So he's hiring a bunch of barely-over minimum wage workers to spread his message... and? What do you think the other politicians are doing with the millions they raise? This isn't a story.
It's a rather disgusting story, actually.
I'm not convinced the typical process as far as there being two viable parties and running through the wringer of their processes, is something that is particularly great at producing good candidates, or that someone bypassing that legally is a bad thing.
... I'm only partly joking; I am not a fan of the idea that there are some special gatekeepers or One True Process™ for determining who's allowed to talk to voters.
The things Bloomberg has meaningfully "wrong" in terms of process look something like this:
- he is be a rich person (definitely not trendy in the party), and...
- his failure to solicit donations deprives people of one meaningful test of his political appeal, instead
- he spends his own money on politics instead: an uncool, Constitutionally protected exercise of the First Amendment, which has an unfortunate interaction with the political narrative that _Citizens United_ must be restored (though in fact it wouldn't stop him from doing this)
Needless to say, arguing about some of these "violations" is actually in practice just arguing about ideology and might be more effectively approached as such.
Politics lately seems to be:1) paint candidate in the best light, 2) paint opponent in the worst light.
Note: there is no requirement to have a consistent set of rules to do this.
Mark Twain: Running for Governor [Written about 1870]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3189/3189-h/3189-h.htm#gover...
I was going to say politics has gotten nastier, but I know that's not true. [1]
The Democratic party is really not required to have any sort of fair process for deciding their candidate for president. It can be as transparently crooked and disgusting as this and really that's just how he chose to operate within the legal frameworks established by folks like him.
Sure, there's the huge personality flaws that Bloomberg displays by taking this strategy, but those don't seem to be of major concern to most American voters. Our current president is a daily salient reminder of this fact.
If we want to focus on Bloomberg's personality, why not start with all the horrific policies he enacted as mayor? There are far more visible character flaws in those decisions than this decision to buy his way towards the Democratic party.
If you supported his policies, after all, you'd have no problem with this strategy being undertaken - right?
Pick your lesser evil
So what though? What point is this rebutting? If a process is crooked and disgusting then damn straight you're gonna have people complaining about it and demanding they do better, as you see here.
I disagree. This is somewhat par for the course. For many people, this could be the first time they experience the disappointment of how corrupt folks like Bloomberg operate within the political sphere. However, these people would be incorrect to chalk this up as historically or even politically noteworthy, for many of us this is rather unsurprising and the story has already been told many times. Why rehash these tired tropes when Bloomberg presents so many new, unique, and significant issues that we now must address?
In other words, just because you don't care doesn't mean that others don't. And the news isn't writing stories catering to solely your interests; there's millions of other readers to consider.
How about the current racist with his reign of corruption and racism?
Assume what you want, but that claim is just false. He also defended it for years even after it was ruled unconstitutional.
Stop and frisk is only the tip of the iceberg, by the way.
This claim he reduced it is a key talking point of his campaign, and an outright lie. He was defending it literally up until the moment he decided to run for president (defending it publicly for years until October 2019, then apologizing in November 2019 when he announced his campaign).
> You know, I strongly disagree with Bloomberg, having lived through his reign of terror in NYC personally. But I just don't see the point in focusing on this kind of attack.
I think there are two issues here:
1) candidate Bloomberg himself, and
2) systemic flaws that are offensive to small-d democratic sensibilities, of which Bloomberg is a representative and symbol.
The point of that kind of attack is to bring focus on the systemic flaws. Also, at this point, many more people are probably attuned to those flaws than they are to the candidate himself (as only New Yorkers have really had to care about him, previously).
> The Democratic party is really not required to have any sort of fair process for deciding their candidate for president. It can be as transparently crooked and disgusting as this...
It can be, but not having a fair process turns off a lot of voters, and makes others angry. Doubly so if that lack of fair process means they'll be forced to choose between two bad options.
This seems like a rather weak point of contention...
It sucks, but welcome to politics.
The precedent for having consecutive 'billionaires' as president is a little troubling. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with billionaires, but it sets the bar oddly high for a democratic republic.
Debatable. Find me a billionaire who didn't get where they are through exploitive labour practices, monopolistic consolidation, political manipulation, massive environmental damage, or inheriting wealth earned in one or more of those ways. A world where billionaires can exists seems like a perversion of the ideals of "healthy" capitalism to me.
Where do you think the moral cash limit should be? 10 million or 100 million? When does your success turn you evil?
I don't see how you can say those things when you live in such a nice capitalistic economy when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil.
You're in the field that embraces capitalism the most, and it's beautiful. You can start a company in your garage and build an empire from nothing, and many of us have.
Capitalism exploits the greedy humans into generating wealth by rewarding them greatly, it also generates many jobs and assets for the economy. Yes that one person gets rewarded greatly, but many masses would not benefit if they never existed or were never motivated to do those things.
The lazy humans will fleece the system until there's nothing left. Some people need survival to motivate them to climb.
Socialism fails when you run out of other people's money. There's many examples of that.
I literally called them greedy in my argument, not virtuous. I don't believe they are all virtuous, some might be. Some are seeking their passions. All are greedy in some capacity.
> If all billionaires retired tomorrow I believe the country would keep working the same way and the economy would keep growing.
I don't understand, we replace them with another person? Or would a government entity take over their assets they generated.
Accruing capital almost never has anything to do with hard work or laziness. It's a lot of luck. What family you were born into, what area of the world, if you had parents growing up etc. You could be the laziest POS and have more money than you could spend in a lifetime.
Tax-funded education and healthcare is necessary to offset some of the insane luck a trust fund kid has vs kid with a single mother with debt and no inheritance in sight. So everyone can have a fair shot at participating in capitalism. Nothing remotely socialistic about it.
There are plenty of people making $100k/year exploiting labour and/or damaging the environment. But when you're one of the ~2000 billionaires in the world you are pretty much by definition responsible for such a massively larger amount of that harm than the guy making $100k.
> when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil
There are plenty of degrees of socialism that could be applied before you end up in stalinist russia. Canada is arguably more socialist than the US, is that in turmoil? Various scandinavian countries are more socialist than Canada, yet they seem to be doing alright.
I'm not saying let's become communist, I'm saying:
1. force capital to respect labour by compensating it fairly
2. force capital to pay for the social and environmental damage it does
3. stop capital from using globalization to avoid doing #1 and #2
4. keep capital out of politics, so that it can't roll back #1, #2 and #3
If we did those things, you'd likely have a lot fewer billionares. Maybe none. But if there were billionaires, they wouldn't be standing on a horde of blood money like a goddamn dragon from a fantasy novel.
(hint: it's because the economy generates so much wealth)
I don't think your Canada/Scandinavia economy argument is going to win any vote from any American.
Also you're wrong: there are ~700 billionaires in asia and only ~600 in north america (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_numbe...)
Maybe I can help. The view is that calling the accumulation of wealth "success" is a misnomer because there is hardly anything he as a person had to do compared to the collective effort of all of the people who labored to carry out the orders from above. The workers who made his "empire" what it is have been shafted, since the result of all of their work is that most of the profit goes to the few people at the top. It is wrong to say that Bloomberg did as much work. It is wrong to say that Bloomberg provided opportunity for those workers, because opportunity to be subjugated is not opportunity at all. Opportunity would be to earn 100% of the proceeds of your work so that you have the opportunity to achieve what you want. Employers unilaterally deciding how much money to pay their employees is fundamentally unfair by definition, courtesy of the word "unilaterally". Choice is a false concept in capitalism as you cannot choose from all possible options, just the ones that are graciously handed down from the plutocrats.
Also: the economy we live in is not "nice". It is if you have significant investments in the stock market, but relatively few people actually do. Of the total invested wealth, 90% of it belongs to the top 10% percent of the population. If you are not a part of this club, chances are you are hurting more than you were 15 years ago.
More importantly, if she only had £60 million would she be any less happy?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/crowd-h...
We should keep complaining until they do.
What exactly does your comment attempt to achieve?
Don't care yourself? Don't read the story, don't comment - or at least don't be surprised when you're rebuffed, too.
Bloomberg is doing that, also at a level of intensity not really seen before, but then also managing a uniquely expensive social media campaign.
Clinton's total campaign was something like $600e6. Bloomberg has already spent half of that, within the span of three state primaries. I would not be surprised if he spends at least that on the primary, and if he somehow gets the nomination, a billion minimum for the entire campaign.
It's unreal.
That said, Biden was up in polls initially based on name recognition alone.
As for why it's a story: Well, there's was (and still is) a bit of controversy over the role that technology, specifically social media, played in the the 2016 election. What Bloomberg is doing fits right into that theme. It also raises questions about what is advertisement, and what is individual "speech", because the former generally has to be identified as such in the context of a political campaign. Posting a status update on Facebook isn't by definition an ad, posting such an update in support of a political candidate doesn't have to be either... but if you're making those posts and you also happen to be getting paid by the campaign? Does each update and DM need to say, "This tweet was paid for by 2020 Bloomberg for President"? Does it need to have a link to Bloomberg stating, "I'm Michael Bloomberg, and I approve of this ad."? Logistically how would he even do such a thing for each and every paid social media interaction?
In short, it's a story because it sits are the nexus of technology, politics, and general societal discourse.