Can someone point to a Bloomberg policy they disagree with...

[brooklynite]

...that Biden holds a more liberal position on?

[cwydro]

1. This should be interesting.

[pangaia]

28. lololol

[ritapria]

2. I am focusing on what he did as Mayor

Of course , Bloomberg is going to now portray himself as a Biden-like moderate Democrat ….He is hoping Joe will collapse in the early states - enabling him to purchase that lane on Super Tuesday …..The problem for Mike is that he will never inherit Joe's Support with African-Americans even if Joe flops in the Early States

[brooklynite]

4. If you asked most New Yorkers whether they preferred Bloomberg or De Blasio...

...Bloomberg would win in a heartbeat.

[cwydro]

26. yeah, I remember posters here being utterly gleeful at how tall O'Rourke was.

How’d that work out?

[ritapria]

11. Those who were stopped and frisked didn't think he was so great

Better than DeBlasio ? ..That's a low bar to cross

[DAngelo136]

12. Speaking as a New Yorker

no he wouldn't. The only "sin" of DeBlasio is that he's an actual liberal; something unforgivable among the elites here.
The NYC elites were perfectly fine with the neoliberal policies of Bloomberg. As a New Yorker old enough to remember what life was like before the fiscal troubles, this is NOT what the masses of New Yorkers wanted; the neoliberal paradise.

I strongly advise you to read "The Assassination Of New York" by Robert Fitch and "City For Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York" by Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield. The neoliberal gentrification model that's in effect now was germinated and field tested in New York City and is coming to your city.

Let me tell you; Bloomberg is NOT the answer.

[melman]

16. Also "Vanishing New York" by Jerimiah Moss

[beastie boy]

20. Oh boy, here we go again. The old "neoliberal" slur creeping back into DU.

I said it back in '16, and I will say it again: to anyone who uses the neoliberal label, explain in your own words what you think it means, and then explain how the term applies to whoever you pick to label with it.

I never got a coherent response in the past. Let's see if things have changed any.

[reACTIONary]

23. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!! "neolibral" is...

.... is a smear, devoid of meaning other than "I don't like you".

[Celerity]

41. no, it has an actual history and a meaning

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287358101#post40

[reACTIONary]

45. Not true....

.... it has a history, but has lost any meaning it might have had. Its just a slur or a smear. Name calling.

If you disagree with someone, avoid name calling and be specific about your disagreement.

[Celerity]

47. you are profoundly wrong, you are taking one small part of the milieu, a part that you take issue

with and through shoddy reductionism attempt to ignore and intellectually erase all else about the taxonomy and the epistemology surrounding the term.

The entire subject is far beyond a misused (at times) charge tossed out by one group at another. I already conclusively have shown this in my link I sent to you. By ignoring all other aspects of the term and its historical underpinnings, you are doing the exact same thing that the people you take umbrage with do.

Then again, you are living up to your username

reACTIONary

so props for truth in adverting

[reACTIONary]

50. I started to read what you posted....

.... The first sentence states....

These days, the meaning of “neoliberal” has become fuzzy

. .... so I didn't read any further.

[Celerity]

51. your loss

[aidbo]

36. neoliberalism is just the belief that market forces should be deciding how the economy functions.

For example, the ACA is a neoliberal policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

[beastie boy]

43. Pretty close, but no.

Neoliberalism maintains that FREE MARKET forces alone should determine the direction of the economy. There is a difference between unregulated market forces and free market forces. Market forces have not been free in ages, probably since the middle of the 19th century. In this respect, neoliberalism was a fairy tale from the beginning of its rise in the 1930s, which is now clear to just about everyone except a few old-fashioned intellectuals in a couple of conservative think tanks.

ACA is definitely NOT a neoliberal policy, if only by the virtue of the fact that it is conceived, implemented and directed by the US government and is a government-centered program. Ironically, ACA contains elements of free market economy, but they only exist thanks to government regulations. It's a great illustration of what I think is wrong with the whole neoliberalism fantasy: it is only under the protection of government regulations that free markets can exist at all. Otherwise free markets get destroyed by the unregulated forces of capitalism that suppress, rather than liberate, free markets - a fact that Teddy Roosevelt realized back when he implemented anti-trust regulations in the beginning of the 20th century.

This is why it is ridiculous to apply a "neoliberal" label to anyone. You can be in favor of free market forces or unregulated market forces, but not both. As crazy as it might sound, if you are in favor of free market forces, you are almost by definition in favor of government regulations.

[betsuni]

39. There's never a good explanation of what "neoliberal" policies are.

The neoliberal insult comes from the fantasy that both presidents Clinton and Obama didn't have to deal with unprecedented Republican obstruction. They could've done anything they wanted, like FDR! Therefore, they did not want to do anything progressive. This is because Reagan destroyed unions, so Clinton turned to Wall Street to finance his campaign and the Democratic Party has been completely controlled by Wall Street/corporations ever since. That's why they ignore the working/middle classes. And even though manufacturing employment peaked in the sixties and was down to about 16% in 1994, with service industry jobs increasing to about 73% (and Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" about GM closing plants came out in 1989), trade deals made in the 90s were the sole cause of deindustrialization and Bill Clinton personally responsible.

This is what they really believe!

[Celerity]

40. Democrats and neoliberalism and the Third Way

These days, the meaning of “neoliberal” has become fuzzy. But it has a long history of association with the Democratic Party.

https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2019/6/11/18660240/democrats-neoliberalism

The fallout from the 2016 election has created many surreal moments for historians of American politics and parties, but surely one of the oddest has been the introduction of the term neoliberal into the popular discourse. Even stranger still is that it has become a pejorative largely lobbed by the left less at Republicans and more at Democrats. As neoliberal has come to describe a wide range of figures, from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates, its meaning has become stretched thin and caused fuzziness and disagreement. This muddle of meanings creates an opportunity to seek a more precise understanding of what I call “Democratic neoliberalism.”

It is actually not the first time Democrats have been called neoliberal. In the early 1980s, the term emerged to describe a group of figures also called the Watergate Babies, Atari Democrats, and New Democrats, many of whom eventually became affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). In this iteration, the term neoliberal was embraced not as opprobrium. Rather, it used a form of self-description and differentiation to imply that they were “new Democrats.” In 1982, Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters published “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto,” which aimed to lay out the core principles of this group; two years later, journalist Randall Rothenberg wrote a book called The Neoliberals that sought to codify and celebrate this cohort’s ascendency.

The DLC and its allies have largely received attention from political historians for their electoral strategy instead of their policies. Yet, even more than electoral politics, this group had an impact on shaping the ideas and policy priorities of the Democratic Party in key issues of economic growth, technology, and poverty. They also created a series of initiatives that sought to fuse these arenas together in lasting ways. The realm of policies is where parties can have an impact that reaches beyond elections to shape the lives of individual people and intensify structures and patterns of inequality. It thus points to the importance of expanding the study of US political parties writ large, beyond simply an examination of political strategy and electoral returns and instead thinking about the ways in which parties come to reflect and shape ideas and policy. It also demonstrates the importance of treating neoliberalism less as an epithet and more as a historical development.

Unlike their counterparts in fields like sociology and geography and even in other historical subfields, historians of the United States were long reluctant to adopt the term “neoliberal.” Many still argue that the neologism has become, in the words of Daniel Rodgers, “a linguistic omnivore” that is anachronistic and potentially “cannibalizing.” In the past few years, scholars of 20th-century American political history, however, have increasingly embraced neoliberalism and sought to understand its historical evolution. Building and drawing on the work of influential theorists like David Harvey, these inquiries have been important in the efforts to understand the relationship between capitalism and politics and the power dynamics with them.

Yet these accounts have largely depicted the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s as inextricably intertwined with conservative ascent and the Reagan Revolution, and situated the Clinton era and the rise of the New Democrats as a piece of a larger story about the dominance of the free market and the retreat of government. This approach flattened and obscured the important ways that the Clintons and other New Democrats’ promotion of the market and the role of government was distinct from Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and their followers.

The principles and policies Clinton and the DLC espoused were not solely a defensive reaction to the Republican Party or merely a strategic attempt to pull the Democratic Party to the center. Rather, their vision represents parts of a coherent ideology that sought to both maintain and reformulate key aspects of liberalism itself. In The Neoliberals, Rothenberg observed that “neoliberals are trying to change the ideas that underlie Democratic politics.” Taking his claim seriously provides a means to think about how this group of figures achieved that goal and came to permanently transform the agenda and ideas of the Democratic Party.

From Watergate Babies to New Democrats

snip



A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto

By Charles Peters; Charles Peters is the editor of The Washington Monthly.

September 5, 1982

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/?utm_term=.ce3a69efb8e6

NEO-LIBERALISM is a terrible name for an interesting, if embryonic, movement. As the sole culprit at the christening, I hereby attest to the innocence of the rest of the faithful. They deserve something better, because they are a remarkable group of people.

The best known are three promising senators: Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gary Hart of Colorado and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. The ones I know best are my fellow journalists, including James Fallows and Gregg Easterbrook of The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley and Robert M. Kaus of Harper's, Nicholas Lemann and Joseph Nocera of Texas Monthly, and Randall Rothenberg of New Jersey Monthly. But there are many others, ranging from an academic economist like MIT's Lester Thurow to a mayor like Houston's Kathy Whitmire to a governor like Arizona's Bruce Babbitt. There's even a cell over at that citadel of traditional liberalism, The New Republic.

While we are united by a different spirit and a different style of thought, none of these people should be held responsible for all of what follows. Practicing politicians in particular should be presumed innocent of the more controversial positions. When I use the first person plural, it usually means some but not all of us, and occasionally it may mean just me.

If neo-conservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.

We have found these responses not only weren't helping but were often hampering us in confronting the problems that were beginning to cripple the nation in the 1970s: declining productivity; the closed factories and potholed roads that betrayed decaying plant and infrastructure; inefficient and unaccountable public agencies that were eroding confidence in government; a military with too many weapons that didn't work and too few people from the upper classes in its ranks; and a politics of selfishness symbolized by an explosion of political action committees devoted to the interests of single groups.

snip



A Neoliberal Says It’s Time for Neoliberals to Pack It In

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/a-neoliberal-says-its-time-for-neoliberals-to-pack-it-in/

My fellow neoliberal shill Brad DeLong has declared that it’s time for us to pass the baton to “our colleagues on the left.” As it happens, I agree with him in practice because I think it’s time for boomers to retire and turn over the reins to Xers and Millennials, who are generally somewhat to the left of us oldsters. Beyond that, though, there’s less here than meets the eye. DeLong says there are three reasons he thinks neoliberals should fade into the background:

Political: The original guiding spirit of American neoliberalism was the idea that Democrats had moved too far to the left and gotten punished for it with the election of Ronald Reagan. For years, neoliberals believed that if the party could be moved toward the center, it would be possible to make deals with Republicans that would lead to better governance. Needless to say, that didn’t work: Republicans, it turned out, were simply emboldened to move even further to the right. They showed absolutely no intention of compromising in any way with Democrats.

But this is old news. Charlie Peters, the godfather of political neoliberalism, conceded it publicly long ago. For at least the past decade, there’s been no reason at all to believe that the current Republican Party would ever compromise with Democrats no matter how moderate their proposals. Anyone who has believed this since George W. Bush was president was deluding themselves. Anyone who has believed it since 2009, when Obamacare was being negotiated, is an idiot. There’s nothing about this that separates neoliberals from anyone else these days.

Policy: DeLong suggests that the folks to his left are basically just social democrats like him who “could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not.” But with the unfortunate exception of its jihad against organized labor, neoliberals have been social democrats from the start. Bill Clinton tried to pass universal health care, after all, and I think Barack Obama would have done the same if he’d thought there was any chance of passing it.

So this is nothing new either. The question is, does DeLong intend to go along in areas where his neoliberal ideas are in conflict with the AOC wing of the Democratic Party? He plainly does not.

The world has changed: “We learned more about the world. I could be confident in 2005 that [recession] stabilization should be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. That you look at something like laser-eye surgery or rapid technological progress in hearing aids, you can kind of think that keeping a market in the most innovative parts of health care would be a good thing. So something like an insurance-plus-exchange system would be a good thing to have in America as a whole. It’s much harder to believe in those things now.”

But has the world really changed? I don’t think so—not yet, anyway. I’ll bet DeLong still believes in these two things, but now understands that Republicans will undermine them at every opportunity. That makes it Job 1 to destroy the current incarnation of the GOP, and the best way to do that is to have unity on the left. But if and when that’s been accomplished, I’ll bet he still thinks the Fed should be primarily in charge of fighting recessions. We just need FOMC members who agree.

At the risk of overanalyzing this, I think DeLong is still a neoliberal and has no intention of sitting back and letting progressives run wild. He has simply changed the target of his coalition building. Instead of compromising to bring in Republicans, he wants to compromise to bring in lefties. Now, this is not nothing: instead of compromising to the right, he now wants to compromise to the left. But I suspect that this simply means DeLong has moved to the left over the past couple of decades, just like lots of liberals.

snip





Third Way

The Third Way is a position akin to centrism that tries to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of some centre-right and centrist economic and some centre-left social policies. The Third Way was created as a re-evaluation of political policies within various centre-left progressive movements in response to doubt regarding the economic viability of the state and the overuse of economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularized by Keynesianism, but which at that time contrasted with the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right. The Third Way is promoted by social liberals and some social democratic parties.

Major Third Way social democratic proponent Tony Blair claimed that the socialism he advocated was different from traditional conceptions of socialism and said: "My kind of socialism is a set of values based around notions of social justice. [...] Socialism as a rigid form of economic determinism has ended, and rightly". Blair referred to it as a "social-ism" involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent and advocated social justice, social cohesion, equal worth of each citizen and equal opportunity. Third Way social democratic theorist Anthony Giddens has said that the Third Way rejects the traditional conception of socialism and instead accepts the conception of socialism as conceived of by Anthony Crosland as an ethical doctrine that views social democratic governments as having achieved a viable ethical socialism by removing the unjust elements of capitalism by providing social welfare and other policies and that contemporary socialism has outgrown the Marxist claim for the need of the abolition of capitalism. In 2009, Blair publicly declared support for a "new capitalism".

The Third Way supports the pursuit of greater egalitarianism in society through action to increase the distribution of skills, capacities and productive endowments while rejecting income redistribution as the means to achieve this. It emphasises commitment to balanced budgets, providing equal opportunity which is combined with an emphasis on personal responsibility, the decentralisation of government power to the lowest level possible, encouragement and promotion of public–private partnerships, improving labour supply, investment in human development, preserving of social capital and protection of the environment. However, specific definitions of Third Way policies may differ between Europe and the United States. The Third Way has been criticised by certain conservatives, liberals and libertarians who advocate laissez-faire capitalism. It has also been heavily criticised by other social democrats and in particular democratic socialists, anarchists and communists as a betrayal of left-wing values, with some analysts characterising the Third Way as an effectively neoliberal movement.

snip

[beastie boy]

44. Excellent sources

They summarize the awkwardness and confusion of the term "neoliberal" as it has been historically applied to Democrats, and how the term diverges from its original meaning.

This is where the term comes in handy to smear Democrats. When you don't differentiate, as the articles you cited do, the differences in the application of the term, however confusing, it is easy to blame some centrist Democrats for all kinds of sins that are associated with the Laissez-Faire neo-liberals, no nuances taken into account.

On edit: A lot of the history and the subtleties that went into the sources you provided is being lost on all sorts of lazy demagogues who use the term too liberally (pun intended).

[Celerity]

66. a lot of the confusion in the US comes from the fact that 'liberal' is mostly used there in regards

to the left, when in most of the rest of the world it is referring to the centre-right (ie. classical liberalism as opposed to social liberalism or 'new' liberalism.)

The Liberal Party (known since 2015 as Liberalerna and before that, for 80 years, as Folkpartiet ie. The People's Party and then, from 1990 to 2015, as Folkpartiet liberalerna) here in Sweden for example, is a centre-right (centre-right based off a European scale) party. The US has been artificially spun so hard to the right (and the fact it only has two main parties due to a constitutional lack of proportional representation mechanisms for Congress) that a large amount of the Democratic centrists and moderates (and especially the few conservative Dems left) would be on the rightward edge of the centre-right parties in many European nations.

[redqueen]

54. Didn't used to have to explain this shit on DU.

My, how things have changed.

[Celerity]

42. it does have an actual meaning, a history and a meaning when it comes to American Democrats as well

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287358101#post40

[JonLP24]

69. It means someone has centrist or right wing economic policies

But socially liberal policies.

[melman]

15. Maybe most New Yorkers on the fancy lunch circuit

[Sanity Claws]

31. As a New Yorker, I can assure you that New Yorkers are fed up with both of them.

I would say that choosing between the two of them is no choice at all.
Bloomberg believed in the free market to cure everything. On of the results was that the homeless population exploded under his watch. He thought that giving real estate folks free rein to build whatever would cure the lack of affordable housing. It didn't.

[George II]

32. No doubt about it. DiBlasio may just be the most unpopular Mayor since....

....David Dinkins or Abe Beame.

[brush]

52. Stop and frisk will never win with black voters. Hard to get...

black women's support when you have a history of aggressively policing their husbands, sons, brothers and nephews for just walking while black on the streets of NYC.

[jrthin]

56. As a New Yorker, no he would not.

[jrthin]

57. As a New Yorker, no he would not.

[thesquanderer]

67. I'm not so sure about that. I'm a local who would take De Blasio.

And at least De Blasio was actually elected as a Democrat, which Bloomberg never was. He ran against Green, Ferrer, and Thompson in his three campaigns, and I think any of them would have been better. De Blasio has his flaws, but it's not like I have such fond memories of the Bloomberg administration. But I guess now that he's a Dem, I have to be careful not to say too much negative about him here.

[thesquanderer]

3. Bloomberg believes term limits are negotiable. Biden, presumably, does not. (n/t)

[brooklynite]

5. I've never heard Biden espouse a position on term limits...

As for the NYC Mayorality, he was fully supported by the Democratic City Council

[thesquanderer]

14. The people voted for term limits. The city council overruled the people/law, at Bloomberg's bequest.

The city council vote was 29 to 22. I don't know how many of the 29 who voted for it were Dems vs. Repubs (though for those who don't know, Bloomberg ran as a Republican, not a Dem).

And most of the city council members who supported the removal of the term limits would have themselves been out of a job if they had not. From the NY Times article:

In the end, of the 35 council members scheduled to be forced out of office in 2009, 23 of them supported the extension. By contrast, only 6 out of 16 who are in their first term voted yes.

It was a travesty of democracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/nyregion/24termlimits.html

[Mike 03]

6. His philanthropy gives us some idea of his values...

and personally I like them.

Bloomberg Philanthropies encompasses all of the charitable giving for founder Michael R. Bloomberg.[1] Headquartered in New York City, Bloomberg Philanthropies focuses its resources on five areas: the environment, public health, the arts, government innovation and education.[2] According to the Foundation Center, Bloomberg Philanthropies is the 12th largest foundation in the United States.[3] Bloomberg has pledged to donate the majority of his wealth, currently estimated at more than $49 billion.[4][5][6] Patti Harris is the CEO of Bloomberg Philanthropies.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Philanthropies

[FreeState]

18. Can you point to that policy?

Just pointing out his wealth does nothing to say what his policy is.

[FreeState]

37. Yes

There are many examples of wealthy people who don’t agree that the current system that enriched them is fair or moral.

[brooklynite]

62. right, just like J.K. Rowling...

She wrote all those extra Harry Potter books to make obscene wealth, didn't she?

[Joe941]

68. This.

[Hortensis]

9. Buying a third mayoral term by getting term limits set aside.

No matter how much or little influence he wielded, he was part of it, and in his position of wealth and power that was intensely il-liberal and un-democratic.

Trump's already probably broken the glass ceiling for billionaires in the WH, but he's small potatoes next to Bloomberg. This man is among the 20 wealthiest people on the planet and owns a media empire. With his ability to potentially buy the power he's so clearly taken a fancy to, he's a huge example of a problem we have to solve before it "solves" the problem of us. Of course ideologically he's far preferable to today's Republicans, but we still need him turned upside down and shaken out so that he can't afford $1M for a painting, much less the current upper "market" limit of $250M. (He could afford much, much more than that.)

"We can have democracy in this country, OR we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Nancy Pelosi quoting pre- New Deal Justice Louis Brandeis to the nation at the opening of the 116th congress.

I think we can pretty much assume Speaker Pelosi's not a Bloomberg supporter either.

[BannonsLiver]

10. You thinking about jumping ship again?

Mayor Pete will have a sad.

[StevieM]

13. The policy of supporting George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for re-election.

Biden held the more liberal position of supporting John Kerry.

[crazytown]

17. Racial profiling for the purposes of good City Hall administration.

of crime infested streets.

[Wiseman32218]

19. He supported "Stop and Frisk"

That is enough for me!!!

[TexasBushwhacker]

60. And that turned into a racial profiling nightmare

I don't see African Americans and Latinos voting for him. If they stay home, Democrats lose.

[Wiseman32218]

61. You are spot on with your conclusion!!

[dsc]

21. Presidency is more than policy

Bloomberg has, on occasion, shown contempt for democracy. As bad an idea as I think term limits are, the people of NYC voted for them. He should have abided by them. Stop and frisk was another affront to democracy, to the extent that being free from unreasonable search and seizure is part of a democracy. We have now a billionaire in the White House who has little need for democracy. I am not sure replacing him with a billionaire who has an unknown amount of need for democracy is the greatest idea.

[Dem4Life1102]

25. Well said

[aikoaiko]

22. That's a low bar, isn't it?

[Dem4Life1102]

24. Stop and frisk

Raising taxes on middle class homeowners while cutting taxes on the wealthy including his own.

Detaining protesters during the GOP convention.

Cutting funds to public schools to fund charter schools.

[sarisataka]

27. I look at character as well as policies

I have no doubt that if Bloomberg wanted to be President and an unpopular Democrat was in the office, he would have no problem putting an (R) after his name if he thought that was the best chance to be elected.

Bloomberg will not get my vote in the primary

[emmaverybo]

29. The presidency is not all about policy. First, the president alone does not create and implement

policy. Second, the president has multiple duties and powers in multiple areas. Biden has far superior job-specific qualifications to Michael Bloomberg, is respected and has stature on the world-stage, and is a more widely liked candidate.

[dewsgirl]

30. Do you know what his views on marijuana are?

[Hassin Bin Sober]

34. Michael Bloomberg:

https://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Mike_Bloomberg_Social_Security.htm

To reduce the deficit we must cut entitlements

Q: Your thoughts on the sequester?
BLOOMBERG: Winston Churchill once said, "You can always depend on America to do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities." We've had a democracy for 235-odd years and it works in the end, and that's what's in important. Sequestering is here. It will go on for a while. It's not going to be the end of the world as we know it. And everybody was saying, "Oh, the worst-case scenario is exactly what we're going to implement." And now they're into the real world and they'll try to find ways to do more with less, and then hopefully Congress will come together and modify sequestering to cut things back where we can afford it and not where we can't. And keep in mind, no program to reduce the deficit makes any sense whatsoever unless you address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payment on the debt, which you can't touch, and defense spending. Everything else is tiny compared to that.

[JudyM]

48. Thanks, Hassin, helpful info.

[TidalWave46]

35. One good reason...

Bloomberg won’t get off the ground.

[Squinch]

38. Stop and frisk, union busting. What would those look like on a federal level?

[myohmy2]

46. he's...

...a .1%er...

...that's all I need to know...and I don't need to know anymore...

...I wouldn't believe a word he'd say...

...I would not participate nor would I support in any way, The Battle Of The Billionaires

...that's a big who cares...

[Hermit-The-Prog]

49. I could vote for Bloomberg

If he wins the primaries, I won't have to hold my nose to vote for him.

[dawg day]

53. Stop and frisk?

Bloomberg's recanted on that one, after literally thousands of people were detained under his orders.

[jrthin]

55. Stop and Frisk, although not his policy,

he enforced it heartily. In NYC he started the "penned-in" of protesters during the oncoming Iraq war. He was an obnoxious mayor. He favored charter schools over public and really helped to further the mess of NY school system. I loathe this man.

[Kurt V.]

58. Bloomberg's run isn't about policy, its about presentation.

[RainCaster]

59. I can't support another NYC billionaire, I've seen one too many already

Maybe if he lived in Denver, Atlanta, or anywhere else.

[Me.]

63. That It's OK To Dinenfranchise Voters

which is essentially what he did to NYers to get a 3rd term when they had voted in term limits twice

[Quackers]

64. His stance on minimum wage? nt

[Celerity]

65. weed (Biden is at least for decriminalisation, which Bloomberg opposes) nt