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Hardly a week goes by without some billionaire sounding as if he was a French aristocrat whose name has been encoded into the scarf that Madame Defarge is knitting in Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities”. It as if the election of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez means that the guillotine blade is being sharpened just for them.
The first and most visible of these panic-stricken plutocrats was Howard Schultz who decided to run as an independent in 2020 because the Democrats were too far to the left. One of them is Elizabeth Warren who once asked him for a campaign contribution. He refused, telling MSNBC that “she believes in programs that will lead to a level of socialism in America.” Warren is on record as opposing socialism, whatever that means to her. Her preference is for a “capitalism with serious rules”. If you Google “Starbucks” and “false advertising”, you get 192,000 hits. Judges keep ruling in Schultz’s favor when civil suits are brought against his corporation. One of these judges, who cleared Starbucks of skimping on ingredients, also cleared the cops of using excessive violence against student protesters in 2011 at U. Cal, Berkeley. Imagine that. So the idea seems to be that it is not so much socialism he is worried about but an end to “capitalism with rules that favor the rich”, which has been its modus operandi for the past 500 years or so.
Michael Bloomberg, who has personal wealth in excess of 47 billion dollars (15 times as much as Schultz), is also considering running for President in 2020 but as a Democrat, unlike Schultz. But like Schultz, Elizabeth Warren keeps him up at night cowering under his blanket. With regard to her wealth tax, he told reporters: “We need a healthy economy, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about our system. If you want to look at a system that’s non-capitalistic, just take a look at what was once, perhaps, the wealthiest country in the world, and today people are starving to death. It’s called Venezuela.”
I doubt that Bloomberg ever read Karl Marx but anybody who has concluded that there was socialism in Venezuela must have been reading Jacobin rather than V. 1 of Capital.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2019/02/05/the-dark-night-of-the-soulless-bourgeoisie/
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