Wealth, sociopathy and presidency: Why corporate media is force-feeding us the premise of a Bloomberg vs. Trump face-off – AlterNet

As predicted in this space back in December, phase one of the Bloomberg 2020 media coronation is well underway.

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The former Mayor of New York City has spent years funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to non-profits, cultural institutions, the academy, and political candidates. Now, it has paid off with a bumper crop of endorsements.

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In the process, he has collapsed former Vice President Biden’s support in the African-American community in South Carolina over just several news cycles.

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Yet the so-called news coverage of Bloomberg’s rise to presidential candidate has largely been vacuous horserace punditry, and on Trump and Bloomberg tweeting at each other.

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What I have yet to see is the talking heads debating whether great wealth, on the scale of the fortunes of Bloomberg and Trump, should disqualify one from holding our nation’s highest public office.

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The pro- side might argue: American culture is defined by gluttony, avarice, excess and the luxury of having it all. So why shouldn’t our leaders?

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Even our key spiritual beliefs, rooted in our Protestant work ethic and Calvinist worldview, see the accumulation of great wealth as a sign of inherent moral superiority and closeness to a higher transcendent power.

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Conversely, being poor has always been seen as a sign of moral defect in America. How else do you explain the way we criminalize the homeless? Or how we throw people in prison for being behind on paying their medical bills, as recently documented by ProPublica?

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Historically, our government was the place the population turned to for protection against the predations of the slave masters and the robber barons. Yet, in the 21st century there’s a growing clamor to hand the Oval Office over to a cyber-oligarch like Bloomberg, as if he were an antidote to the last billionaire the media machine foisted on us.

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The media has consoled itself that Donald Trump’s abusive gyrations are merely a function of his unique eccentric personality, without examining how a lifelong fixation on wealth could be the manifestation of a pathology. That pathology has had severe repercussions for the nation and the world.

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It is very possible based on his behavior that Michael Bloomberg, who has accumulated tens of billions of dollars more than Trump, suffers the same pathology.

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Could it be that vast wealth accumulation on the scale we are talking about is itself a manifestation of the malignant narcissism that’s plaguing the current occupant of the White House?

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“Really, in order to make that much money off of other people’s labor by giving people less and taking more for yourself, you have to lose compassion for those other people to accumulate more and more,” said Dr. Harriet Fraad, a psychotherapist and host of the podcast “Capitalism Hits Home: Faith, Family and America’s Future.” “What happens to billionaires is that they are no longer earning to buy this or that, have this or that, or even to be free of economic worry and anxiety. They are motivated to accumulate more and more for themselves, which becomes for them ‘winning.’”

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As mayor, Bloomberg exhibited a unique capacity to be utterly detached from the human misery in his vicinity. You may not have a feel for it unless you were on the streets of New York City like I was, working for WNYC during those Bloomberg years.

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In neighborhoods of color it was like apartheid. The NYPD went from inflicting around 80,000 stop-and-frisks in 2002 —Bloomberg’s first year — to 685,700 by 2011. After massive protests, the city relinquished its racist policy slightly, and the number of stop-and-frisks went down a “mere” 532,900 the next year.

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In 2013, U.S. District Court Shira Scheindlin ruled the practice as executed by the NYPD as unconstitutional.

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