Republican Oligarch Bloomberg Explains Why He Would Never Win A Presidential Race

Yesterday, in his often excoriating music business newsletter, Bob Lefsetz set his sites on... oligarchs in politics. "You’ve got to be rich," he wrote. "And it always comes down to who you know." That could've easily been the opening lines about a music business post. But not when he turned to the powerful dons who run the Nevada Culinary Union who "bargained for a blue chip health care plan" and have basically said SCREW YOU to anyone who doesn't have a plan as good. (NOTE: Medicare-for-All is better than any union-negotiated healthcare plan and for that matter, better than any healthcare plan offered to corporate presidents in any U.S. company.) Anyway, Lefsetz was quickly on to two detestable targets: Trump and Bloomberg, two beneficiaries of skillful marketing. "Trump," he wrote "won by being a renegade. By talking about how the government does not work and the game is rigged. The government has issues, but one thing’s for sure, the game is rigged. Let’s see, all the people Trump pardoned/commuted today… It’s not like they had public defenders, it’s not like they didn’t have the right to appeal, they were convicted, fair and square, there’s a system, based on laws, and if you sacrifice the law…you’ve got chaos. Which is what we’ve got today... [O]ne thing is for certain, if you’re not rich, you don’t count, you have no voice. Because they don’t want to let you have one. Oh, they’ll let you call in to talk shows, they’ll get you fighting about secondary issues, but they won’t let you challenge the system, which is imperfect but works just fine for them. Which brings me to last night’s John Oliver show, wherein he makes the case for Medicare for all:

Oliver goes through all the negative talking points, blows them away, and if you’re not for Medicare for all after you watch this, you’re greedy or, like members of the Culinary Union, have a blue chip policy.

But there can be no change.

But change happens. The last twenty years have been all about change. Digital disruption. It’s always outsiders with a creaky new way that is cheap and pooh-poohed that ultimately triumphs and kills what came before. Why can’t this happen in politics?

BECAUSE THOSE IN POWER DON’T WANT IT TO!

I’ll vote for any Democrat against Trump. But I must say, the DNC and the media are bending over backward to hand it to Michael Bloomberg. Today the polls came out and the stories were all about Bloomberg’s surge, when Sanders surged way ahead of the field.

Selective reporting.

It used to be different. There was the Fairness Doctrine, making sure the limited news outlets presented both sides.

And if you owned a megaphone, a newspaper, TV or radio station, you were powerful.

You’re less powerful today.

Those in power, the elite, hate technology, even though they selectively use it. I listened to NPR tonight wherein they sang the virtues of the independent bookstore, saying the digital book was neutered. But the sycophantic host even admitted he showroomed the Ron Chernow book on Ulysses S. Grant and bought the digital copy, because the physical book was just too heavy.

This is the establishment, they like it how it was, even though it’s no longer this way.

I get it if you’re a member of the Republican elite. The money and perks have always flowed upward. But the Democratic elite? They have contempt for those below them, believe they know better, spread their own disinformation in pursuit of their goals. There can be change, just as long as they don’t lose out.

And you wonder why the rank and file voted for Trump.

So it all comes down to hope. If Bloomberg is elected, we’ll get rid of the orange menace. But will the fundamental problems of this country be addressed? Of course not, because Bloomberg doesn’t even know how the hoi polloi live.

So Blagojevich broke the law. We don’t want our elected officials selling Senate seats. But we live in a country where our President can lean on Ukraine to neuter the campaign of Joe Biden, which he successfully did!

Mitt Romney did the right thing, and he was excoriated by the right, but…they still love him in Utah, because their society is built on the family and helping one another, morality.

Bernard Kerik was caught red-handed, as was Eddie DeBartolo, Jr. Commit a blue collar crime and you’re screwed, there’s a camera everywhere, you’re going up the river. But white collar crime is seen as less bad, these are good people, we don’t want to ruin their lives, like the judge said in the Stanford rape case. SO WHY DID THEY DO THIS?

That’s what you’ve got to ask. These people thought they were invulnerable, they’d been getting away with bending the rules for years, it’s just that this time they got caught. Whereas you’re lucky if you can get probation on the first offense.

So there’s a different legal system for the rich and poor. And unlike in the old days, the rich no longer worry about the optics. Trump doesn’t care how it looks, Kerik working with the Donald’s henchman Giuliani, Blagojevich appearing on The Apprentice, he just does what he feels like, with a vengeance, vindictively.

Susan Collins told us Trump learned a lesson…yeah, that he can do whatever he wants!

As for those who support him, it’s less about him than the tribe on the other side. They hate Democrats so much, they’ll endorse the behavior of any Republican, just ask the evangelicals.

So if you live online, you see contrary opinions.

But big media has told us it’s all cranks and their opinions don’t count. Meanwhile, Breitbart and the Daily Caller got Trump elected. Who cares about veracity, that demonstrates power.

And although the right decries authoritarianism in China, it refuses to publicize any story it doesn’t agree with, that doesn’t reinforce its position.

So, you can be an outsider, you can have the illusion of power, because you vote.

But for the first time in my life I’m starting to wonder if it matters. If we organize and come up with a contrary candidate, our own opinion, they shut us right down. Bernie Sanders is a socialist who loves Russia and will ruin the economy, after eliminating Democratic coattails.

Meanwhile, Trump is a guy who really loves Putin, and endorses/enables socialism for the rich, with low taxes, the carried interest rule, government handouts, but somehow that’s different.

It isn’t about Bernie Sanders the man, it’s about what he’s saying, telling the truth in a world where that is abhorred. The everyday person got screwed, and the playing field must be leveled, while everybody is taken care of while they get back on their feet.

But those on both the right and left say this can’t be so. Change must be gradual, and you know there can’t be change because the government is gridlocked, and you’re asking the impossible anyway.

Meanwhile, let’s hand the nomination to a billionaire who just recently was a Republican, who changed the law so he could serve a third term as mayor, who made the elites feel safe while his police force threw those less privileged up against the wall.

But that’s overlooked. Even the sexism. Because this is the guy the elites want, because he’ll just be the anti-Trump, who cares if he gets anything done.

And their plan is working. I was with three twentysomethings just now, all were Bernie fans, now they’re behind Bloomberg, the media has convinced them, they’re defeated. Even though it’s their future at risk.

So what we’ve found is despite our numbers, we ain’t got much power. Even if Bernie Sanders wins a primary, he loses. The owners of this country want it this way.

As for Michael Milken… Wasn’t he the first guy to make so much money on Wall Street? Isn’t he evidence of the basic problem? By pardoning him aren’t we endorsing this kind of behavior, especially if you employ your riches that remain for good causes?

It’s depressing. And everybody is telling us we know nothing and should do what they say. And however it plays out, they’re not gonna lose, but we are.

Meanwhile, we’re fighting each other for scraps and most have no idea how the game is really played anyway. Everybody believes they’re gonna be a successful entrepreneur, become a billionaire. Someone else did it, so why can’t they?

Because that other person had wealthy parents who gave them the best education at institutions where you can make relationships that pay dividends down the road. You never had a chance. And today, both parties are doing their best to snuff whatever light, whatever hope remains, out.

And you wonder why there’s a rash of suicides.

"I'm not a dictionary, but I know what words mean. And I'm not a clock, but I know what time it is." That was from Richard Eskow in his post for Common Dreams earlier this month, Of Course Bloomberg's an Oligarch-- and He's Coming For Your Social Security. "By any common definition," he wrote, "Bloomberg’s an oligarch. He wants to buy your vote. Based on his record, he’s also coming for your Social Security.

An “oligarch,” according to the Cambridge American Dictionary, is “one of a small group of powerful people who control a country or an industry.”

Is Michael Bloomberg such a person? Maybe he’s just really rich and doesn’t control that much. But let's have some background.

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? Ferguson et al. found that campaign cash drives election outcomes. That means campaign donors largely control the process.

Gilens and Page found that wealthy people and interests usually get what they want. The rest of us usually don’t, unless what we want is also what they want. The fact that progressives like some of Bloomberg’s positions doesn’t undermine these findings. In fact, it reinforces them.

Bloomberg hasn’t just given money to a number of campaigns. He also controls a media empire. In true oligarchical fashion, he decreed years ago that his news outlets would not cover his political career. He said recently that it would not cover his rivals’ campaigns, either-- a move that drew criticism from journalists and an ethics professor. Less than a month later, however, Bloomberg News violated that edict by running a hit piece against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

That’s oligarchical behavior.

Bloomberg’s own political history is an exercise in the use of oligarchical wealth to change electoral outcomes. He was unpopular when he first ran for mayor of New York-- a situation he rectified by dramatically outspending his rivals. Even so, Bloomberg only eked out a two-point victory against Democrat Mark Green in his first mayoral race, after outspending him five to one.

The argument between Turner and Johnson involved another compelling example of Bloomberg-as-oligarch. The DNC’s rules said each candidate had to have a minimum number of donors to quality for the debate stage. That rule wasn’t overruled for Cory Booker or Julian Castro, despite calls for greater diversity in the race. But it was overturned for Bloomberg, who had donated more than $1 million to the DNC and a related organization a few short weeks before.

Will Michael Bloomberg Cut Your Social Security?

If you thought there were problems with Joe Biden’s Social Security record, wait until you see Bloomberg’s. His record of espousing austerity economics has including a special enthusiasm for cutting Medicare and Social Security.

As he 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.

These are bad ideas. They make for even worse politics. Voters love Social Security. A Pew study released in March 2019 found that “74 percent of Americans say Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way.”

And voters don’t like entitlement cuts, or the Bloomberg-endorsed thinking behind them. That can be seen in a GBAO/Center for American Progress survey conducted in October 2019. Less than half of Republicans, one-third of Democrats, and roughly one-third of independents agreed with the Bloomberg-like statement that “our national debt is way too high, and we need to cut government spending on the biggest programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”

Trump has given Democrats an opening on Social Security. His administration is currently engaged in a de factor program to cut Social Security disability benefits, by forcing millions of disabled people to endure the punishing process of eligibility screening as often as every six months. Newsweek reports that the Social Security Administration concluded that this would lead to $2.6 billion in benefit cuts and an additional 2.6 million case reviews between 2020 and 2029. It’s a brutal assault on the health and security of a vulnerable population.

Trump also said he intends to pursue additional cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid after the upcoming election, when he no longer has to worry about public opinion. Worse, he did so at the annual gathering of billionaires in Davos. That reinforces the perception that he’s imposing hardship on the majority to help a privileged few.

Most leading Democrats understand that there is wide support for protecting and expanding Social Security. Most leading candidates-- including Joe Biden-- have offered some form of Social Security expansion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has embraced the idea in principle. There’s an opportunity here-- if Bloomberg doesn’t stop them from taking it.

...Given his virtually unlimited resources, Bloomberg could theoretically win both the nomination and the presidency. By my calculation, Bloomberg could pay the same “unit price” he paid to make himself mayor of New York-- $88 per voter-- and make himself president for $12 billion. He’d even have $50 billion set aside for a rainy day.

The nomination would presumably cost less than the presidency, so he has a better shot at that. But it would be a bad look for the Democrats to become the first party in modern history whose candidate openly bought the nomination. But then, Bloomberg’s used to getting the rules changed just for him. When he wanted to run for a third term as mayor, Bloomberg used all the tools at his disposal (one of which led to an ethics complaint) to change the city’s rules. Once he got what he wanted, Bloomberg then pushed to change the rules back. It seems that some privileges should be labeled, “for oligarchs only.”

Am I saying that all the members of Congress who have endorsed Bloomberg are corrupt and should be defeated in primaries? Pretty much. YES! Right now there are a dozen of them, 10 Blue Dogs and New Dems and one-- Bobby Rush-- an outright criminal who takes bribes from everyone, not just Bloomberg. All these members should have the guts to withdraw their endorsements of Bloomberg today after his disqualifying performance last night. Instead, this morning, 3 other money-hungry Democrats endorsed him-- Blue Dog walking cesspool Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Pete Aguilar (New Dem-CA) and Nita Lowey, who is retiring from Congress and knows she'll never have to face the voters again.

• Harley Rouda (New Dem-CA)- F
• Juan Vargas (New Dem)- D
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)- F
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)- F
• Ted Deutch (FL)- C
• Lucy McBath (New Dem-GA)- F
• Bobby Rush (IL)- B
• Haley Stevens (New Dem-MI)- F
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)- F
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)- F
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)- F
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)- F

You Never Thought You Would Vote For A Republican Oligarch But You Are Considering Doing So This Time? Please Read This First So You Don't Slit Your Wrists In 2021

Over the weekend, Bernie was in Nevada, where a new poll shows him leading in this next-up caucus state (next Saturday). He's not just leading; he's surging while his closest competitor, Status Quo Joe, is collapsing and has all but abandoned Nevada for South Carolina.

• Bernie- 25%
• Status Quo Joe- 18%
• Elizabeth- 13%
• Steyer- 11%
• Mayo Pete- 10%
• Klobuchar- 10%

Republican oligarch Michael Bloomberg won't be on the ballot Saturday but Bernie has been keeping a cautious eye on him. Last week, at the Clark County Democratic Party dinner, he criticized Mini Mike's longtime opposition to raising the minimum wage, which, for the sake of gaining votes, he has now flip-flopped on. Bernie also noted that Bloomberg has always backed Austerity plans that included cuts to Medicare and Social Security and that he opposed efforts to hold "the crooks on Wall Street accountable." Bernie told the party activists that "Regardless of how much money a multi-billionaire candidate is willing to spend on this election, we will not create the energy and excitement we need to defeat Donald Trump if that candidate pursued, advocated for and enacted racist policies like 'stop and frisk' which caused communities of color in his city to live in fear."

A Trump vs Bloomberg general election would be asking Democrats to participate in a Republican primary between a fascist and a mainstream conservative. Last week Sonali Kolhatkar noted that Mini Mike is having a moment as elites abandon the floundering Biden and turn to the big-spending oligarch. "One," she wrote, "could attribute this rise to the insane amount of cash he has spent on his campaign-- more than $200 million so far-- out of his own bottomless pockets to blast commercials on every platform as he sells himself to the public. Now, liberal pundits are contemplating things like, 'It is time to earnestly consider the possibility that Bloomberg will be the Democratic nominee for president.' But are we honestly considering him a serious candidate?"

Bloomberg’s main stint with politics was as mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, during which time he pushed aggressively to criminalize and racially profile people of color under the guise of the “stop and frisk” policing model. The idea was simple: Preemptively arrest poor Black and Latino men, and crime rates would magically drop. Thousands of men were ruined in Bloomberg’s dragnet, and the policy persisted until legal challenges forced the city to end the program with a judge declaring it unconstitutional. In launching his bid for the White House last year, Bloomberg stood in front of black congregants at a church and said, “I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong.”

Perhaps the billionaire candidate simply expected that his money would wash the stench of racism away.

...Perhaps Bloomberg hopes white liberals can set aside any misgivings about his racism simply because they are fantasizing about the unlimited access to his campaign cash to defeat Trump. Bloomberg is currently the ninth richest person on the entire planet. In a sincere sounding op-ed in the New York Times, he explained how “the rewards of the economy are far too concentrated at the top,” and that he is “making the system fairer and more progressive, including by increasing taxes on wealthy people like me.” But only three years ago, Bloomberg-- in a conversation with the then-head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine La Garde-- explained that he was in favor of regressive taxation because it helped socially engineer poor people’s habits:

Taxes are regressive, yes they are. That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money and so higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves. So I listen to people saying, ‘Oh we don’t want to tax the poor.’ Well, we want the poor to live longer so that they can get an education and enjoy life. And that’s why you do want to do exactly what a lot of people say you don’t want to do… If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks, for example, they will drink less and there’s no question that full sugared drinks are one of the major factors in obesity and obesity is one of the major factors to heart disease.

While this clip has not received as much attention as Bloomberg’s defense of “stop-and-frisk,” it is just as instructive about his attitude toward low-income people. A multibillionaire’s opinion of those on the bottom rung of society is-- unsurprisingly-- utterly distorted by his obscene wealth.

How exactly can a racist, classist billionaire be favored by Democrats? As Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to build momentum, the liberal establishment is in full panic mode. All of the superficial criticism they have cast at Sanders-- that he’s an old white man who has been a Democrat for barely a minute-- apply just as equally to Bloomberg. But what is most critically important to Bloomberg’s backers is that his politics are the polar opposite of Sanders. Just days after the disastrous Iowa caucuses, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson bizarrely declared Bloomberg “the biggest winner,” even though he skipped the caucuses. Robinson’s reasoning was that “the chaos in the Democratic Party and Trump’s White House are making Bloomberg’s argument for him.”

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman this week opined that Bloomberg “has the best chance to carry the day” in a match-up against Trump and that he is “a moderate progressive with a heart of gold but the toughness of a rattlesnake.” The words “moderate progressive” are code for “not a Democratic Socialist like Bernie Sanders.” Defenders of the establishment are terrified that in a bid to sweep away Trump and his policies, too many Americans will want to strip wealthy liberals of their power and money as well.

For all the fears that [establishment] Democrats have about a Sanders’ nomination, the worst that Trump could accuse Sanders of doing is sticking to a set of economic, racial and gender justice principles for 40 years. He could harp on Sanders’ avowed socialism, but polls show Americans are actually quite receptive to socialism. He could lie and call Sanders a communist, but the Senator could retort, as he has already done, “Obviously I am not a communist,” even if Trump “maybe doesn’t know the difference.”

In demonizing Sanders and all he represents, Trump is siding with the likes of former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who is so terrified of Sanders he worried the senator would “ruin the economy” as president. By that comment, Blankfein of course means that Sanders plans to upend an economy that is working very well for him and terribly for the rest of us. Trump, Wall Street executives and wealthy elites like Blankfein and Bloomberg are all arrayed against threats to the corporate stranglehold on America. They are all part of the same team, and yet establishment Democrats claim there is a difference between Trump and Bloomberg.

As Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren dip in the polls, Bloomberg’s numbers are rising. In a head-to-head matchup with Trump, one poll showed him beating the president by the widest margin of all Democratic candidates. But Bloomberg has so far benefitted from scant media coverage and as journalists dig deeper, his many skeletons are tumbling out of the closet. He has also not yet faced his challengers on a debate stage. If he does cinch the nomination, picture Trump ripping him apart over his comments about crime in minority neighborhoods and his patronizing attitudes toward poor people.

Sanders surrogate Nina Turner, in a recent interview on MSNBC, dared to call Bloomberg an “oligarch” and raised the ire of liberal pundits. But the word “oligarch” is defined as a member of a nation’s economic elite unfairly using their status and money to wield power. Former Labor secretary and popular progressive author Robert Reich explained that, yes, at this stage, anyone is better than Trump and that “[o]ligarchy is better than tyranny.” But, he added, “neither is as good as democracy.”

Bloomberg’s immense wealth allows him to bypass the traditional reins of accountability that the public has over a candidate running for election. Bloomberg doesn’t need the public to donate to his campaign, and therefore there is no guarantee that as president he would care about serving the public. Already with Trump in the White House, we are suffering the ill effects of an unaccountable wealthy person who cares more about his money than his country. How can anyone who wants to defeat Trump want to replace him with someone not unlike him?

Alan Grayson's Twitter poll yesterday shows a lot of dissatisfaction with Bloomberg. He's far less popular than the other two conservative Democrats running, Status Quo Joe and Mayo Pete.

Maybe that's because plenty of Democrats agree with widespread assertions that he's a Republican plutocrat trying to buy the Democratic nomination. In Current Affairs Michael Robinson wrote that "The idea of Michael Bloomberg becoming the Democratic presidential nominee should be too absurd to even consider seriously. For one thing, he is a conservative who openly believes that the poor should be ruled over by the super-rich and is trying to buy the nomination outright. He has a history of saying monstrously offensive things about women and transgender people, and oversaw an infamous racist police regime that terrorized Black and Hispanic New Yorkers. If he did somehow manage to spend his way to the nomination, bypassing the democratic process, it would be such an outrage-- and so demoralizing to the Democratic base-- that it would guarantee Trump’s reelection. If the choice were between two sexist billionaires who hate the poor, how many young people would drag themselves to the polls to support “our side’s” billionaire? It would permanently disillusion an entire generation and vindicate every cynical theory of politics as a domain where money rules absolutely. But, troublingly, Michael Bloomberg’s candidacy has not entirely been laughed out of the room. A number of prominent Democratic officials, liberal intellectuals, and celebrities have endorsed him, including San Francisco mayor London Breed, Illinois congressman Bobby Rush, Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs, Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo, TV’s Judge Judy, and singer John Mellencamp. Henry Louis Gates promoted Michael Bloomberg, and Evicted author Matthew Desmond effusively praised Bloomberg’s housing plan (without officially endorsing him). Some of this seems a little strange-- why is a sociologist known for studying evictions boosting the guy responsible for the New York homelessness crisis? Why are dozens of liberal elected officials suddenly stumping for a Republican billionaire?"

Well, first of all, virtually none of the elected officials endorsing Bloomberg is "liberal." Most of them are conservatives like Bloomberg (such as Wall Street shill Gina Raimondo) or, worse, corrupt buckets of slime like Bobby Rush, which Robinson notes: "In the case of some elected officials, the answer seems to be simple bribery. Bloomberg 'has supported 196 different cities with grants, technical assistance and education programs worth a combined $350 million' and 'now, leaders in some of those cities are forming the spine of Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign.' The mayors have all 'attended his prestigious boot camp at Harvard that gives the mayors access to ongoing strategic advice from Bloomberg-funded experts' and 'more than half have received funding… worth a total of nearly $10 million.' Bloomberg has been good to them and promises to keep being good to them in the future; endorsing him will probably guarantee the cash keeps flowing. Bloomberg hands out bags of money, they come on board."

Just as bad are the conservative Democratic Party elites who just care about one thing: stopping Bernie. Some would prefer Trump. Other believe Bernie can't win, regardless of polling points to the opposite, namely that Bernie has the best chance of any Democratic candidate of beating Trump. Much of this is based on wrongly thinking that ignorer to win, Democrats need to win moderate Republicans. Even if there are any "moderate Republicans," Democrats can win without them-- by exciting their own base and by winning independents. And that's Bernie's strength.

Bloomberg has never been shy about being a free-market conservative waging war on the poor, and the only reason it isn’t immediately obvious that he is right-wing is that so many Democrats have also been free-market conservatives waging war on the poor. Sure, his 2020 campaign has slapped together some hastily plagiarized literature pitching him as progressive, and he is publishing op-eds claiming that “fixing inequality is my priority.” After years of staunchly defending racist policing practices, he apologized for them the moment he began the campaign. But none of this should persuade anyone familiar with Bloomberg’s actual record.

Remember that Bloomberg himself says he is the type of conservative who believes in slashing the government to bits:

I actually am a conservative-- more so than other conservatives in the sense that I think you could go and cut 2 or 3 percent out of the budget in every agency. We’ve done that 12 times… 

Indeed, as New York City mayor, the billionaire mayor vowed to smash working people’s unions. He adopted an “aggressive approach to reforming the pension system” and made it his No. 1 legislative priority. He “threatened to withhold worker raises unless the municipal unions yielded on benefits.” Bloomberg vowed that nobody would get raises unless they accepted benefit cuts:

“Today, I will make this commitment: I will not sign a contract with salary increases unless they are accompanied by reforms in benefit packages that produce the savings we need…”

When transit workers went on strike after the transit authority’s attempted to raise the retirement age and substantially increase pension contributions, Bloomberg called them “selfish,” “greedy,” and “thuggish.” He even attacked the morality of the city’s firefighters. He eliminated the employee protection plan for the city’s 8,000 school bus drivers, leading to a strike. Bloomberg told public sector workers that “we have to find ways to do more with less” and would not pledge to end layoffs, even as the city spent millions on private consultants. Bloomberg said he wanted workers who appreciated that they should be grateful to the private sector for their salaries: “The unions I will get are the unions who understand that the private sector pays for the work of municipal employees.” (Bloomberg also spent $3 million backing right-wing Michigan governor Rick Snyder-- remembered for the Flint Water Crisis and seizing power from Black-led cities-- in part because Snyder “took on the unions.“)

Bloomberg has never shown himself to care much about workers’ rights. He once ordered that a low-level city employee making $27,000-- supporting a wife and child-- be fired after Bloomberg noticed Solitaire open on the man’s computer. Bloomberg forced the resignation of the director of the city’s first Arabic dual language school program after ludicrous allegations that she was a terrorist sympathizer. When Bloomberg found out that a New York City teacher had previously been a sex worker, he demanded she be fired, saying, “We’re just not going to have this woman in front of a class.” The teacher was suspended and ultimately had to resign.

Bloomberg’s own company was sued by 72 women who claimed “the company discriminated against them by decreasing their pay, demoting them, and excluding them from other employment opportunities after they became pregnant,” with one senior executive allegedly remarking “I’m not having any pregnant bitches working for me.”

Bloomberg has always opposed traditional Democratic policies for improving the lives of working people. He said he is “not, and [has] never been in favor of raising the minimum wage” (giving the usual discredited talking point about job loss), and as mayor vowed to veto a living wage bill, comparing it to Soviet Communism and promising to fight it in court. Bloomberg is a believer in “trickle-down” economics, whereby helping the rich helps the poor:

The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills.

This is far from the only time that Bloomberg suggested inequality was good and the city needed to lure more rich people. If the city was divided into rich and poor, he said, it was “one group paying for services for the other,” meaning that the poor should be grateful for their benefactors. He called New York City a “luxury product,” and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?” and “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap.”

Bloomberg’s New York was intensely friendly to rich developers. His city planning director, Standard Oil heir Amanda Burden, stated the administration’s aspirations: “What I have tried to do, and think I have done, is create value for these developers, every single day of my term.” Little-noticed zoning changes protected rich people’s neighborhoods from development and put poor neighborhoods up for grabs. Billionaires building luxury towers in New York City pay almost nothing in property taxes, and CityLab concluded of Bloomberg’s plan to lure as many billionaires as possible that “what Bloomberg saw as a way to provide for the welfare of New York looks more like one of the firmest expressions of inequality anywhere.” CityLab writes that “the property-tax burden has shifted from owners to renters, and from the wealthier to the poorer.” Under pressure, Bloomberg introduced a “market-based” solution for affordable housing, but it produced a pitifully small number of affordable units and “affordability” was often a joke, with units accessible only to those making more than the median income. Public housing was neglected, and “under Bloomberg, the city stopped checking for lead paint in public housing apartments, a disastrous decision that endangered thousands of children.” Kate Albright-Hanna describes the destructive effects of the Bloomberg philosophy for City & State New York, and warns what would happen to the country if Bloombergism were enacted on an even larger scale:

New York City is under siege, vanishing, empty or already dead as a result of the “Bloomberg Way”-- the concept of the mayor as CEO, businesses as clients, citizens as consumers, and the city as a product that’s branded and marketed. Bloomberg’s corporate worldview drained the color out of New York City-- a sterile, relentless kind of destruction that dehumanized its victims with the logic of the market… Bloomberg invited global investors to knock down old brick buildings and erect glassy, lifeless towers of secrecy that housed the wealth of foreign oligarchs and kleptocrats.

...Unsurprisingly, Bloomberg’s tenure saw an explosion in both rent prices and homelessness. By the end of Bloomberg’s time, “half of renting households paid more than 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities.” Commercial rents soared too, and beloved mom ‘n’ pop stores that had been in the city for decades closed by the hundreds. (Moss’ blog is a heartbreaking catalog of these.) The St. Vincent’s Hospital was shuttered and turned into luxury condos, just one of nearly 20 hospital closures between 2000 and 2013.

At the end, nearly one of every three children in the city resided in poverty, and the “record-high shelter population includes more than 22,000 homeless children.” The New York City Coalition For The Homeless has been absolutely scathing, noting that “the number of homeless people in NYC has soared to all-time record highs under Bloomberg; and the number of poor New Yorkers has also risen and remains at alarming levels.”

...Former City Council chair Christine Quinn [no progressive herself] was blunt: “In a time of prosperity, he took aggressive steps from a policy perspective to hurt the homeless.” Bloomberg’s idea of a solution to homelessness was giving them one-way bus tickets to get them out of the city. Today, Bloomberg insists that inequality is a top priority, but before his sudden transformation into a Democrat, Bloomberg said of inequality that “that’s not a measure of something we should be ashamed of.” (Recall he specifically wanted billionaires to move to New York to increase the “income gap.”)

...Bloomberg reserved his sympathy for bankers. As mayor, he gave Goldman Sachs more than a billion dollars in tax breaks to build a headquarters in New York. Later he said Occupy Wall Street was unfairly targeting financial industry workers who were “struggling to get by.” After all, he said, “This is our industry. We’d appreciate it if someone recognized that this is our tax base.” He was scathing about the Obama administration’s effort to regulate banks after the financial crisis, calling fines “outrageous” and suggesting that Wall Street insiders, rather than Congress, should be writing the laws, and has supported cutting the corporate tax rate. He called raising taxes on the rich “about as dumb a policy as I can think of,” making his usual case that rich people give us everything, describing Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax as “mean.” Bloomberg can be comically out of touch with working people; when the city was crippled by a blizzard he suggested residents use the free time to take in a Broadway show.

Bloomberg also established an insidious patronage system, whereby he would “slash funding in the city’s budget [then] backfill those cuts with anonymous donations.” This allowed him to boast of being a cost-cutter, but also made organizations completely depend on his largesse, meaning that the moment he personally decided to take funding away, it was gone, and forcing them to stay on his good side. (Remember, when billionaires give away money, it has nothing to do with generosity and should not be seen as virtuous, because it costs them nothing. If I give away $50, it is more meaningful than Michael Bloomberg giving away $50 million.) By making more and more organizations dependent on him, Bloomberg took decision-making out of the democratic sphere and turned it over to himself. This is clientelism, a system built on financial quid-pro-quos, and naturally “the mayor and his top deputies… pressed social service, arts and neighborhood groups that receive donations from Mr. Bloomberg to express support for his third-term bid by testifying during public hearing.” (A useful and comprehensive article on the Bloomberg Way in the International Socialist Review also explains how Bloomberg’s “philanthropy” offers solutions to problems he himself creates, such as funding organizations that help men with drug convictions get jobs while escalating drug arrests. It shows how Bloomberg’s wealth is dependent on making sure the financial sector never stops growing.)

I am sure you can guess what Michael Bloomberg’s education policy was like. He’s a strong believer in testing and charters and believes school is about preparing children for the job market. He has been a major contributor to “school choice” initiatives around the country. As mayor, he seized control over the schools, let private charters use city school buildings, and pushed for school closures. He tried to cut $170 million from early childhood education and after-school programs. He says he believes in doubling class sizes and halving the number of teachers (which is bananas). “Everybody I know in my generation went to classes of 40 or more. And education by some people’s argument was as good then as it is today,” he explained. Bloomberg went to war with teachers unions, who he compared to the NRA, and teacher morale was dismal. Bloomberg controversially appointed publishing executive Cathie Black to be school chancellor, a charter school advocate and union opponent who irritated educators and soon had to resign after jokingly suggesting that the solution to school overcrowding was birth control.

Bloomberg’s governing philosophy is very clear: He is one of these “run it like a business” types, which means a focus on maximizing “growth” and “development” even if doing that requires mass layoffs and pushing poor people out of the city. (“Running like a business” does not actually mean efficient and careful; the Bloomberg years saw the largest contractor fraud scheme in the history of the city, with half a billion dollars in waste). His goal for New York was to market it as a product to the super-rich around the world, not to govern it in the interest of its working class. Unsurprisingly, this meant mass evictions, staggering rent increases, billion-dollar luxury “pencil” towers, “poor doors.” This is the New York of taxi driver suicides, homeless 11-year-olds, and beloved diners turned into Chase banks. And this is the America we could expect if Michael Bloomberg were to obtain the power he thirsts for.

...So, considering that he is a sexist oligarch who has spent his life undermining democratic values, why would any Democrat even consider voting for Michael Bloomberg? The case for him is that we should set aside all of the above, suspend every political principle and standard of morality we hold, for one simple reason: He is a “pragmatic” choice to take on Trump. The New York Times reported that some Democrats were being “drawn to Mr. Bloomberg because they believed his fortune would give Democrats the best chance to beat President Trump in the fall.” I must therefore attend briefly to this argument, because anyone who buys it will not be swayed by my catalog of Michael Bloomberg’s foul deeds.

Now, first, I am not even sure that given his record, it is self-evident that Bloomberg is better than Trump. He seems even more ruthlessly effective than Trump at using his money as a form of absolute power. Bloomberg might believe that climate change is real, which is a critically important difference, but he’s also revealed himself to be an aspiring dictator who will bribe elected officials into doing as he pleases.

But the idea of Bloomberg as an effective candidate against Trump is an error. It rests on the idea that to beat a rich asshole, we just need an even richer asshole, one who is kind of a mirror image of Trump. (Instead of Mar-a-Lago, Bloomberg has a giant gaudy house in Bermuda.) Unfortunately, Bloomberg is just Trump without charisma or a narrative, Trump but with a far more obvious contempt for poor people. (Trump would obviously bring a Big Gulp to every rally, taunting Bloomberg as he slurped it.) He has the worst bits of liberalism (nanny state mentality that wants to take away your guns and drinks) with all the ugliest bits of conservatism (rabidly pro-Wall Street mentality, warmongering).

Michael Bloomberg’s “electability” against Trump is one of the most dangerous illusions in politics. In fact, all his run would do is destroy the Democratic Party completely. Many in the party would see him as a wholly illegitimate nominee who had subverted democratic institutions and bought the election. They would be repulsed by his record. And they would hardly be interested in doing a single thing to help one horrible Republican billionaire oust another horrible Republican billionaire. Turnout would collapse, because the Democratic Party would be running someone who does not share the values of Democratic Party voters. Who would rally under the “Tax The Poor” banner? The guy who would fire you for playing a computer game at work or for having been a sex worker? Who is going to lift a finger to help this guy? Not only is he unelectable, he’s probably the least electable candidate in the entire field.

...Racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-union, pro-War on Drugs, hawkish, authoritarian, plutocratic, and in favor of taxing the poor: Michael Bloomberg offends every single “Democratic” value. I am sure he is attempting a rapid pivot at this very moment, hoping his hundreds of millions can bury his record and “rebrand” him as a moderate progressive. But there is no reason to believe a thing he says-- or a thing he pays people to say.

Bloomberg has shown a far more terrifying form of clientelism even than Donald Trump. If someone opposes him, he simply uses his money to overpower them. Because Bloomberg’s wealth is virtually infinite (even the billion dollars he will spend this year will not diminish his net worth at all, since it’s just the money his money makes), if a newspaper reporter tries to expose him, he can just buy the newspaper and shut them down. If a nonprofit group complains about him, he can just give them a pile of money to shut them up. The reason this is a kind of dictatorship is that people need money, so it’s very hard to turn it down when it’s offered. How can a struggling city turn down Michael Bloomberg’s checks? Yet if they take them, they have to do what he says. The Michael Bloomberg pitch is that because of his money, he is not beholden to anyone. But leaders should be beholden—only a dictator is beholden to no one. When Bloomberg says that nobody owns him, it’s because he owns you.

I have already seen people around me suddenly and mysteriously turn into Bloomberg supporters, and I sometimes feel like being in the Ionesco play Rhinoceros, in which people unexpectedly become rhinoceroses overnight. I have already spoken to people I never would have expected to see supporting Bloomberg, who have taken jobs with his campaign out of need. As Bloomberg bribes more and more people, I fear that resistance to him will break down, former critics suddenly going oddly quiet. It’s an alarming prospect.


 


The fact that Michael Bloomberg has more money than Donald Trump is actually a good reason not to let him anywhere near the presidency, because it would mean he would have a kind of absolute power to shape political policy-- if a legislator opposed him, he could easily give a hundred million dollars to their opponent. If someone tried to sue him, he could bring a hundred million dollar legal team against them. Do not think Michael Bloomberg would not do this, because this is exactly what Michael Bloomberg has been doing. He simply bought a change in the law when he wanted an illegal extra term, now that he’s out of office he wants to see the old term limits restored because it was a “one-time thing,” and of course he called the idea of extending terms for city council members an “absolute disgrace.” (rules are for everyone else). The entire theory of his presidential run is that you can just use money to buy power.

A Bloomberg nomination would signal the end of what’s left of our country’s democratic politics. The bitterness his nomination would cause among young people would be immeasurable. The thousands of people who knocked doors in the Iowa snow to try to push Bernie over the top would be enraged to see a billionaire skip the contest because he has too much money to need to bother. Many would probably give up permanently on electoral politics, convinced that our efforts don’t matter, because ultimately we live in a plutocracy. And they would not be wrong. Nominating Bloomberg would be one of the darkest days in the history of democracy.

Any Democrat supporting Bloomberg should be ashamed of themselves, and should be confronted with the serious question of how they can possibly support someone like this. If Michael Bloomberg offers you money, do not take it. If people you know speak positively about Michael Bloomberg, confront them with his record. Michael Bloomberg should not be discussed seriously as a Democratic presidential contender. He should be a laughingstock. He is a delusional man squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on an ego trip. We should be disgusted at his choice to fritter away money that could do so much good on trying to subvert the democratic process and seize more of what isn’t his. It is an outrage that someone who shares no democratic values can be made a contender merely because, as Michael Moore so eloquently put it recently, “he has a billion fucking dollars.” The case is closed.

Yesterday on Meet The Press, even fellow Austerity hawk, Status Quo Joe, hissed at Bloomberg that "$60 billion can buy you a lot of advertising, but it can’t erase your record." Of course that might prompt someone to inquire what will erase Biden's? It doesn't matter; it's too late now. You can stick a fork in ole Status Quo Joe. That lane belongs to the Oligarch; he bought it.

A Culture Of Corruption-- Republican Oligarch Buying Shameless Democrats

Yesterday, I purposely left a major-- maybe the major-- Bloomberg drawback out of the early morning post on Bloomberg's drawbacks. That's because it deserves a post of its own. I wanted to call it "Bloomberg Buys Whores" but using the word "whores"-- even if you're referring to men and clearly not to sex-- always gets some people going-- including, of course, the incredibly flagrant whores of Ohio. In this case there is some sex involved from time to time and women as well as men. Like EMILY's List, which has taken at least $6 million from Bloomberg and helped him cover up his misogyny and his antipathy to the #MeToo movement. Obviously, EMILY's List doesn't sell sex; it sells itself to rich donors like Bloomberg in other-- more consequential-- ways. And it isn't just EMILY's List. Which Democratic-aligned groups hasn't blown Bloomberg for a couple of checks? He gave to crooked Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush's scam-church-- which Rush uses as a source personal enrichment-- and Rush endorsed him. Is every elected official who endorses Bloomberg a crook? Probably most of them. They sure are a slimily group, that's for sure. I mean Queens Democratic Party boss, Congressman Gregory Meeks has been named the most corrupt member of Congress. So no one was in the slightest bit surprised that he's on Team Bloomberg, despite the Stop and Frisk policy that badly impacted Meeks' own constituents. Mini-Mike spent over $4 million on anti-NRA candidate Lucy McBath in 2018, a key to her victory over incumbent Karen Handel, who had outraged McBath $8,685,781 to $2,673,521. A few weeks ago, she endorsed him.

In 2016 the Republican Party sold itself to Donald Trump and their base-- for one reason or another-- went right along with it with barely a peep. This year the Democratic establishment is welcoming Bloomberg and his checkbook-- primarily to help save them from Bernie and his unwashed masses-- but will their base's hatred of Trump be enough to force them to go along with it. The party establishment links so, but I haven't spoken to any progressive voters who said they would hold their nose and vote for Bloomberg if he's the nominee. Bloomberg will be Trump's ticket to ride, a John Lennon song-- and the Beatles' 7th consecutive U.S. #1 song-- "about" Hamburg's certified-clean whores.

Yesterday, NY Times reporters Alexander Burns and Nick Kulish, writing on the Bloomberg Money Machine, noted 5 takeaways on his political spending. They wrote that Bloomberg's "unusual strategy... is betting more than anything that his fortune will enable him to run a national campaign. His campaign is a test of the degree to which a candidate can use his vast wealth to impose himself on the political system." Their New York Times exhaustive look at his spending found that Bloomberg "had given away or spent more than $10 billion on a combination of charitable and political donations," including a great deal of money that helped him "build an influence network on a scale rarely if ever seen. Bloomberg gave away $3.3 billion in 2019. It was by far the most he had given away in a single year-- more than in the previous five years combined-- and most of it has not been publicly disclosed."

Bloomberg has long mingled support for progressive causes with more conservative positions on law enforcement, business regulation and school choice. He has often given voice to views that liberals find troubling: Over the past week, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign was on the defensive over past recordings that showed him linking the financial crisis to the end of discriminatory “redlining” practices in mortgage lending, and defending physically aggressive policing tactics as a deterrent against crime.

...In less than three months as a candidate, Mr. Bloomberg has poured more than $400 million, and rapidly counting, into the campaign. But that figure pales in comparison with what he spent in prior years, positioning himself as a national leader with presidential ambitions.

A Times examination of Mr. Bloomberg’s philanthropic and political spending in the years leading up to his presidential bid illustrates how he developed a national infrastructure of influence, image-making and unspoken suasion that has helped transform a former Republican mayor of New York City into a plausible contender for the Democratic nomination. If anything, his claim-- and his support among anxious moderates-- has grown stronger with the ascent of the “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders in early voting in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes... [I]n 2019, the year he declared his presidential candidacy, Mr. Bloomberg’s charitable giving soared to $3.3 billion-- more than in the previous five years combined. His campaign disclosed that total in response to inquiries by The Times, but the donations were not itemized and most of it does not fall under public disclosure requirements.

...His political and philanthropic spending has also secured the allegiance or cooperation of powerful institutions and leaders within the Democratic Party who might take issue with parts of his record were they not so reliant on his largess.

In interviews with The Times, no one described being threatened or coerced by Mr. Bloomberg or his money. But many said his wealth was an inescapable consideration-- a gravitational force powerful enough to make coercion unnecessary.

“They aren’t going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don’t want to jeopardize receiving financial support from him in the future,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

That chilling effect was apparent in 2015 to researchers at the Center for American Progress [notorious political whores, as bad as EMILY's List and whom the media keeps referring to as], a liberal policy group, when they turned in a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States. Their draft included a chapter of more than 4,000 words about New York City police surveillance of Muslim communities; Mr. Bloomberg was mentioned by name eight times in the chapter, which was reviewed by The Times.

When the report was published a few weeks later, the chapter was gone. So was any mention of Mr. Bloomberg’s name.

Yasmine Taeb, an author of the report, said in an interview that the authors had been instructed to make drastic revisions or remove the chapter, and opted to do the latter rather than “whitewash the N.Y.P.D.’s wrongdoings.” She said she found it “disconcerting” to be asked to remove the chapter “because of how it was going to be perceived by Mayor Bloomberg.”

...[A]t least one senior official wrote at the time that there would be a “strong reaction from Bloomberg world if we release the report as written,” according to an email reviewed by The Times. And three people with direct knowledge of the situation said Mr. Bloomberg was a factor.

Alienating him might not have been a cost-free proposition. When the report came out, he had already given the organization three grants worth nearly $1.5 million, and in 2017 he contributed $400,000 more.

...It was during his 12 years at City Hall that Mr. Bloomberg wrote the playbook for propping up allies and co-opting opponents with a mix of political and charitable giving. Even as he spent $268 million on his three campaigns and made $23 million in campaign contributions to others, his philanthropy gave away $2.8 billion, much of it to civic and cultural groups around New York.

...His spending on electoral politics has also steadily increased, from about $11 million in 2013, his final year as mayor, to the more than $100 million during the 2018 midterms.

All of those funds flow not just from Bloomberg Philanthropies and Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC, Independence USA, but through an array of advocacy groups that rely on him for donations in the tens of millions of dollars. A number of them are cornerstones of liberal politics, including the Sierra Club, one of the country’s most influential environmental groups, Planned Parenthood and Everytown for Gun Safety.

The foundation, along with Mr. Bloomberg’s other entities, has become something of a talent stable for people he admires-- public officials, business leaders and political strategists, among others. The foundation’s board looks almost like a shadow administration, including luminaries like former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and current or former executives from companies including American Express, Disney and Morgan Stanley.

...His domestic philanthropy has also overlapped with his political agenda, tying him closely to powerful progressive interest groups and amassing reservoirs of gratitude, admiration and influence across the country.

His relationship with the Sierra Club is a case in point. While he was still mayor, Mr. Bloomberg began expressing a keen interest in climate change. The Sierra Club had been working for years to block the construction of coal-fired power plants but wanted to go on the offensive, forcing aging plants offline. In the summer of 2011, Mr. Bloomberg stood on a barge on the Potomac River with the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, to announce a $50 million gift to the group’s Beyond Coal initiative, a figure that has since grown to over $100 million.

Separately, Mr. Bloomberg has deployed his political apparatus to advance the same agenda. In 2015, he announced that he would spend more than $10 million running ads against state attorneys general who were litigating against the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate emissions. In 2018, he gave $5 million to the League of Conservation Voters, and partnered with the group to identify targets for his political giving, including elections for an obscure New Mexico panel that regulates energy utilities.

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, said the former mayor tended to approach his large-scale causes by seeking out trusted partners-- political leaders or organizations-- and using various parts of his operation to support them... That model of concentrating political and philanthropic spending has defined Mr. Bloomberg’s approach in other arenas.

A champion of charter schools, Mr. Bloomberg has used his wealth in numerous ways to sway education policy in Louisiana. As mayor, he began giving relatively small donations, several thousand dollars each, to candidates in Louisiana school board races. But that investment sharply increased after a former New York City deputy schools chancellor, John White, became Louisiana’s state education chief in 2012.

Mr. Bloomberg has made more than $5 million in political donations in the state, including $3.6 million to Empower Louisiana, an education-focused political committee chaired by a powerful Republican donor, and also backed Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. Over the same period, Mr. Bloomberg gave nearly $15 million to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to promote charter schools, and his foundation gave nearly $3 million to the City of New Orleans. Two former senior aides to Mr. Landrieu are now helping lead Mr. Bloomberg’s political strategy in the South and his national outreach to African-American voters.

Some places have become points of convergence for numerous strands of Mr. Bloomberg’s agenda. In Washington State, he contributed more than $2 million to political committees focused on issues like gun control, carbon pricing, soda taxes and same-sex marriage. At the same time, he showered the City of Seattle with grant money for climate-related policy, and the Bloomberg-funded group Everytown for Gun Safety deployed lawyers there, first to help craft regulations and then to defend them in court.

The city’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, now sits on the steering committee of C40 Cities, an alliance of mayors confronting climate change. Mr. Bloomberg is the head of its board. Even in a city like her own, Ms. Durkan said, Mr. Bloomberg stands out.

“There’s a lot of wealth here, and I see a lot of people who are personally interested, to varying degrees,” she said. “I’ve never seen the Mike Bloomberg package before.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s giving to Johns Hopkins has also intersected with his political advocacy. In Maryland, where the university is among the state’s most prominent institutions, he spent more than a half-million dollars in 2014 seeking to elect a governor supportive of gun control. The Bloomberg name, politicians say, is well known throughout the state because of the institutions that carry it, most of all the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at the school, said the foundation kept in close touch to monitor the projects it funded, track their attention in the media and connect recipients of Mr. Bloomberg’s money with other people close to the former mayor.

“Sometimes they’ll call us and say, ‘There’s a mayor who is interested in this-- can you talk to them?’” said Dr. Sharfstein, who directs the Bloomberg American Health Initiative, built on a $300 million donation from Mr. Bloomberg.

The range and reach of Mr. Bloomberg’s spending, experts say, cannot but play to his advantage in the presidential race.

“The fact that he can call in all these favors, all over the country-- a normal person can’t do that,” said Adav Noti, chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center. “A normal person will never be able to do that.”

Policy, the Bloomberg Way

On a national level, there is arguably no issue more closely associated with Mr. Bloomberg than gun control. Nor does any other issue better capture the tension between his preference for data-driven, incremental, top-down strategy and the surges of ambitious activism that have increasingly defined American politics.

It was a cause he embraced after winning re-election as mayor. On New Year’s Day 2006, Mr. Bloomberg declared in his inaugural address that he saw an urgent duty “to rid our streets of guns, and punish all those who possess and traffic in these instruments of death.”

That April, he convened a Gracie Mansion summit of 15 mayors from across the country, marking the beginning of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which within a few short months included more than 100 civic leaders from 44 states.

Soon enough, Mr. Bloomberg ramped up his spending on politics beyond New York. Frustrated at the flow of firearms from Virginia, a state with lax gun laws, Mr. Bloomberg tried to buoy candidates in the state’s 2011 elections who shared his views.

Then, in 2013, he received a visitor in New York: Mr. McAuliffe, by then a candidate for governor of Virginia. He proposed to Mr. Bloomberg that he make the state a decade-long priority, with an eye toward empowering Democratic supporters of gun regulation.

“I walked out with a multimillion-dollar commitment that day,” Mr. McAuliffe recalled.

Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $3 million in Virginia that year through his super PAC, helping propel Mr. McAuliffe to the governorship and electing a Democratic attorney general supportive of gun control, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. He has plowed millions more into the state since then, culminating last fall with a takeover of the state legislature by Democrats who are now seeking to pass a series of tougher gun laws.

Then, after leaving office in December 2013, Mr. Bloomberg began expanding his advocacy operation. He founded a new group, Everytown for Gun Safety, which has since spent tens of millions of dollars pushing for gun control measures, with considerable success in swing states like Colorado and Nevada.

Incorporated as a nonprofit, Everytown does not need to disclose its donors or most of its expenditures, but officials there say Mr. Bloomberg typically provides roughly one-third of the group’s budget. While officials at Everytown said the group was ultimately independent, it is closely intertwined with Mr. Bloomberg’s political operation.

Everytown is managed directly by one of Mr. Bloomberg’s close lieutenants, John Feinblatt, a former New York deputy mayor whose wedding Mr. Bloomberg officiated in 2011. Numerous people connected to the group said it channeled Mr. Bloomberg’s priorities, including his strong preference for working with both parties.

The organization came into existence through an almost corporate-style merger: Mr. Bloomberg already had a gun control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but he needed a grass-roots army to compete with the National Rifle Association. So it joined forces with an existing activist group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, to form Everytown.

Moms Demand Action had sprung up on Facebook after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Volunteers organized into local chapters, held protests and lobbied for legislation. After a year of working long hours for no compensation, many volunteers were running on fumes and well aware their organization needed money.

Mr. Bloomberg promised to infuse the movement with $50 million, bringing his mayors’ group and Moms Demand Action under the Everytown umbrella. According to his spokesman, Mr. Bloomberg has underwritten the gun control movement with a total of $270 million since 2007. But with his backing came a stark shift in culture and a rigid new command structure, one that left some activists feeling they were pawns in matching red T-shirts.

People involved in the group described being forced to communicate exclusively in canned talking points. Kate Ranta, shot twice by her ex-husband in front of her young son, was a member of Everytown’s network of survivors. She was asked to address a rally on the steps of the Capitol, along with her son. Standing beside Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, and Representative John Lewis, she found herself stumbling over the text she had been given.

“Someone from Everytown wrote my speech. It was pushing their legislative agenda versus my authentic voice,” Ms. Ranta said. “I couldn’t say ‘gun control.’ It was moderate messaging-- ‘gun safety’ and ‘gun violence prevention.’”

Other members greatly appreciated the new direction from Everytown. “A structure began to be put into place, and we could avail ourselves of the data that was offered so we could speak more intelligently,” said June Rubin, a Moms Demand Action volunteer in New York. “So we’re focused and single-issue and highly recognizable and speaking with one voice, and it’s powerful.”

The policy agenda was to be focused on tightening background checks; more radical ideas like banning assault weapons were off the table. “There were people who were very, very troubled by that,” Ms. Rubin said. “I became very pragmatic.”

More confrontational tactics were also rejected. After the mass shooting last year at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex., other groups organized protests to pressure the retailer to change its policies. But Moms members were discouraged from attending and told not to show any affiliation if they did. One Moms official told volunteers in a closed Facebook group that doing otherwise could “undercut our relations with responsible gun owners whose support we need.”

“Our goal is always to get results, and sometimes that means playing the outside game and sometimes it requires playing the inside game and working with partners who have shown themselves to be amenable to change,” said Maxwell Young, chief of public affairs for Everytown. “We’ve found Walmart to be an ally on gun safety and an example of a leader always willing to engage in productive conversations.”

Mr. Bloomberg also insisted on a strategy of bipartisanship, frustrating activists who saw the Republican Party as unalterably opposed to their goals. In 2016, he spent nearly $12 million to re-elect Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a Republican supportive of background checks but strongly conservative on nearly everything else.

Lisa Boswell, a former Moms volunteer who got involved after the Sandy Hook shooting, said activists in Pennsylvania were ignored. “While the ground volunteers were very much opposed to this idea, the decision was going to be made at a higher level, without taking those views into consideration,” she said.

Mr. Wolfson said that in the wake of Sandy Hook, Mr. Bloomberg felt strongly that Mr. Toomey’s support for background checks represented “an extremely important moment.” Mr. Bloomberg’s view, he said, was that “if you are asking someone to take a strong bipartisan stand in support of an absolute key priority, you want to be supportive of them.”

In 2018, even as Mr. Bloomberg was spending nine figures to defeat congressional Republicans, Everytown backed another Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, for re-election. A number of local volunteers, who said they had been assured that Everytown had no plans to support Mr. Fitzpatrick, quit to form their own gun control organization.

Former members of Moms Demand Action, who had been cut off from private Facebook groups and blocked by leadership on Twitter, were surprised when they received emails from Mike Bloomberg 2020. Then they learned his campaign had rented the group’s email list, for $3.2 million, two days before he announced his candidacy in November.

At least a half-dozen former Everytown and Moms Demand Action officials have joined the Bloomberg campaign, including senior political and legal strategists and the deputy director of the Survivors Network. Spokespersons for both the Bloomberg camp and Everytown said that they had put up a firewall in the campaign, and that there was no coordination between the two entities.

In his campaign, Mr. Bloomberg has proposed a gun control agenda that goes far beyond Everytown’s, including a ban on assault-style weapons and a national licensing system.

When Mr. Bloomberg spent roughly $10 million on a Super Bowl commercial this month, he chose to focus his 60-second spot entirely on gun control. The emotional ad featured Calandrian Simpson-Kemp, whose son had been shot and killed, and who previously appeared in videos for Everytown, wearing the distinctive red Moms Demand Action T-shirt.

Powerful Alliances

In the presidential race, Mr. Bloomberg has activated his sprawling network of allies to great effect-- drawing on his foundation and its beneficiaries to build a campaign staff, and calling on politicians he has supported in the past for their endorsements.

It is that network, as much as the raw force of his campaign spending, that has propelled Mr. Bloomberg into contention in the Democratic race. He is not the only candidate spending hundreds of millions of dollars promoting himself: Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund investor, has spent at least $243 million of his fortune on the race but has struggled to win support.

Mr. Bloomberg’s trajectory has been different. He has climbed to the top rank of contenders, even catching up to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in some national polls.

Since the start of his campaign, more than 50 employees of Bloomberg Philanthropies have moved across town to his Times Square campaign headquarters as paid staff members, including the foundation’s chief executive, Patricia E. Harris, a former New York deputy mayor, and James Anderson, previously the foundation’s head of government innovation.

Overnight, Ms. Harris and Mr. Anderson went from providing cities around the country with grants to contacting mayors for support. Dozens of current and former mayors have since endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, including leaders from major cities like Houston, Memphis, Tampa and Washington.

Two prominent Democratic leaders with direct ties to the foundation quickly renounced their support for Mr. Biden after Mr. Bloomberg joined the race. Former Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia, a fellow attached to Mr. Bloomberg’s What Works Cities initiative, became a paid adviser to the campaign. Manny Diaz, the former mayor of Miami and a paid board member at Bloomberg Philanthropies, defected from Mr. Biden to Mr. Bloomberg several weeks later.

Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign commercials have featured his crusades against coal, tobacco companies and the N.R.A. And he has continued to dole out money to the party-- giving $10 million to a super PAC supporting House Democrats, $5 million to a voting-rights group led by Stacey Abrams, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee as well as dozens of state parties. The D.N.C. recently revised its debate-qualification standard to make it possible for someone like Mr. Bloomberg, who does not accept political donations, to participate, drawing accusations of favoritism from other campaigns.

One of the first members of Congress to endorse Mr. Bloomberg was Representative Stephanie Murphy of Florida. Elected in 2016 as a champion of gun control, Ms. Murphy said she had worked closely with Everytown on legislation, and said Mr. Bloomberg had shown his political mettle by backing groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood.

“All of these are organizations that supported and endorsed my campaign in ’16 and ’18,” Ms. Murphy said. “This is a guy who puts his money where his mouth is.”

Mr. Bloomberg has promised to do just that in the general election, spending aggressively to defeat Mr. Trump no matter who the nominee is. But advisers to Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged the scale and focus of his spending would differ, depending on whether he is the Democratic standard-bearer.

“If Mike Bloomberg is the nominee, he will ensure that the Democratic Party has the greatest funding in its history,” Mr. Wolfson said, describing a plan to guarantee “all 50 states have the resources that Democrats need to compete up and down the ballot.”

If Mr. Bloomberg is not nominated, Mr. Wolfson suggested a narrower focus. “If you’re trying to defeat Donald Trump and you’re not on the ballot, you’re going to focus on the battleground states,” he said.

There are places where Mr. Bloomberg’s past spending has left a less helpful mark for his campaign: Pennsylvania may be one of them, since some Democrats there still resent his past support for Mr. Toomey. Teacher unions view Mr. Bloomberg with distrust because of his donations to school-choice groups and his charter-friendly policies as mayor.

But in most places he has ventured as a candidate, Mr. Bloomberg’s many years of largess have helped earn him a warm reception.

During the week of the Iowa caucuses, he toured California with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, for whom Mr. Bloomberg spent millions in a 2018 gubernatorial race, and San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, a beneficiary of Bloomberg foundation grants. He visited Providence, R.I., to be endorsed by Gov. Gina Raimondo, a moderate Democrat whose election Mr. Bloomberg aided in 2014. And he got an endorsement from Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, for whom Mr. Bloomberg’s super PAC spent more than $2 million in the last midterm elections.

Some of his biggest endorsements have come out of cities that have been focal points for his philanthropy. In the Bay Area, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation has distributed dozens of grants to museums, dance companies and climate organizations, while his political donations have funded school board candidates and referendums to tax soda and ban e-cigarettes. San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, endorsed Mr. Bloomberg last month, hailing his “ability to beat Trump.”

Mr. Wolfson said no promises had been made to Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsers about what they could expect from him down the line. “I haven’t had a single conversation with anyone where I suggested or implied any future support, nor did anyone ask for it,” he said.

So far, most lawmakers Mr. Bloomberg supported in 2018 have not endorsed him, but in interviews several acknowledged that his status as a patron of the party was weighing on their thinking. Sitting down with members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition on Capitol Hill last month, Mr. Bloomberg was greeted by a sequence of thank-yous from House members he backed in 2018, according to two lawmakers present.

Neo-fascist slob Steve Bannon knows from first-hand experience how a plutocrat can buy the presidency. Friday, on PBS' Firing Line, he predicted that "2020 is going to be the nastiest election in American history" with Bloomberg buying the Democratic Party to use as a vehicle of both ego and Trump-hatred. Jacobin writer Ross Barkan opined this week that "an admirer of dictators, a lowbrow misogynist, an unfiltered bigot-- Michael Bloomberg is the only Democratic contender who might actually be worse than Trump... Though the Democratic Party has moved away from its admiration for union-busting charter schools, Bloomberg remains an ardent supporter. He isn’t about to embrace single-payer health care. He does, at least, believe in science and he would, inarguably, represent an improvement over Donald Trump, but that is not supposed to be the bare standard on which the next president is judged. Swapping kakistocracy for oligarchy will not undo the damage of the Trump presidency. It will merely calcify the rot." Which Republican would you vote for?