FIRST OF A SERIES: HOW MIKE BLOOMBERG THINKS

Has Bloomberg Crashed, Along with the Mindless ‘Information Society’?

by Barbara Boyd

[Print version of this article]

March 2—As we head into Super Tuesday, the March 3 Democratic Party primary elections in the United States, Michael Bloomberg’s political future has become the question of the day, based on two absolutely disastrous Democratic Party debate performances by the former Mayor of New York. On Super Tuesday, one third of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be picked. Bloomberg’s millions of dollars in ads and endorsements, based on lavish gifts to mayors and other pols, have been focused on the Super Tuesday states and those that follow.

As the result of Bloomberg’s poor debate performances, there is now a huge effort underway to reconstruct Joe Biden into something other than the reality of a senile old man publicly and aimlessly wandering through the mental debris of his past. In the minds of the Democratic Party elites and their British imperial sponsors, someone, anyone, other than Bernie Sanders, must be found to defeat Donald Trump. Mike Bloomberg’s unanticipated and total initial flop as the great white hope has created panic and desperation. It is now very possible that another candidate will enter the race.

An article in Politico on February 28, “The Wizards Behind Bloomberg’s Half-Billion Dollar Makeover,” accurately described the problem. Bloomberg hired, as is his wont, the “very best” people to create a narrative about him to sell his candidacy to the American people. As in all of Bloomberg’s campaigns for mayor, millions of dollars—in this case, $500 million dollars and counting—were spent creating a story about the smart, humble, billionaire who would “get it done,” namely, depose President Trump and, presumably, given his resemblance to Benito Mussolini, make the trains run on time.

Bloomberg saturated the entire country with these ads. Every citizen not living under a rock has seen or heard one or many more. But, that all went up in smoke when the arrogant, narcissistic, and simply mean former Mayor of New York City appeared from behind the curtain in his first and second Democratic Party candidates’ debates. The pure shock of reality—the warm fuzzy figure of the ads versus the actual small, mean little man—might very well have killed Bloomberg’s personal quest for the Presidency. It is also a metaphor for the tale we are about to tell, a tale of why mythical and axiomatically flawed systems violating the laws of nature always crash and burn. When reality asserts itself, however, Bloomberg’s type of elite delusion will have sacrificed thousands of human beings in the course of its existence.

The Walking Dead

For reasons of who Bloomberg represents, however, his electoral story is far from over. As he brags, Nancy Pelosi owes her Speaker’s Chair to him, he is the dominant financial force in the Democratic Party, and he “bought” 21 of the 40 Democratic seats in the House which created the Democratic majority. He is deeply tied to the British oligarchy and its current public face, the Bank of England’s Mark Carney. Carney will step down in March as Governor of the Bank of England and replace Bloomberg as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.

The Carney-Bloomberg project involves the new globalist imperative to steer all global credit, public and private, into Green finance projects, lowering living standards world-wide and killing millions by means of technological attrition and “sustainable” economic goals characteristic of feudal societies. As the financial bubble built on the smoldering remains of the financial collapse of 2008 collapses, the elites must sell a myth legitimizing zero population growth, further deindustrialization and freezing of living standards, and mass surveillance, in order to maintain control. Hence the great Climate Catastrophe myth.

Mark Carney has openly called for the world’s central bankers to run the world without political interference, as the post 2008 financial bubble unwinds and collapses. He is eager to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, with some global central bankers’ invention. Bloomberg’s plans for supervising credit world-wide and his very significant role in the globalist Green Finance schemes demonstrate that he is the fully preferred candidate of Wall Street and the City of London. If he drops out of the race for the Democratic nomination, he will continue to fund the defeat of Donald Trump and Democratic races to control the Senate and the House, and the world’s oligarchs will match his expenditures.

In a previous article for EIR, “Mike Bloomberg: The Dossier,” we described Bloomberg’s background, his backers, and some of his more disastrous prescriptions as Mayor of New York. In this present series of articles we will discuss the more important point, how Michael Bloomberg thinks. In this, the first article of the series, we will tell you about systems analysis as applied to governing societies and economies, and demonstrate how Michael Bloomberg exemplifies these inherently fascist and synarchist doctrines.

In forthcoming articles, we will show you how Bloomberg’s policies concerning the environment, education, healthcare, city building and management, and culture were disastrous for the City of New York, completing the process of destruction first undertaken by Bloomberg’s mentor, Felix Rohatyn and the Emergency Financial Control Board during New York’s 1974-75 financial crisis. Through his monster foundation, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bloomberg is now seeking to apply these policies systemically, in all the cities of the United States and many in Europe. As previously noted, following the end of his Mayoralty in 2013, Bloomberg and his philanthropy assumed the leading role in constructing the new green finance regime for the world—the creation of a globalist fascist regime with surface democratic characteristics.

In each of these policy areas we will contrast the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, creating, thereby a path for a very different and prosperous future.

‘In God We Trust, For Everything Else Bring Data’

Why—since it can be demonstrated that Bloomberg actually failed in all the policies he claims advanced New York City—do elites on both the right and the left declare him to have been the most successful mayor in the city’s history? The answer to this question lies in the fact that his method of thinking—the disease of systems analysis and a religious belief in something called the digital or information age economy—is the hegemonic mind set of the elites both here and in Europe, extending even into Russia and China. “In God We Trust, For Everything Else Bring Data,” is the corporate moniker of Bloomberg L.P. and, as Bloomberg says, it is his method of thinking and governance. This slogan, coined by W. Edwards Deming, an actual genius in organizational management, has been perverted by Bloomberg to encompass the murderous results of applying fixed linear equations to large economies and social processes. Its premises are those of largely econometric platforms and a consumer society where individual tastes can be endlessly profiled and exploited.

Those with a memory for Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration” designs for social control in the Obama Administration’s surveillance state and the “data” and “evidence-based” claims behind Obamacare, will recognize that it was also Barack Obama’s disastrous mode of governance.

In his autobiography, Lyndon LaRouche noted that his fundamental discoveries in economics were based in first confronting and then refuting the methods of systems analysis and the cybernetics championed by Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. Instead, LaRouche demonstrated that individual human creativity, what LaRouche called the power of labor, was the driving force of sustainable, progressive economic development and that societal policies based on fostering creativity were the means of advancing everyone.

In Part I of his 1981 two-part article, “Systems Analysis Is White Collar Genocide,” LaRouche wrote:

It is sometimes useful to misrepresent a process by interpreting (misinterpreting) that process as if it were a network of interconnected chains of causes and effects. If such a fictitious network can be simplified, reduced to a matrix of the sort agreeable to present day computer technology, a process which appears to defy mathematical analysis in its true form may be analyzed with a reasonable minimum of error of calculation by the methods of approximation we have indicated. . . .

The application of systems analysis to economic and related cases developed during and out of World War II “operations research” practices. Economic-network problems (scheduling problems) were simplified in the descriptive form of sets of linear algebraic expressions, and calculations performed on the matrices so constructed. . . .

As long as these indicated and related forms of systems analysis are restricted in application to relatively smaller-scale (“micro-economic”) cases over short-term spans, and with a carefully selected limited number of considerations taken into account, such “micro-economic” applications are often beneficial—assuming that both the analysts and the management possess and exercise reasonable competence. The benefits vastly outweigh the errors caused by the fallacious assumptions of the method employed.

The moment we shift the use of similar methods to whole national economies, especially over periods in the range of five years to a generation or longer, the benefits become relatively infinitesimal in respect to the gross errors arising from fallacious assumptions. . . .

If a society’s economy can be fairly described, over successive periods, by means of linear economic models, that society is very sick, and will die unless radical changes are introduced to its policies of economic practice.

Increases in Physical Productivity Advance Humanity

LaRouche goes on to demonstrate that the perpetuation of human existence over thousands of years has depended on the emergence of new forms of society more advanced technologically than its predecessors. This advance correlates with increases of mankind’s potential relative population density and geometric growth of the required average level of per capita energy throughput to society, relative to increases in potential relative population-density. As society advances, historically, the variety expressed in elaboration of tools and of the division of labor in production of goods increases.

These alterations in the input-output characteristics of the economy mean that linear equations completely fail to anticipate or accurately describe the process, which is one of change, of necessary dramatic leaps into new economic platforms, as humans exhaust the resources which have been the basis of past economic life. When economic processes are radically altered in some determining feature, the changes are like those that occur when ice melts to form water, or when water boils and creates steam. They are equivalent to changes in physical state. If society is progressing, then there are non-linear changes occurring within present economic models and these non-linear changes are the key to accurately assessing an economy’s state. Again, if the linear models of systems analysis can accurately describe or predict the state of an economy, LaRouche notes, the economy is dying because it is exhausting its extant resources through technological attrition.

At root, Bloomberg and his kin are unable to distinguish men and women from beasts or to account for the human ability to undertake willful, self-conscious change and to invent whole new modes of being. Bloomberg’s recently infamous statement, that you can just hand out a xerox to police describing all perpetrators of murder in New York City, as “18- to 25-year-old minorities,” thereby justifying a policing policy of throwing thousands of 18- to 25-year-old minorities “up against the wall” and frisking them, is much more a reflection of Bloomberg’s mode of thought than anything he could conceive as racist.

Determining why significant crime is occurring in these parts of the population and developing responses based on that finding are outside the parameters of Bloomberg’s profile of the problem, the immediate data he uses as a basis for action. The fact that crime in New York has been in a state of constant decline since the crack epidemic subsided and continues to decline despite the end of stop and frisk demonstrates the fallacy of his data-based and brutally incompetent systems analysis approach.

Similarly, the huge population growth and economic surge of the Renaissance, resulting in large part from the Council of Florence, is something that is simply inconceivable to Bloomberg or those who think like him.

Bloomberg Got Rich by Inventing Diseases

Michael Bloomberg made his money by inventing the Bloomberg Terminal, a private, computerized network that facilitated trades on Wall Street, at the dawn of the computer age. That operation has since morphed into a computerized information system for stock analysis and trading, including the high-frequency trading based on algorithms responsible for most modern Wall Street crashes. He is a devotee of systems analysis and the operations research and behaviorism which are the moniker of the so-called digital age as well as the surveillance police state we live in today. He even admits that he thinks like one of his machines. Here he is in an excerpt from an interview with National Public Radio in April of 2012:

And I’ve always liked things where you can understand from beginning to end, and it’s rational. And that’s why I’ve been studying Spanish for six, seven years now and trying to learn to play golf for seven to eight years, and I’m terrible at both. And part of the reason is I think sequentially, and when the instructor says, oh just do it, I don’t. I stop every word if I don’t understand it and understand the spelling and the termination and the rule that says the pronoun goes before and the subject goes afterwards, or in my golf swing, your hands are here, and your wrists are there, and . . . and being an engineer has its disadvantages too.

The Oxford Speech

On December 8, 2016, Bloomberg made an amazing speech at the Said Business School at Oxford University. That speech included the now widely circulated statements that anyone could be a farmer and that farmers and industrial workers are stupid. But the whole context of those remarks is a brazen demonstration of how this man and his elite colleagues think.

In answer to a question about how to address the vast income inequalities that the questioner believed resulted in the election of Donald Trump, Bloomberg began by questioning the very premise of income inequality. He declared that in the last four decades the world’s poverty rate had been cut in half if measured by whether someone went to bed hungry, had a roof over his or her head, and could read.

He elaborated that in New York City, the lower 20% was a lot better off, in that 80% of them had cars, 30% of the automobile owners had two cars, everyone had cell phones, and many had 72-inch television sets. He then attributed the entire disparity in income between the top 1 to 5% and the rest of the population to fixed asset inflation caused by the low interest-rate policies in practice since the financial crash of 2008. He claimed that the disparities between this top 5%—who, his data says, are rich because of one fairly recent decision about interest rates—and the rest of the population, are really not that much.

Bloomberg’s figures, his data on world poverty, originate with Bill Gates and have been ridiculed as the measurements of the “Davos” class by scholars. An article in The Guardian on Jan. 29, 2019 by poverty expert Dr. Jason Hickel notes the figures assume a poverty line of $1.90 per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the U.S. in 2011. Hickel says, as common sense would indicate, that there are reams of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality.

According to Hickel,

Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 [per person] per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance of seeing their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day.

So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum—$7.40 [per person] per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since 1981.

Bloomberg: Racism Against Productive Humans

As for the figures for the City of New York, Bloomberg’s deliberate policies of luxury development and rezoning in New York created a situation such that by the time he left office in 2013, New York City had 400,000 millionaires and over half of the rest of the population was living below or at the poverty line.

Bloomberg goes on to tell the students at the Oxford event, whom he describes as “the intelligentsia,” like himself, that you can “fix the inequality” by taxing the rich and giving the money to the poor. You do this for various reasons, he says, including altruism and the fact “that you don’t want the poor on your doorstep.”

But, he says, what the lower strata really want is the dignity of a job. He then launches into his version of economic history, pointing out that, “we can teach processes,” saying that he could teach anyone in the room to be a farmer because of the simple steps of putting the seed in the ground and watering it—follow the set of instructions and you’re a farmer. Similarly, in the industrial age all that was required was following the instructions for the process, the skill involved figuring out which way the arrow pointed on a machine and turning the crank.

But, in the “information age,” Bloomberg says, something more is required since we are replacing men with machines and the requirement is the ability to think and analyze, using a lot more “gray matter.” It is unclear whether the teachers can teach this or the students can learn, but the problem has to be solved, he says, lest “they start setting up guillotines some day.”

Since business has no responsibility for this, because it exists solely to create products which people like, and to maximize the profits of its shareholders, the forum for solving this is government. And, the only solution Bloomberg thinks government can provide is in the creation of no-show or meaningless and “inefficient” jobs for people who don’t fit into the green “information society,” like former industrial workers and coal miners. It would be better to do this, he says, than to have them without jobs and being out there acting to destabilize society.

It is difficult to understate the level of arrogant ignorance represented by Bloomberg’s class-based and utopian remarks. He has obviously never been to the science and engineering based factory, which is the modern farm, nor does he have any relationship to actual productive processes—after all, the terminal he invented simply facilitates better card-counting in Wall Street’s gambling casino. He knows nothing about machine tools and the inventiveness of workers on modern manufacturing platforms. He lives in the world of his “data” and in the utopian fantasies of the information age, and will not ever define the type of national mission, such as the Artemis Moon-Mars program, which will cause leaps in human productivity. His mission is elsewhere: using the myth of global climate catastrophe to further devolve the physical economy of the world, so that he and his friends maintain their power.

Linear Madness

Despite the huge expenditures on “connectivity” and hard communications infrastructure, and despite the profits earned by Silicon Valley and Amazon and the so-called new economy generally, the productivity of the labor force has actually decreased as the result of these new “technologies,” a real historical anomaly for which linear thinkers will never be able to account. The degraded usage of the internet for social control, aimed at pacifying, controlling, and stupefying the huddled masses undoubtedly has something to do with this and the meaningless jobs available in the consumer economy obviously have much to do with this.

What Bloomberg’s remarks demonstrate is his complete lack of imagination and any actual scientific and engineering knowledge. Real technology does not steal jobs. That concept is a notion which should have gone out with the Luddites and Karl Marx’s falling rate of profit. The post 1971 conversion of the U.S. economy from a productive society to a consumer society killed thousands of jobs, the type of dramatic shift for which systems analysis cannot account. As President Trump describes it, this shift created carnage, human carnage. Instead of money from the rich, which Bloomberg now proposes to distribute, the displaced were fed a steady diet of drugs, pornography, and dumbed down education which was supposed to keep them fat and happy.

If we look at the future through the eyes of American System economists, such as Alexander Hamilton and Lyndon LaRouche, there are thousands of productive jobs we can create in large infrastructure projects which will change our relationships to the biosphere—greening the deserts, building dams and canals, creating efficient and modern transportation grids, building new cities, beginning the colonization of space, harnessing fusion power as an energy source. These projects, in turn, require an education system that fosters the creativity of students, instils in them the spirit of discovery of the fundamental laws of the universe by replicating the discovery of fundamental scientific principles from the past, whilst steeping them in the classical arts. Mike Bloomberg, instead, advocates skill-set training and the drill-and-grill program of the Common Core, which, he said at Oxford, teaches social camaraderie and the ability to follow orders.

LaRouche: A Classical Humanist Mode of Education

Here again is Lyndon LaRouche, this time from his 2002 essay, “Does Technology Steal Jobs?”:

What is the means by which to promote the development of the ability to generate, replicate, and transmit those non-deductive ideas typified by experimentally valid discoveries of universal physical principles? A classical humanist mode in education, as opposed to the mind-destroying policies presently rampant in U.S. schools and universities and in today’s epidemic of socially induced video games schizophrenia is the problem to be addressed in remedial action.

This means, that industrial progress requires an increase in the number of persons so employed, and also an upgrading of the average skill levels and standard of living in the households of persons so employed. . . .

This means, that a higher standard of living should be defined functionally, in terms of those physical and related changes which foster the increase of that human cognitive potential in the individual, family household, and community affairs of society.

To realize the potential which cognitive discoveries represent for increasing potential relative population-density, we must, in effect, constantly change the biosphere . . . improving nature in ways which raise the level of the Biosphere . . . such as causing deserts to bloom, placing water distribution under human management, fish farming, and so on. . . .

It is the ratio of man’s level of scientific and technological development to the results of such a man-managed relationship to the man altered Biosphere and cognitive domain, which delimit, and otherwise determine the possible rate of improvement of the potential relative population-density of our species. The efforts required to maintain and improve that relationship, constitute the determinants of potential productivity of the society, and therefore define the true costs of production for society as a whole. . . .

When this matter is examined competently, it is clear that technology, as such, does not “steal jobs”; technological progress as such requires a change in employment from lower to higher quality of employment opportunities generally. Any different ultimate effect is not the result of technology, but of bad policy, or of bad management, of national governments, banking institutions, or firms.