening to diminish Bloomberg’s power is the possibility that Sanders or Warren might get elected president and bring enough like-minded people along with them. To him, the true crisis of Trump is that by devolving one of the major American political parties from plutocratic to kleptocratic, the president has given the left wing of the other party an opportunity to expand its influence. The proper countermove, for a responsible plutocrat, is to try to buy out the opposition, to restore the nation’s former, politely unchecked levels of wealth accumulation." We need to understand this because we need to understand the danger, the crisis that is Bloomberg and unite to stop him. — Molly

By TOM SCOCCA

The morning after President’s Day, a new poll found that Michael Bloomberg had captured enough public support to claim a place onstage in the next Democratic presidential debate. On Wednesday night, the business-information tycoon and former Republican mayor of New York City will appear alongside candidates who have spent months or years trying to win over Democratic voters—shaping their policy proposals, cultivating armies of donors and volunteers, gathering support door-to-door—having himself spent only money, a tsunami of it: more than $400 million of his own fortune on campaign expenses, including saturation ads across TV and online media.

It may look as if Bloomberg is simply joining the presidential race a little later than the others. But what he’s really there to do is shut down the presidential race entirely. Yes, everyone running wants to win. But the other people in the race are asking voters to choose them. Bloomberg is asking—or telling—the public to give up on the idea that anyone really has a choice.

Everyone in and around the Democratic field shares the understanding that Donald Trump represents a crisis of democracy. The candidates are all, to a greater or lesser extent, running on the message that they are each the singular person best positioned to resolve the crisis, by defeating Trump and what he stands for: Bernie Sanders because of his mass mobilization of supporters, Elizabeth Warren because of her policy acumen, Pete Buttigieg because of his bright-eyed affection for unity, Joe Biden because of his long-established public profile, Amy Klobuchar because of her feisty moderation.

Bloomberg’s message is that it’s too late for any of that. Michael Bloomberg is the only person who can beat Donald Trump, because he has the power to beat Donald Trump, because he has the money. The voters’ preferences don’t matter. The crisis is too urgent for that. He alone can fix it.

A broad swath of the media and political establishment is lining up behind this message of inevitability, just like it did last time. So far, this would-be consensus is struggling to overcome Bloomberg’s long and well-documented record: He is, after all, an enthusiastic authoritarian and a sexist bully and boor. He ruthlessly wielded the power of the state against black and Latino people and against Muslims. He’s a glib technology enthusiast who sees labor and craft as pointless and obsolete.

It is easy, but not sufficient, to point out that many of these details line up with the reasons we’re supposed to want to get rid of Donald Trump. Bloomberg has much more money than Trump, and he cuts a much more respectable figure, but the two of them come from the same cynical, domineering New York circles of power, and act like it. Not for nothing is Trump a sometime Democrat, and Bloomberg a former Republican. Not for nothing does each present himself as too rich to be bought, even while the Trump Organization chases foreign development projects and Bloomberg News killed its own coverage of high-level corruption in China to protect its access to the Chinese market for its moneymaking Bloomberg terminals.     

Please continue this article here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/michael-bloomberg-2020-democratic-campaign.html