Did Michael Bloomberg, a former Eagle Scout, look down from Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 and just marvel at all that he thought he controlled? Was he lost in that dream, mindlessly sipping seltzer water with lemon in one of those plush red chairs? Did he flip through his own magazines while lounging on the beige couches, looking like he was on the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation? Or did he have more base desires or just hitching a ride with a fellow elite with whom he shared so much comradery? Perhaps not in the sex trafficking specifically, no proof of that, but definitely in class solidarity, the sense of entitlement to others’ bodies, the feeling of invincibility.
Flying on that plane, he must have felt like a god looking down on all the little ant people with little lives scurrying back and forth between his little terminals watching numbers change. Imagine the false power he felt coursing through him when he commanded his female employee to abort her child. “Kill it,” he had said, like an emperor condemning a prisoner. He must feel on Cloud 9 right now.
Mike Bloomberg really does think we all work for him, doesn’t he? He lives in a magical cocoon where he imagines all of the grubby voters and peons he sneers at are actually his employees, the entirety of the planet his personal backyard, and running for President is simply the natural evolution of his entitlement. Michael Bloomberg’s 1997 autobiography contains a chapter entitled Computers for Virgins. His other book The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg is a 1990 “joke” compendium of his utter disregard for women and ur-text of his cruelty.
For decades, he thought he owned all of us with absolute certainty. All his money and property and imagined power gave him this impression. Of course, there had been loses, rights gained by the unwashed teeming troglodytes, labor lost to their mewling protests. He sat on a throne and on TV shows, telling us all how the World Should Be and how he was Always In Charge. He really though this. But he was only renting, enjoying his luxury on borrowed time.
Back home in the quiet boredom of it all, there was enough colorful cereal boxes and movie franchises to make the chaff sleepy and quiet for a while. Even if those new forms were weaker, more fragile, more soft, smugly confident that he was still the emperor of all things. Such a natural feeling, as if the whole of creation was designed and built for him and him alone.
He thinks he owns the world. But he doesn’t. He never did.
He’s never assembled a single terminal, punched a metal press, written a solitary line of code, penned any article, driven a mile of delivery truck, taken an editorial photo, or edited a frame of video. 20,000 employees do that work, all under the banner of one man who spends their stolen labor running for President to stop people getting healthcare and having large sodas. Not to say that only physical labor is legitimate, far from it, but to claim the lion’s share of wealth when he only distantly supervised in its creation is a laughable idea on its face. When you strip away the American myth of the self-made billionaire, you start to realize the ugly truth: this is kleptocracy on a scale never before seen in human history. The untold labor of tens of thousands of people stripped from them to satisfy the ego of one elderly man with more money than he can spend in a 100 lifetimes.
His little machines designed and built by hands other than his, pushing out droves of financial data in a tsunami of illusory wealth. It’s money that doesn’t exist, creates nothing tangible, but when it’s gone, real people lose their shirts. Funny how it works that way. He muscled his way into being the CEO of the largest city in America, helping pump the dark heart of its zombified economy well past the flatline.
The petty, selfish tyranny of Bloomberg is one of an office manager who wants to make sure everyone is using the right color stapler. Any deviation will be squashed. From his pathetic, nanny-state obsessions with big sodas to his brutal crackdown on black and brown people in his fiefdom, Bloomberg oozes the repellent bravado of a car dealership owner who smacks the receptionist’s ass and directs his salesmen to steer “those customers” towards the exit.
This contempt for everyone who is not him is the exact same vein as Trump; they are mirror images of the same coin, a Janus of shitty New Yorkers. Trump is the grotesque Long Island ogre and Bloomberg is the midtown smug yacht boy slapping each other’s shoulders at the strip club. They’re the guys who crumple up bills and throw them in dancer’s faces. They have the exact same desires: money, power, cruelty, but Bloomberg isn’t an undisciplined and reckless manchild. He’s cold, calculating, and driven to consume, like an internal combustion engine that runs on working class suffering.
Where Trump is a pretend capitalist, the poor person’s fantasy of a rich person, Bloomberg is the genuine article. Trump is an abyssal media spectacle, childish and impudent. Bloomberg knows the game, because he’s won it before. He puts his name on things because he actually claims to own them, not just licensing his name out like he’s a living brand. Bloomberg wields power, even if it’s really an illusion of power owned by his workers. Trump’s power is an illusion of an illusion: a complete simulacrum. Bloomberg’s monetary might is actually a tenuous loan from the people that created his wealth, sustain his empire, and cash his checks because they have no real choice. That power can be taken away at any moment, in a heartbeat, so fast it would shellshock a capitalist class if it happened. Occupy Wall Street was the opening stages of a genuine revolt, which is why he so gleefully crushed it, sweeping away all that potential like a pile of moldering Bloomberg magazines.
What an insult this must be to the man who fancies himself King of New York: filthy street urchins clogging up a park in heart of Wall Street! How uncouth of them! Defying their masters?! HARUMPH! His monocle must have almost popped off when he saw the mass of people in Zuccotti Park. How dare these urban thugs try to end stop-and-frisk?! It’s for their safety that we harass them! This is why Bloomberg rightfully surrounds himself with capital’s elite shocktroops: the NYPD, aligning heavily with the natural protectors of American neoliberalism. It’s a match made in heaven.
Cultural liberals who approve of Michael Bloomberg do so because they either just saw him on TV or they approve of his professional managerial dictatorship. They’re so desperate to be as cruel and ugly as they want to be, they’ll look to Bloomberg to help unleash their inner chud. But not in a gross, obvious way. With astonishing, murderous austerity, the final unshackling of the police state, the micromanagement of our lives under friendly, corporate-approved mandatory funtivities like “rat on your neighbors and get this Arby’s coupon, you swine.” They’re terrified of giving the gross poors any sort of power, or any benefit that doesn’t come with a million strings attached. They simply don’t want to share this planet, or revamp their behavior in a way that makes this planet continually habitable.
Bloomberg’s vision of America is the sinister efficiency of a killer drone: lethal, obedient, and silent. His bloodless corporate affect fulfills their secret desires for unchecked but legitimized power, but wearing a suit that fits and a big marketing budget to put out bullshit memes and TV ads with ads within ads within ads. He knows how to construct a sentence and is ideologically coherent; he thinks the world belongs to him and you, you fucking simpleton, you pathetic puny worm, you will give him everything and you will smile, sweetie. You will vote on a Bloomberg terminal. You will drink thimble-sized sodas. You will pay for your sins, apostate. You will forget you ever wanted anything. Submit. Liberals secretly want to be conservatives anyway, it must seem more fun than tsk-tsking all the time, but they don’t like the hog people and idiots that drink that swill straight from the trough. They want to be classy and economically powerful, with as much superficial progressive values that allow them to achieve that. There’s a cowardice to this whole dynamic; which is the reason most regular unengaged people and the left despise Bloomberg and his liberal sycophants wholesale.
His brand is one of sneering condescension, his campaign manufactured out of whole cloth, with no real constituency, whose central goal is to seek a coronation from what he sees as an ungrateful nation. His campaign recently did a thread of defaced branch offices, a hilarious gallery of self-owns. If it’s real vandalism, this should be a blaring warning sign to stop arrogantly shoving your stick into the hornet’s nest of working class anger. The wrong message with the absolutely wrong messenger. If it’s a cynical attempt to do a false flag and drum up anti-Sanders support, his real reason for running in the first place, Bloomberg also loses because it turns him into a phony whiner who needs to cheat. But then again, spending $400 million of your own money already feels like a cheat code. Maybe it’s a bit of all of these things. And they’re not wrong. America does in fact deserve better, it’s just not Michael fucking Bloomberg.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.