|
Meyerson on TAP
Bloomberg: The Manchurian Candidate. If there’s anyone out there who believes Michael Bloomberg would be a strong candidate to unseat Donald Trump, a very well-documented story in today’s Washington Post should tank any such delusions. Some of the particular weaknesses that Post reporter Michael Kranish documents have been in plain view for some time, while others are getting their first exposure, but no one has assembled them into a coherent narrative comparable to Kranish’s.
In case you didn’t know, Bloomberg is up to his neck in business relations with China and the Chinese government. His company has had offices in Beijing for the past 25 years and has made a tidy sum selling its computers and financial information to the nation’s multitude of capitalists and to its Leninist-capitalist government. Two years ago, the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Bond Index elected to include Chinese government bonds in its listings, enabling Western investors to fund the Chinese government’s myriad endeavors. Kranish reports that financial experts believe that $150 billion in such investments will flow to China in the next couple of years.
Also in 2018, Bloomberg initiated the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, his very own Asian-oriented Davos, which held its meeting that year in Singapore, and its 2019 confab in Beijing.
Not surprisingly, seldom is heard a discouraging word from Bloomberg about the Chinese government. One searches in vain for his criticisms of the government’s mass incarceration of the Uighurs or its threats to Hong Kong. On the contrary, he told a television audience that Chinese President Xi Jinping “is not a dictator.”
In short, Bloomberg is the man who opened the door to major American investments in the Chinese government. Can I see the hands of those who think this will help him if (as, happily, will not happen) he’s the designated Democrat to take on Trump? ~ HAROLD MEYERSON |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s not forget in that aforementioned PBS interview where Bloomberg stated Xi Jinping is not a dictator he also stated that he does not support paying workers a living wage.
The DINO establishment is watching their candidate, Status Quo Joe, implode. So, they are desperately seeking alternatives–Mayor Pete, Mayor Mike. Bloomberg has already outspent all the other Democratic candidates on campaign commercials in the first primary states, touting a Biden- and Buttigieg-like compromise on Medicare for All that will leave the insurance companies happy, happy; create two-tiered, have- and have-not healthcare in America; leave in place the incentives that make our healthcare cost twice as much per capita as in the rest of the OECD; and still allow the US health insurance RICOs to raise people’s premiums to a zillion dollars a month when they get sick. Of course, these commercials are based in dissembling, disingenuous fear-mongering (they will raise your taxes; they will take away your insurance).
“The middle-class kid made good” Bloomberg calls himself in his ads. Bloomberg could outspend the total of all candidates in the past three Presidential elections combined and still barely put a dent in his vast fortune. Bloomberg is saying in his commercials that it’s time for the rich to pay their fair share. Don’t expect Jake Tapper to ask him any tough questions about specifics on that one.
Count on the New Yoke Times, aka the Not Woke Times, to go all in for one of these, once a front-runner emerges among the DINOs. Count on the DINOcrat National Committee and the paid court singers of the New Feudal Order (Tom Friedman, David Brooks) to do so as well. And count on Murdoch’s Faux News and his Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics to try to paint these ardent DINO capitalists as “Socialists” (boo, scared ya). And, finally, count on the Democratic base to stay home as they did last time when offered a plate of the same old [insert expletive here].
Oh, no. Please not Joe,
Joe, who stands for the Status Quo.
We’ve seen this film too many times,
too many times befo’.
I’m no fan of Bloomberg, but we have got to knock off this “Manchurian Candidate” garbage. The world is not a Tom Clancy novel. It was stupid when the Republicans were running around calling Obama a “Manchurian Candidate”. It’s just as stupid when liberals do it.
I think Manchurian was a reference to China in this case, like The (heavily invested in) Manchurian China Candidate, not like a conspiracy theory.
Having Bloomberg as president would certainly be ironic when Senate Republicans started calling for impeachment based on the Emoluments Clause. Trump’s proposed Moscow Tower is nothing compared to Bloomberg’s China holdings. Bloomberg should be pressured to give up all his foreign entanglements in order to be allowed to take up space on the ballot.
Metaphors are valuable. A world without metaphors would be dull indeed.
Imagine that, if Bloomberg became the next president, we trade in the Kremlin’s Agent Orange for the Manchurian In-Bloom-berg Candidate.
Puttin would be so pissed to lose his double agent code-named Trumpty Dumpty, while Xi Jinping ended up with his own man in the White House.
Buttigieg is the Siliconian Candidate
And Biden is the Stomachchurnian Candidate
Feel the manBerniean candidate.
Ha ha ha!
Of maybe the TrumpBern(ie)ing candidate