 |
| Former New York City mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg (Reuters/Brian Snyder via Business Insider) |
It's almost hard to know where to start. But I suppose we might as well start from the (chronological) beginning. Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City on January 1, 2002, just weeks after the September 11 attacks. He is sure to endlessly tout his "successful" tenure as mayor of the nation's most populous city now that he is running for president; in fact, his tenure was shameful and indefensible in many respects. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYPD began heavy surveillance targeting the city's Muslim population. According to a lawsuit by the ACLU (among others), the city "mapped more than two hundred and fifty mosques in and near New York State" and "monitored sermons, documented conversations, and compiled lists of people at religious services and meetings...all without prior evidence of wrongdoing," to quote from the New Yorker's article about the surveillance, along with posting video cameras to spy on congregants and collect license plate numbers at some of the fifty-three "mosques of concern" the police had identified.
The surveillance also extended to Muslim student groups. Not only did the police department monitor the websites of such groups at numerous universities, an undercover officer even went with a group of Muslim students from the City College of New York on a whitewater rafting trip, later listing the names of the other attendees in a report, as well as their conversation topics and the number of times they prayed. Turning to the New Yorker article again:
One man, who said that he had been paid up to $1,500 a month to work as a police informant, declared in a sworn statement that he had provided the police with phone numbers from a sign-up sheet listing people who attended Islamic instruction classes, and had been told to spy on a lecture at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, even though the police did not believe the Muslim student group there was doing anything wrong. The man, Shamiur Rahman, also said that he was told to use a strategy called "create and capture[.]"
"I was to pretend to be a devout Muslim and start an inflammatory conversation about jihad or terrorism and then capture the response to send to the NYPD," he said in a legal filing, later adding: "I never saw anyone I spied on do anything illegal, not even littering."Even as universities expressed concerns over this surveillance, Bloomberg strongly defended it. That defense fits perfectly with his similar defense of another bigoted NYPD policy: stop and frisk, which granted officers broad authority to detain suspected criminals, which, in turn, they used to routinely stop and frisk (hence the name) groups of black and Latino men. The overwhelmingly majority of those stopped and frisked were, unsurprisingly, not guilty of anything. According to data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, 90% of those the policy impacted were people of color. In 2013, when a federal judge found that stop and frisk had "intentionally and systematically violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of people," Bloomberg responded by saying the ruling was a "dangerous decision made by a judge who I think does not understand how policing works and what is compliant with the US Constitution." While Bloomberg has now issued a transparently politically motivated apology for his support of this policy, he defended it as recently as earlier this year, and his apology has rightly been dismissed by activists.
But really, who could be surprised that Bloomberg would grant carte blanche to the police to tread all over the rights of minority groups? After all, from 2001 to 2007—all of his first term as mayor and part of his second—he was a Republican. And by no means a nominal one at that: beginning in 2002, he began a successful bid to have the 2004 Republican National Convention hosted in New York City. When he addressed that convention, he made sure to vocally throw his support behind incumbent president George W. Bush, praising him "for leading the global war on terrorism."
Not every New Yorker was as delighted as Bloomberg to be hosting the RNC in their predominantly liberal city. But Bloomberg wasn't about to let that get in his way. Starting a year before the convention, the NYPD conducted elaborate surveillance on potential protestors, even when they had no apparent intention to commit a crime (sensing a pattern here yet?). When (overwhelming peaceful) protests did take place against the convention, police arrested over 1,800 and detained hundreds of protestors in unsanitary conditions, some for more than two days. After Bloomberg had been succeeded as mayor by Bill de Blasio, the city announced an $18 million settlement with protestors who had sued because of their mistreatment at the hands of the police. Bloomberg had consistently stood by the NYPD's treatment of the protestors, just as he did with stop and frisk and surveillance of Muslims.
Hostility to (generally liberal or left-wing) protests is sort of a through line of Bloomberg's tenure as mayor, in fact, from his 2003 refusal to grant a permit for a march protesting the illegal US-UK invasion of Iraq (which, incidentally, Bloomberg supported) to his decision to break up the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Zuccotti Park with heavily armed police—a decision, one suspects, that might have had to do with the fact that Bloomberg himself is a former investment banker who felt OWS was too hostile toward one of New York's key industries.
Not at all shockingly, the former investment banker mayor was no great ally of the poor or working class of New York City, either. While Bloomberg's supporters praise him for rebuilding New York and restoring its prosperity, his record on inequality is unimpressive to say the least. New York's public housing system languished under Bloomberg, who left it badly underfunded. The city even stopped checking for lead paint in its public housing apartments, putting tens of thousands of children at risk. In 2011, the city council sued Bloomberg's administration over its new restrictions on who was eligible for city homeless shelters; in 2013, it was forced to override Bloomberg's veto in order to pass a paid sick leave law. When a "living wage" proposal that would have ensured those working on projects funded by one million dollars or more in public subsidies would be paid at least $11.50 an hour (or $10 plus benefits) came across Bloomberg's desk in 2012, he also vetoed it and compared it to a Soviet-style "managed economy." While New York may have succeeded at keeping its poverty rate relatively steady during Bloomberg's tenure (at a time when it was on the rise nationally), 45.9% of the city's residents were still in or near poverty in 2013, the last year of Bloomberg's tenure—and his record plainly shows he was not overly concerned with the well-being of New Yorkers lower down on the economic ladder.
It should also be emphasized that, despite his reputation as some sort of liberal, Bloomberg continued to support Republicans for years after he himself left the GOP. In 2012, he endorsed Scott Brown over Elizabeth Warren in the election for senator from Massachusetts, saying of Warren, "You can question, in my mind, whether she’s God’s gift to regulation, close the banks and get rid of corporate profits, and we’d all bring socialism back, or the USSR." In 2014, he donated a quarter of a million dollars to a Super PAC supporting the completely odious Senator Lindsey Graham. In 2016, he endorsed Republican Senator Pat Toomey over his Democratic opponent; Toomey, who won reelection, went on to vote in line with Donald Trump's wishes 88% of the time, per FiveThirtyEight, including votes for all but one of Trump's cabinet nominations, and, of course, both of his Supreme Court picks. Also in 2016, Bloomberg held a fundraiser for Representative Peter King, an extreme Islamophobe who once baselessly claimed that "80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists" and that "[t]his is an enemy living amongst us," who held a series of McCarthyite hearings to reveal the supposedly pervasive radicalization in American Muslim communities, and who urged Trump to expand surveillance of Muslims as well as heartily endorsing the latter's anti-Muslim travel ban. In 2018, Everytown for Gun Safety, a Bloomberg-founded (and -funded) pro-gun control organization, threw its support behind Republican Brian Fitzpatrick, a congressman from Pennsylvania who, despite his moderate image, voted in favor of the horrific Republican tax plan passed in 2017. The move caused a mass exodus from the group by local activists, who argued Fitzpatrick's Democratic opponent had a stronger gun control platform.
Even when it comes to the issues that Bloomberg's defenders praise him for, his record is often far more mixed than they admit. Bloomberg's environmental advocacy and philanthropy have earned him widespread plaudits, as well as a position at the United Nations as United States Special Envoy for Climate Action. But, while Bloomberg has taken a strong stance against the use of coal, he has been far more forgiving toward other fossil fuels. He has strongly supported fracking, an environmentally destructive technique for the extraction of natural gas, criticizing a statewide fracking ban in New York in 2015. In Climate of Hope, a book he co-authored with a former head of the Sierra Club, he wrote that "it makes sense to frack." In the same book, he notes that he isn't opposed to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline; just as a sidenote one of the already-existing pipelines in the Keystone system recently spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the surrounding North Dakota wetlands.
One of the major environmental organizations that has benefited from Bloomberg's largesse—and now readily goes to bat for him—is the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). The EDF, like Bloomberg, has enthusiastically promoted natural gas as a cleaner replacement for coal, and has received generous support from such noted environmentalists as the Walton family and Goldman Sachs. In 2013, about 70 other environmental groups publicly rebuked the EDF after it became a founding member of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development, along with oil companies like Chevron and Shell. Truly the sort of environmental advocacy group a former investment banker could get behind.
In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. The Climate, author and activist Naomi Klein elaborates further on Bloomberg's environmental hypocrisy:
[W]hile talking a good game about carbon bubbles and stranded assets, Bloomberg has made no discernible attempt to manage his own vast wealth in a manner that reflects these concerns. In fact, he helped set up Willett Advisors, a firm specialising in oil and gas assets, for both his personal and philanthropic holdings. Those gas assets may well have risen in value as a result of his environmental giving – what with, for example, EDF championing natural gas as a replacement for coal. Perhaps there is no connection between his philanthropic priorities and his decision to entrust his fortune to the oil and gas sector. But these investment choices raise uncomfortable questions about his status as a climate hero, as well as his 2014 appointment as a UN special envoy for cities and climate change (questions Bloomberg has not answered, despite my repeated requests).As for gun control and social issues—two other areas that Bloomberg and his defenders cite to appeal to liberals—it should be enough to briefly return to Bloomberg's support for Republicans. Peter King, for instance, earned a whopping score of three (out of 100) from the pro-LGBT+ rights Human Rights Campaign for his voting record in the 115th Congress and a 0% rating from the pro-choice NARAL. For 2014, the same year in which Bloomberg donated to his Super PAC, Lindsey Graham received an A- rating from the fanatically anti-gun control National Rifle Association. It is a polite understatement to say that with "friends" like Michael Bloomberg, the environment, LGBT+ people, victims of gun violence, and those in need of reproductive healthcare do not need enemies.
Bloomberg, as much as (or perhaps more than) Donald Trump, is an exemplary specimen of America's parasitic and corrupt elite: an obscenely wealthy businessman with undue (and frequently damaging) influence on politics and society, supposedly redeemed by often-dubious acts philanthropy that have mysteriously done little to keep his net worth from increasing over the years. What makes him perhaps more unusual is that he has actually decided to cut out the middleman (the politicians that plutocrats like him use their wealth to influence) and pursue his own career in politics, though this may have seemed more exceptional in the era before the 2016 election.
Bloomberg's bid for the Democratic nomination is almost certainly doomed to failure for a number of reasons, ranging from his poor favorability numbers to his ridiculous plan to skip the early states altogether. Perhaps he plans to use it as a springboard for an independent bid, though the logistics for this appear somewhat dubious. But his relevance goes beyond his own political future, or even his ability to shape the debate in this primary campaign with the help of his vast fortune. In many ways, Bloomberg represents a prototype for what liberalism might look like before long, if the current left-wing insurgency is defeated by the Democratic Party establishment: vocally supportive of "tolerance" and "pluralism" while embracing and defending systemic racism; socially liberal but disturbingly authoritarian; and undisguisedly pro-Wall Street and divorced from any concern about the poor or working class. The newfound love many liberals have for George W. Bush and #Resistance neocons like Bill Kristol and David Frum—and the new hawkishness they display towards Russia—bodes well for Bloomberg's brand of militaristic and pro-police, but outwardly "woke," centrism.
Indeed, one doesn't have to look far within the Democratic Party to find prominent figures with remarkable similarities to Bloomberg, from his fellow former big city mayor Rahm Emanuel, who sucked up to the rich while turning his back on the public sector and sat on evidence of a police murder until forced to release it by a judge, to the governor of Bloomberg's own state, Andrew Cuomo, whose outspoken social liberalism has helped distract from his role in giving the Republicans a working majority in the State Senate. The next few decades, which will likely be marked by increasing economic inequality, social alienation and potentially influxes of climate refugees, will probably sharpen the conflicts that already exist in society and tend to create greater unrest than we've seen already. This means that the Democratic Party will be forced to make a choice of whose side they're on: the various underprivileged groups who will be the source of much of the unrest, or the established powers in society that will want order restored, violently if necessary. It's not much of a secret which side the Democratic Party's donors, and its leadership, will prefer—and from their standpoint, a Bloombergite form of socially liberal authoritarianism will make good sense. An appeal to the relatively comfortable professional-managerial class in the face of social disquiet, mixed with an emphasis on the rights of LGBT+ people (which, while undeniably important, also conveniently pose no threat to the socioeconomic elite) is perhaps the best way to keep the Democratic Party electorally viable, if it refuses to embrace economic populism.
Bloomberg's presidential bid may appear quixotic and doomed, and it almost certainly is. But his legacy as a politician could remain painfully relevant for many years to come, whether we like it or not.
