It Would Be Hard To Imagine A President As Entitled And Self-Centered As Trump... But Think About Republican Oligarch Michael Bloomberg

Julia Carrie Wong, reporting for The Guardian-- $45 Million in 90 days: How Bloomberg Bought Your Facebook Feed-- wrote that "In the first six weeks of 2020, more than 1.6 billion of the 2.4 billion presidential campaign ads shown to U.S. Facebook users were from the Bloomberg campaign. Since launching his campaign in mid-November, the former mayor of New York City has spent nearly $45m on Facebook ads-- more than all his opponents combined. And Bloomberg’s spending doesn’t just dwarf that of other Democrats; Donald Trump’s giant re-election effort on Facebook looks paltry in comparison.”

Bloomberg is also blanketing the TV and radio airwaves-- especially in deep red SuperTuesday states like Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Alabama where the other Democrats are spending nothing. He has also been pestering YouTube and Google users with another $40 million in annoying pop-up ads and paying Instagram "mini-influencers for Mini-Mike" to put up "well-lit" photos of himself with campaign-approved messaging. That debate performance killed his momentum on the spot. He's now behind Biden for the conservative lane and, by his own logic, should drop out and help rally conservative Democrats around Status Quo Joe. But no one things his ego-driven campaign would consider doing anything like that. Note that after the debate the two progressive in the race gained 4 points while the 4 conservatives lost a total of 5 points.

Tomorrow, Bernie will be the featured guest on 60 Minutes. In a teaser CBS put out yesterday, Anderson Cooper asked him about Bloomberg's debacle debate in Vegas this week:





In that debate, Elizabeth Warren pulverized Bloomberg on several fronts, one of which was his Trump-like non-disclosure agreements he signed with women he molested after paying them off to keep quiet. At a CNN town hall Wednesday Warren rubbed it in, saying "I used to teach contract law. And I thought I would make this easy. I wrote up a release and covenant not to sue. And all that Mayor Bloomberg has to do is download it. I’ll text it. Sign it. And then the women, or men, will be free to speak and tell their own stories." Her "or men" is a reference to the fact that Bloomberg is a closet case who has also molested young men and shut them up with pay-offs as well. Can you imagine what Trump would do with that information?

On Thursday, NYC-based journalist Alison Rose Levy, writing for TruthDig, took on the DNC's disaster-in-the-making decision to align with the Republican oligarch, a political opportunist with an open checkbook. And this despite (???) Bloomberg's years-long battle to help elect Republicans. "Bloomberg," she noted, "calls himself an environmentalist while investing in fracking, championing it politically (as he did at this week’s Democratic presidential debate), and donating to a notorious green-washing environmental organization, the Environmental Defense Fund, in an ongoing but doomed effort to make fracking safe."

“Michael Bloomberg is often sold to people as a climate hero. Headlines that tout him as a green visionary adorn the pages of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He skips across the globe as the UN’s special envoy for climate action,” Derek Seidman wrote in Eyes on the Ties. “Bloomberg’s framing of fracking as the practical, common-sense option is a big obstacle to more far-reaching measures needed to curb carbon emissions now.”

At this week’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, Bloomberg reiterated his support for fracking, dismissing the Sanders-backed Green New Deal. Bloomberg also opposes plans to transition to renewables within the time frame dictated by reports issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bloomberg’s support for both fossil fuels and Republicans may be connected. Consider this useful research provided by Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy:

Over the last decade, Bloomberg helped Republicans take and maintain control of the U.S. Senate, which, in the Trump era and under Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) leadership, has confirmed scores of right-wing judges, blocked liberal legislation passed by the House, and shielded the president from any repercussions after seeking foreign election assistance, tampering with witnesses and defying congressional subpoenas.

For several decades up to and through 2018, Bloomberg, whose own party affiliation has changed repeatedly, “donated over $900,000 directly to Republican candidates’ campaigns, national GOP party committees and federal PACs of state Republican Party committees,” Kotch reported. Bloomberg added millions more through his two super PACs, one of which spent over $10 million “supporting Republican federal candidates from 2012-16.”

In what the Philadelphia Inquirer called a “pivotal” 2016 campaign that “many thought could decide control of the Senate,” Bloomberg “poured millions of dollars into the contest-- to help Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey” gain reelection. Bloomberg’s $5.9 million donation, used to buy television ads in key Philadelphia suburbs, portrayed the pro-fracking Republican as a moderate centrist, helping him win by a narrow margin over Democrat Katie McGinty, an environmental policy expert.

A Bloomberg spokesperson now claims the billionaire’s support for Toomey was based on the latter’s stance on gun control, even though Toomey’s challenger McGinty “supported far stronger gun measures, including bans on assault-style weapons.”

Raising further questions as to Bloomberg’s actual agenda in pushing Toomey, McGinty campaign adviser Mike Mikus noted that with the Senate secured by Republicans, no gun bills “would see any light as long as [McConnell] controlled the chamber. The Senate was up for grabs, and [Bloomberg] clearly sided with Mitch McConnell.”

Whatever his purported motive in helping Toomey, Bloomberg spent considerable funds to reelect a fracking apologist who represented the environmentally devastated swing state of Pennsylvania, the second most important natural gas state after Texas. Fracking may represent a boon to investor-donors like Bloomberg and their vested politicians, but the practice poses a clear health hazard to Pennsylvania communities as well as climate hazards to the global community. A recent review of scientific literature found close correlations between “health impacts including cancer, infant mortality, depression, pneumonia, asthma, skin-related hospitalizations and other general health symptoms” and “living near unconventional oil and gas development [in] Pennsylvania.”

In November 2019, Toomey introduced federal legislation to unilaterally prevent future presidents from introducing a moratorium on fracking. The Pike County Courier reported that the measure squarely aims “at several Democratic presidential candidates” by thwarting their potential moves with regard to introducing fracking regulations.

Bloomberg’s intervention-- supporting a pro-fracking senator and keeping the Senate under Republican-control-- unleashed other serious consequences. One related outcome of that Senate race is that in preserving GOP control, the Senate was able to see through Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. In Justice Kavanaugh, the nation’s top court gained an anti-choice ideologue who had faced credible charges of sexual predation.

The problematic aspect of Bloomberg’s personal history vis-s-vis allegations of his own sexist remarks and actions was discussed at Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate. After being energetically challenged on the debate stage by Democratic rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Bloomberg explained that he had needed to sign non-disclosure agreements with several women in his professional milieu who he claimed were offended because “they did not like a joke I told.”

...The exploitation of people, earthly resources and money cannot be ignored or dismissed. Bloomberg now poses a new danger by using his largesse to act, in turns, as either a kingmaker or candidate, thus threatening the nomination process and the will of American voters. Sanders, currently the clear Democratic front-runner, is the sole candidate who has pledged to rely only on donations from citizens rather than from the billionaires who fund nearly all the other candidates.

Through the campaign this year, Sanders has helped Americans to grasp what has been apparent but long denied: Billionaires like Bloomberg have been controlling the country, decimating the middle class, putting health care out of reach and destroying the environment for profit. Democrats can’t afford to anoint a candidate who uses his money and influence to rob them of their futures.