Would You Prefer A Super-Rich President Or A Middle Class President?

I put this together yesterday while I was waiting for Super Tuesday results to start coming in. I was too distracted to do anything more useful or worthwhile  So this is what each candidate has-- calculated before the Great Trump Crash of 2020. And, yes, Señor Trumpanzee actually may be a billionaire-- by the skin of his teeth:

Status Quo Joe

Elizabeth

Bernie

Tulsi

Why no Bloomberg? Like Trump, he's puts a tremendous amount of energy and resources into hiding his worth and even his personal financial disclosure report, which is due to come out "after" today. According to Wallethub.com excluding home equity, the average presidential candidate owns assets worth $208.5 million, compared to $29,410 for the median American. The average candidate was $16 million in cash savings, compared to the average American, who has less than a thousand dollars in cash savings.

They asked a bunch of economists "All else being equal, who would make the better president: someone rich or someone poor?" Here were the responses:

• Drew Landry, Assistant Professor of Government, South Plains College: "No difference. We had good presidents who were rich, bad presidents who were rich, good presidents who were poor, and bad presidents who were poor. This is clearly subjective."
• Richardson Dilworth, Associate Professor, Drexel University - Department of History & Politics: "I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone make a serious run for president who was actually poor. If all else were indeed equal I don’t think the financial condition of the candidate would determine whether they were a good or bad president-- and being a 'better' president is a pretty subjective judgment."
• Brandon Rottinghaus, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Houston: "Mount Rushmore has presidents of high and modest means. Presidents are honed by their experiences and shaped by the history into which they are elected. How rich or poor they are is less important. In recent polling, we asked voters if they would be more or less likely to support a billionaire for president. Most voters indicate it makes no difference to them, but more responded it would make them less likely to vote for a billionaire candidate. In today’s populist polarized climate, being a billionaire is a net neutral edging towards a net negative."

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.

Can You Tie Fascism To Plutocracy? You're Joking, Right?

No Bumps In The Road-- What More Do We Have To Say?

Billionaire Steve Cloobeck-- a gross oinker in somewhat human form-- and his lovely wife Chantal have given immense sums of money to the Democratic Party and to conservativish Democratic candidates, a $1,000,000 check, for example, to a Hillary Clinton super PAC-- as well as assorted largesse to everyone's favorite Dems, like Joe Lieberman, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Kirsten Gillibrand (back in her anti-immigrant/pro-NRA days), Joe Crowley, Dick Gephardt... all the people who have forced the Democratic Party into the kind of decay and moral bankruptcy that laid the groundwork for a fascist shit like Trump to be elected. Please watch the short clueless MSNBC clip-- and commentary-- above before I tell you little about Willie Brown.

It's unimaginable that these 2 wouldn't be connected

Willie Brown was once the most powerful politician in California, though he never ran for anything more than the state Assembly and the San Francisco mayoralty. He served as Speaker of the Assembly for 15 years-- including for a time when the Republicans had the majority! Today Willie is a somewhat prominent Bay Area media figure-- radio shows, a podcast, newspaper columns and OpEds... This past Saturday, The Chronicle ran one: Elizabeth Warren can win the nomination. California is key. "For Sen. Elizabeth Warren," he wrote, "the road to the White House runs right through California and right over fellow Sens. Kamala Harris [Brown's ex-girlfriend] and Bernie Sanders. A win or even a strong showing by the Massachusetts senator in California’s 2020 primary, coupled with good results in Iowa and New Hampshire’s early-state contests, would vault the former college professor into the Democratic nomination contest’s top tier. If Warren’s appearances around the Bay Area during last weekend’s California Democratic Party convention are any indication, she’s off to a good start on achieving her goal." [To be honest, a win or even a strong showing by anyone in California's 2020 primary, couple with good results in Iowa and New Hampshire's early state contests would vault any of them into the Democratic nomination's top tier, evening of the one-percenters.] 

Our old friend, emorej, offered an alternative headline for Brown's Chronicle piece: "Willie Brown shows Joe Biden that, after aging out of money-drenched politics, in an era of establishment decline, one can stroke one’s own ego for attention more reliably and enjoyably by truth-telling than by declaring a doomed Presidential candidacy." That's some headline! But you get the point, I'm sure. He added "A California establishment that cannot bribe or bully silence from Willie Brown, who knows where more California corruption bodies are buried than any other person (living or dead), is further proof of ongoing establishment collapse, especially in California, where this collapse suggests that Kamala Harris's candidacy is almost as doomed as Joe Biden's."

Emorej seems impressed with Willie's line that "Warren’s stump speech is pretty much a greatest hits package of proposals that Sanders was touting in 2016," pointing out that Brown's "very positive views on Warren are tempered by this additional bit of truth-telling." What a great ticket she and Bernie would make! Gotta protect the country from... well, you know. Here, watch Professor Stanley on with Amy Goodman:

Out Of Touch With Popular Culture-- But Not Out Of Touch With That Devil Alexander Hamilton

I was never a big fan of most pop music. I found it disposable and a waste of time for the most part. I was always more into cutting edge stuff-- like the just-released song up top by the Scottish band Paris Street Rebels. The band is barely 2 years old and their press agent tried to put their music in context by explaining that they take the best parts of the transatlantic Punk explosion of the 1970's and combine it with towering melodies and 21st century working class outrage. Their region has collapsed economically. All 4 "hail from the tough mining town of Ballingry, Fife, Scotland where the mines have long shut down and 'Thatcher' is still a dirty word. The band look to music as an escape, an antidote and a means to elevate themselves and others like them from the indignity of a story left untold, a destiny unfulfilled. Beyond the confines of their beginnings, Paris Street Rebels' ultimate goal is to unite the forgotten people, the misfits, the lost, the persecuted, the afraid and everyone in between. To give something back in an age where musicians and artists only exist to take. To give the world what it's been missing ever since Rock 'n' Roll lost its teeth. 'Freakshow' is a schizophrenic anthem penned in desperation. The need to escape to an almost mythical, promised land where authenticity trumps artifice and drives the narrative whilst simultaneously realizing that this can only be achieved by changing the place and time you're in."

I ran the Student Activities Board at my university. I was out of touch with pop culture back then too. I booked unknown bands and artists very few people wanted to hear. But now anyone who went to Stony Brook in those days brags about how they heard Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, the Dead, Otis Redding, Tim Buckley, The Airplane, Ravi Shankar, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, The Who, Jackson Browne, The Byrds... long before anyone had heard of them. (I had to fight off a serious impeachment challenge for "wasting" $400 of student money on The Doors.

Earlier today I explained why I never watched The West Wing. Another admission: though I had been invited numerous times, I never went to see Hamilton. Let me explain why-- but first some context. I was an "A" student in high school. And history was my best subject. One teacher, who was embarrassed that I had so much more knowledge about the subject than she did was wise enough to have me teach the class while she took the opportunity to go to the teachers' lounge and smoke cigarettes. The following year, we got a young wiz kid, Mr. Feldman as our history teacher. Madison High was lucky to get him and he definitely knew more about history than I did. I graduated in 1965 but he stayed. I found an old NY Times article about the school from 1975, 10 years after I had left.

When New York City first desegregated its high school system 10 years ago, James Madison High School in the South Flatbush section of Brooklyn seemed a good place to start. Academically, it was one of the best in the entire city and regularly sent almost 90 per cent of its 1,000 graduates off to college. The faculty had a fair complement of civil‐rights sympathizers, and the surrounding community, a grid of neat brick and stucco houses set off by tiny but faultlessly trimmed lawns, was dominated by middle‐class Jews, largely Democratic and loosely liberal, who presumably would offer little objection to giving blacks and Puerto Ricans a chance at a better education. “When the blacks first came,” recalls Rae Marcus, now an assistant principal at the school, “there was none of the feeling of ‘Why us?’ The community and faculty and kids were all ready. If integration would work any place, we thought, it would work at Madison.”

Chuck Schumer graduated a year after me, went to Harvard and soon after was elected to the state Assembly (where he quickly turned himself over to Wall Street). The Times interviewed the young Assemblyman for the story. He was socially liberal and said "I looked at the black kids with the same regard as the whites in the business and commercial course. There was no animosity or anything. They were just different; they were not the kinds of kids who were friends.”

I couldn't resist but the quote I was really looking for was Mr. Feldman's, the whiz kid history teacher, who seemed mournful that the school was by then desegregated.

Others have moved beyond a sense of helplessness to one of resentment. “In the old days, teaching wasn't work; it was a pleasant experience,” says Stanley Feldstein, a history teacher who has written three books on race and ethnic history and has one of the school's few doctorates. “Now I look on it as a job.” Several weeks ago, Feldstein, now so unhappy that he is seeking a transfer to another high school, had to take a knife away from one of his freshman girls who was prepared to stick it into a boy who had just pinched her. “I just don't like to be a cop, that's all,” he said. “You're not really in class to teach any more. You're there just to keep discipline.'

In some ways Mr. Feldstein was one of my favorite teachers. I saw one serious flaw at the time: Alexander Hamilton-worship. My own idol was my grandfather and he always taught me that Hamilton was a capitalist pig and Washington's biggest mistake. I was crestfallen when Mr. Feldstein sang his praises at every opportunity. I started thinking Mr. Feldstein might be the first Republican I had ever met. I didn't care what he said about this-- I was, and would always be, a Jeffersonian.

This morning I was happy to see that one of my friends, Matt Stoller, wrote a wonderful piece for The Baffler about Hamilton-- The Hamilton Hustle-- a couple of years ago. He found all the recent praise for Hamilton, especially within the Democratic Party, "strange [since] it presumes that Alexander Hamilton was a figure for whom social justice and democracy were key animating traits." Maybe Stoller had a grandfather like mine. "Given how Democrats, in particular, embraced the show and Hamilton himself as a paragon of social justice," he wrote, "you would think that he had fought to enlarge the democratic rights of all Americans. But Alexander Hamilton simply didn’t believe in democracy, which he labeled an American 'disease.' He fought--with military force-- any model of organizing the American political economy that might promote egalitarian politics. He was an authoritarian, and proud of it." More recently, there were people who found his rile analogous to Trotsky's in the Russian Revolution.

To assert Hamilton disliked democracy is not controversial. The great historian Henry Adams described an evening at a New York dinner, when Hamilton replied to democratic sentiment by banging the table and saying, “Your people, sir-- your people is a great beast!” Hamilton’s recommendation to the Constitutional Convention, for instance, was to have a president for life, and to explicitly make that president not subject to law.

Professional historians generally avoid emphasizing Hamilton’s disdain for the people, at least when they write for the broad public. Better to steer safely clear of the freight train of publicity and money behind the modern Hamilton myth. One exception is amateur historian William Hogeland, who noted in a recent Boston Review essay that Hamilton had strong authoritarian tendencies. Hamilton, he wrote, consistently emphasized “the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.”

Indeed, most of Hamilton’s legacy is astonishingly counter-democratic. His central role in founding both the financial infrastructure of Wall Street and a nascent military establishment (which supplanted the colonial system of locally controlled democratic militias) was rooted in his self-appointed crusade to undermine the ability of ordinary Americans to govern themselves. We should be grateful not that Hamilton structured the essential institutions of America to fit his vision, but that he failed to do so. Had he succeeded, we would probably be living in a military dictatorship.

Viewers of the play Hamilton have a difficult time grasping this point. It just seems outlandish that an important American political official would argue that democracy was an actively bad system. Sure, America’s leadership caste has done plenty on its own to subvert the legal norms and folkways of self-rule, via voting restrictions, lobbying and corruption, and other appurtenances of access-driven self-dealing. But the idea of openly opposing the hallowed ideal of popular self-government is simply inconsistent with the past two hundred years of American political culture. And this is because, in the election of 1800, when Hamilton and his Federalist allies were finally crushed, America repudiated aristocracy and began the long journey toward establishing a democratic political culture and undoing some, though not all, of the damage wrought by Hamilton’s plutocratic-leaning Federalist Party.

Indeed, the shifting popular image of Hamilton is itself a gauge of the relative strength of democratic institutions at any given moment. In the roaring 1920s, when Wall Street lorded it over all facets of our public life, treasury secretary Andrew Mellon put Hamilton’s face on the ten-dollar bill. Mellon was the third richest man in the country, famous for, among other things, having his brother and chairman of one of his coal mining subsidiaries extoll the virtues of using machine guns to enforce labor discipline. Mellon himself, who later presided over the Great Depression, was routinely lauded by big business interests as the “greatest secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” Big business leaders in Pittsburgh, such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, worshipped Hamilton (as well as Napoleon).

During the next decade, as populists put constraints on big money, Hamilton fell into disrepute. In 1925, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then just a lawyer, recognized Hamilton as an authoritarian, saying that he had in his mind after reading a popular new book on Hamilton and Jefferson “a picture of escape after escape which this nation passed through in those first ten years; a picture of what might have been if the Republic had been finally organized as Alexander Hamilton sought.” By 1947, a post-war congressional report titled “Fascism in Action” listed Hamilton as one intellectual inspiration for the Nazi regime. Hamilton’s name practically became an epithet among Democrats of the New Deal era, which makes it all the more surprising that he is the darling of the modern party.

Within this context, it’s useful to recognize that Hamilton the play is not the real story of Alexander Hamilton; rather, as historian Nancy Isenberg has noted, it’s a revealing parable about the politics of the finance-friendly Obama era. The play is based on Ron Chernow’s eight-hundred-page 2004 biography of Hamilton. Chernow argues that “Hamilton was an abolitionist who opposed states’ rights, favored an activist central government, a very liberal interpretation of the Constitution and executive rather than legislative powers.” Hamilton, he notes, “sounds . . . like a modern Democrat.” The abolition arguments are laughably false; Hamilton married into a slaveholding family and traded slaves himself. But they are only part of a much broader obfuscation of Hamilton’s politics.

To understand how outrageous Chernow’s understanding of Hamilton is, we must go through a few key stories from Hamilton’s life. We should probably start with the Newburgh Conspiracy—Hamilton’s attempt to foment a military coup against the Continental Congress after the Revolution. In 1782 several men tried to organize an uprising against the Continental Congress. The key leader was Robert Morris, Congress’s superintendent of finance and one of Hamilton’s mentors. Morris was the wealthiest man in the country, and perhaps the most powerful financier America has ever known, with the possible exception of J. P. Morgan. His chief subordinate in the plot was a twenty-seven-year-old Hamilton, former aide-de-camp of George Washington and delegate to the Congress.

After the war, army officers, then camped out in Newburgh, New York, had not been paid for years of service. Morris and Hamilton saw in this financial-cum-political crisis an opportunity to structure a strong alliance between the military elite and wealthy investors. Military officers presented a petition to Congress for back pay. Congress tried to pass a tax to pay the soldiers, while also withholding payments owed to bondholders. Hamilton blocked this move. Indeed, according to Hogeland, “when a motion was raised to levy the impost only for the purpose of paying army officers, Hamilton shot it down: all bondholders must be included.” Meanwhile, Morris and Hamilton secretly encouraged General Horatio Gates at Newburgh to organize a mutiny. After unifying investors and the military elite, Morris and Hamilton calculated that the military officer corps would threaten Congress with force unless the Articles of Confederation were amended to allow full federal taxing power by federal officials. This coup attempt would then, they reasoned, force Congress to override state governments that were more democratic in their approach to political economy, and place aristocrats in charge.

According to Hogeland,

In Morris’s plan these taxes, collected not by weak state governments but by a cadre of powerful federal officers, would be earmarked for making hefty interest payments to wealthy financiers—including Morris himself, along with his friends and colleagues—who held millions of dollars in federal bonds, the blue-chip tier of domestic war debt.

Douchebag! by Chip Proser

The mutiny itself failed due to a public statement by George Washington opposing a military uprising. But in broader terms, the plot succeeded, once Washington promptly warned Congress about the unstable situation and urged that they take drastic action to centralize and federalize the structure of the American republic. Military officers received what would be the equivalent today of multi-million-dollar bonuses, paid largely in federal debt instruments. This effectively institutionalized the elite coalition that Morris and Hamilton sought to weaponize into a tool of destabilization. The newly unified creditors and military officers formed a powerful bloc of aristocratic power within the Congress that pushed hard to dramatically expand federal taxing power. This group “set up [Hamilton’s] career,” Hogeland writes, because by placing him in power over their asset base-- a national debt-- they would assure a steady stream of unearned income. Chernow obscures Hamilton’s participation in the mutiny, claiming in a rushed disclaimer to preserve his hero’s honor that Hamilton feared a military uprising-- but he then proceeds to note that Hamilton “was playing with combustible forces” by attempting to recruit Washington to lead the coup. It’s a howling inconsistency bordering on falsification.

When Hamilton became Washington’s secretary of the treasury, he swiftly arranged the de facto payoff of the officer group at Newburgh, valuing their bonds at par and paying them the interest streams they wanted. Here was perhaps the clearest signal that the Federalist Party was structured as an alliance between bondholders and military elites, who would use a strong central government as a mechanism to extract money from the farming public. This was Hamiltonian statecraft, and it was modeled on the political system of the Whigs in Great Britain, the party of “monied interests” whose power was anchored by the Bank of England.



Chernow, a longtime Wall Street Journal financial writer, portrays Hamilton as a visionary financial genius who saw beyond the motley array of foolish yeoman farmers who supported his ideological foe Thomas Jefferson. In lieu of the static Jeffersonian vision of a yeoman’s republic, Chernow’s Hamilton is reputed to have created a dynamic, forward-looking national economy-- though it’s more accurate to say that Hamilton was simply determined to shore up the enduring basis of a financial and industrial empire. Hillary Clinton even quoted the play paraphrasing Hamilton’s line, “They don’t have a plan-- they just hate mine.” But in fact, there were competing modern visions of finance during the period, as Terry Bouton showed in Taming Democracy. And the one we have today-- a public central bank, substantial government involvement in credit markets, paper money-- has characteristics of both.

True to their own aristocratic instincts and affiliations, Hamilton and his mentor Morris wanted to insulate decision-making from democratic influence. Morris told Congress that redistributing wealth upward was essential so that the wealthy could acquire “those Funds which are necessary to the full Exercise of their Skill and Industry,” and thereby promote progress. While in office, Hamilton granted a group of proto-venture-capitalists monopoly control over all manufacturing in Paterson Falls, New Jersey, the site of some of the most powerful waterfalls on the East Coast. Hamilton, who captained this group of investors, thought it would power a network of factories he would then control. Among the prerogatives enjoyed by the funders of the Paterson Falls project was the authority to condemn lands and charge tolls, powers typically reserved to governments. More broadly, in the fight to establish a for-profit national bank owned and controlled by investors, he placed control over the currency in the hands of the wealthy, linking it to gold and putting private financiers in charge.

Morris and Hamilton sought, as much as possible, to shift sovereign powers traditionally reserved for governments into the hands of new chartered institutions-- private corporations and banks-- that would be strategically immunized from the democratic “disease.” These were not corporations or banks as we know them; they were quasi-governmental institutions with monopoly power. Jefferson sought to place an anti-monopoly provision in the Constitution precisely because of this well-understood link between monopoly finance and political power.

Chernow portrays this far-reaching debate over the future direction of America’s productive life as a byproduct of Hamilton’s unassailably noble attempt to have the federal government retire the Revolutionary War debt. This is simply false (and a very common lie, expressed with admiration by other prominent Hamilton fans like Alan Greenspan and Andrew Mellon). Hamilton wanted a large permanent debt; he wanted it financed so his backers could extract a steady income from the people by way of federal taxes. To pay off the debt would be to kill the goose laying the golden egg. By constricting the question of democracy to a question of accounting, Chernow misrepresents what was really at stake. It was a fight over democracy, authoritarianism, and political economy-- and in many ways, the same one we’re having today.

Protests broke out in the western parts of the country, similar to pre-Revolution-era revolts against the British, who, in extracting revenues for the Crown and its allies, were pursuing the same policies that Hamilton did. These protests were a response not to taxes, but to the specific tax structure Hamilton constructed. Western farmers, though not poor, had little access to cash, so they used whiskey as currency-- a medium of exchange that farmers in many cases produced sporadically in backyard stills. Hamilton’s tax was a political attack on these farmers, whom he saw as his political opponents. The levy targeted whiskey because western farmers had converted this commodity into a competitive monetary system. The whiskey levy was also regressive, with a low rate on industrial distillers and a high rate for small farmers, with the goal of driving the farmers out of the whiskey business. Furthermore, Hamilton placed the collection authority for the tax in the hands of the wealthiest big distillers, who could then use it to drive their smaller competitors out of business. This was all intended not only to destroy the political power of small farmers, but to foment a rebellion that Hamilton could then raise an army to crush. And that’s just what happened.

In 1795, Washington and Hamilton raised more than ten thousand troops to march into Western Pennsylvania, the strongest redoubt of opposition to the new tax (known forever after as the Whiskey Rebellion). Washington, halfway through the march and perhaps doubting the wisdom of this use of military power, handed over command to Hamilton, and went home. Entrusted with executive power, Hamilton used indefinite detention, mass arrests, and round-ups; seized property (including food stores for the winter); and had soldiers administer loyalty oaths. He also attempted to collect testimony to use against his political enemies, such as William Findley and Albert Gallatin (who would later be Jefferson’s and Madison’s secretary of the treasury), which he “hoped to use,” as Hogeland writes, “to silence his political opponents by hanging them for treason.” This is the strong-armed tyranny that David Brooks (to take one among countless exemplars of latter-day Hamilton worship) celebrates when he says that Hamilton gave us “the fluid capital markets that are today the engine of world capitalism.” It is also, far from incidentally, what John Yoo cited as precedent when defending George W. Bush’s national security policies.



Similarly, Hamilton’s fights with John Adams in the late 1790s represented one of the most dangerous periods in American history, akin to the McCarthy era on steroids. The latter part of the French Revolution was as shocking to Americans of the early republic as the 1917 Russian Revolution was to their modern successors. It stoked the widespread fear among Federalists that any talk of democracy would lead to similar guillotine-style massacres; they began referring to Jefferson’s supporters as “Jacobins”-- an epithet that was the 1790s equivalent of “terrorist” or “communist.” This was the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made criticism of the government a federal crime. But in addition, and more frighteningly, Hamilton constructed the only partisan army in American history (titled the “New Army”) and tried to place himself at the head of it. Only Federalists could be officers. He envisioned himself leading an expedition into Florida and then South America, and mused aloud about putting Virginia “to the test” militarily. Ultimately, Adams-- perhaps the most unlikely savior of self-governance in the annals of our history-- figured out what Hamilton was doing and blocked him from becoming a New World Napoleon. The New Army was disbanded, and our military established a tradition of nonpartisanship.

...Hamilton lost, but not without bequeathing to later American citizens a starkly stratified political economy. Bouton argues that the defeats of the middle class in the 1780s and 1790s narrowed democracy for everyone. As poor white men found the freedoms for which they fought undermined by a wealthy elite, they in turn “tried to narrow the concept to exclude others.” Much of the turn toward a more reactionary version of white supremacy in the early 1800s, in other words, can be laid at Hamilton’s feet. Later on, Hamilton’s financial elite were ardently in favor of slave power. Manhattan, not any Southern state, was the first political entity to follow South Carolina’s call for secession, because of the merchants’ financial and cultural ties to the slave oligarchy. In other words, Hamilton’s unjust oligarchy of money and aristocracy fomented a more unjust oligarchy of race. The aggrieved rites of ethnic, racial, and cultural exclusion evident in today’s Trump uprising would no doubt spark a shock of recognition among the foes of Hamilton’s plutocracy-in-the-making.

...One of Hamilton’s biggest fans is Tim Geithner, the man who presided over the financial crisis and the gargantuan bank bailouts during the Obama presidency. In his 2014 memoir, Stress Test, Geithner wrote admiringly of Hamilton as the “original Mr. Bailout,” and said that “we were going to deploy federal resources in ways Hamilton never imagined, but given his advocacy for executive power and a strong financial system, I had to believe he would have approved.” He argues this was a financial policy decision. In doing so, he evades the pronounced anti-democratic impulses underlying the response to the financial crisis.

As economist Simon Johnson pointed out in a 2009 essay in The Atlantic titled “The Quiet Coup,” what the bailouts truly represented was the seizure of political power by a small group of American financiers. Just as in the founding era, we saw a massive foreclosure crisis and the evisceration of the main source of middle class wealth. A bailout, similar to one that created the national debt, ensured that wealth would be concentrated in the hands of a small group. The Citizens United decision and the ever-increasing importance of money in politics have strong parallels to the property disenfranchisement along class lines that occurred in the post-Revolutionary period. Just as turnout fell to record lows in much of the country in 2014, turnout collapsed after the rebellions were put down. And in another parallel, Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out across the country were evicted by armed guards-- a martial response coordinated by banks, the federal government, and many Democratic mayors.

The Obama era looks like an echo of the Federalist power grabs of the 1780s and 1790s, both in its enrichment and glorification of financial elites and its open disdain for anything resembling true economic democracy. The Obama political elite, in other words, celebrates Hamilton not in spite of Hamilton’s anti-democratic tendencies, but because of them.

Set in contrast to the actual life and career of its subject, the play Hamilton is a feat of political alchemy-- as is the stunningly successful marketing campaign surrounding it. But our generation’s version of Hamilton adulation isn’t all that different from the version that took hold in the 1920s: it’s designed to subvert democracy by helping the professional class to associate the rise of finance with the greatness of America, instead of seeing in that financial infrastructure the seeds of a dangerous authoritarian tradition.

In 1925, Franklin Roosevelt asked whether there might yet be a Jefferson to lead the forces of democracy against Hamilton’s money power. Perhaps someone-- maybe Elizabeth Warren, who pointed out on PBS that Hamilton was a plutocrat-- is asking that question again. That said, Hamilton is a great musical. The songs are catchy. The lyrics are beautiful. But the agenda is hidden, because in America, no political leader, not even Donald Trump, can credibly come right out and pronounce democracy a bad thing and agitate for rule by big finance. And the reason for that is that Alexander Hamilton, despite his success in structuring Wall Street, lost the battle against American democracy. Thank God for that.

And I'll never go see it. But I have three updates from an old high school friend, who I checked in with to make sure I had my facts straight. Fist of all, he told me that when the teacher left the class in my hands she was actually out flirting with Mr. Feldstein. I never knew. And he said that Mr. Feldstein is gay-- which I didn't know either-- and he was also cruel towards my friend who had a lisp and who Mr Feldstein would openly mock in class. Sure... that's the kind of person who champions Alexander Hamilton!

Trumpanzee Makes His Move Against The Florida GOP Establishment-- Endorses A Neo-Fascist For Governor

Suppose you found yourself in charge-- for a week. One week to clean up America. Would shooting plutocrats Sheldon Adelson, Rebekah (and Robert) Mercer and Foster Friess be part of the plan? (We’ll leave the Koch brothers out of this for a moment, because this post isn’t really about shooting anyone.)

Who remembers when Adam “Howdy Doody” Putnam retired from Congress in 2009? Little Howdy Doody had one dream… to be governor of Florida. So he ran for Agriculture Commissioner in 2010, a stepping stone to the governor’s mansion. And he’s waited patiently. Everyone assumed he would be a shoo-in for the Republican nomination in 2018. The 3 top Democrats in the race-- Andrew Gillum, Blue Dog Gwen Graham, and conservative self-funder Philip Levine-- have all been tacitly running against him. But Señor Trumpanzee upended the race this week, with a seemingly off-the-cuff tweet, pretty much endorsing a far right extremist congressman, Ron DeSantis. Every single poll since December of 2016 had shown Putnam winning the GOP primary and the most recent poll has him ahead of DeSantis 23-12%. But… along comes Mary, I mean Trumpanzee.

Back to Koch, Mercer and Friess. In the wake of Trump’s tweet they’re all on Team Neo-Nazi, part of DeSantis’ Finance Leadership Team, along with David Bossie and far right money-bags Jonathan Burkan, Dick Uihlein, Elliott Broidy, Roger Hertog, and Darwin and Doug Deason. Bossie, who doesn’t need a “neo” when his politics are described, said Trump and all those billionaires backing DeSantis sets him “apart from the rest [Putnam]. He will have the financial resources and the ground game and the Trump base to be an incredible statewide candidate.” Politico’s Marc Caputo:

As a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, DeSantis is a frequent Fox News guest who has earned a reputation as a small-government conservative, an opponent of the independent federal investigation of Trump and a supporter of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. And donors have so far loved what they have heard.

“These big national finance givers are true believers. Donors like Adelson care about Israel, and they watched DeSantis fight for what they care about,” the fundraiser said. “They see him consistently boosting Trump on Fox. So here they have a prominent national congressman who speaks their language, pushes their issue and defends their president.”

A spokesman for the Adelsons, who own the Las Vegas Sands casino empire, said “there is no decision on the level of financial support” for DeSantis but that the husband and wife duo “appreciate and have great respect for the leadership of Congressman Ron DeSantis on numerous issues.”

Mercer’s support for DeSantis stands above the others. She manages the political giving of her father, hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, and played a key role in the Trump transition. The Mercers, top supporters of Trump’s campaign, own a stake in the conservative Breitbart media enterprise and the Cambridge Analytica data firm used by Trump’s campaign.

Other top DeSantis finance team members include:

• Bernard Marcus, a Home Depot co-founder who has given nearly $18 million to federal campaigns and political committees since 2000, Federal Election Commission records show. Of that money, more than $7 million went to committees supporting Trump’s 2016 election.
• Thomas Peterffy, the founder of Interactive Brokers, one of the nation’s largest electronic brokerage firms. Peterffy contributed $366,200 in 2016 to two committees helping Trump’s election, according to Federal Election Commission records. Peterffy, according to a Time report, was Florida’s richest immigrant who supported Trump.
• Foster Friess, a Wyoming-based investor who has toyed with running for U.S. Senate in his home state after talking to Mercer and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Friess has given more than $4.3 million to federal campaigns and committees since 2000, with more than $2 million going to committees supporting Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign in 2012. Friess also donated $100,000 to the Trump Victory PAC in 2016.
• David A. Siegel, the CEO of Westgate Resorts in Orlando, who contributed $30,000 last year to the Trump Victory committee. Many expect the time-share mogul could start playing more in state and national politics with Trump’s election. Siegel last year said Trump’s election was “the greatest thing that's happened to me since I discovered sex.” Siegel’s wife, Jackie, said she once went on a few dates with Trump.

One name conspicuously absent from DeSantis’ list: Koch. None of the famed conservative brothers have signaled their support for him, though Siegel and other DeSantis backers, such as Dallas investor Doug Deason, are Koch network donors.

In a sign of his rising national profile, DeSantis played golf with Charles Koch in June at a Koch network retreat in Colorado. Another prominent Florida Republican who is considering a bid for governor, state House Speaker Richard Corcoran, didn’t get the same face time. While Trump’s tweet supporting DeSantis put a damper on Corcoran’s prospects, the list of top national donors supporting the congressman makes it even tougher for the state legislative leader to run as the conservative alternative to the GOP front-runner, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.

Though many of the big-name Republican donors who announced their support of DeSantis have yet to contribute to the congressman, his campaign-to-be is expecting their financial support in the beginning of the year to eat into the hefty fundraising advantage enjoyed by Putnam, who is widely perceived in Florida conservative circles as having a relatively weak right flank in a Republican primary.

In a state as big as Florida, where a week’s worth of saturation TV during next year’s general election could cost as much as $3 million, cash is king. And Putnam has so far reigned over both his likely and current Democratic and Republican rivals by raising his money from the major industries that do business in Florida’s capitol, such as agricultural interests, the health care industry, power companies and Disney.

Blue America is supporting Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum for governor of Florida. If you’d like to keep another Trumpist out of the governor’s mansion, please consider contributing to his campaign here. And if you want to read why we’re supporting Andrew, you can read about that here.