[As Senators Warren and Sanders have made the ever-widening income
inequality centerpieces of their election campaigns, a host of
plutocrats have gone public with their anger at all this
billionaire-bashing, and others are running for the White House.]
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BOO-HOO BILLIONAIRES: WHY AMERICA'S SUPER-RICH ARE AFRAID FOR 2020  
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Dominic Rushe
November 16, 2019
The Guardian
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_ As Senators Warren and Sanders have made the ever-widening income
inequality centerpieces of their election campaigns, a host of
plutocrats have gone public with their anger at all this
billionaire-bashing, and others are running for the White House. _

Michael Bloomberg is making moves to enter the 2020 race – and some
of his fellow billionaires are already coming out for him. , By
Rubenstein/Flickr CC BY 2.0

 

The 1996 US election was all about the “soccer mom”; 2004 belonged
to the “Nascar dads”; Donald Trump won the White House with a
“basket of deplorables”. Every election cycle seems to have a key
demographic said to define the race, and 2020 is no different. This is
the campaign of the “boo-hoo billionaire”.

There’s a billionaire in the White House and two of the top
Democratic rivals for Trump’s job, senators Bernie Sanders and
Elizabeth Warren, have made ever-widening income inequality central to
their campaign.

“I don’t think that billionaires should exist,” Sanders said
recently, citing the “immoral level of income and wealth
inequality” that has only deepened 
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the Trump administration.

One billionaire bid for the White House has already flamed out. Howard
Schultz, Starbuck’s former barista-in-chief, ended his run almost as
soon as it had begun chased away by angry crowds who labeled him
an “egotistical billionaire asshole!”
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That hasn’t stopped another billionaire, hedge-fund mogul Tom
Steyer, running for the Democratic nomination. And now former New York
mayor Mike Bloomberg, founder of the eponymous media empire, is also
making moves to enter the race, fired up by the billionaire bashing.
Ironically, Bloomberg (net worth $52.3bn
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signaled his intention to get in the race by getting his name on the
ballot in Alabama, one of the poorest states
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the union with a median household income of $48,123.

Kevin Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University and
co-author of Fault Lines: 
[[link removed]]A
History of the United States Since 1974, believes there’ll be more
to come. “The Trump candidacy made a lot of them think, ‘Well, if
this guy with his inherited wealth, who went bankrupt all the time, if
he can do it, why not me?’”

The mistake they make is ignoring Trump’s charisma and “huckster
showmanship”, said Kruse. “They think because they have even more
money they will have more charisma. That’s not the case, It wasn’t
with Schultz, it isn’t with Steyer and it’s not going to be with
Bloomberg,” he said. “The idea that Mike Bloomberg is going to do
well in Alabama is insane.”

That’s not what the billionaires think. As Warren and Sanders have
stepped up their attacks, a host of plutocrats have gone public with
their anger at all this billionaire-bashing, and some are already
coming out for Bloomberg.

For them, this is personal. The “great plute freakout of 2019
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as Anand Giridharadas, the author of Winner Takes All, a recent study
of the deleterious impact of elites, has called it, is literally
reducing billionaires to tears.

Asked about his views on the 2020 election on CNBC earlier this month,
moist-eyed investment giant Leon Cooperman, worth $3.2bn according to
Forbes
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barely hold back the tears.

“I care. That’s it,” he sobbed, eyes cast down and shuffling
papers.

Cooperman has clashed with Warren in recent months after she proposed
higher taxes on the super wealthy. “I believe in a progressive
income tax and the rich paying more. But this is the fucking American
dream she is shitting on,” Cooperman told Politico.
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“The vilification of billionaires makes no sense to me,” Cooperman
told CNBC. He called her policies “idiocy” and said it was
“appealing to the lowest common denominator, and basically trying to
turn people’s heads around by promising a lot of free stuff”.

Warren responded with a tweet, saying: “One thing I know he cares
about – his fortune. He’s a shareholder in Navient, a student loan
company that has cheated borrowers and used abusive, misleading
tactics. He even went so far as to ask how I might impact his
investment in the last earnings call with Navient.”

Her campaign is now selling mugs stamped with Billionaire Tears.

Days later, a far perkier Cooperman went on CNBC to celebrate the news
that the “terrific” Bloomberg was potentially in the race.
“He’s a unifier, he’s bright, he’s immensely successful,
he’s been extremely generous with his resources,” he said.

Cooperman was particularly impressed that as New York’s mayor,
Bloomberg successful blocked a proposed billionaires tax. “He
resisted, and he explained that if you lose one billionaire, you lose
more revenue than you are gonna get from everyone else. So he
understands how the system works.”

The problem for this caterwauling Croesus and his cohorts is that, in
fact, many billionaires know that the system does not work. Over the
last few years a bevy of billionaires have warned that the society
that created them faces an existential threat in income inequality.

The yawning gap between rich and poor is now a “national
emergency”, hedge-fund king Ray Dalio ($18.7bn
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an 8,000-plus-word blogpost on Linkedin
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in April. Dalio’s fears have been echoed by JP Morgan boss Jamie
Morgan ($1.6bn
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Buffett ($87bn
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others but none have matched his devastating and detailed critique.

As Dalio points out:

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The wealth of the top 1% of the population is more than that of the
bottom 90% of the population combined

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Forty per cent of all Americans would struggle to raise $400 in the
event of an emergency.

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There has been little or no real income growth for most people for
decades.

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The childhood poverty rate in the US is now 17.5% and has also not
meaningfully improved for decades.

The opportunities for people like Dalio (born to a jazz musician in
Queens) or Cooperman (the son of a Polish plumber) are disappearing.
The rate of economic mobility in the US – the opportunity to earn
your way out of poverty – is now one of the worst in the developed
world.

But Dalio’s “solutions” sound less impressive than his critique:
more “leadership from the top,” bipartisan cooperation and
“clear metrics”. Kruse is not surprised billionaires don’t have
the answer.

“The reality is that government isn’t a business,” he said.
“They are fundamentally different enterprises. What you are able to
do in business doesn’t pan out in foreign affairs, in domestic
policy. Convincing your board of directors is one thing; convincing
Congress to pass legislation is entirely different.”

But that won’t stop the billionaires from wanting to add 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue to their property portfolio – even if the
peasants have gathered with their pitchforks at the gates.

“There is something about the very wealthy, they don’t have enough
people telling them that they are full of shit,” said Kruse.

[_Dominic Rushe is business editor for Guardian US. He was part of the
Guardian team that won the 2014 Pulitzer prize for public service
journalism. Click here
[[link removed]] for Dominic's
public key. Twitter @dominicru [[link removed]?]_]

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