How Bloomberg hijacks and redirects progressive fights
Nocturne Grey and Silver, Whistler, 1873-1875
Well I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about Michael Bloomberg. In the past week or so, he has emerged as a new favorite among Democrats who are basically Republicans but maybe they shop at Whole Foods or people who don’t like Trump but also things are going A-OK for them so let’s not f with the program too much.
But the big news is that Bloomberg’s candidacy has resurfaced a lot of the awful stuff he’s done and said, including being an enthusiastic implementer of the racist stop and frisk policy that led the NYPD to terrorize New Yorkers with over 5 million reported stops during his time as mayor. Black and Brown people were nine times more likely to be harassed by cops than whites during that time, and fewer than 0.1% of stop and frisks led to convictions for possession of a weapon, the policy’s purported goal. Bloomberg says he merely inherited stop and frisk and ended it, which is technically true except for the giant middle chunk in between when he dramatically expanded it, fought against civil rights lawsuits challenging it, then finally succumbed to pressure and wound it down.
And there was other coverage like a recap of several allegations of misogyny that include nearly 40 discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits.
So all of that is to say, I’d like to officially endorse Mike Bloomberg in the Democratic primary. No just kidding, he should not be a candidate and honestly the idea that any plutocrat would lead the Democratic ticket right now is ridiculous.
But you know I see a lot of people, very serious climate people, rush to Bloomberg’s defense because of his philanthropic record. They will say hey now it’s worth pointing out that Bloomberg has given hundreds of millions of dollars to climate action, etc., and that is true. But his philanthropy also shows us a lot about how Bloomberg wields power. In fact, I would argue that you can’t really say, oh he maybe did this bad stuff BUT look at his philanthropy, because his philanthropy is inseparable from the entire Bloomberg thing, which is that he uses multiple channels of significant power to try to fix the world in the ways that he sees best.
I have written a fair amount about his philanthropy over the years, so here are two big observations:
Bloomberg uses his philanthropy to increase his own power
One thing you can say about his philanthropy is that it is highly effective, in the sense that it is substantial, focused, and it often does exactly what he wants it to do. That’s potentially a positive because a lot of the things he tries to do (like expanding gun control, for example) are good things, and I’ve even written positively about some of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ grantmaking. But as I never stop saying these days, the true judge of philanthropy’s value to society should be whether it distributes power instead of consolidating it. And Bloomberg is kind of the embodiment of the exact opposite of that.
It’s well documented (check out this rundown by a reporter who covered his tenure for years) that Bloomberg as mayor used his massive giving as a tool to advance his agenda, all the way up to his push to expand the number of terms he could serve. He arguably became even more powerful after his administration ended, through his combined philanthropy, consulting, political giving, public platform, and his connections with city leaders in the US and abroad.
To be clear, there are certainly good people working on important things that are funded by Mike Bloomberg (which is a real bummer for them right now!). But it’s also all part of this overall network of influence he’s developed, which is certainly now benefiting his run as president.
Bloomberg tends to hijack and redirect progressive fights
When Bloomberg sets his sights on a cause like climate change, he makes it his issue and steers it in the direction he wants it to go. That is almost always toward a more moderate approach, typically led by elites. The classic example of this is his huge funding to shut down coal plants, making it a priority for the environmental movement, while championing natural gas.
Here’s a thing I once wrote about this:
Bloomberg is a proud moderate, and a number of times in his run as a billionaire environmentalist, he’s bristled at climate agendas more idealistic or progressive than his own. I’m reminded of an analogy presented by Mark Dowie in his book American Foundations, depicting philanthropy as a “drag anchor,” a nautical device that steadies a ship in rough waters, but notably slows forward progress.
For one example, just as Bloomberg was becoming coal’s worst enemy, he was simultaneously pushing for an embrace of natural gas. Bloomberg co-wrote an op-ed in 2012 championing the economic and environmental benefits of gas and calling well-regulated fracking the “sensible center.” He also gave $6 million to the EDF to secure such rules. The ongoing gas production boom he supported in the name of pragmatism sunk billions into new fossil fuel infrastructure that is still leaking methane and locking us into carbon emissions we can’t afford.
Then there was the Global Climate Action Summit, during which businesses and government officials were celebrated as climate leaders, while climate justice protestors filled the streets calling for stronger action and a seat at the table. Bloomberg, who played a large role in the summit, found it crazy that there would be “environmentalists protesting an environmental conference,” and strangely compared the activists to those supporting Trump’s border wall.
Finally, we can’t forget that Beyond Carbon is Bloomberg’s direct response to the Green New Deal, which he’s criticized as “pie in the sky,” and those who promote it as disingenuous. The Green New Deal is by no means perfect, but it is a sweeping, aspirational platform for government action, led and under development by mostly young activists. The idea that a wealthy donor would counter that with his own approach (especially coupled with political donations) is also troubling.
It’s worth noting that this is not just a Bloomberg thing. It’s often the MO of large foundations to see themselves as brokers of compromise or above the fray technocrats, throwing themselves into issues in ways that edge out other players like grassroots and activist groups. As Dowie describes, the drag anchor may steady the ship, but it slows forward progress. This is documented in the realm of climate diplomacy in the excellent book The Price of Climate Action by Edouard Morena. One recent example of this (although it’s a little different) is Marc Benioff convincing Trump to embrace the trillion trees program, which I had a twitter convo about here if you want to see it.
So I see Bloomberg’s presidential campaign as another example of this hijack and redirect approach, attempting to fix a Democratic Party that is veering beyond his preferred solution set.
You might think well what’s the big deal he did help shut down those coal plants, after all. But hey maybe there was a way to transition away from coal without the US becoming the world’s largest producer of oil and gas in the process. And you know what, maybe he could beat Trump, but given what we know about his record, in service of what values, exactly? At the expense of whose suffering? And maybe the most important question, why is this the guy who gets to set these terms? And the answer is that he has $62 billion.
Links
- A proposal for an old state hospital in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston would build residences heated and cooled by geothermal energy.
- Hundreds if not thousands of recorded incidents of school bullying can be directly linked to Trump’s rhetoric. “Build the wall,” has become a popular chant.
- “We will shut down Canada.” All over Canada, there’s been nationwide blockades and demonstrations of solidarity for Wet’suwet’en chiefs in British Columbia as they fight a gas pipeline.
- End the GOP.
- Hundreds of billions of locusts are swarming East Africa because of you know what.
- Environmentalism’s racists origins.
- Black women are leaders in the climate movement.
- Mayor Pete represents a fissure in the Democratic Party between transformation and restoration.
Listening
I love Dan Bejar who records as Destroyer and he has a great new record called Have We Met. This is one of my favorite songs on it, which has a recurring line “Just look at the world around you, actually, no, don’t look” that I think would be a good tagline for Crisis Palace. Another line I love in the song Cue Synthesizer goes “Went to America went to Europe, it’s all the same shit.
Watching
In 2019, I started a rewatch of every David Lynch movie and then I kind of stopped for some reason I think maybe I got really into Skyrim or something. But I started it up again and just watched Wild at Heart. I had last seen it when I was in high school and was obsessed with David Lynch, and I remember it being one of the more straightforward of his movies but I don’t know it’s pretty weird I guess. Apparently 100 people walked out of one of the test screenings if Wikipedia is to be believed. It’s basically a love story but horrifying. A horrifying love story. The one scene that stuck with me as a teen (and there is a lot of hanky panky in this movie) is when Sherilyn Fenn is about to die on the side of the highway after a car crash, lit up only by headlights, and she keeps saying “I have all this sticky stuff in my hair.” Also Willem Defoe as Bobby Peru (Defoe again!). I’ll spare you a picture of Bobby Peru here’s these two instead.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. Today I got a haircut at the shop down the street and my barber Joniel who speaks about as much English as I do Spanish said Happy Thanksgiving as I was leaving and then looked at me like hang on a second and then everyone started laughing and another barber yelled out Valentine’s Day. For a second there I was like, wait, is it Thanksgiving today? Anyway we all had a good laugh dude can really cut hair he is raking it in over there.
Remember the right amount to care about Valentine’s day is the same amount as the person you love plus just a little bit more to be safe. And you know what readers? I LOVE YOU. Every one of you.
Tate
PS. Don’t worry there’s not going to be a lot of presidential election stuff around here you get enough of that everywhere else. And by the way, if you are ever like what is this guy talking about or I am totally wrong on something you can reply to this email and I’ll read it and I promise I won’t get mad.