Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a tried-and-true racist, sexist, and fascist of the internationalist main wing of the U.S. ruling class, is rising in the polls after spending $338 million on media ads—to date—in his bid for the presidency. Bloomberg’s candidacy reveals the dilemma of the banks and multinational corporations that rule the U.S. When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election in 2016, it marked finance capital’s loss of control over the Republican Party. Trump has mostly allied with the isolationist Small Fascists led by the Koch family, the “Fortress America” capitalist bosses who don’t want to invest in a global war with China and/or Russia. As a former stock and bond trader who made his fortune by selling data to Wall Street, Bloomberg and his checkbook candidacy reflect a desperate bid by the main wing, the Big Fascists, to impose direct control over the elections and the state apparatus. But unfortunately for the bosses, Bloomberg brings a lot of negative baggage with him.
Over the last 30 years, the most powerful ruling class in history has been on an epic losing streak: two disastrous wars in the Middle East, a devastating economic crisis, and a stubborn challenge from the Koch faction. The main wing bosses have responded with intensifying fascism, from mass incarceration to mass deportations to record levels of kkkop murders of Black workers. Meanwhile, the rulers’ ranks are divided, undisciplined and openly corrupt. Barely half of U.S. workers bother to vote for president. Alienation and disgust with the capitalist system is widespread and profound.
At the moment, finance capital’s best bets to unseat Small Fascist Trump are three white men close to 80.  Bernie Sanders is a fake leftist who backs U.S. imperialism and garners support among desperate young workers buried in debt. Joe Biden is a racist bumbler who has yet to come close to winning a primary in three presidential campaigns. Bloomberg is a richer and more disciplined version of Trump, with a personal fortune estimated at $64 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the U.S. (Forbes). His well-documented history of outrageous racism and sexism will make him a tough sell for the younger workers the bosses will need to fight World War III.  
Big Racists
The main wing capitalists have a long history of seeking Black loyalty while simultaneously launching vicious assaults on the Black working class.  We can see this from the Civil War to World War II, from Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs to Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech, where he peddled the old racist myth that the plight of Black workers was the fault of Black male irresponsibility (New York Times, 6/15/08).
Arch-racist Bloomberg is a shameful part of this tradition. As mayor of New York City, he unleashed the cops to stop and frisk innocent workers more than five million times during his 12 years in office. The vast majority of those terrorized and abused were Black and Latin males, “even though their white counterparts were twice as likely to be found with a gun, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union” (NYT, 11/17/19). Bloomberg arrogantly defended his Jim Crow policy right up until he decided to run for president last fall. If anything, he said, “we disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little” (6/28/13 interview on WOR).  
While Bloomberg is a Klansman in a three-piece suit, his racist approach to criminal injustice is part of the liberal Democratic Party tradition. Stop-and-frisk was a logical extension of the mass incarceration policies rooted in Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, “tough-on-crime legislation that was championed by [presidential candidate] Joe Biden and supported by Bernie Sanders” (Politico, 2/13).
There is also no shortage of older Black misleaders, from senior ministers like New York’s Calvin Butts to the Congressional Black Caucus, lining up to pocket some of racist Bloomberg’s cash and support his campaign. Among these class traitors is former Black Panther and Chicago hack Bobby Rush.
Big Sexists
Over the last four years, the Democratic Party has been posing as the anti-sexist savior of the working class by exposing Trump’s crude sexism.  But in reality, liberals’ assaults on women may be worse. Since the 1980s, 64 women have brought sex discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits against Bloomberg and his organizations (GQ, 2/13). According to the Washington Post, he told a pregnant employee to “kill” her unborn child and “talked kind of crudely about women all the time” (Washington Post, 2/15).
When Bloomberg helped to engineer the massive wave of gentrification in Black and Latin working-class neighborhoods, he disproportionately displaced women and families (NYT, 11/9/19).
Big Fascists
Bloomberg is used to suspending liberal democratic laws and rules, a hallmark of fascism. As New York’s mayor, with the Democratic Party’s blessing, he used his fat bankroll to change the term limits law and then buy himself a third term. More recently, the Democratic National Committee changed its rules to give Bloomberg a place in the February 19 debate, despite the fact that he essentially has just one donor: himself.
For years now, main wing liberals have championed direct ruling-class control over education through the heavily segregated charter school movement, where powerful bosses like Eli Broad or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg privatize schools and run them on the taxpayers’ dime without interference from elected school boards, teachers’ unions, or parents. After Bloomberg won mayoral control over the New York City school system, the number of charter schools expanded from 18 to 183 under his administration  (Politico, 1/20).
Bloomberg wants a national ID work card system based on DNA and fingerprints. He expanded camera surveillancein Manhattan, bragging “you’re never going to know where all of our cameras are” (politico.com, 1/18). He gave drones to the NYPD and deployed the Sky Watch towers used at the U.S.-Mexico border to monitor Black and Latin neighborhoods. He spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters and sent police agents to snoop on Muslims up and down the East Coast (Politico, 1/18).
Before they can try to impose full-blown fascism on the working class, the bosses must get their own house in order. Bloomberg is showing a new willingness to discipline the capitalist ruling class. Though he’d opposed financial regulation and oversight in the past, “the candidate announced an ambitious financial policy plan on Tuesday that includes imposing a tax on financial transactions and toughening restrictions on risky banking practices…Perhaps the most surprising proposal, given the billionaire’s close personal ties to Wall Street movers and shakers, is a plan for the Justice Department to create a dedicated team to fight corporate crime by “encouraging prosecutors to pursue individuals, not only corporations, for infractions” (NYT, 2/18).
Workers need communism: join PLP
Election-year rhetoric aside, the bosses’ political parties always defend the capitalists’ class interests. At the moment, Republicans and Democrats are serving different wings of the U.S. ruling class. But both parties represent anti-worker sexism, racism, and fascism.  
The Progressive Labor Party seeks to champion the interests of the international working class. By joining the class struggle in our areas of work, by expanding the readership of Challenge and most of all by recruiting workers and youth to our revolutionary communist organization, we help the working class prepare to turn imperialist war into class war and lead armed struggle for a dictatorship of the proletariat.  Because the working class is international, we are organized as one international party dedicated to communism, and nothing less.  Don’t vote, join PLP!