The Chris Moeller Archives

The mayor of the fascist state

It's not a given that a President Bloomberg would be an improvement over President Trump. Do you prefer the bully that confronts you face to face or the one that disguises his bullying intent? Sometimes I think I want to see the guy drive that stake through my heart, rather than into my back. Michael Bloomberg, the most explicitly corporate and Republican candidate seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has nothing but private disdain for the people that go to work in this country and that number among its poor and underprivileged.

Bloomberg is the former New York City mayor that ramped up the "stop and frisk" policing program by a measure of seven times (97,296 stops in 2002 up to 685,724 stops in 2011) and now claims instead that he scaled it back by 95%. He also oversaw the mass warrant-less, suspicion-less surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers, as his police department mapped out where they did their praying, their eating, their studying, and went to work. As his candidacy ascends this week, even Trump has taken the opportunity to call Bloomberg a racist. At Oxford University in 2016, Bloomberg questioned whether blue-collar workers-- factory workers and farmers-- had the skills required to adapt to the information technology era. In office in New York, he called both the ACLU and the local teachers' union "extremists."

The billionaire publisher is unquestionably attempting to buy his way to a nomination and into the White House. He certainly isn't a Democrat, even by its most historically-heinous parameters. He bought his way into the party's primary race with a sizable contribution to the DNC on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. He's avoided the televised debates and any confrontation with an opposing candidate as the possibility exists that he or she might publicly quarrel with the unfiltered message of his massive media ad buy. His strategy is to bypass the early voting states, where personal appearances are important to voters, and focus instead on the 14 states that go to the polls on March 3rd, Super Tuesday. If all goes according to plan with his attack of 30-second and 60-second commercials, he'll be the anti-Bernie and anti-Democratic Socialist candidate left standing in the summer that can challenge Sanders at the convention in Milwaukee, claim the lion's share of the DNC's unelected superdelegates, and protect Wall Street from ever experiencing the Sanders tax on stock transactions.

The Washington establishment is welcoming him, even if few others are. With Sanders winning the first two voting states and rising in the national polls (he now leads either of Biden or Bloomberg, the two closest runners, by at least 7% nationally among all voters), Bloomberg has self-financed his candidacy with this $60 billion in advertising, and he is reportedly considering, yep, Hillary Clinton, as a running mate, if he were to land the party nomination. Will Democrats go for it? The only question is how many will. Nothing less than the soul of it is again at stake. Bloomberg has paid prominent "liberal" groups, like the Center for American Progress, to whitewash his public record on Islamaphobia. After giving the group a million and a half dollars, a 4300-word chapter on the Bloomberg-era NYPD was cut out of a 2015 report on that subject. He's received several endorsements already from Congressional members, including some-- inexplicably-- in the Black Caucus, and he's leading the polls in Florida.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was very clear about what he believed the Corporate State to be-- he called it fascism during an address before Congress in 1938, and he didn't live to see anything like the Corporate State we have today. It's not an exaggeration in this context to call Bloomberg a fascist. According to the New York Times, the NYPD eavesdropped on thousands of conversations between Muslims in restaurants and stores in New York and New Jersey. They worked with the CIA to deploy undercover agents in Muslim neighborhoods, in book stores, bars, cafes, and nightclubs. Police had informants they called "mosque crawlers," at times even reporting back on how often people prayed. Paid informants were ordered to "bait" Muslims into saying provocative things. The police commissioner of the city later admitted the surveillance produced "not one actionable piece of intelligence." Bloomberg spied on Muslims in their homes and in their places of worship during his three terms in office. Trump simply praised him for it.

Now that he's seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party, Bloomberg has apologized for "stop and frisk" (though still not for his warrant-less Muslim spying), yet in 2015, he remarked on tape his belief that most murders are committed by young "male minorities" who are so similar that they could all be described on a standardized "Xerox" form distributed among police officers. Be honest now. Did you think I had supercharged the word "fascism" earlier?

The candidate certainly sees himself as the protective wall between Bernie Sanders and the Wall Street corporatists. The threat is a legitimate one and they know it. 90 percent of Americans want to break up the big banks, according to polls, and Sanders vows to do it. He's not a pretender, like Barack Obama, who talked the talk, but collected record-breaking fundraising dollars from Wall Street, grabbing even more of the loot than John McCain managed to do in 2008, before bailing out the crooks with trillions of dollars and sending not one fraudulent speculator to prison. Sanders actually believes that it's immoral for people to go into a store and pay a 7% tax on a loaf of bread while a billionaire can buy a 100 million dollars of Exxon stock and not pay a cent in levy.

The party's not big enough for both the champions of the poor and the working class, like FDR, and those that FDR would call fascist. That's why the DNC has tried to rig two primaries in succession, 2016 and 2020, in order to maintain the fascist control. A Bloomberg nomination in 2020 would protect the fleet by setting up a general election choice between two billionaires, but more importantly, one between two corporate toadies. At that point, a Trump victory might even be preferable to them because it's better for fundraising.

A Bernie ticket in November not only provides the best chance of any that exist to dethrone Donald Trump, but would also deliver a massive surge of voters to create a more agreeable Congress for the new president. Bloomberg would provide no such boost. His nomination would suppress the overall vote. But they know all that as well as we do. Bloomberg and the establishment aren't really worried that Bernie will lose. They're worried that he will win. His prospects are neither here nor there, however. Not for us. As Jean Paul Sartre, the great man of the Left, once said, you don't fight fascists because you will win. You fight fascists because they are fascists.

posted by CM @ 9:08 PM