Carl,
I think you're fighting a losing battle. As I told Roger in a private email
last night during a discussion on the Bard Talk list, people who've been blind
for all or most of their lives, have been trained to conform to the status quo,
to be passive, to gratefully accept what is given. What they want most in the
world is to be part of the sighted world, not to change it. And we're asking
them to question the status quo? Did you ever read that book, "The Making of
Blind Men"? I think that's the title. It was written in the 60's about how the
blindness system socializes its clients. I remember that the author compared
how differently blinded veterans were trained than blind civilians, and how
much more effective the rehabilitation of the veterans was. I wonder if that's
still true. Somehow, I doubt it.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2020 3:55 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Of Course Michael Bloomberg Is an Oligarch
I'd better hold onto my hat. I posted this article on the ACB Chat list. If
Chris Hedges gets me scalped, this one will probably get me roasted.
But I've been saying this for some time. We are an Oligarchy. Sure, we *Want
to be a Republic, fueled by democracy, but the bare faced truth is, **We're
not!!
This nation, no matter how radical the idea of a people's government was back
in the 1770's, the end result, the historic US Constitution, hammered out by
our vaunted Fore Fathers, included a very small number of our total population.
Only White Male Landholders and Persons of Wealth 21 years of age and older,
were included. Those were the decision makers. They determined the fate of
the rest of the people.
Women, Negroes, Indians, Chinese, and anyone who worked the Land but did not
own a piece of it, were considered to have no stake in the new nation's fate.
And the struggle down through the subsequent years has been to preserve the
control and protection of the descendants of the original First Class Citizens.
Just remember the long struggles by the Establishment to control those who
could vote. Gerrymandering, elimination of access to poling places by the
working and lower classes, the establishment of a two party system designed to
defend the Ruling Class, and the ugly practices of threatening and causing
bodily harm to those who dared to attempt to vote or to speak out.
But we simply shrug and shove all that stuff under the carpet and go on
believing that somehow we had these all wise Fore Fathers who, despite the fact
that many of them owned other human beings, who believed it was their proper
place to order their women folk and children around, that these broad minded
men could put together a document that was so perfect that it would last for
hundreds of years, despite dramatic changes in culture.
Wow!
Carl Jarvis
On 2/8/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Of Course Michael Bloomberg Is an Oligarch Democratic presidential
candidate and former Mayor of New York City Michael
Bloomberg.Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of New
York City Michael Bloomberg. (Carlos Osorio / AP) A recent exchange on
MSNBC turned viral after Nina Turner, a national campaign co-chair for
Bernie Sanders, described billionaire Michael Bloomberg as an
“oligarch.” That drew a heated response from MSNBC contributor and
political science professor Jason Johnson, who insisted that Turner’s
word choice was unfair and inaccurate.
That’s absurd. By any common definition, Bloomberg’s an oligarch. He
wants to buy your vote. Based on his record, he’s also coming for your
Social Security.
After this exchange, Sen. Turner tweeted, “I may not have a PhD (yet!)
but I DO have the good sense of knowing what makes for Oligarchy.”
Hey, I’m not a clockmaker, but I know what time it is.
My social media feed is filled with Democrats celebrating Bloomberg’s
return to the Democratic Party, his candidacy, and his pledge to up to
a billion dollars to defeat Trump. (Few, if any, of these Democrats
are repeating a line of attack often used against Sanders—that he’s
not really a Democrat—despite the fact that Bloomberg is a former
Republican who only rejoined the Democratic Party two years ago.)
Think again.
The Video
A brief recap of the “oligarch” argument: Turner, Johnson, and Chris
Matthews were discussing the Democratic National Committee’s
last-minute rules change, which allowed Bloomberg into the next debate
after he wrote it a large check.
“We should be ashamed of that as Americans, people who believe in
democracy,” said Sen. Turner, “that the oligarchs, if you have more
money you can buy your way.”
When asked if she thought Bloomberg was an oligarch, Turner didn’t
hesitate.
“He is,” she said, “buying his way into the race.”
Johnson insisted this was “name-calling,” and that a label like “oligarch”
has “implications in this country that I think are unfair and
unreasonable.”
But is it true? Some landmark political science studies—and most
dictionaries—say that it is.
Is This Country an Oligarchy?
Merriam-Webster defines an “oli·gar·chy” as follows:
1 : government by the few
2 : a government in which a small group exercises control especially
for corrupt and selfish purposes; also: a group exercising such
control
3 : an organization under oligarchic control
Does that describe our government? Political scientists Martin Gilens
and Benjamin Page found that “Economic elites and organized groups
representing business interests have substantial independent impacts
on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based
interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
Gilens and Page didn’t use the word “oligarchy,” but those elites and
groups represent only a small percentage of the population, so a
number of the journalists who covered their work did.
In a related finding, political scientist Thomas Ferguson and his
colleagues found “the relations between money and major party votes in
all elections for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives from
1980 to 2014 are well approximated by straight lines.”
Money doesn’t just talk, it votes. That’s oligarchy.
But is Michael Bloomberg an Oligarch?
An “oligarch,” according to the Cambridge American Dictionary, is “one
of a small group of powerful people who control a country or an industry.”
Is Michael Bloomberg such a person? Maybe he’s just really rich and
doesn’t control that much. But let’s have some background.
With an estimated net worth of more than $60 billion, Bloomberg is the
twelfth-richest person on the planet and the ninth-richest person in
the United States. That’s a pretty small group of people. But do they
control the country? Ferguson et al. found that campaign cash drives
election outcomes. That means campaign donors largely control the process.
Gilens and Page found that wealthy people and interests usually get
what they want. The rest of us usually don’t, unless what we want is
also what they want. The fact that progressives like some of
Bloomberg’s positions doesn’t undermine these findings. In fact, it
reinforces them.
Bloomberg hasn’t just given money to a number of campaigns. He also
controls a media empire. In true oligarchical fashion, he decreed
years ago that his news outlets would not cover his political career.
He said recently that it would not cover his rivals’ campaigns, either
— a move that drew criticism from journalists and an ethics professor.
Less than a month later, however, Bloomberg News violated that edict
by running a hit piece against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
That’s oligarchical behavior.
Bloomberg’s own political history is an exercise in the use of
oligarchical wealth to change electoral outcomes. He was unpopular
when he first ran for mayor of New York—a situation he rectified by
dramatically outspending his rivals. Even so, Bloomberg only eked out
a two-point victory against Democrat Mark Green in his first mayoral
race, after outspending him five to one.
The argument between Turner and Johnson involved another compelling
example of Bloomberg-as-oligarch. The DNC’s rules said each candidate
had to have a minimum number of donors to quality for the debate
stage. That rule wasn’t overruled for Cory Booker or Julian Castro,
despite calls for greater diversity in the race. But it was overturned
for Bloomberg, who had donated more than $1 million to the DNC and a
related organization a few short weeks before.
Will Michael Bloomberg Cut Your Social Security?
If you thought there were problems with Joe Biden’s Social Security
record, wait until you see Bloomberg’s. His record of espousing
austerity economics has including a special enthusiasm for cutting
Medicare and Social Security.
As he told Face the Nation in 2013:
No program to reduce the deficit makes any sense whatsoever unless you
address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security, interest payment on the debt, which you can’t touch, and defense
spending.
Everything else is tiny compared to that.
Bloomberg has called for raising the retirement age, a move that would
cut Social Security benefits for all retirees and create physical
hardship for many older workers.
These are bad ideas. They make for even worse politics. Voters love
Social Security. A Pew study released in March 2019 found that “74
percent of Americans say Social Security benefits should not be reduced in
any way.”
And voters don’t like entitlement cuts, or the Bloomberg-endorsed
thinking behind them. That can be seen in a GBAO/Center for American
Progress survey conducted in October 2019. Less than half of
Republicans, one-third of Democrats, and roughly one-third of
independents agreed with the Bloomberg-like statement that “our
national debt is way too high, and we need to cut government spending
on the biggest programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”
Trump has given Democrats an opening on Social Security. His
administration is currently engaged in a de facto program to cut
Social Security disability benefits, by forcing millions of disabled
people to endure the punishing process of eligibility screening as
often as every six months. Newsweek reports that the Social Security
Administration concluded that this would lead to $2.6 billion in
benefit cuts and an additional 2.6 million case reviews between 2020
and 2029. It’s a brutal assault on the health and security of a
vulnerable population.
Trump also said he intends to pursue additional cuts to Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid after the upcoming election, when he
no longer has to worry about public opinion. Worse, he did so at the
annual gathering of billionaires in Davos. That reinforces the
perception that he’s imposing hardship on the majority to help a
privileged few.
Most leading Democrats understand that there is wide support for
protecting and expanding Social Security. Most leading
candidates—including Joe Biden—have offered some form of Social
Security expansion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has embraced the idea
in principle. There’s an opportunity here—if Bloomberg doesn’t stop them from
taking it.
What about inequality?
Bloomberg has sometimes embraced tax increases, but he has long
opposed tax hikes that reduce inequality by targeting the wealthy.
In fact, he called the idea “class warfare” in a 2012 op-ed for the
Wall Street Journal. The op-ed was called “Federal Budgets and Class Warfare,”
and it trotted out some hoary clichés about “class war”—which is more
like asymmetrical warfare on behalf of the rich—along with other stale
and debunked right-wing talking points. Bloomberg wrote, for example,
that “the top 5% already pay 59% of all federal income taxes, while
42% of filers have no federal income tax bill at all.”
That statistic omits state, local, and sales taxes, so it doesn’t
prove Bloomberg’s point. What it does demonstrate is the extent of
today’s income inequality.
Now that he’s running, Bloomberg’s had a seeming change of heart. He
has a plan to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations—the same
idea he bitterly condemned in 2012. It’s a modest plan, compared to
Sanders and Warren, but it’s not bad. The question is, does he mean it?
Bloomberg has close ties with organizations that have long campaigned
for deficit reduction and against Social Security and Medicare. His
only recorded complaint against past bipartisan budget-cutting
proposals, in fact, was that they didn’t go far enough—a statement
that won him praise from the anti-entitlement “Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget.” The Fiscal Times quoted Bloomberg as
saying Democrats “have to face the reality that we need more spending cuts,
including reasonable entitlement reform.”
(Bloomberg’s “class warfare” screed was posted on his website, but has
since been removed.)
The text of his “this deal doesn’t cut spending enough” speech has
also been removed from the CRFB website—(apparently there’s a lot of
that going
around.)
There are other reasons to worry about Candidate Bloomberg.
Given his virtually unlimited resources, Bloomberg could theoretically
win both the nomination and the presidency. By my calculation,
Bloomberg could pay the same “unit price” he paid to make himself
mayor of New York—$88 per voter—and make himself president for $12
billion. He’d even have $50 billion set aside for a rainy day.
The nomination would presumably cost less than the presidency, so he
has a better shot at that. But it would be a bad look for the
Democrats to become the first party in modern history whose candidate
openly bought the nomination. But then, Bloomberg’s used to getting
the rules changed just for him. When he wanted to run for a third term
as mayor, Bloomberg used all the tools at his disposal (one of which
led to an ethics complaint) to change the city’s rules. Once he got
what he wanted, Bloomberg then pushed to change the rules back. It
seems that some privileges should be labeled, “for oligarchs only.”
Democrats should also be troubled by Bloomberg’s authoritarian streak.
As mayor, Bloomberg had a history of suppressing peaceful
demonstrations, sometimes with brute force. His police spied on Muslim
gatherings and engaged in racially-biased “stop and frisk” tactics
that expanded sevenfold under his leadership. He took advantaged of
privatized public spaces, including Zuccotti Park, to suspend basic
liberties within them, while renting out his police force to the banks
the movement was protesting. His unconstitutional suppression of
Occupy even included the needless destruction of the movement’s library.
As Conor Friedensdorf writes in The Atlantic, comparing Bloomberg to Trump:
Had Trump spent years sending armed agents of the state to frisk
people of color, 90 percent of them innocent, would you forgive him?
How about if Trump sent undercover cops to spy on Muslims with no
basis for the targeting other than the mere fact of their religious
identity? What if he thwarted the ability of anti-war protesters to
march in New York City?
But it’s okay to take his money, right?
If he doesn’t win the nomination, Bloomberg will once again play the
role of billionaire donor. After lamely arguing that Bernie Sanders is
a “rich guy”—as if a million or two means anything to
billionaire—Prof. Johnson objected to calling Bloomberg an “oligarch”
because it might make him decide to close his checkbook. Johnson said:
It’s the kind of thing that blows up in your face if you become the
nominee and you have to work with Bloomberg three or four months from
now. That’s the issue that Sanders’s people never seem to want to remember.
Johnson didn’t seem to realize that his argument—“Politicians
shouldn’t make the billionaire mad or he won’t give them his money”—is
a textbook example of oligarchy in action.
Maybe Sanders’ people do remember. Maybe they just don’t care.
Bloomberg says he’ll unconditionally offer financial support to any
Democratic nominee, including Sanders and Warren. That sounds good.
But “unconditional” isn’t Bloomberg’s usual M.O. As the New York Times
reported in 2018, when he donated heavily to Democrats running for
Congress (and one or two Republicans):
Bloomberg] has indicated to aides that he only wants to support
candidates who share his relatively moderate political orientation,
avoiding nominees hailing from the populist left.
If that means embracing Bloomberg’s views on Social Security and
“class war,” Democrats could be trading electability for cash. Beware
of billionaires bearing gifts—especially when one of those gifts is
the billionaire himself.
Richard Eskow / Common Dreams
