Bloombergville Redux

Months before the Occupy movement sprang up in 2011 and its first major encampment made New York City's Zuccotti Park a household word, there were sidewalk sleepovers known as Bloombergvilles. The longest of these anti-austerity protests, in front of City Hall, lasted for three weeks before police broke it up and arrested 13 of the participants.

Inspired by the Depression-era Hooverville shantytowns erected by the destitute and homeless, the pre-Occupy Bloombergvilles were set up to irritate the city's multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, under whose watch the Big Apple had become Income Disparity Capital of the Universe. The big Wall Street banks got the bailout while the rest of us got the bum's rush as well as the bill for both their reward and our punishment. As Bloomberg's own personal wealth was in the process of tripling to more than $53.4 billion, making him the eighth richest person in America, wages of workers stagnated and more jobs disappeared. Social programs were cut nationally and locally. Bloomberg even ordered that the city's food stamp applicants be fingerprinted as if they were criminals, before Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally put the kibosh on that cruelty.

Bite Me

It goes on and on. Bloomberg in 2011 had very Trumpily appointed as schools chancellor his own version of Betsy DeVos, a crony named Cathie Black, despite the fact that she had no education experience. Her liberal take on school overcrowding was to wonder out loud why poor minority women didn't use birth control. Unlike DeVos, though, Black didn't last too long on the job. Maybe it was the disclosure that Bloomberg had also had to hire a separate person to actually do Black's job for her.

 The very legitimacy of democratic institutions had become a critical issue of contention and mass outrage long before Donald Trump ever stumbled onto the scene to cast a lot of unwanted light on the corruption long endemic in our neoliberal society, in which government and corporations are for all intents and purposes the very same entity.

Then, as now, you would never have known that people were taking to the streets if you got all your news from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. Six months before the corporate media had no choice but to acknowledge Occupy (first by ridiculing it and later by covering it as legitimate news once the police beatings began) there was a "Day of Rage" march on Wall Street by a diverse group of thousands of students, teachers, trade unionists, retirees, doctors, nurses - in other words, a cross-section of humanity forging a new solidarity which cuts across income and racial and "identity politics" lines.

Young student debt slaves are forming coalitions with the homeless, the recently unemployed or underemployed professionals of the middle class, trade unionists and others with the common experience of having suffered injustice and who are united in outrage. This building of cross-class coalitions is something relatively new. The "helping professions" have all been in the forefront because their ability to do their jobs has been so adversely affected by the budget cuts of the neoliberal project. Likewise, people who had heretofore been permanently relegated to victimhood, such as the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill have taken on activist roles in protest movements as well. Tenant unions have sprung up as associations of eviction victims united in fighting landlords, more apt of a name than ever in these times of neo-feudalism.

The Bloombergville/Occupy movement was the beginning, in America at least, of the refugees from the middle class finding common cause with more historically oppressed groups of people. It was a slap in the face to the Divide and Conquer regimen which created enough of a norm-busting vacuum for Donald Trump to be ushered into power, courtesy of the arcane Electoral College and the dismal campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Pre-Occupy March 2011 March On Wall Street

The only media outlets bothering to cover this huge Bloomberg-era march and rally were Al Jazeera and the Amsterdam News.

So, for me anyway, nothing brings back memories of the heady, halcyon days of those civic uprisings than the possible/likely/all but certain entry of the despised Bloomberg, a virtual parody of smug class privilege, into the Democratic presidential primary race. Nothing spells irony better than Bloomberg's plaintive reason for running for the presidency in the first place: to restore the "norms" that the elites feebly claim were so suddenly and tragically lost during the reign of Donald Trump, along with the "legitimacy" of our democratic institutions.

Politics has been in legitimacy crisis mode for decades. Long before Trump, there was deep distrust of citizens for their government, a reality which Trump and other right wing "populist" leaders have co-opted brilliantly.

 Political parties are not allies of the citizens. And since the political system depends on the mass loyalty of citizens, it reacts to this negativity by clamping down, via censorship, policing, mass surveillance. As Barack Obama made plain in his annoying lecture on "wokeness" last week, deferential citizens are viewed as better citizens than critical citizens. He wanted to deflect from the scary truth that conflict is absolutely essential for the development of democratic rights.

It was Bloomberg (who was offered and turned down the World Bank presidency by Obama) himself who had directly crushed legitimate democratic protest when he spearheaded the orchestrated nationwide police crackdowns on the Occupy camps in December, 2011. (To be fair, he got a little help from the Democratic veal pen of organizers, such as MoveOn, which had attempted to co-opt the movement by starting its own get-out-the-vote "99% Spring" astroturf imitation,  which mysteriously disappeared around the time that the camps were destroyed.)

Bloomberg's threatened entry into the race is all about saving the oligarchy at the continued expense of the rest of us. His candidacy is living proof that we do indeed live under neo-feudalism,  and that our quadrennial participation in presidential politics is a privilege granted to us, and not a right. Specifically, his entry into the race is meant as a warning and a rebuke to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its popular candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

His entry into the race is above all a sign of desperation by the oligarchs that there is the tiniest possibility that they may actually be parted from a smidgen of their obscene wealth sooner rather than later.

From Barack Obama last week chiding the victims of his austerity policies to tone down their indignant rhetoric, to mega-banker Jamie Dimon complaining on TV that the "success" his predatory cohort is being disrespected, to Jeffrey Epstein pal Bill Gates threatening to vote for Trump if Warren is the nominee. the Ruling Class is wallowing in a virtual orgy of overblown sensitivity. They are so corrupt that any vestigial insight into the ugly fact of their own corruption and criminality has long disappeared. whittled away by both their ill-gotten gains and the fawning coverage they get from their corporate press courtiers.

Bloomberg even owns his own media empire, a feat he had accomplished long before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

No wonder all the usual suspects are welcoming this godzillionaire ex-mayor to the party with open arms, despite there being no chance that he'll win the nomination, let alone even make it on to the debate stage. Bloomberg has all the debate stage he wants in the way of free publicity. 

One positive point: the Stop and Frisk former mayor who made extreme racial profiling by cops a core part of his agenda, makes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who failed to rein in police misconduct and to address racism in his own little town, look like the rube he is. He's also pulling the rug right out from under fellow centrist Joe Biden, increasingly viewed as a liability by the Owning Class because of his chronic "gaffes" and obvious mental decline. 

Bloomberg's self-funding billions will buy him all the air time and space he demands with which and from which to hurl class venom at the lesser people under the guise of hurling venom at Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He is the leader of his own party, the Oligarch Party. His MAGA motto is to Make America Gentrified, Always. His task is to promote the narrative that 1) Bernie and Liz are making our Trickle-Down Tyrants so nervous that they can't even pee their golden drops of beneficence on us without getting a nasty groin-ache; and 2) the serfs of the Heartland are so bummed and so terrified by the prospect of guaranteed health care and debt-free college that they will vote for Trump again out of a dearth of centrism.

Bloomberg has heeded the call of fellow financier Steve Rattner, who is granted regular New York Times opinion page space despite his tacit admission to robbing public pension funds in a sleazy kickback scheme. Like most members of his class, he avoided criminal indictment and prosecution by "settling" with New York and agreeing to pay a fine. Like most members of his criminal class, he no doubt later claimed the fine as an income tax deduction.

Three days before Bloomberg filed the paperwork to enter the Alabama Democratic primary, Rattner complained in the Times that even worse than Medicare For All and the threat to private insurance predators are Warren's regulatory reforms and taxes, which would greatly threaten his class's ability to rob, cheat, steal and pollute:

Many of America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered. Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would be effectively eliminated. Shale fracking would be banned, which would send oil and natural gas prices soaring and cost millions of Americans their jobs. And on and on.

 Oh, the humanity. Notwithstanding that Warren cringe-worthily said that among the Black leaders she'd consider for her cabinet were Bain Capital's Deval Patrick and Melody Barnes, late of the Obama administration and revolving doors to JP Morgan Chase and Booz Allen Hamilton, at least she's making them momentarily uncomfortable, albeit probably unnecessarily so if she wins the nomination. They count Bernie out at their own peril.

Since normal tycoons, meanwhile, are so not used to defending themselves in public, it will now fall to Bloomberg to seamlessly continue what Barack Obama started last week by way of gaslighting the underdog and reassuringly dog-whistling endless class supremacy to the traditional movers and shakers of The Realm who have so richly rewarded Obama since he left office.

And just to be on the safe side, the Oily Garchs will protect their bullshit narrative by ostentatiously moving Wall Street's mythical bull sculpture to a place of greater safety. Just last month, a protester doused it with fake blood. And the month before that, another ne'er-do-well violently bashed it with a toy metal banjo. This symbol of the Overlords was not only punked, it was plinked. And that is so rude, seeing as how the Overlords paid homage to women's rights -  not by passing wage parity legislation -  but by commissioning a Fearless Girl statue to face down the Charging Bull.

No word if Bull will be reunited with Girl, who also had to be fearfully removed from the site due to safety concerns.

Maybe Bloomberg and the other belly-aching, plutocrapping Thought Leaders can get together before the first terrifying Democratic primaries and strain to come up with a solution to the pressing dilemma of where they can run, where they can hide.

(graphic by Kat Garcia)