Put up your feet and stay awhile on Billionaires Row at the Kentucky Derby
Louisville mayor supports billionaire oligarch in pursuit of maintaining status quo
Everyone knows Michael Bloomberg: the benevolent billionaire trying to save our democracy from Donald Trump and protect his billions by making sure Bernie Sanders doesn’t tax it out from under his feet.
Michael Bloomberg is a lot like you or me, we’re both just a couple of Average Jo’s who live in moderation and simplicity. You and I are maybe one missed bill or visit to the emergency room from bankruptcy and he has a net worth of 62 billion dollars.
Today’s newsletter isn’t explicitly about Bloomberg, an oligarch who actually doesn’t give a shit about helping the country so much as he cares about protecting his own ass…ets. For a man who says he cares an awful lot about the damage Trump has done to the U.S. (kids in cages, giving Nazis a pat on the back, bribery, rape accusations, etc. etc.) it sure took him a hot minute to come out and speak out.
Michael Bloomberg should not be considered a serious presidential candidate. I’ll take it a step further and say we shouldn’t have billionaires running for office at all! Why the hell would we want people so far detached from reality leading us? Remember that time on The Ellen DeGeneres Show when she asked Bill Gates to guess the price of everyday items at the grocery store?
Bill Gates thought pizza rolls cost $22 because he hadn’t been to a grocery store himself in years. And make no mistake, Ellen DeGeneres probably hasn’t been to grocery store herself in years either. When you have lots of money you can afford to pay other people to do that chore for you.
I realize by the virtue of how our political system functions that about all politicians are in a position to make a whole lot of money as they continue their political careers. And I’m not saying that facet of the system is acceptable, but I’d at least rather have someone running for office who has made money from working honestly in some form than a billionaire.
A person does not make or earn a billion dollars. There is no amount of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears that nets a person a billion dollars. I, for the life of me, cannot even visualize what it’d be like to have say $10,000, much less a billion dollars. People make billions of dollars by stealing the excess of people’s labor, and it also helps to already have a golden goose somewhere in the family.
Michael Bloomberg made his billions on the heels of a Harvard education going to work at New York investment bank Salomon Brothers. Salomon merged with a commodities trading firm called Phibro Corporation and Bloomberg was let go as a result, but not before receiving a $10 million severance. Can you imagine getting $10 million for being let go? I couldn’t make $10 million working my entire life. He then used his severance money to develop the Bloomberg terminal that went on to help Wall Street and investment banking.
Bloomberg’s posturing as a centrist candidate who can go toe-to-toe with Trump is based on his idea that Bernie Sanders, and probably Elizabeth Warren as well, have ideas that are way too far left, unpractical, and people would never support them. This despite the constant polling showing people support the idea of Medicare for all, a wealth tax, and free college as well as a debt forgiveness program.
Billionaires like Bloomberg think ideas like this are unpractical because they’re the people who would be impacted the most, and for people who have comfortably held onto billions by hiding them in charities or tax havens for years it rattles the shit out of them.
For billionaires, and other ultra wealthy people, these ideas are unpractical because their lives are so far removed from the rest of ours that practicality for them means deciding to take the fuel-efficient jet because they want to be mindful of their carbon footprint.
Poster for the American drama film The Kentucky Derby (1922)
Given we’ve established that Michael Bloomberg is a disingenuous billionaire hellbent on buying the election who suffers from a severe case of brain worms, who exactly is supporting him?
Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York City, has garnered a lot of support from the mayors of America, including Louisville mayor, co-chair of Bloomberg’s presidential campaign, and man I once publicly booed because I could, Greg Fischer.
"He's ready to go from day one," Fischer said on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "He's proven he can unify people and that's really what the country needs right now — for us all to get on the same page, and realize that diversity is our strength, and let's work together. He can do that."
For the most part Fischer’s role on Bloomberg’s campaign has been largely underreported as it relates to his plans and political beliefs for Louisville, and it shouldn’t be. Because when a politician or other person in power gives credence or support, whether implicitly or explicitly, to a person running for president then that means on some level they support their platforms and record.
This was directly brought up last week during Fischer’s State of the City event when Mike Gamms, himself a resident from New York City who was in town at the time, disrupted the event, according to the Courier Journal.
The above video is telling because of the glaring, major contradiction Fischer says of his support for Bloomberg. He concedes there’s a “disproportionate concentration of wealth and income and it’s not acceptable. It’s not going to allow our company [whoops country he corrected himself] to prosper morally, economically from a public safety standpoint.”
How someone makes the mental gymnastics admitting there is a disproportionate amount of wealth concentrated in this country at the very top but still support Bloomberg, one of the guys at the very top!, is a master class in contortion. If Michael Bloomberg were elected president the obscene concentration of wealth in the U.S. would not change, and Greg Fischer is smart enough to know that but unaffected enough to not care.
In a couple ways, Fischer’s trajectory in political life mirrors Bloomberg’s.
Fischer’s dad was was the CEO of MetriData Computing Inc. and one-time Secretary of the Cabinet of Kentucky. He studied at Vanderbilt University and, according to Wikipedia which offers no supporting citation for this claim, he “worked summers as a crane operator on the fishing docks of Kodiak, Alaska unloading salmon boats.” I’ve tried to find some supporting evidence of this and have found none, leading me to believe it’s a finely crafted, albeit obscure, joke.
At the age of 25, Fischer co-invented the SerVend automated ice/beverage dispenser which transformed into a global manufacturing business. He was also an investor and board member of MedVenture Technology (now Freudenberg Medical) and he serves as founder and chairman of Iceberg Ventures, a private investment firm.
Greg Fischer may not be the billionaire Bloomberg is, but it’s easy to see why he would throw his support behind him for personal reasons and political ones. The two are cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways, even if Bloomberg’s cloth is satin and Fischer’s is … something not as nice as satin but still better than nylon. Denim? Tweed?
As reported by the New York Times, Louisville has received $4.7 million in grants during Fischer’s first three years in office, beginning in 2011. from Bloomberg Philanthropies. According to the Times, “Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has assets totaling $9 billion, has supported 196 different cities with grants, technical assistance and education programs worth a combined $350 million.”
Moving past Fischer’s vapid support of Bloomberg, it’s worth considering the policies Bloomberg enacted as mayor of New York City and how those policies have tie-ins to some of the most important issues facing Louisville.
Stop and Frisk
Bloomberg is most well known for his controversial stop and frisk policy, wherein people are temporarily detained, questioned and more often than not frisked by police. In 2011, the number of stop and frisks conducted by NYCPD peaked at 700,000 stops, about 90% of those stopped were nonwhite, a majority of those stopped were innocent of wrongdoing, and all the justifications Bloomberg gave for stop and frisk were fictitious.
Stop and frisk was a policy that only served to prop a police state where Black, Latino, and other racial/ethnic minorities lived in a constant state of fear. Nothing of value was accomplished by doing this, unless you count the looming terror of a police state as an accomplishment which some people very well may.
Bloomberg’s record on this has recently gotten a lot more mainstream attention.
Bloomberg traffics in some of the most age-old stereotypes as it relates to Black people and crime. He wholeheartedly believes having cops throw Black kids up against walls and frisking them is a good thing, a great thing even!
"So, one of the unintended consequences is people say, 'Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.' Yes, that is true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that is true. Why did we do it? Because that's where all the crime is," Bloomberg says. "And the way you get the guns out of the kid's hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them."
The Courier Journal reported that of 130,999 Louisville traffic stops from 2016 to 2018, “African Americans were stopped more often and three times as likely to be searched as white drivers.” The Courier also notes, “though African Americans make up about 20% of Louisville’s driving-age population, they accounted for 33% of the stops and 57% of the 8,942 searches.”
In response, LMPD said they would be changing its policy (surely that’ll fix the squeaky wheel once and for all) but Fischer for his part seemingly brushed these incidents off and the larger implications they bring.
Given just how vile Bloomberg’s comments on stop and frisk is, and his clear disdain for Black people in general, it’s absolutely worth asking if Greg Fischer supports the policies Bloomberg enacted policies and if he still supports him.
Homelessness
Michael Bloomberg doesn’t care about homeless people, and that’s not just me saying it because he’ll tell you himself.
Asked to comment about a New York Times series on a homeless family trying their best to survive in NYC, Bloomberg said the 11-year-old who is the focal point of the series simply had bad luck.
“This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes, some of us are lucky, and some of us are not,” he said.
Bloomberg’s most innovative policy to reduce homelessness in NYC was to, quite literally, give people a one-way ticket outta there.
It’s the biggest “not my problem” thing I can actually imagine. How absolutely fucking craven does a person have to be to think the solution to something like this is to ship people out? These people won’t suddenly not be homeless if they left NYC! It doesn’t work that way! Bloomberg’s justifications for this was to tackle overcrowded shelters and save taxpayer money. I’m afraid at this time, folks, I regretfully have to tell you that Michael Bloomberg’s case of brain worms dates back to, at the absolute minimum, 2009.
Oh, and if you were experiencing homelessness and needed to stay in a shelter then Bloomberg wanted you to prove you had no other option.
In fact, it was Bloomberg’s own policies that further exacerbated homelessness. After the end of his mayoral tenure in 2014, New York University’s Furman Center estimated that more than half of renting households paid more than 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities and rent increased more in lower-income neighborhoods than in areas with household incomes above the citywide median.
Bloomberg ushered in record high rates of homelessness; settin records babbbyyyy! According to the New York City Coalition For The Homeless, more than 52,000 homeless homeless people were residing each night in the municipal shelter system, which was up 69% since Bloomberg was sworn into office. That number also includes 22,000 homeless children.
In Louisville, homelessness is a prominent issue. A recent street count by Coalition for the Homeless found more people sleeping on the street than in 2019 (this specific count doesn’t include those who are in shelters). In 2018, the coalition counted nearly 7,000 people who slept in emergency shelters or on the streets, and despite a decrease the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased the last couple years.
Time and time again, the solution Louisville government, and in effect Greg Fischer, have pursued is clearing out the homeless camps around the city, driving an already vulnerable population further into the margins. Granted homeless camps can present a danger to those living there, but at least they have the autonomy to choose to live there. And then you have to contend with a huge influx of people going from the camps to existing shelters and that can result in really dire consequences.
I’m reminded of how just a few weeks before the Kentucky Derby, the city cleaned out one of the biggest and most visible homeless camps. Of course officials said it had absolutely nothing to do with the upcoming derby, where rich people would be wined and dined by Fischer so they’d pour their money into Louisville. But that’s clearly bullshit, and people aren’t so dumb as to not see through that.
Just imagine how much the wealthy would’ve lost their minds had they been forced to confront the harsh reality of homelessness. The PR disaster it would’ve caused the city would have been catastrophic! Think of the city’s brand! Bourbon, museums, art, fashion, more bourbon, brunch, baseball!
William H. Matthews’ Mazes and Labyrinths, published in London in 1922
Greg Fischer’s continued support of Michael Bloomberg means in some way, whether it be minuscule or large, that he is supportive of an oligarch, who defended stop and frisk as recently as 5 years ago and shipped homeless people out of NYC, buying his way into the presidential election as he runs on a campaign of emptiness and plagiarism.
And given his tacit support of Bloomberg and all these things, then what does that say about Fischer and his plans and vision for the people of Louisville? What does it say for those who are living in the margins in the city struggling to survive or just live a good life?
The only people who would benefit by a Michael Bloomberg presidency are people like Michael Bloomberg, and Fischer fancies himself in the same mold.
Greg Fischer didn’t have to even support anyone for president, much less co-chair a campaign! It’s his last term in office and he can’t run for mayor again, so in all likelihood he’s betting on this experience with Bloomberg working out for him in the long haul to maybe launch him onto the national stage. Maybe he’ll be Vice President Fischer or something like that.
I’ll end this off by telling you to keep an eye out this year at Churchill Downs because you might just see Michael Bloomberg and Greg Fischer smoking cigars and sharing a laugh on the newly minted Billionaires Row.