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Thursday, March 28, 2024

What a Mike Bloomberg or Jamie Dimon Presidency Would Look Like

Courtesy of Pam Martens.

Illustration by Keith Seidel from Mike! Wall Street's Mayor by Neil Fabricant

Illustration by Keith Seidel from Mike! Wall Street’s Mayor by Neil Fabricant

Michael Bloomberg served three terms as New York City’s Mayor from January 2002 to January 2014. In 2009, the New York Times reported that Bloomberg had spent$261 million of his own money” in order to get elected to those three terms as Mayor. When Bloomberg took office, there was a two-term limit in place which had been voted on in public referendums in 1993 and 1996. But two years before Bloomberg’s second four-year term ended, he asked the City Council to repeal the two-term limit to allow him to serve a third term.

Because voters had already expressed their will in a public referendum twice, numerous members of the City Council felt it would be unethical for them to repeal that decision and that the matter should be determined by another voter referendum. But the City Council went forward with their vote in 2008, repealing the will of the people and giving Bloomberg his third term. The City Council’s vote was 29 in favor, 22 against. A Quinnipiac University poll at the time showed that 89 percent of New York City voters felt the issue should have been decided by a voter referendum, not the City Council.

That’s strike one against Bloomberg running for President – he’s not bothered at all about ignoring the will of the people, precisely the failing of the current occupant of the Oval Office. According to Forbes, Bloomberg’s current net worth is $52.4 billion. If he enjoys life in the White House, we have no idea how many billions he might decide to spend to try to repeal two-term limits for the Presidency.

Bloomberg also shares another Trump problem – he has massive business conflicts of interest. He owns both a business heavily linked to maintaining Wall Street’s goodwill and he owns a media outlet, Bloomberg News. The vast majority of Bloomberg’s wealth has come from leasing his Bloomberg market data and news terminals at a cost of approximately $24,000 per terminal per year to tens of thousands of Wall Street trading desks and global banks around the world.

Just how protective of Wall Street Bloomberg is was on display during the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 and 2012 when his administration oversaw the brutal pepper-spraying and beating of protesters attempting to realign their democracy from the iron grip of Wall Street plutocrats. This stunning video, which was entered as evidence in a court case, shows the New York City police during the Bloomberg era brutalizing the Occupy protesters.

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