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From the opening bell, the 2020 presidential prize fight was billed as Trump versus Biden (“My grandpa can lick your grandpa!”). Then Biden flagged and Bloomberg tagged himself (“My oligarch can lick your oligarch!”). But can he?

Yow

According to Forbes, Michael Bloomberg is among the 12 wealthiest people in the entire world. He owns 80% of Bloomberg LP, which reportedly earned $10 billion in 2018. Since that’s not his only company nor source of income, it’s not unreasonable to guesstimate that he has an annual income of $10 billion himself. That gives a nice round number to work with.

And let’s round off the number of work hours in a year to 2,000 (40 hours per week times 50 weeks). And just to keep the math simple, let’s peg your income, you hypothetical middle-class individual, at $50,000 a year. Ergo,

Bloomberg
Annual gross income $ 10,000,000,000
Hourly gross income $           5,000,000

Middle-class wage earner
Annual gross income $               50,000
Hourly gross income $                       25

Comparison

Thus his annual income is not 200, not 2,000, but TWO. HUNDRED. THOUSAND. times as much as yours!

In one hour he makes 100 times more than you do in an entire year.  Conversely, it would take you 100 years to earn as much as he makes in one hour!

And he’s been making money at or near that level for 30 years or more. Putting that  in perspective, to catch up with him, you’d have to earn your middle-class income every year since long, long before the pyramids were built, over 4 thousand years ago!

That really puts the gross in gross income, doesn’t it?

Though its an extreme case, that’s the kind of staggering, breathtaking income inequality we have in America today.

How

Let’s remind ourselves how Bloomberg acquired such stratospheric wealth.

He developed a beyond-the-state-of-the-art computer system in the 1980s. But what did it do?

• Did it help doctors treat the sick and dying?
• Did it help teachers better educate their students in reading, writing, math and science?
• Did it improve the standard of living of all humankind?
• Did it do anything to make the world a better place?

No, none of the above. Not even close.

The invention he makes most of his billions from does one thing: it empowers the wolves and the Gekkos and the other predators on Wall Street to concentrate ever more of the world’s economies into fewer and fewer hands. It’s a specialized computer terminal and software system tied into a private network geared exclusively toward the most elite financial analysts in the banking and investment world, people who don’t actually make  anything. They simply move money around, and his system allows its users to get data and respond to it a few seconds faster than the people who don’t use his system, and that’s what matters in the billionaire boys’ clubs where they carry out their financial debauchery.

It became the  indispensable tool to the people who aspire and conspire to turn a lot of money into a lot more money. (They’re also the same people, using the same tool, who turned a lot of money into a lot of nothing in the Great Recession of a dozen years ago.)

(BTW, his company continues to “improve” its product and expand its market share.)

To create such a system he had to not just grasp the technological possibilities emerging in the computer industry, he had to understand the work of the money changers in the financial temples of the world better than they understood it themselves. He became their master enabler.

Along the way, he also launched a subscription media empire targeting those same people and their minions and wannabes.

And in the process he arguably had the most impact of any single person in growing the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, where the already scandalously rich extend their riches to and beyond any imaginable level of Trumpian extravagance.

And now

So, is Bloomberg some kind of once- and maybe still-evil sorcerer seeking to buy his way into redemption (without actually admitting any past transgressions)? Or is he just an innocent bystander who got rich in the economics arms race by selling some mercenaries automatic weapons to replace their muzzle loaders?

Can his contributions to The Good Cause really undo so much of the unprecedented inequality he’s complicit in?

If Bloomberg wanted to atone for the immense damage he’s helped to inflict, he would never have even dabbled in the Democratic presidential primaries. After all, the elephant in the room (metaphor intended) at every Democratic debate so far has been the fact that it matters little which of the candidates should be chosen as president if the Senate remains in Republican stranglehold.

Bloomberg’s billions would undoubtedly do the most good if directed strategically at winning the most critical House and (especially) Senate seats and funding a rapid response team to Republican lies and disinformation, not on his own self-congratulatory ego trip.

Wow

So is this the guy who deserves to be the standard bearer of the party of working-class Americans?  (Don’t the numbers say he works 200,000 times as hard as the rest of us?)

The other Democratic candidates ought to be constantly reminding voters that the super-rich made that kind of obscene wealth because of the America we all, every working person in America, for the past 400 years, built.

Without the roads and the farms and the schools and the factories, without the wars fought and won by Americans from all  backgrounds, none of that outrageous affluence would even be possible. For anyone.

Which candidate is most likely to take on Wall Street and unstack the deck that keeps making the super-rich richer and everyone else poorer? Someone who actually fought Wall Street and won, or someone who profited astronomically by making Wall Street more  Wall Street than it ever was before?