I Vomit On Mayo Pete-- Elite Pete-- And Here's Why

"Let's face it," wrote Nick Lento on Facebook yesterday, "Mayor Pete is a Democratic version of Mitt Romney... corporate to the core." That's right. His corporateness defines him and oozes out of every pore. Pete is the ultimate product of McKinsey & Company, a real life, genuine nexus of evil on Planet Earth. Ben Chu: "McKinsey's fingerprints can be found at the scene of some of the most spectacular corporate and financial debacles of recent decades." And that list of McKinsey achievements includes scandals as diverse as Enron, ICE, the dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi (which Mayo Pete is not accused of participating in), China's Uyghur concentration camps... and, of course, McKinsey is in it up to their eyeballs in both Ukraine and Turkey.

Norman Solomon's essay for Common Dreams this week, Beware, Pete Buttigieg Is a Sharp Corporate Tool, is an apt warning about how dangerous Mayo Pete is and what an inappropriate candidate he is for Democrats. "With the mutual alignment of Buttigieg and his corporate healthcare-industry donors," wrote Solomon, "Mayor Pete's approach seems to be a case of a flimflamming candidate who poses as a forthright leader. [He] burst on the national scene early this year as a new sort of presidential candidate. But it turns out he’s a very old kind-- a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families. That has become apparent this fall as Buttigieg escalates his offensive against Medicare for All."

A not-funny thing has happened to Buttigieg on the campaign trail. As he kept collecting big checks from corporate executives and wealthy donors, he went from being “all for” a single-payer Medicare for All system in January to trashing it in the debate last week as a plan that would kick “150 million Americans off of their insurance in four short years.” The demagoguery won praise from corporate media outlets.

Those outlets have often lauded Buttigieg for his fundraising totals this year without scrutiny of the funding sources. They skew toward the wealthy-- and toward donors with a vested interest in protecting the status quo.

The flood of corporate cash has... reoriented Pete's mind

...The sordid story of Buttigieg’s about-face on Medicare for All was well-documented and deftly analyzed days ago by Jezebel writer Esther Wang under the headline A Brief History of Pete Buttigieg Faking It on Medicare for All. She observed:

Buttigieg is not the only Democratic presidential candidate who has switched positions on supporting Medicare for All, or is just generally using the public and political confusion around the issue to undermine real efforts to move to a universal system. Kamala Harris, who co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ Senate bill, has consistently waffled, and has settled on a plan that continues to let private insurers play a role. But Buttigieg is the only candidate who is now making opposition to the Sanders- and Warren-backed Medicare for All a central focus of his campaign.

...As for Buttigieg’s slippery slogan of “Medicare for all who want it,” Rep. Ro Khanna pointed out that such a setup “won't bring the administrative costs down of private insurers or maximize negotiation with Big Pharma and hospitals.” And: “This means higher premiums, higher drug costs, higher deductibles, and more denied claims for the middle class.”

...Buttigieg has joined with Joe Biden to open up a well-funded, double-barreled assault on Medicare for All.

“I am tired of seeing Democrats defend a dysfunctional healthcare system where 87 million people are uninsured or underinsured and 30,000 people die every year because they lack adequate coverage,” Bernie Sanders wrote last Friday in an email to supporters. “So I was disappointed this week to see that Joe Biden used the talking points of the health insurance industry to attack Medicare for All and our campaign.”

While Buttigieg is not strong in national polls right now, he’s polling notably well in Iowa, where the first voting for the Democratic presidential nomination will occur in early-February caucuses. And with $23.4 million in the bank, he’s got much more money in hand than Biden ($9 million). The only rivals with more money than Buttigieg are the two he’s assailing for their resolute support of Medicare for All-- Sanders ($33.7 million) and Warren ($25.7 million).

While I personally support Sanders, I’m equally appalled by Buttigieg’s attacks on Warren. As part of a campaign strategy that aims to undermine both of his progressive opponents, the mayor continues to falsely characterize Medicare for All-- no matter how much confusion and disinformation he creates along the way.

Whether or not Pete Buttigieg can win the nomination, he has certainly emerged as a sharp corporate tool.

Yesterday, Tucker Higgins, reporting for CNBC, noted that Mayo Pete (new nickname: Mayor Elite?) has hired Sonal Shah, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and Google executive as his national policy director. And... over at Bloomberg, a team of reporters wrote that the Silicon Valley CEOs are pushing Pete. "The technology industry is looking for something different in a president in 2020. And it appears Pete Buttigieg is their candidate... California’s deep-pocketed Silicon Valley is donating to the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana over the former vice president by a 5-to-1 margin... 'Well-educated recognizes well-educated,' Moran said, adding that Buttigieg could have come to Silicon Valley after graduating from Harvard as many Ivy League graduates do. In other words, in their eyes, Buttigieg is like them."

“There’s a big move on the Democratic side to more heavily regulate tech, and that hasn’t been part of Buttigieg’s message,” said Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “His message is consistent with innovation and forward-looking technology. He has not given the impression that he would threaten their interests.”

While he hasn’t said much about competition and antitrust, Buttigieg has focused on improving regulations as opposed to breaking up big tech.

“We’re going to need to empower the FTC to be able to intervene, including blocking or reversing mergers, in cases where there’s anti-competitive behavior by tech companies,” he said in a CNN town hall in April, referring to the Federal Trade Commission.

Buttigieg was his high school’s valedictorian and went on to Harvard, where he befriended two roommates of future Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and was one of the first 300 users on the social media platform. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, joined McKinsey & Co. as a consultant, and volunteered for Barack Obama’s tech-savvy 2008 presidential campaign before joining the U.S. Navy Reserve and serving in Afghanistan.

His relationship with Zuckerberg persisted. Zuckerberg, 35, visited South Bend in 2017 while doing research for his philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and got a personal tour from Buttigieg. That relationship lasted into this year, when Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, recommended two people that Buttigieg ultimately hired for his campaign. Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Zuckerberg and Chan, said the couple hasn’t yet decided whom to support for president.

California voters have an unusually large influence in choosing the party’s nominee this cycle. The state primary next year is in March instead of its previous June slot and its donors contributed 1 of every 5 dollars raised by the party’s presidential candidates in the first six months of this year, data from the Center for Responsive Politics show.

Buttigieg is second only to home-state senator Kamala Harris in the percentage of his campaign money that comes from California. Harris got 45% of her donations from Californians, Buttigieg got 22%.

Yes, of course rich people like the candidates who will protect the economic inequalities of the status quo. But California voters have a very different perspective than executives from Google, Facebook and Uber. Kamala and Pete are getting the big checks from the crooked billionaires and their company lackeys but ordinary, non-millionaire voters feel otherwise:

• Elizabeth Warren- 23%
• Status Quo Joe- 22%
• Bernie- 21%
• Kamala- 8%
• Elite Pete- 6%

And then there's this offensive typically McKinseyPete bullshit, nicely summarized by Twitter's Freeborn Black Woman First Of Her Name: