Donald Trump is an extremely dangerous, racist, sexist, billionaire pig. But is the former New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, that much different?
All billionaires are not created equal. Bloomberg’s $55.2 billion fortune makes him the ninth richest person on earth. Trump’s stash is a mere $3.1 billion.
Trump is a Republican while Bloomberg has become a registered Democrat again. (He was originally a Democrat, then a Republican and finally an “independent” before his latest shift.)
The Donald J. Trump Foundation was forced to shut down because it was nothing more than a slush fund. Bloomberg gets oodles of publicity as a philanthropist. (And plenty of tax deductions.)
Yet both Trump and Bloomberg are capitalist pigs.
Trump got to the White House even though he lost the popular vote. Bloomberg bought the popular vote by spending at least $268 million in his three mayoral races.
Bloomberg spent $102 million in the 2009 mayoral election or $174 for every vote he got. Yet the moneybags mayor got fewer votes than Mayor Hylan did in 1921, when the Big Apple had 2.5 million fewer people.
This is the democracy for the rich that the billionaire class wants to bring to Cuba and Venezuela.
Never forget Kalief Browder
Trump started his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists. The day after Trump’s racist tirade, nine Black people were murdered by a white gunman in Denmark Vesey’s church in Charleston, S.C.
At least 179 people were killed by New York City police from 1999 to 2014. Eighty-six percent were Black or Latinx.
Bloomberg was New York City mayor for 12 of those 16 years. In 2006, Bloomberg’s cops fired 50 shots at an unarmed Black man, Sean Bell, killing him on what was supposed to be his wedding day.
Trump keeps migrant children in cages and refuses to give them flu shots. New York City keeps 10,000 poor people locked up on Rikers Island. Eighty-five percent of the inmates haven’t been convicted of anything and are just too poor to post bail.
Among these inmates was the African-American youth Kalief Browder. He spent three years at Rikers while Bloomberg was in City Hall. Two of those years were spent in solitary confinement,
Browder was beaten regularly before his case was dismissed. Two years afterwards, the 22-year-old hanged himself on June 6, 2015.
Civil liberties mean nothing to either Trump or Bloomberg. Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches and seizures didn’t exist for Black and Latinx people in New York City. In 2011, Gotham’s cops stopped and frisked almost 700,000 people, 84 percent of whom were African American or Latinx.
Yet Bloomberg actually claimed in 2013 that police “disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
Both Trump and Bloomberg are union busters. In 2005, Bloomberg called the striking members of Transit Workers Union Local 100 “thugs.”
This is the same Michael Bloomberg that wants to be our saviour by spending $500 million to defeat Donald Trump.
Only the people can stop the Trumps and the Bloombergs.
Big time capitalist decay
Both Trump and Bloomberg are prime examples of what Lenin—the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution—called “The Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism.” Lenin did so in his 1916 pamphlet, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”
Fred Trump was just as much a bigot and a crook as his son Donald. Daddy Trump got himself arrested when he joined a Klan rally in Queens in the 1920s.
Trump senior refused to rent to African Americans until he was sued in the 1970s. The U.S. Senate investigated him for excessive profiteering from federal housing programs.
Construction workers employed by Fred Trump still built 27,000 apartments that were affordable to a section of the working class, although Asian, Black, Indigenous and Latinx families had to fight to rent or purchase them.
Donald Trump doesn’t do affordable housing. His developments are exclusively luxury housing for the super rich. Many of the sales for Trump’s condos are to “flight capital.” Capitalists from other lands buy them as a safe haven in case a revolution breaks out in their country.
Today, there’s virtually no affordable housing being constructed in New York City. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to tear down part of the Fulton public housing complex to build private, high-rent apartments. This is at a time when, every night in June, some 21,295 homeless children slept in municipal shelters.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has built three million homes for poor people.
Bloomberg’s fortune comes from renting 325,000 computer terminals to stock speculators. Capitalists rent from Bloomberg because they think it will give them an edge over other capitalists.
Employees in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills had to work 12-hour days. When they went on strike in 1892 at Homestead, Pa., Carnegie hired Pinkerton gunmen to shoot them down.
Yet steel is absolutely necessary for a modern society. Gambling on the stock exchange isn’t.
Capitalism is so decayed that it can’t even replace the lead water mains that damage children’s health across the country. That’s another reason we need a socialist revolution.
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