Michael Bloomberg and the Rage of the Billionaire Class

By Michael Gibson

After winning the popular vote in Iowa and New Hampshire, US Senator Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls and looks to be the rightful frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Former Vice President Joe Biden, previously presumed to be the inevitable nominee, failed to crack the top-3 in Iowa and fared even worse in New Hampshire, fleeing the state before the polls officially closed. The ‘surging’ candidates, Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar, though performing well in the first two contests, barely register with non-white voters, and seem only to be upheld as viable by the pundit class and wine-track donors.

The next two states, Nevada and South Carolina, are much more diverse states and are likely to prove much more difficult for candidates without multi-racial and multi-class appeal. Although Biden has staked South Carolina as his ‘firewall,’ Sanders has cut rather dramatically into his lead in recent polls and continues to expand his standing with non-white voters. If Sanders wins these two states, albeit even with narrow victories, it should be incontestable that Sanders will and ought to be the nominee.

However, Super Tuesday holds yet another obstacle: the candidacy of the multi-billionaire former Republican mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg is taking a considerably different campaign strategy. To date, Bloomberg has sat out of the early states: no field offices, organizing efforts, and in some cases not even appearing on the ballot. Because Bloomberg is entirely self-funding his campaign from his egregious horde of wealth (he can spend over $1 billion on the campaign from the annual earned interest on his holdings alone), he was not included in any of the Democratic debates (and wouldn’t until the DNC changed its rules to allow him on stage for the debate ahead of the Nevada caucuses).

Instead, Bloomberg is anchoring his candidacy to Super Tuesday, aiming to take advantage of the large slate of states that hold their primaries on the same day, where other candidates are stretched thin after the grind of the previous four contests. To that end, Bloomberg has funneled an unprecedented amount of money into advertising in those states, blitzing the airwaves and social media platforms with a staggering volume of commercials and clips, getting in well ahead of other candidates, both in timing and spending. And it has worked: polls in Super Tuesday states, especially a number of states in the south, show Bloomberg leapfrogging into contention. He has bought a top-3 slot already. On cue, as well, with Sanders gaining momentum coming off recent victories, the media establishment has begun its shift to Bloomberg puffery.

A Shameful Track Record

This is odious on multiple levels. First, Bloomberg’s record is, frankly, atrocious. As mayor, Bloomberg oversaw and expanded the notorious racist stop-and-frisk policies and tolerated racially motivated police violence and brutality. He is on record as recently as 2015 (and likely even more recent than that) not only defending these policies but espousing openly racist stereotypes about non-whiteness and criminality. To compound this, in 2008, Bloomberg blamed the financial disaster of Wall Street’s meltdown on the end of the discriminatory banking- and housing practices of redlining, which sequestered non-white citizens into dilapidated neighborhoods by refusing loans or home sales to non-white clients and customers.

As the Republican mayor of the city at the center of 9/11 and an ardent supporter of George W. Bush’s imperial wars in the Middle East, Bloomberg oversaw some of the most repressive and openly Islamophobic policies of surveillance and policing that targeted Muslim citizens, immigrants, and religious communities. It should be unsurprising, too, that Bloomberg has been fierce proponent of Israel’s apartheid policies toward Palestinians and has refused to condemn even the most disproportionate and aggressive actions of the Israeli government.

Second, as much has been made of the current President’s horrid history of misogyny and sexual assault of women, it should be inconceivable that Democrats would put forward a candidate who has as nearly an ugly track record. Currently, over 60 women have filed or joined lawsuits against Bloomberg alleging discrimination and sexual harassment. Bloomberg has an exceptionally long record of blatantly degrading and objectifying remarks about women employees, colleagues, and acquaintances.

He has defended multiple prominent males accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment, and is a known associate of Ghislaine Maxwell (Jeffrey Epstein’s wrangler). Bloomberg is, as well, openly mocking of the trans community, making patently transphobic comments in 2016. In this regard, nominating Bloomberg is simply replacing one misogynist bigot with another, just one with better syntax but who shares the same views from the same gutter.

Third, elevating Bloomberg to the nomination would be the final remaking of the Democratic Party in the image of finance capitalism. While Democratic leadership has been enthralled with neoliberal economics since at least the Clinton years (if not longer, as documented by Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal!), a Bloomberg candidacy would be its literal embodiment. Bloomberg made his $60+ billion fortune as a Wall Street trader, media mogul, and “entrepreneur” before seeking public office — a move that further eroded the already razor-thin separation between government, business, finance, and corporate media.

Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg brought this mentality into the mayor’s office and pushed through a barrage of tax cuts, subsidies, and favors for big business and corporations, while fiercely resisting pro-worker or pro-labor efforts. He vetoed important bills improving labor rights and conditions for workers, as well as nixing expansion of public housing. While corporate profits skyrocketed during his tenure, he denounced efforts to increase the minimum wage (comparing the minimum wage itself to Soviet communism) and advocated cutting Social Security. His most emblematic moment came with the hazing and eventual razing of the Occupy Wall Street camp at Zuccoti Park in 2011, in which he mobilized and weaponized the police and institutions of city government against citizens in defense of capital.

A Picture of an Oligarch

It is the defense of capital that is at the heart of Bloomberg’s campaign and it is an oligarchic quest to prevent power from being shared with or redistributed to those outside the wealthy class. Bloomberg, despite being a Republican until 2018, is running in the Democratic primary because he was commissioned by fellow billionaires. The billionaire class is deeply terrified by the prospect of any hindrance to their continued pursuit of wealth acquisition and ability to exploit not only workers but the political system itself.

A candidate like Sanders threatens their position in both respects. It is not because Sanders wants to improve the lives of everyone through programs funded by taxing individual and corporate wealth that he frightens them. Rather, what scares them is that the sum of the package of programs Sanders advocates is the delimitation of the rule of monied class over workers, which imposes austerity and precarity on workers while extracting ever greater profits. Even more, Sanders represents the overturning of the patronage system between the monied class and public governance: a candidate funded entirely by the masses and not the monied means an end to dependence on wealthy donors and a government beholden to those interests.

For nearly four years, we have heard ceaseless stories about Russia and Russian interference in US elections. Russia is, of course, an oligarchy, controlled by obscenely wealthy business barons who made their money through the stripping of state assets following the fall of the Soviet Union (graft enabled by the US in the 1990s); those oligarchs have a patronage relationship with the current Russian premiere. The US is, in many ways, already a quasi-oligarchic system on account of the monopolistic control of most industries by a handful of large, multinational corporations, which also own most of western media. Those industries are able to dump tremendous amounts of money into the political process through lobbying, campaign donations, and Super PAC funding (see Jane Meyer’s Dark Money).

At the same time, for nearly forty years, there has been an unending revolving door between these corporate organizations and government, so that representation of the corporate apparatus is ensured at the highest levels. This has had far more extensive and damaging impact on government and public policy than any conceivable foreign influence. It is the control of American oligarchy that has radicalized and degraded our public institutions to the point that we now have a laughably incompetent occupant of the highest office: that is in the interest of American oligarchy (Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew is especially illuminating on this).

With Bloomberg, the situation is unique. Bloomberg is the true face of corporate totalitarianism and is poised to insert himself as the standard-bearer for the political party that claims to represent democratic and human rights for all people, but especially non-whites, women, labor, immigrants, and the poor. Bloomberg represents none of those things, and in fact has long been a champion of the repression and exploitation of these classes. That Bloomberg can pursue this in the way he is, moreover, demonstrates the total disregard for democracy at the heart of the monied class.

Oligarchy detests democracy and presumes itself an exemption to the rules of democratic society. Bloomberg believes he can bypass the process that others must adhere to, and bribe his way on to the debate stage. With unlimited amounts of money, he can buy polling results and even endorsements. By dramatically outspending, he can deplete resources that other campaigns need. If Bloomberg wins, he will have outright bought the nomination — and that makes him accountable to no one, especially not the people.

The Stakes are Clear

Bloomberg is not running for president to serve the public or protect the interest of the people. He is the candidate of the billionaire class itself with two objectives: to stop Bernie Sanders and to protect the corporate oligarchy. If the Democratic Party allows, and even supports this, it demonstrates just how hollow the claims to democracy and resistance have been.

Moreover, Democratic support for Bloomberg is a concrete illumination of the argument put forward by Ishay Landa in The Apprentice’s Sorcerer that liberalism itself is vulnerable to the temptation of fascism when under threat: for all the noise about tyranny and fascism during the current administration, it is now the liberal party that is on the cusp of installing an authoritarian billionaire mogul who represents no one other than the corporate aristocracy and has mobilized the instruments of government against the bodies of those that pose any threat to its unchecked power. Liberalism, here, is willing to sacrifice the rights and persons it claims to champion to protect its own power and to ensure the security of those whose patronage it depends upon.

A general election between Trump and Bloomberg is simply a contest between two vulgar, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, anti-worker billionaires. Nothing good can come of that except the end of the pretense that the political architecture of the country is really divided. The one speck of light in this scenario is that the rest of us might finally see in all its nakedness that the structures of political power and rule are truly aligned and consolidated in self-preservation and that liberalism is as willing as conservatism to render the masses as ‘sacrifice zones’ to maintain the system of extraction and graft. By then, of course, it’s too late.

And this is precisely what writers like Angela Davis, George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Sheldon Wollin, and Chris Hedges have forewarned. These writers were not concerned with conservative fascism (that was all too obvious), but rather the thinness of liberalism’s own susceptibility to fascism. That is at the heart, as well, of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lamentation of the white moderate liberal: it would sacrifice the bodies of the non-white suppressed to tyranny and brutalization out of fear of change that threatens the power of the comfortable, of those who profit from the systems of racism and terrorism. This is the reality of a Bloomberg nomination. The time to organize and resist this is now. The hour is getting late.

Michael Gibson is senior editor at Lexington Books, the academic imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, and the author of a forthcoming volume on film director Stanley Kubrick (Rutgers University Press). He is the contributing editor in film, literature, and culture at The Bias.

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