Benevolent billionaire

News outlets covering the campaigns to be the Democratic nominee for president frequently highlight a citizen saying what is most important is choosing a candidate to defeat the nasty guy. So there is still lots of talk about electability. Phillip Goff nicely defines the term for us:

Y'all get that "electability" is just a word for "I acquiesce to other people's prejudices," right?

So give your primary vote to the person who you think is best.

On one side of the electability issue is Elizabeth Warren. She was lower in the vote tallies in Iowa and New Hampshire than I would like. It seems strange she isn’t in front when she says things like this in debates:

But the question we should be asking ourselves is, in America, across the country, including gun owners, agree in certain things. Universal background checks. Get assault weapons off the streets. Why can we not even get a vote in the United States Senate? And the answer is neither -- think about this -- 90% of the Americans agree on this. We can't get a vote in the United States Senate because it is the gun industry that continues to call the shots. Until we attack the corruption in Washington, the influence of money on campaigns and lobbying, we're not going to be able to meet your promises.

I noted before Warren seems to be getting less media exposure than the other candidates. A couple people point out reasons why.

David Carroll tweeted:

Warren is the only candidate hammering Trump’s criminality and that’s why the media can’t deal with her because running her speeches involves confronting how we have all allowed organized crime to swallow us all alive, we were so naïve to think we were immune to the mafia.

The advertising industry is filled with fraud but they look the other way. Much of it comes from Russia. The best fraudsters do their adfraud in Cyrillic. The advertising industry funds your election news. Any questions?

Ben O’Keefe tweeted:

Wondering why the media is silencing Elizabeth Warren?

Seems pretty obvious to me.

It's time to take back our country from the wealthy elite and finally become a country that works for the people.

One big idea from Warren is her wealth tax. That tweet includes a link to an article in Forbes with the title These 15 Billionaires Own America’s News Media Companies.

Politico says Warren “suffered a blow” with a third place finish in Iowa. Yeah, declaring a decent finish in negative terms. But Warren isn’t duking it out with Sanders and Buttigieg, media complains. She is too upbeat.

Well, yeah, she can’t be divisive if she is going to be the unity candidate. She doesn’t want to be divisive, either.



On the other side of the electability issue is Mike Bloomberg. Although he didn’t enter the early primaries, he is filling the airwaves with ads in hopes of a big gain on Super Tuesday. I saw his ads show up on progressive Daily Kos – annoying he is linking himself to President Obama. That Bloomberg is paying for all those ads out of his own billionaire pocket prompted Jared Sexton to tweet:

Mike Bloomberg is revealing a horrible truth at the heart of the American political system, and that's that a billionaire can flood the airwaves with slick propaganda and become a presidential contender without so much as speaking to the issues or interacting with the people.

We have to get big money out of our politics. This simply isn't conducive to a functioning system and isn't in line with anything even resembling a democracy.

We're watching our society slip into an oligarchy and it's speeding up in a hurry.

That prompted replies defending Bloomberg: At least he’s talking about the ugly truth about Trump. Sure, fight fire with fire. I like his ads! Don’t you want to beat Trump? At least Bloomberg can’t be bought. He’s showing us the good side of the “wealth coin.”

Which, to me, sounds like they’ve all missed the point. It is quite a ways down the responses before someone quoted Elizabeth Warren:

…powerful men who want us to be quiet. And it's not just women - everyone else who has less power should be quiet. Because ultimately what this is about is this is about power. This is about who's got it and who doesn't plan to let go of it…

The problem isn’t just the nasty guy. The problem includes the billionaires who back him and that they became billionaires through exploitation of workers and the environment. A guy exploiting enough to be a billionaire does not have the principles I want in my president or in my Democratic nominee.

Will Bunch, an opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tweeted that he hears a lot of people around Philly are desperate to beat the nasty guy and that Bloomberg is positioning himself to be the one to do it.

What could happen is a) Bloomberg arrives on Super Tuesday as the anti-Bernie with a coalition of suburbanites and non-whites to counter the Sanders bloc,

b) in 11/20, we hope that voters choose a (somewhat) benevolent billionaire philosopher-king over a nasty dictator.

That means the White House will either be bought, or retained by a cheating, corrupt autocrat.

A few days ago a video of Bloomberg’s praise of the stop and frisk policy he used as mayor of NYC began making the rounds on social media. Josh Rogin of the Washington Post tweeted a thread of a couple more of Bloomberg’s unsavory opinions. He feels Bloomberg misunderstands history, promotes false equivalences, and has too much sympathy for Putin. That’s troubling in someone wanting to be the leader of the free world.

Benevolent billionaire? No such thing.



This pair of tweets confirms for me again that candidate Pete Buttigieg doesn’t have enough experience. Sahil Kapur tweeted:

Pete Buttigieg says Democrats should focus on cutting the deficit, which fell under Obama and is soaring under Trump.

“The time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable owning this issue... It’s not fashionable in progressive circles to talk too much about the debt.”

To which Stephanie Kelton replied:

It’s “not fashionable in progressive circles” because progressives are rejecting the bogus arguments about debt and deficits that have been used to undermine the progressive agenda for decades.

Mayor Pete probably had to follow a law that his city’s budget was required to balance or run a surplus. He doesn’t catch on to the idea that the GOP is and has been running up the deficit in order to force cuts to the social safety nets.