Want it or not, it looks like the primary voters don’t trust Bernie Sanders would be able to deliver.
I doubt the thinking of most got that far.
The WaPo has a couple of articles about this. Apparently by transferring all his campaign assets to the DNC he gets around a limit on single individual donors, so ultimately the “whatever it takes” was never a fulfillable promise. That said, laying off the campaign workers, even with full pay through April, is pretty crappy given that he’d promised them employment through the election. Let’s hope that the DNC does the right thing and keeps them in the offices where they currently work (and that he’s now transferred to them).
He could have set up a super pac and put however much he wanted into it.
And kept the staff working there
By the way, I went online to see if Jill Stein has decided, in the face of the epidemic, to apologize for helping give us Trump as POTUS. Instead I discovered that she has redirected her supposed medical expertise away from vaccine skepticism and towards distance-diagnosis of Biden’s mental acuity. Thanks, Jill!
I suppose he still could set up such a PAC. But the reason this is a story now is that he no longer controls those campaign offices, which is the place of their current employment. So it is up to the DNC, not Bloomberg, to keep the staff working there, or not.
The responsibility is and remains Bloomberg’s.
He made the commitment to the employees. Who are now in the middle of a pandemic without employment, prospects or health insurance.
If this commitment was part of the hiring agreement, as the HuffPo article says, then he should have a legally-enforceable fiduciary responsibility. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Legalities be damned- it’s his responsibility morally.
That’s what I said, a fiduciary responsibility. It might also be legally enforceable, which would be even better from the staffers’ point of view.
Oh, come on, Kathy… everyone knows the markets are the only REAL arbiters of morality… /s
Obviously I lack empathy here. But: senior staffers in a campaign like this are filled by true believers, people who think their candidate, in this case Bloomberg, is the very best guy for the job. I don’t have a huge amount of empathy for them; I reserve that for junior staffers, who lost their jobs without extended pay, and for the staffers of the other candidates who likewise had worse deals than these guys.
As a general statement about Bloomberg as an employer, well, we already knew he is a shitty guy to work for; for those that didn’t know it, Warren made that pretty clear in the debates. The staffers who are complaining now were probably working hard to defuse her accusations before Super Tuesday.
I highly recommend this book for discussion on how a world where we are in service to the markets, where all our language and interactions are “marketatized” is not a world that is in the service of humanity and just how dangerous that is for us:
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, until the moment I shuffle off this mortal coil… if it’s not in the service of making the world a better place for humanity (making it a healthier, more egalitarian, more just, greener, more interesting world for ALL of us), it needs to go.
You seem to be implying that I denied a fiduciary responsibility.
No, I’m agreeing with you. If, as has been claimed, his job offer included a guarantee of salary through November, then he owes this to them.
I don’t know the details of the offer, only what has been reported (which is vague), and honestly I don’t care about this particular set of people, who were hired to sell us on Bloomberg as president, who should have known how much to trust any offer from Bloomberg, and who got paid higher and are getting more severance than the staffers for failed candidates I like better.
I’m honestly not sure when it happened, because I was raised to believe that morality was independent of wealth/economy and when I discussed corporate ethics in school in the early 00s the entire purpose of ethics was to step back from a laissez-faire and decide things based on empathy/humanity rather than market. And I went to an extremely business friendly and conservative technical school where we had these discussions. I know my experience isn’t everyone’s by any means, but still.
The ideology has long existed since the second industrial revolution, but was out of favor after the depression during the period of the liberal consensus, where the new deal society was generally accepted by the mainstream of both parties. A major shift came when the more libertarian wing of the GOP began to employ racist dog whistling to peel off disgruntled, white working class voters based on “cultural” issues. Nixon employed the “southern strategy” in this way, but it really came to fruition with Reagan in 1980. He employed that same “southern strategy”, with backing from the Moral Majority formed in the late 70s in response to gay rights legislation that was being passed on a local level. He also adopted a deregulatory stance, which brought in the libertarians. Remember how many failures government had over the period of the 60s and 70s, everything from Johnson’s policy in Vietnam being revealed as the failure it was after Tet, to activists revealed Cointelpro spying under Nixon, then of course the downturn in the economy (stagflation), Watergate in Nixon’s second term, and finally the OPEC oil embargo after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 which had a major impact on the economy well into the Carter administration. When Carter tried to being trust back in, he was seen as failing to deal effectively with the Iranian Hostage Crisis, leading to him losing to Reagan by a landslide. Reagan ran on deregulation (among other things) and then worked to deliver through on his promise. This continued through both GOP and to a lesser extent Democratic administration. More people had less trust in government because of the failures of the late 60s and 70s, and this was relatively bi-partisan, so they were willing to embrace shifting more responsibility onto the private sector. Neo-liberalism became the mainstream approach to the economy and regulation during that period for both parties, in other words.
I’d also say it’s less about our own views on this, and more about the views of the political class in the US.
The Polyani book was written right after the second world war, and deals with the 20s and 30s, and how a hardline, market-based liberalism fed into fascists and communist movements at the expense of democratic, regulatory liberalism.
