Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution wrote one of the most insightful columns that I have read about the candidacy of Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s net worth is more than $50 billion. He has given generously to many charitable causes. But he has also used his charitable donations to advance his political ambitions.
In recent years, he has given millions of dollars to mayors across the nation, ostensibly to aid them as they shaped a political agenda that was anti-gun, anti-smoking, and other good causes.
But now Bloomberg is collecting on some of those gifts. He already has the endorsement of the mayor of the District of Columbia, who received a Bloomberg gift of $4 million.
Williamson writes:
In his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already spent nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, more than that of the major Democratic candidates combined. But, ironically, focusing on his immense campaign budget underrates the impact of Bloomberg’s money on his chances. Just as important is the political force of his charitable giving.
Traditionally, presidential nominations have been decided more by political insiders than by grassroots mobilization. Bloomberg may be able to gin up some public support through campaign ads and Tammany Hall-style politics, but in the inside game, it would seem he is at a disadvantage. He has never run for national office, has supported Republican candidates, and was himself a Republican.
But politics in America is increasingly organized around institutions reliant on big-donor philanthropy. Candidates, local and state parties, advocacy organizations, think tanks, and many foundations are in a constant scramble for money. Few leaders of these organizations will want to offend a man whose personal wealth makes their entire operating budgets look like a negligible rounding error.
And in case Bloomberg’s potential support had escaped the attention of any would-be grantees, he ramped up his giving in advance of his presidential bid. Bloomberg outspent every other billionaire philanthropist last year, giving away $3.3 billion dollars, nearly five times more than he did in 2017. This spending has had little impact on his overall wealth; the 77-year-old Bloomberg remains the eighth-richest man in the world, with more than $50 billion dollars.
His tactical philanthropy gives Bloomberg the unique capacity to influence the decision-making of the institutions that are traditional power brokers and opinion makers in Democratic politics. As Bloomberg knows well from his stint as mayor, big-money “charity” is an imposition of the giver’s political will. While he is best known for his work on the crucial issue of gun control, Bloomberg has also deployed his wealth to bully and sideline potential opponents. “When church groups or community organizations threatened to get noisy in opposition to him or his programs, he wrote checks that tended to quiet them down,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere in his analysis of Bloomberg’s mayoralty. Bloomberg can run pork-barrel politics out of his own pocket. And, of course, the political effects of Bloomberg’s philanthropy are not limited to New York.
Charity tends to get a free pass when it comes to its political effects. Liberal concern about “money in politics” is usually limited to direct electoral engagement. Charitable endeavors are seen as sacrosanct; witness the opposition President Barack Obama faced upon attempting to limit the charitable deduction. (The tax implications of Bloomberg’s run are interesting in themselves—assuming the billionaire gets a tax write-off for his charity, and that those contributions meaningfully contribute to his presidential chances, he is the only major candidate whose campaign is publicly subsidized.)
Big-dollar philanthropy deserves vastly more criticism than it receives; when wealth is highly concentrated, charity comes at enormous cost to the public good. The Democratic presidential primary has already seen multiple experienced public servants drop from contention for lack of funds, including, not coincidentally, every single non-white person who was a serious contender for the nomination. If Bloomberg can buy his way out of the public scrutiny that a campaign is supposed to afford—if he can purchase, rather than persuade, the party faithful—it represents yet another fissure in our decaying political process.
In essence, Bloomberg is engaging in a very old form of politics that has long been recognized as at odds with the function of representative institutions. As political theorist Emma Saunders-Hastings explains, philanthropy in ancient Rome was “not only comparable to campaign finance”—it was campaign finance. To assure their political base, those wishing to accrue power gave generously to the poor. Machiavelli, whose analyses made his name synonymous with the pursuit of power, recognized that philanthropy was a form of political domination. “Many times works that appear merciful,” he wrote, “are very dangerous for a republic.”
Machiavelli would easily have recognized the implications of Bloomberg’s philanthropy for his position in the Democratic primary. No matter his intentions, the Bloomberg campaign’s reliance on his personal wealth threatens America’s democratic institutions at a time when those institutions are already profoundly weakened. His charitable contributions exacerbate the risks posed by his self-funded campaign. Money is power, even when it is donated.
In addition to his strategic philanthropy, Bloomberg used his vast wealth to buy opinion leaders. He selected a number of experts in various fields, people known for writing opinion pieces and speaking out on issues, and invited them to be on his “personal payroll,” not on the government payroll. It was impossible to know which experts supported his policies because they agreed with them or because he had hired them. No one knew who was on his “personal payroll.”
None of his donations have ever been “charitable”. They’ve always been done in the service of power and control. That’s how he “won” his illegal third term. He donated to non-profits who couldn’t refuse the money and then he forced them to support his third term. The man is an authoritarian, racist, sexist, anti-LGBT+, belligerent Republican scum who’s only putting a D after his name because that’s where the opening is.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/02/why-does-anyone-think-michael-bloomberg-would-beat-donald-trump
Bloomberg made under the table deals with individuals and organizations to buy their support. He won a third term by giving a third term to all the member of the City Council, who needed the jobs. He probably put some of them on his personal payroll too.
It’s just sad. Now they just buy the elections directly. Before we had the fig leaf of handing it to a middleman.
Bloomberg won’t be the last, either. I assume Bezos goes after him. Maybe Gates after that, certainly some of the Walton heirs….
The “donations” were never free. They always came with strings. When did Americans become such suckers that they believe so fervently they will get something for nothing? They all jeer at Bernie Sanders promising “free stuff” but he’s not promising anything of the kind. He plans to tax to pay for it. The billionaires with their grants and their purchase of entire institutions are the people really promising “free stuff” but of course it isn’t free.
Go to any ed reform site and look for specific, pointed criticism of ANY billionaire funded ed reform- a specific criticism with a billionaire name attached. You won’t find it. They all insist they’re independent but they never, ever bite the hand that feeds them. The same is true of the US Department of Education. It’s either praise and promotion or silence.
I’ve been reading up on Bloomberg and boy is he a doctrinaire true believer. All of it- the penchant for huge class sizes, the slogans about the “skills gap”, the near-religious faith in “data” and the wonders of technology, the management slogans that include firing the whole “bottom half” of teachers and the usual ed reform snobbery about where teachers went to college as a reliable indicator of their worth to students. He’s ed reform on steroids.
You said “He’s ed reform on steroids.”
I agree. He is a disrupter and he is funding other disrupters .He is a collaborator with Bill Gates
Thomas L. Friedman: “Democrats need to nominate the right person to prevent Trump from winning a second term. And this candidate is now rising steadily in the polls. This candidate is Michael Bloomberg.”
NO. We DO NOT need another racist in the WH. He supported Stop-and-frisk even though nearly 90% of the people stopped were innocent of any wrongdoing. There were 685,724 people stopped in 2011.
Bloomberg ran for mayor of NY first as a republican and later as an Independent. Guess any party will do.
Bloomberg believes that money can buy him anything. He hasn’t ruled out spending $1 billion on the presidential race. The problem is that this is plutocracy, rule by the wealthy. The wealthy can pay for what they want.
Bloomberg: “I actually am a conservative—more so than other conservatives in the sense that I think you could go and cut 2 or 3 percent out of the budget in every agency. We’ve done that 12 times”.
Bloomberg vowed that nobody would get raises unless they accepted benefit cuts: “Today, I will make this commitment: I will not sign a contract with salary increases unless they are accompanied by reforms in benefit packages that produce the savings we need…” Bloomberg told public sector workers that “we have to find ways to do more with less”
Under Bloomberg, the city stopped checking for lead paint in public housing apartments, a horrible decision that endangered thousands of children.
I will vote for anyone on the Democratic ticket running against Trump. However, I will not actively work to get Bloomberg elected.
I agree and hope that he does not win in the primary. He may inadvertently help Bernie win by draining votes from Biden, Buttigieg, Warren and Klobuchar. If Bloomberg does win the primary, then I will have to hold my nose and vote for him in the general election. Trump must be flushed from our body politic.
Of course, Tom Friedman loves Bloomberg. He is rich and powerful. What’s not to like?
Is a pretty safe bet that the opposite of whatever Thomas Friedman says is the actual truth.
Remember that it was Friedman who kept telling us that “We are turning the corner in Iraq”
The problem is that we turned the corner a multiple of 4 times and ended up right back where we started.
Some people are dishonest. Others are just dumb. Friedman is both.
I’m afraid that Bloomberg is “a legend in his own mind.” I don’t know where the expression came from. It sounds like a George Carlin kind of quip. I was going to say, “…and oh so true,” but when it comes to our pithier comediennes, the truth is frequently hidden in humor.