Wednesday, February 19, 2020

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG'S OWN NEO-FASCISM - "This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants." PATRICIA McCARTHY

DEMOCRAT PARTY CORRUPTION 

Their banksters and billionaires demand wider open borders to keep wages depressed 

"This is how they will destroy America from within.  The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants.  They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers.  These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

"American elites continue focusing on a global order while ignoring the decline of the United States. A broken America will be unable to meet any geopolitical threats abroad. Any national security strategy that does not begin with securing our own national security at home will be doomed to fail." DANIEL GREENFIELD

Knowing that the wall will become a reality if the President gets the cash brings out the cheap-labor-express, wealthy power brokers like the Billionaires for Open Borders: Michael Bloomberg; Rupert Murdoch; other distinguished members of the Forbes 500; and, as Lou Dobbs often reminds us, the "globalists, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Koch brothers and Wall Street." 


 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com


Nolte: The Fascist History of Tiny Tyrant Michael Bloomberg

AURORA, CO - DECEMBER 05: Democratic presidential candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg waits to speak at an event to introduce his gun safety policy agenda at the Heritage Christian Center on December 5, 2019 in Aurora, Colorado. The event, which was closed to the public, was held …
Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
13:52

Short Person Syndrome is indeed real. To compensate for their height, or lack thereof, some short people — especially men — look to become authority figures to compensate: supervisors, hall monitors, security guards, soldiers, police officers, and politicians.
Billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg is five feet, seven inches tall, and is so self-conscious about his height, he claimed to be five foot ten on a driver’s license. Oh, and he also became a fascist authoritarian; a tiny tyrant determined to control everyone else’s life.
Someone with an authoritarian streak is frightening enough in your everyday walk of life — as a family member, neighbor, or heaven forbid, a boss. A Tiny Tyrant is frightening enough as a mayor — say, a mayor of New York City. But in that case you can at least move to another city.
Now imagine a Tiny Tyrant as president of the United States.
You want to leave the country?
Like all left-wing tyrants — Stalin, Hitler, Mao — Michael Bloomberg arrives bursting with good intentions.
He only wants to help, you see.
He only wants to make the world a better place, you see.
He knows what’s best for you, and understands you’re either too stupid to know what’s best for you or too undisciplined to do what’s best for you, so he’s gonna take care of you by creating laws –lotsa, lotsa, lotsa, lotsa laws…
On paper, the 78-year-old Bloomberg has been all over the place… a businessman, a Republican, Independent, and finally a Democrat. But you don’t have to squint to see the one constant in Bloomberg’s life and career: he’s a busybody tyrant, a rabid authoritarian whose decades-long history portends a presidency filled by an egomaniac who will make no sacrifices for himself as he signs a flurry of executive orders and treaties that force the rest of us to sacrifice our guns, our air conditioners, our privacy, our meat, salt, and sugar; and if we’re of a certain age, our access to life-saving health care.
Bloomberg was a perfect New York City mayor: a city full of left-wing sheep who love living under a tyrant, and who love having a nanny tell them what to do. There’s just something about leftists that makes them sleep better when the messiness of freedom is replaced with the orderliness of tyranny. The left is pathetic that way, but the rest of us will bleed out by the thousand paper cuts that slash away at our right to live our lives in the way we choose.
Here are some bone-chilling examples of Bloomberg’s authoritarian streak:
No Smoking in Your Own Establishment
Like the proverbial boiling frog, people are actually okay with this now… They think it’s great no one can smoke in public buildings, in a workplace, bar, or restaurant.
As a non-smoker, I agree…
What I don’t like, though, is the government telling a property owner what he can do with his property. If the owner of a bar or restaurant wants to allow smoking, who is the government to outlaw it?
It’s an outrageous and obscene violation of property rights.
What’s more, Bloomberg banned smoking outdoors! In New York, you can no longer smoke in public places such as a beach or park.
Banned Trans Fats
Restaurants and food vendors are no longer able to add trans fats to their foods.
Who the hell is Bloomberg to tell free Americans what they can sell and buy?
Bloomberg deserves credit for requiring menus to reveal ingredients and calories. I am always in favor of giving the public information to go with their choices.
Ban Big Sodas
Bloomberg wanted to tell you what size soda you could buy. Thankfully, a judge struck this nonsense down.
But the mindset of such a man is revealing.
And what the hell is the difference between drinking two 16 ounce cokes and a 32 ounce coke? It’s just stupid, bossy, punitive and un-American.
Ban Baby Formula
Bloomberg Doesn’t Believe China Is a Dictatorship
“Xi Jinping is not a dictator. He has to satisfy his constituents, or he’s not going to survive.”
Bloomberg said that.
And he said it for two reasons, neither of them acceptable…
First off, although he is already worth $50 billion, that’s not enough. It’s never enough for these guys, and Bloomberg wants to ensure he can continue to make money in China.
Secondly, Bloomberg doesn’t believe a dictator is a dictator if he has the “best interests” of his people in mind. But as I pointed out above, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and pretty much every dictator throughout history believed they knew what was best.
Bloomberg Wants to Let Old People Die
Nothing reveals the heart of an authoritarian more than a utilitarian view of human life.
“If you show up with prostate cancer and you’re 95 years old, we should say, ‘Go and enjoy, have a nice one, live a long life. There’s no cure, and we can’t do anything.’ A young person, we should do something for. Society’s not willing to do that yet.”
Bloomberg said that.
And please note the “yet,” as though allowing a 95-year-old to die of cancer is “progress.”
This is monstrous.
Bloomberg is a monster, for only a monster is willing to condemn a human being to die in order to save a little money.
Bloomberg Believes Black People are Useless
Bloomberg is a classic racist, someone who sincerely believes black people are something less than human, are at best chattel, at worst a physical and financial danger to society.
– You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16-25.
– And the way you get the guns out of [black] kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them
– [P]eople say, ‘Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods.
– Cory Booker [a black U.S. Senator] endorsed me a number of times. And I endorsed Cory Booker a number of times. He’s very well-spoken.
– Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said people in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages. Tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas. And then Congress got involved and local elected officials as well. And said, ‘Oh, that’s not fair. These people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.
All of the above are Bloomberg’s own words. We have the audio.
After learning she was pregnant, Bloomberg has also been accused of telling a female employee struggling to find childcare, “It’s a fucking baby! . . . all you need is some black who doesn’t have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building.”
Bloomberg denied the allegation. He also settled the suit.
Bloomberg Seeks to Control Women
These allegations from 1997, when Bloomberg was in his late-fifties, are not just horribly sexist, they also again reveal his authoritarian streak and his twisted need to control the lives of others:
In her lawsuit, [Sekiko Sakai] Garrison alleged that when she told Bloomberg she was pregnant, he responded, “Kill it!” and said it again when she asked him to repeat himself.
“Great! Number 16!” he allegedly said, a complaint about how many employees had gotten pregnant.
A former employee for Bloomberg, David Zielenziger, confirmed Garrison’s account to the Post.
“He talked kind of crudely about women all the time,” Zielenziger said of his former boss. Indeed, the lawsuit alleged that Bloomberg would say “I’d fuck that in a second” upon seeing certain women.
He allegedly told several female employees that “all of you girls” should “line up” to give oral sex to male coworker who was getting married “as a wedding present.”
Dishonest partisans are going to compare this to Trump, but there is one major difference between the allegations against Trump and those against Bloomberg…
It was only after Trump decided to run for president as a Republican that women started hurling age-old allegations — which of course undermines their credibility.
The allegations against Bloomberg are contemporaneous.
Bloomberg Refused to Accept Term Limits
You know how paranoid freaks on the left and in the media (but I repeat myself) go on and on about Trump refusing to ever leave office?
Bloomberg actually did refuse to leave office.
Although he was limited to only two mayoral terms, in 2008, he successfully bought a third term.
Bloomberg Despises the Kulaks
Bloomberg is such a bigoted and ignorant elitist, he talks about farmers and factory workers as though they are thoroughly expendable idiots who might not even be capable of being re-educated to survive in Bloomberg’s Brave New World.
Direct quote:
If you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody, even people in this room so no offense intended, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then you have 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture; today it’s two percent in the United States. Now comes the information economy, and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill-sets you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree/level different. You have to have a different skill-set; you have to have a lot more gray matter. It’s not clear the teachers can teach or the students can learn, and so the challenge of society of finding jobs for these people, who we can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach and a cell phone and a car and that sort of thing. But the thing that will stop them from setting up a guillotine someday, is the dignity of a job.
No Joke: Bloomberg Wants the Government to Read All Our Emails
Another direct quote:
Look, if you don’t want it to be in the public domain, don’t take that picture, don’t write it down. In this day and age, you’ve got to be pretty naive to believe that the NSA isn’t listening to everything and reading every email. And incidentally, given how dangerous the world is, we should hope they are, because this is really serious, what’s going on in the world.
Is this someone we want in charge of the federal government?
Bloomberg Is Not a Big Fan of Democracy
Yet another direct quote:
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have democracy, but there’s something to be said for a democracy like Singapore’s. In Singapore you can’t stand for election unless you have certain credentials. You have to have run something and have a PhD, and published[.]
Here’s where things get really scary…
Having a mayor of a city is fine. You can argue that you should have a legislature to go along with it. I think a lot of the purists would say ‘that’s a check and balance on the mayor.’ But if you look at places where there are strong legislatures; for example California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, you will find disasters at the state level where they have strong legislatures. As a matter of fact, take a look at Washington. The president can propose, the president can cajole and maybe influence, but it’s Congress that writes the laws and allocates the money. Are you happy with what they’ve been doing? Public doesn’t seem to be, and so I would argue … the public’s safeguard is every four years at the ballot box … far and away you should give more powers to the executive branch if you want progress.
So a guy who purchased a third mayoral term also believes we should essentially elect a dictator every four years… Gee, do you think that an elected dictator who is not dealing with the checks and balances that come a co-equal branch of government, might use his dictatorial powers to ensure he’s never voted out of office?
FACT: Every dictator who has destroyed a democracy has started with this exact same argument.
Pushes the Global Warming Hoax
Flaming eco-hypocrite Michael Bloomberg is of course a climate paranoid, but the real reason he pushes this hoax is because it is a “crisis” that gives the government license to violate every one of our rights and freedoms — from our light bulbs, to where we live, to our right to life.
Disarm the American People
Nowhere has Bloomberg put more energy and treasure than in his demonic quest to disarm the American people and leave us helpless — which makes total sense if you look at the man in full…
How else is Bloomberg going to thwart democracy, treat black people like animals, treat women like slaves, get away with reading all of our emails, and force us to do what he says is best for us, unless we are helpless to a federal government with the legal right to use violence against us?
Michael Bloomberg should terrify anyone who believes in individual freedom.
I know many of you hate Trump, but you can’t honestly hate him this much. And the two men are complete opposites.
Trump uses his authority to decrease the power of government in our lives, and to empower the individual.
Bloomberg uses the power of government to interfere in every aspect of our lives … as he disarms us.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNCFollow his Facebook Page here.




Pro-Life Leader Rips Michael Bloomberg’s Alleged Hostility Toward Pregnant Staff

Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images
18 Feb 202019
5:34
The communications director of a UK pro-life organization said a 1997 lawsuit that alleged Michael Bloomberg told his pregnant employee to “kill it” in order to protect her career at his firm, is an example of the pressure to abort that pregnant women continually face in the workplace.
“Outrageous comments such as these can pressure women to have an abortion in order to protect their career,” said Michael Robinson, director of communications at the pro-life Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC). “These comments are not appropriate for any employer.”
According to allegations made in a 1997 lawsuit against the former New York City mayor, Bloomberg told employee Sekiko Sakai, a sales manager in his company, to “kill it” when she revealed her pregnancy.
“Great, No. 16′,” the current Democrat presidential candidate allegedly bemoaned, according to a 2001 New York Times article, in a reference to the 16 pregnant employees he had in his company at the time.
The lawsuit and its allegations resurfaced in December, along with others claiming a sexist environment at Bloomberg LP, after the billionaire businessman’s announcement of his candidacy for president.
ABC News ran a piece with the headline, “Bloomberg’s Sexist Remarks Fostered Company Culture that Degraded Women, Lawsuits Allege.”
As the Times reported in 2001, Bloomberg has denied the specific allegation that he told Sakai to “kill it,” citing a polygraph test.
According to ABC News, Bloomberg LP “settled Sakai’s case on undisclosed terms, and she is now bound by a confidentiality agreement.”
SPUC’s Robinson said Bloomberg’s alleged comments represent “a scenario in which such negative workplace attitudes towards pregnancy and motherhood make a woman feel she ought to have an abortion in order to protect her career.”
In 2007, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) brought a massive case against Bloomberg’s company, alleging discrimination against pregnant women and new mothers in the firm.
ABC News reported:
The lawsuit alleged that the company engaged in a pattern of discrimination against women after they became pregnant and after they took maternity leave. Sixty-seven women were prepared to join the case. The time period of the misconduct alleged in the lawsuit was between 2002 and 2007 while Bloomberg was mayor of New York City and not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, although he remained the majority owner of it. A court dismissed the case in 2011.
A later 2016 lawsuit places the blame directly on Bloomberg for creating the hostile culture at his company.
“Mr. Bloomberg, Bloomberg’s founder, CEO, and President, and the former three-term Mayor of New York, encouraged this type of sexist and sexually charged behavior,” said the complaint, according to ABC News. The complainant was an anonymous 26-year-old female employee of the company.
“Bloomberg’s notoriously sexist and hostile work environment has been well documented and has been the subject of myriad law suits prior to this lawsuit,” the complaint continued.
“It is important that women in the workplace do not have their job security threatened because of pregnancy,” SPUC’s Robinson commented. “Negative workplace attitudes towards pregnancy and motherhood can put pregnant women in an extremely vulnerable position at a time when their focus should be on their wellbeing and that of their unborn child.”
Robinson stressed as well that discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace “is not a matter of isolated incidents, but is part of a growing hostility towards pregnancy and motherhood.”
Bloomberg is a staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood and abortion rights. Last week, he announced his plan “to expand and safeguard access to reproductive services.”
Women employees of Planned Parenthood have reported complaints similar to those of Bloomberg’s female staff.
In December 2018, the New York Times published a report that revealed employees of Planned Parenthood said the abortion giant mistreated and discriminated against pregnant women and new mothers in the workplace.
The report observed interviews and legal documents showed women employees of Planned Parenthood and other feminist organizations have “described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor.”
“Many women said they were afraid to announce a pregnancy at work, sensing they would be seen as abandoning their colleagues,” stated the Times, adding:
[A]t Planned Parenthood, the country’s leading provider of reproductive services, managers in some locations declined to hire pregnant job candidates, refused requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushed them out of their jobs after they gave birth, according to current and former employees in California, Texas, North Carolina and New York.
Former Planned Parenthood employees and union representatives say the discrimination exists against pregnant employees and new mothers, with some employees expressing a disdain by management toward pregnant staff.
According to the Times report, Planned Parenthood blamed its reported failure to provide paid maternity leave or appropriate workplace conditions for pregnant employees on continued threats of defunding by conservative lawmakers.

BLOOMBERG AND WOMEN:
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a 4,000-word profile of Bloomberg that documented a long series of allegations by female employees, largely about profane and sexist comments, many of them demeaning, some outright threatening. These were not #MeToo-style allegations of personal misconduct, but charges that Bloomberg encouraged a hostile work environment for women employees. These conditions generated dozens of lawsuits and numerous settlements in six and seven figures.

Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will 

demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a 

“progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist 

party, which does the bidding of Wall Street and the CIA.

Bloomberg’s billions and the politics of oligarchy
17 February 2020
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million on television and internet ads that present “Mike” as an up-from-poverty, self-made fighter for progress and decency, a friend of the common man.
The marketing of Bloomberg involves distortions so grotesque that one commentator recalled the massive advertising campaign by Ford Motor Company, in the early days of television, to promote an exciting new model named the Edsel, arguably the ugliest and most unsuccessful car ever produced.
The Bloomberg campaign is spending more than $1 million a day on average just on Facebook ads. In advance of the March 3 primaries dubbed “Super Tuesday,” when there will be voting in 14 states, Bloomberg has spent $40 million on television and internet advertising in California, $33 million in Texas, $9.5 million in North Carolina and $6 million in Massachusetts. He is the only candidate to air TV ads in Virginia and Alabama. Except for fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, no other Democratic candidate has thus far spent even $10 million in all 14 states combined.
Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston [Credit: AP Photo/David J. Phillip]
The electoral impact of Bloomberg’s vast expenditures—a drop in the bucket from his $60 billion fortune—is difficult to estimate in advance of the voting on “Super Tuesday.” March 3 will be the first time that the former mayor of New York City is on a primary ballot. Polls suggest that Bloomberg is close to the 15 percent mark required to win delegates to the Democratic convention. His aim, should he fail to win enough delegates to gain the nomination, is to combine with other “moderate” candidates to block a victory by the current front-runner, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Whatever the outcome of the primary 
campaign, it is clear already that 
Bloomberg’s spending exerts a vast influence 
on the Democratic Party establishment and 
on the corporate media (of which Bloomberg 
News, part of his empire, is a major 
component). It is safe to say that no other 
Democratic presidential hopeful could have 
survived last week’s series of press reports 
on Bloomberg’s support for “stop-and-frisk” 
police attacks on minority youth, his blaming 
the 2008 Wall Street crash on loans to 
minority borrowers, and his abusive 
treatment of female employees.
Last week, reports surfaced of Bloomberg’s 2015 comments on his policy as New York mayor of “stop-and-frisk,” in which he declared, “Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25.” He went on to add, “The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”
In response, the Bloomberg campaign immediately rolled out endorsements of his campaign by three African-American members of Congress.
Anticipating the crisis, Bloomberg had already met with a group of prominent black pastors who had been critical of “stop-and-frisk” but were willing to administer absolution if the billionaire candidate was sufficiently apologetic—and generous. As Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, put it, with revealing frankness, “He used his money, which is one of the reasons I continue to support him, to express his sincerity.”
As a 5,000-word profile in the New York Times Sunday edition detailed, Bloomberg, who spent $270 million on his three successful campaigns to buy the mayoralty of New York City (2002-2013), built “an empire of influence” through targeted donations to an array of liberal and pro-Democratic Party groups over the past decade. According to the Times account:
Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes. His personal fortune, built on a financial information and news company, is estimated at over $60 billion. It fuels an advocacy network that has directed policy in dozens of states and cities; mobilized movements to take on gun violence and climate change; rewritten election laws and health regulations; and elected scores of politicians to offices as modest as the school board and as lofty as the Senate.
This includes an estimated $270 million to gun control campaigns, largely through the Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety group. He has pumped large sums into the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, charter school advocacy groups and similar organizations, giving himself near-veto power over their campaigns.
In one incident described by the Times, the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party think tank, edited a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States to remove a chapter on New York City police spying on Muslim mosques and communities that had eight references to Bloomberg by name. Bloomberg gave nearly $2 million to the organization.
A longtime Democrat who adopted the Republican label in 2001 to run for mayor, then ran for reelection as a Republican in 2005 and as an “independent” in 2009, Bloomberg supported Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. He returned to the Democratic Party as an endorser only in 2016, when he backed Hillary Clinton. He later changed his registration to Democratic.
In 2018, Bloomberg spent more than $100 million supporting Democratic Party candidates for Congress through his personal super PAC, and he has pledged to spend $1 billion to elect Democrats this year, whether or not he wins the party nomination.
Among those now singing the praises of Bloomberg are dozens of current and former mayors, many of them African-American, from cities including Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, Tampa, Sacramento, Miami and Washington DC. This only demonstrates the completely corrupt and cynical character of identity politics, which a layer of the black upper-middle class has used to obtain a bigger share of the wealth and status of the top 10 percent, while the conditions of the vast majority of black workers and youth have continued to deteriorate.
In the wake of the “stop-and-frisk” controversy, an array of video and audio clips has surfaced documenting Bloomberg’s long record of racist and sexist comments.
The Associated Press reported last week that Bloomberg made comments in 2008 in which he blamed the collapse of the mortgage security market, which triggered the Wall Street crash, on efforts to restrict the practice of “redlining”—racial discrimination by bankers against predominately minority residential neighborhoods. A spokesman for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition called this “a billionaire defending other billionaires and placing the blame on lower-income homeowners.”
In a 2018 conversation with International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde, made public Sunday, Bloomberg can be heard opposing minimum wage laws and defending the finger printing of food-stamp recipients. He called the minimum wage one of “these impediments to job creation” that he favored eliminating.
On Sunday, the Washington Post published a 4,000-word profile of Bloomberg that documented a long series of allegations by female employees, largely about profane and sexist comments, many of them demeaning, some outright threatening. These were not #MeToo-style allegations of personal misconduct, but charges that Bloomberg encouraged a hostile work environment for women employees. These conditions generated dozens of lawsuits and numerous settlements in six and seven figures.
Any of these episodes would have destroyed another candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. But for Bloomberg and his media acolytes, it is a big “so what?” Being a right-wing, dictatorial, foul-mouthed, racist, sexist billionaire is not a problem for the Democratic Party establishment, as long as the billionaire’s money finds its way into their own pockets.
What dominates the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans under Trump, is the politics of oligarchy. It is naked and shameless.
The financial aristocrats, the multimillionaires 

and billionaires, control the two-party system 

and dictate the course of the stage-managed 

political events called “primaries,” 

“conventions” and “elections.”
Later this week, Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders are likely to appear on the same platform, if Bloomberg, as expected, qualifies for Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Sanders claims that his campaign is the means to transform the Democratic Party into an instrument of progressive reform, a weapon against the rule of the super-rich. Bloomberg’s very presence on the debate platform will demonstrate the opposite—that the Sanders campaign is a “progressive” fig leaf for the oldest American capitalist party, which does the bidding of Wall Street and the CIA.

Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more in taxes

 

Many of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Bloomberg, the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a lock on the nomination.
The immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and Sanders.

The second event was Warren’s announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1 billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.
Neither of these taxes would be passed by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated and suppressed.
But the modern-day lords and ladies who inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.
They do not fear Warren, a self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.
The levels of wealth wasted on this parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:
It is very difficult to comprehend what a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.
And yet, there are 607 people in the United 
States with a net worth of over a billion 
dollars.
Bloomberg, a liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.
Last January he denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
Over the past several months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s Medicare plan.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,” complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms), said last week, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.
Hedge fund owner Leon Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s potential candidacy.
The New York Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel, he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and Chrysler workers.
But for fawning toward the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column by the Times ’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”
Calling for “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs… Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened, they want a strong leader.”
This is under conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’ share has tripled since the 1980s.
In their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in 2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since 1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half, dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.
The United States is not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.
The ferocious response of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the nomination.
There is no way to address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast majority of the population.
The corporations and banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized to meet human needs, not private profit.
This is a revolutionary task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a conscious political leadership.

Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers

Getty Images
JOHN CARNEY
 12 Nov 2019382
2:32

President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.

“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”
Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.
“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”
The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.
Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.
“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”
Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”

Bloomberg’s spending binge cannot hide 

 

that he’s a nasty bit of work



Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is currently trying to buy the Democrat nomination. His spending doesn't just buy recognition; it keeps him from having to appear in person, revealing how nasty he is.
In 1997, Sekiko Sakai Garrison sued Bloomberg for sexual harassment. She alleged that, when she told him she was pregnant, he told her “Kill it.” She also alleged racism towards blacks:
On another occasion when she expressed she was struggling to find childcare, Bloomberg told her to hire 'some black'.
'It's a f***ing baby! All it does is eat and s**t! It doesn't know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn't have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building,' Bloomberg said in July 1993.
Another employee corroborated the “kill it” comment, adding, “He talked kind of crudely about women all of the time.”
Bloomberg claimed Garrison had misunderstood him. Her allegations, though, are consistent with a 1990 booklet that admiring employees assembled: The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg: An Unauthorized Collection of Unauthorized Sayings.
The editor assures readers that the quotations in the booklet are accurate:
Yes, these are all actual quotes.
No, nothing has been embellished or exaggerated.
And yes, some things were too outrageous to include.
The booklet reveals an intelligent, cynical, calculating man with the cast-iron testicles needed to become a multibillionaire. It also reveals someone cruel, sexist, racist, homophobic, and vaguely anti-Semitic.
For Bloomberg, sexual analogies were constant and crude:
“Make the customer think he’s getting laid when he’s getting f***ed.”
“A good salesperson asks for the order. It’s like the guy who goes into a bar, and walks up to every gorgeous girl there, and says ‘Do you want to f***?’ He gets turned down a lot – but he gets f***ed a lot, too!”
He saw women, even famous women, in crude sexual terms:
“What do I want? I want an exclusive, 10-year contract, an automatic extension, and I want you to pay me. And I want a blow job from Jane Fonda. Have you seen Jane Fonda lately? Not bad for fifty.”
He was big on revenge and threats:
“Let me tell you something, buddy boy, I have picture of you and they’re not with your wife.”
He had harsh words for one competitor, showing a mean streak of homophobia:
“Cokehead, womanizing, fag.”
That revulsion to homosexuality reemerged when he spoke about the future of computers:
“You know why computers will never take the place of people? Because a computer would say that the sex of the person giving you a blow job doesn’t matter!”
And the homophobia, as well as the misogyny, again made their appearance when he talked about the British royal family:
“There’s only one queen in Buckingham Palace – the rest are in Trafalgar Square.”
“The Royal family – what a bunch of misfits – a gay, an architect, that horsey faced lesbian, and a kid who gave up Koo Stark for some fat broad.”
As the reference to both Koo Stark and Fergie shows, for Bloomberg, at least in 1990, women are stupid objects:
“If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s.”
“I only look.”
“I just like to look.”
“I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site [and] doesn’t get a whistle will turn around and walk past again and again until she does get one.’
However, he did proudly boast that “the Bloomberg” itself would give blowjobs – and in the same breath brutally demeaned the women to whom he was speaking:
“It will do everything, including give you a blowjob. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.”
Although he's never hidden his Jewishness, Bloomberg was, at the very least, ambivalent about being Jewish:
“The three biggest lies are: the check’s in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I’m glad I’m Jewish.”
The same casual racism Bloomberg showed when telling the employee who sued him that she should get “some black” to care for her baby showed up again in a nasty remark about both Hispanics and Jews:
“If Jesus was a Jew, why does he have a Puerto Rican first name?”
It’s also becoming clear that Bloomberg doesn’t believe in capitalism -- despite the booklet quoting him saying “I believe in the capitalist system and free enterprise.” If he really believed in capitalism and free enterprise, he would not have been caught on camera in 2011 stating that it was time to implement death panels:


This video of Bloomberg saying we should deny care to people once they're past a certain age (because it isn't worth it) is everything about him which is so awful.

Death panels, of course, are a fixture in socialized medicine.
And as a bonus, don't forget Bloomberg's utter contempt for farmers:


Mike Bloomberg’s contempt for rural America is real. https://twitter.com/petermentes/status/1228518467776761856 



Bloomberg's words paint him as a mean, arrogant, 
self-centered man. While Trump ran for love of 
country, Bloomberg is running for love of 
Bloomberg.