Michael Bloomberg – Too Rich To Ignore

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today I will be looking at Michael Bloomberg, who has now forced or bought his way into the Democratic debates. Suddenly he is a very legitimate candidate for the Democrat Party’s nomination. Who is this man, Michael Bloomberg, and where did he come from?

Michael Bloomberg pays handsomely to get our attention

Mr. Bloomberg insists that we look at him and he is willing to pay dearly for our attention. Since the debate last Wednesday night, I have been seeing commercials for Mr. Bloomberg in which Barack Obama appears with him. I suppose that means the Obama-Clinton team are all in with Bloomberg and all out with current frontrunner Sanders. President Obama said he would intervene if Sanders looked like he would be nominated and now he’s doing it. Perhaps it also means a VP spot for Mrs. Clinton, but we’ll have to wait and see.

In just a little over 3 months, he has spent more than $400 million on advertising for the Democrat nomination. Every time you turn on your TV or look at You Tube¹ on your phone you will see Michael Bloomberg and hear that “Mike will get it done”. We will, therefore, indulge him. We devote this Castle Report to learning something about him that 30 second soundbites cannot tell us.

Information freely available

We don’t have to look very far for information though because it is hard to avoid him right now. The Sunday edition of the New York Times did a front-page article about him. He has spent so much money and bought so many TV and internet commercials that we can’t help but know what he wants us to know about him. We will endeavor to look beyond the purchased media for other information that may prove helpful.

Life and career of Michael Bloomberg

He was born February 14, 1942, so happy birthday Michael Bloomberg. That makes him 78 years old the same as Bernie Sanders, I believe. Unlike Mr. Sanders, Michael Bloomberg has worked for a living outside government, has built a business, and has made payrolls. He attended Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Business School. He built and is still majority owner of Bloomberg L.P. That company makes its money by selling subscriptions for information and market data analysis. He has a listed net worth of more that $61 billion.

Michael Bloomberg, political chameleon

He is, therefore, not diminished very much by his outlay so far. Furthermore, he says that he is willing to spend more than a billion dollars on his presidential campaign. He was a lifelong Democrat until 2001. In that year he switched to the Republican Party to run for mayor of New York. He was elected Mayor in 2002 and served until 2013. I remember his campaign very well because my daughter was a student at New York University then. I spent a lot of time in New York during those years. The controversy then was the same as now, in that he spent more than $100 million on his campaign.

Sense of duty?

He switched his political affiliation to independent in 2007, and in 2018 he switched back to the Democrat Party, where he remains today. In 2004, he endorsed George W. Bush and was a speaker at the Republican National Convention. His web site says that a sense of duty and common purpose has guided him throughout his life. When someone is willing to spend more than a billion dollars to obtain a job that pays less than half a million then you know something about the lure of power and its seductive, addictive nature.

Comparing and contrasting Michael Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders

If we were to compare him and current front runner Bernie Sanders, we would see some similarities and some differences. They are both white, Jewish, 78-year-old men and they both want to be emperor of the world, but the similarities probably end there. Michael Bloomberg is a billionaire many times over and Bernie Sanders is, as Mr. Bloomberg pointed out in the debate, the nation’s best-known socialist is a millionaire with three houses. Mr. Bloomberg founded and runs a company that has made him worth $61 billion. But Mr. Sanders gives me the impression that if he took over a small grocery store free of debt, he would bankrupt it in six months.

Comparing and contrasting Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump

Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump seem to have things in common as well, although they apparently hate each other passionately. They both live and built their fortunes in New York City. Likewise, they both used their fortunes to enter the political arena. They both have a habitual way of committing what the media refers to as gaffes. But to me just seems like the actual truth about what they really believe. President Trump has taken to calling Mr. Bloomberg “Mini Mike” I suppose to imply that he is small. But he is actually 5’8”, which is about average to slightly below average for American men.

Trump on Bloomberg’s money and physical stature

This is what he recently said about Mr. Bloomberg’s use of his money:

What Mini Mike is doing is nothing less than a large-scale illegal campaign contribution. He is spreading money all over the place, only to have recipients of his cash payments, many former opponents, happily joining or supporting his campaign. Isn’t that called a payoff?

He then tweeted out the following:

Mini is illegally buying the Democrat nomination. They are taking it away from Bernie again. Mini Mike, Major Party nominations are not for sale. Good luck in the debate tomorrow night and remember, no standing on boxes!²

The name-reco barrier

When I was a candidate for President in 2016, I had a lot of trouble persuading media companies to cover my campaign or to even mention me. Under the law the media does not have to cover a campaign or give a candidate attention. But the law does require media companies to sell media to candidates at the lowest prevailing rate. If I had a net worth of $61 billion, I could have bought enough media and media associated people to force voters to at least listen to my views, even if for only 30 seconds at a time. Sometimes purchasing media exposure is the only way to get it.

Michael Bloomberg will save the planet?

If you’ve seen one of Mr. Bloomberg’s commercials, and if you have a TV or a computer, I know you have, then you know that his campaign slogan is “Mike will get it done.” He runs commercials showing turtles, birds, and other cute animals then says that he will end the war on science. Other commercials and announcements say that he will save the planet. The late George Carlin used to do a very funny skit about the arrogance of saying you’re going to save the planet.³

I can here him now:

These arrogant bourgeoise liberals who think they alone can save the planet. The planet is fine, leave it alone, but the people are [bad].

Michael Bloomberg will fix Wall Street?

He also said that he intends to fix Wall Street. I guess he feels free to do that now that he has made his fortune there. He made his money in financial services and in the past has criticized efforts at reforms following the financial crises. So I suppose he feels particularly qualified to lead the reforms. Among his proposed reforms is a 0.1 percent tax on transactions in stocks, bonds, and payments on derivative contracts. All these payments go straight back to clients of his financial services firm. He would use the collected revenue to reimpose regulations on the Wall Street firms. He falls short of his rival Bernie Sanders, however, who calls for Wall Street banks to break up.

<Sigh /> The Debate

I should probably talk about last Wednesday’s debate, as difficult as it may be to do so. Held in Las Vegas Nevada, the debate was billed as a heavy weight title fight. Well, if it was, then it was the first one without a heavy weight or even a title.

Mr. Bloomberg did well in my view, although he was hammered by all the others. He is, after all, the late arrival at their family reunion. He did his best to remain poised and did not get rattled when the others attacked him. Their attacks directed primarily at him are indications that they fear him as their greatest rival. They are right to do so because he comes across as the most competent and electable of the bunch. Even the womanizing and racism attacks didn’t seem to faze him. Indeed he seemed able to shrug them off in a kind of no big deal way.

The Michael Bloomberg policy prescription

He gives the appearance of someone competent who could handle foreign leaders and run the swamp as it is. His policies are basically Obama part two, i.e.,

• Tax everyone to death,
• Return to the Paris Climate Change Agreement,
• Apologize to China. And
• Tell the rest of what have become our enemies that we really didn’t mean it.

This while his wife wags her finger in our faces and tells us to eat more kale and stop drinking soda.⁴

Michael Bloomberg has had money problems, too!

Mr. Bloomberg has papered many of the problems that have occurred in his life with money. I wonder if, as president, he would try to do the same things with our money instead of his. A good example would be the lady who accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were young people. He had the audacity to express misgivings about the lady’s testimony. He also questioned the #MeToo movement as it related to accusations against news anchor Charlie Rose.

The record: on women…

Michael Bloomberg was coincidentally scheduled as a headline speaker at Emily’s List, which is an organization of that movement. His comments published in The New York Times, didn’t sit well with the ladies of Emily’s List. But Mr. Bloomberg has so much money one simply can’t ignore him, so he spoke anyway. During his speech he pointed out that during the last election cycle he had given more than $100 million to the political campaigns of women. Of those, 21 had won election. Money buys a lot of things, including friendship, loyalty, and especially elections. Joe Biden said on Meet the Press last weekend when questioned about Mr. Bloomberg’s recent rise,

$60 billion will buy you a lot of advertising, but it won’t erase your record.

…and on law enforcement

Perhaps his most difficult position regarding Democrat voters was his Stop and Frisk policy when he was mayor. He made some statements to explain why he instituted it that many Democrats consider racially inflammatory and a clear avenue on which to attack him. Stop and Frisk was necessary, he asserted, to keep people in minority neighborhoods from killing each other. Gun control wasn’t the problem because New York has the tightest gun laws in the country. But the targets of Stop and Frisk still had their guns. His policy ran afoul of the 4^th amendment but he continued to do it because it got results.

About racism…

Racism within the criminal justice system is now Democrat Party orthodoxy. So even the merest mention of a possibly different explanation will get you banned for life from all accepted circles in the woke culture. Mr. Bloomberg is now on his apology tour trying abjectly to convince Democrat voters that he really didn’t mean it. Would he have been better off to just let them kill each other? No more racially insensitive and misogynistic policies for me, he says. Just let me have your nomination, and I promise to be a good elitist like all the rest of you.

Michael Bloomberg, teaching people to farm?

Race is not the only thing Mr. Bloomberg is trying to overcome right now. It seems that in 2016 he went to Oxford University and made some remarks about farmers that have come back to haunt him. “I could teach anybody, even the people in this room, to farm.” He went on to make jokes about the lack of intelligence of farmers and he referred to agriculture as a process. He said these people could be replaced with technology which has the skill sets to think and analyze. You have to have a lot more gray matter to do that, he said.

Michael Bloomberg plumps for death panels

Perhaps the most important thing he has said recently was his admission that death panels would be necessary in the new healthcare. He said that healthcare is unaffordable for everyone. So if you are 90 and have prostate cancer, we will have to tell you, sorry we can’t help you. So once again in his Democrat elitist, nanny-state, we know everything and you don’t view, the government in Mr. Bloomberg’s Administration decides who lives and who dies. It was a vitally important admission. It confirmed that the only way to afford free healthcare for all is to empower the single payer to make the ultimate decision of what the word all means.

All Democratic candidates are would-be brokers in pillage

Finally, folks, all the candidates on the debate stage in Las Vegas, without exception, are perfect examples of H.L. Mencken’s quote about politicians:

The state or to make matters more concrete, the government, consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government. They have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who paint and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle.

Editor’s Notes

1 Your editor will vouch personally that Michael Bloomberg seems bent on funding all monetized YouTube videos up to fifty percent. Such is literally the distribution of his YouTube advertising.

2 Mr. Trump accused Michael Bloomberg of demanding a box to stand on. Bloomberg’s campaign and apologists disputed the allegation. But in fact Michael Bloomberg has a history of standing on boxes to speak in public.

3 Mr. Carlin uses language that parents might not find suitable for younger viewers. Parental judgment and discretion are advised.

4 Surely everyone remembers then-Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to ban soda. He lost that battle in court.

About the image

This photo of Michael Bloomberg comes from Gage Skidmore. He has licensed it under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike 3.0 Unported License.