Michael Bloomberg

Michael Rubens Bloomberg (born February 14, 1942) is is an American politician, businessman, philanthropist, and author. He is the co-founder, CEO, and majority owner of Bloomberg L.P known primarily for its media unit and stock trading terminals. He served as a mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, starting his term as a Republican and then switching party alignment to Independent. In March 2018 he has been appointed by Secretary-General of the United Nations to serve as a Special Envoy for Climate Action, resigning from the role in November 2019 to focus on his campaign. He is a candidate in the Democratic Party primaries for the 2020 United States presidential election.

Political Spectrum


Belifes


Immigration
As a mayor, Bloomberg has made several reforms in New York to help immigrants. His administration ensured the confidentiality of immigration status for all people who interacted with the city government and spearheaded programs to help immigrant entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. Bloomberg is a supporter of immigration reform to secure the rights of illegal immigrants. He argues that deportation breaks up families and scares illegal immigrants away from cooperating with law enforcement or accessing vital social services; as such, he supports proposals like those put forth by Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain, which would normalize the status of otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants already present. Bloomberg believes that border enforcement is somewhat futile. He told the Senate hearing on Immigration Legislation on 5 July 2006: “It is as if we expect border control agents to do what a century of communism could not: Defeat the natural forces of supply and demand and defeat the natural human instinct for freedom and opportunity. You might as well sit on the beach and tell the tide not to come in.” He says that "reforming a broken immigration system is the single most important step the federal government could take to bolster the economy." Bloomberg said during an Arizona campaign stop that the U.S. needs “an awful lot more immigrants rather than less” and promised to increase legal immigration as president.

Healthcare
Bloomberg states he is passionately interested in public health. He has donated millions of dollars to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Under Bloomberg, the city Health Department has made HIV, diabetes, and hypertension priorities.

Former mayor has released a health care plan centered around a government-run "public option," arguing it will lead to universal coverage while cutting costs. "No one should have to forgo care because they don't have insurance, and no one should face hardships because of medical bills," Bloomberg said in a statement. "We will reverse the president’s attacks on the ACA, reach universal coverage, reduce costs for all Americans, increase support for rural communities and fix our broken health care system once and for all."

Bloomberg’s medical policy would allow people to buy into a public option — a Medicare-like health insurance policy that would be administered by the federal government but paid for by customer premiums — aimed at providing less expensive alternatives to private insurance. He also claimed the competition would drive down private insurance premiums. The plan would extend the tax credit for individuals and families whose health care premiums account for more than 8.5 percent of income. And it would allow families with expensive employer-sponsored insurance to buy health plans in the individual market with federal subsidies, giving roughly six million more people help with their premiums. Bloomberg would also create a permanent federal reinsurance program to help cover high medical costs for insurers with a higher percentage of sicker customers. He said the program would reduce premiums by up to 10 percent. Bloomberg, while stumping in Memphis, Tenn., said his plan builds on and improves former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and vows to reverse President Trump’s efforts to destroy it. “President Trump has spent three years sabotaging the Affordable Care Act and offering nothing in return but empty promises. We will reverse the president’s attacks on the Affordable Care Act, reach universal coverage, reduce costs for all Americans, increase support for rural communities, and fix our broken healthcare system once and for all.”

Abortion
Bloomberg supports abortion rights, stating, "Reproductive choice is a fundamental human right and we can never take it for granted. On this issue, you're either with us or against us."

After he became mayor, women's rights groups regularly supported him, rating him strong on defending abortion rights and in fighting domestic violence. Bloomberg has also set a pattern of giving some women significant responsibility in his company and in government.

His nonprofit, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, donated $13,962,000 to Planned Parenthood Federation of America between 2014-2017, according to research by Newsbusters. Planned Parenthood is the nation’s leading provider of abortions. In its latest report (2017-18), the organization said its clinics had provided 332,757 abortions over the span of 12 months. In 2014, he launched a $50 million reproductive health program to help women in Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Uganda “freely and safely make decisions about when to have children,” according to a press release. To me, it’s very simple: A woman’s right to choose is a fundamental American right – and it is the law of the land,” he said in 2018 at Emily’s List luncheon. In one of his most controversial moves, as mayor of New York City, Bloomberg endorsed a Manhattan requirement that forced public hospitals to teach OB-GYN residents how to perform abortions. Bloomberg said his administration also “increased access to emergency contraception, which helped us dramatically reduce unwanted pregnancies, particularly among teens.”

Religion
Michael Bloomberg is Jewish. He is known for not speaking publically about his faith but has said that he's not religious. As once political controversy swirled around plans for an Islamic community center and mosque near the site of the World Trade Centre, he delivered a moving and powerful rebuke to its opponents, saying: "Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as the people of any faith". Speaking with the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, and surrounded by religious leaders from the city, Bloomberg upheld the proposed mosque as an example of the religious tolerance that made New York famous, reminding his audience that Jews, Quakers, and Catholics had all suffered religious discrimination within the city in the past.

LGBT Rights
During his mayoralty in New York Bloomberg has been a champion of marriage equality. He pushed for New York State’s lawmakers to legalize same-sex marriage, which they did in 2011. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to successful marriage equality campaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington. Also, in 2002, in one of his first acts as mayor, he signed a transgender civil rights bill into law. On the other hand, he has received some criticism for failing to follow through on other issues important to transgender people, such as making it easier to change the gender on one’s birth certificate, something that happened under his successor, Bill de Blasio. Bloomberg has employed several high-profile gay staffers as mayor and in his philanthropic efforts. Bloomberg record on Equal Rights includes:
 * Helping lead New York State’s push for marriage equality, which became law in 2011.
 * Standing up for religious freedom, tolerance, and diversity when he forcefully defended the right to build an Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site.
 * Providing benefits to domestic partners employed by his companies, regardless of gender.
 * Bloomberg L.P receiving a perfect score from the Human Rights Campaign and being named one of the "Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality."
 * Supporting his company in creating the first-of-its-kind Gender Equality Index to help companies around the world measure and showcase their progress toward gender equality.

Wall Street Regulations
During his entrepreneurial career, Bloomberg has been numerously against imposing new financial sector regulations and undermined their usefulness. At the time when the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill was taking shape, Bloomberg tried to affect its final formation, he favored the creation of a consumer-protection agency and public trading of derivatives; while vehemently opposed Arkansas senator Blanche Lincoln’s proposal to force the spinoff of the swaps business and imposing a bank tax. Speaking at a breakfast event in 2011, at the peak of the Occupy Wall Street protest, Bloomberg told the gathered crowd that he believes the protesters are blaming the wrong entity for the mortgage crisis: “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” he said, as Politico reported at the time. “It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”

Bloomberg added, that he wasn’t sure whether the federal government’s affordable housing policies were a “terrible” idea since they’d helped many low-income people become homeowners. But the housing boom and bust, he insisted, was most definitely Congress’ doing. “They were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent if you will,” he said. “''They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.''"

Three years later, in 2014, while giving a talk at the annual conference of the securities industry, Bloomberg again attacked the idea of regulatory oversight as well as the government saying that if and when government regulates, it should take the advice of financial industry insiders and not listen too much to elected representatives in Congress. "The administration should have sent out a carefully crafted, consistent, well-thought-out piece of legislation," he said of major legislative packages like the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. It should have been "created by the people who really understand how the world works, how financial services work, and went to Congress and maybe you tweak it a little bit and you get it through."

The current financial rules "can be dysfunctional," he said. "You don't write a piece of legislation that way by letting Congress do it."

The risk with what Bloomberg sees as poorly written and confusing rules is that banks and other companies simply won't comply with them. "Complying with it is really impossible, which means you're not going to comply with it. The world adjusts to stupid laws, they don't pay any attention to them and you get burned later on, like a 25 mile per hour speed limit," Bloomberg said, getting more laughter and spontaneous applause with a jab at one of the signature policies of his successor, Bill de Blasio.

He also criticized the large fines meted out to banks in recent years. "Some of these fines I think are outrageous and shouldn't be allowed to take place," he said.

Former Mayor warned that more regulation could mean a financial system that does less to stimulate the broader economy. "If you reduce the risk, they can't make the money, they can't provide the financing that this country and world needs to create jobs and build infrastructure and all of those things."

Wealth Tax
When speaking to a crowd at a rally in November of 2019, Bloomberg vowed to increase taxes on wealthier people when elected. But when asked specifically about a wealth tax, the presidential candidate seemed to retreat to his old footing: "A wealth tax has been tried in a number of countries, I think France the last time," he said. "It just doesn't work."

2 months later, during his appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Bloomberg again spoken against the measure, this time criticizing Elizabeth Warren's Wealth Tax proposal, to which he referred to as: "[something that] just doesn't work," adding that the policy should not be pursued just "to be mean.".

He later added: "The wealth tax just doesn't work. It's been tried elsewhere,", "We have to raise taxes on the wealthy, that's the way you fix income inequality. And that's where we get money to do the things that we need to do that keeps this country safe and to keep the economy going. But you don't just go and do it for the heck of it because you want to be mean. You do it because you need the money and...you're going to spend it wisely."

Social Security
When asked about his thoughts on the sequester by a CBS Interviewer conducting the CBS Face the Nation 2013 series: 2016 presidential hopefuls show, Bloomberg had this to say about the so-called "Entitlement Benefits": "Winston Churchill once said, "You can always depend on America to do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities." We've had a democracy for 235-odd years and it works in the end, and that's what's in important. Sequestering is here. It will go on for a while. It's not going to be the end of the world as we know it. And everybody was saying, "Oh, the worst-case scenario is exactly what we're going to implement." And now they're into the real world and they'll try to find ways to do more with less, and then hopefully Congress will come together and modify sequestering to cut things back where we can afford it and not where we can't. And keep in mind, no program to reduce the deficit makes any sense whatsoever unless you address the issue of entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest payment on the debt, which you can't touch, and defense spending. Everything else is tiny compared to that."

As a mayor of New York Bloomberg radically changed the pension scheme in the city, raised the retirement age for new employees, and eliminated a bonus for retired police officers and firefighters.

It has also been reported that he is in favor of extending the retirement age from the current number of 67 to 69, increase Medicare premiums, and raise co-pays in an attempt to dissuade retirees from using too many medical services. All of these proposals were created by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan committee put together by President Obama in 2010 with the mission of breaking Washington gridlock and balancing the federal budget. It became known as the Simpson/Bowles Committee. Bloomberg endorsed all of the recommendations of Simpson/Bowles and has spent considerable time and money lobbying Congress to adopt such remedies since early 2011.

Justice System Reform
During his time in office as a Mayor of New York City Bloomberg introduced The stop-question-and-frisk program, or stop-and-frisk, NYPD practice of temporarily detaining, questioning, and at times searching civilians and suspects on the street for weapons and other contraband. The practice was heavily criticized by Human Rights activists and resulted in black and Latino people being nine times as likely as white people to be targeted by the police (even though, once stopped, they were no more likely to actually be arrested). In 2011, police officers made about 685,000 stops; 87 percent of those stopped were black or Latino. During a speech before the congregation at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch in Brooklyn, Bloomberg apologized for enacting the policy in the first place, saying: “I was wrong,” Mr. Bloomberg declared. “And I am sorry.” Numerous studies found contradictory conclusions about the impacts of stop and frisk on New York's crime rates.

To adress current problems with overincarceration of mostly people of color, wasteful spending attached to it, high rate of recidivism (43%), as well as the high unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people (27%), Bloomberg laid out a set of policies aimed at fixing those flaws. These include:
 * Sentencing Reform by providing incentives for states to experiment with and evaluate the impact of shorter sentences.
 * Prison Reform by expanding alternative-to-incarceration programs that have a proven record of success, as well as expanding drug treatment, mental health services, and re-entry and career-training for people who are incarcerated. Former Mayor promises to restore access to Pell Grant funding for incarcerated individuals, allowing them to pay for post-secondary education while in prison. He promises to lower barriers to hiring for public employee and government contractor positions so those job applicants are not asked about their criminal records until after they receive a conditional offer.
 * Bail Reform: Because of many people's inability to pay the bail and the existence of a disparity in granting them by the judges between White people and minorities, particularly African-American and Latinos, Bloomberg supports reform efforts that aim to reduce or eliminate cash bail for non-violent offenders.
 * Juvenile Justice Reform: Because there are more than 50,000 young people in confinement away from their homes, 17,000 of whom are being held for low-level, non-violent crimes, and 6,000 are being held before even being convicted, Bloomberg pledges to launch a nationwide initiative to cut imprisonment of young people in half by the end of his first term and eliminate juvenile incarceration for all non-violent offenders.

Elections Reform
On his site, Bloomberg prides himself with enacting several key political reforms while in office as a mayor of New York City, among them: Supporting the passage of a law that required spending in referendum campaigns to be publicly disclosed. To ensure every American's right to vote in a fair election is protected, Bloomberg released a plan calling for a set of reforms to the current election process. The key pillars of his plan include:
 * Making expanded public financing of elections in New York City by increasing the matching rate for small donations from $4 to $6, which meant that a $25 donation resulted in a $150 public match.
 * Cracking down on pay-to-play by drastically limiting campaign contributions from individuals and entities that did business with the government.
 * Strengthening New York City's ethics and conflicts of interest laws and forced lobbyists to disclose their contacts with city officials.
 * Making it easier to register to vote, created a web- and video-based voter guide, and supported efforts to allow voting on weekends.


 * Fixing burdensome voting laws and practices that make it more difficult for Black and Latino voters, Native Americans, transgender people, and people with disabilities to vote in federal elections. And he’ll end voter suppression by banning states from purging eligible voters.


 * Preventing Gerrymandering and Eliminating Partisan Influence in Elections by requiring states to establish independent redistricting commissions to draw federal congressional districts, through a transparent and inclusive process, that produces fair representation. This is especially important for communities of color that have long been disenfranchised by unfair, partisan redistricting.


 * Making it simpler to vote by implementing uniform standards for federal elections across states, requiring policies like automatic voter registration and early voting, and ensuring the availability and accessibility of polling places.


 * Upgrading election infrastructure and protect the integrity of our federal elections by mandating the use of state-of-the-art voting machines, providing training and technical assistance for election officials, and requiring the Department of Homeland Security to assess threats prior to elections.

Former Mayor is the only 2020 contestant funding his campaign entirely with his own money, which led him not to qualify for any previous and upcoming democratic debates. As of January 22-nd 2020 Bloomberg already spent 250 million dollars in total, $209.3 million on broadcast television time, $13.7 million on cable, $1.1 million on radio and $27.2 million on digital, according to data from Advertising Analytics, which tracks political ad spending. Which makes him the biggest spender in the 2020 election cycle so far. He is also the only one who promised to commit his financial resources and staff to whoever wins the Democratic nomination. He suggested who could spend as much as one billion dollars on various elections causes although he hopes the sum will not amount to as much because "It's a lot of money to me. It's a lot of money to anybody."

Global warming
In 2007, while serving as a mayor Bloomberg unveiled PlaNYC, a plan to make NYC “the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city,”. A whopping 127 projects, regulations and innovations for New York and the region was proposed as a part of the strategy.

The plan was intended to foster steady population growth, with the city expected to gain about 1 million residents by 2030 and to put in place a host of environmentally sensitive measures that would reduce the greenhouse gases it generates. The plan also included imposing an $8-a-day charge for people who drive their cars into Manhattan below 86th Street which was not brought up for a vote in the state assembly after opposition from politicians from Queens, Brooklyn, and New York’s suburbs, who viewed the proposed congestion fee as a regressive measure that overwhelmingly benefited affluent Manhattanites. Under PlaNYC, in just 6 years New York City reduced citywide greenhouse gas emissions by 19% since 2005 and was on track to achieve a 30% reduction ahead of the PlaNYC 2030 goal. In October 2007, as part of PlaNYC, Bloomberg launched the Million Trees NYC initiative, which aimed to plant and care for one million trees throughout the city in the next decade. In November 2015, New York City planted its one millionth tree, two years ahead of the original 10-year schedule.

In June 2013 Bloomberg introduced the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR) after the city was affected by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. The $20 billion initiative laid out extensive plans to protect New York City against future impacts of climate change. On September 26, 2013, he announced that his administration's air pollution reduction efforts had resulted in the best air quality in New York City in more than 50 years. The majority of the air quality improvement was attributed to the phasing out of heavy polluting heating oils through Bloomberg administration's "Clean Heat" program which began in 2012. As a direct result of the air quality improvement, the average life expectancy of New Yorkers had increased by three years during Bloomberg's tenure, compared to 1.8 years in the rest of the country.

Former New York City mayor was also one of the biggest donors and supporters of the Beyond Coal campaign which has managed to help bring about the closure or planned retirement of nearly 300 coal power plants since 2010.

For his work on fighting climate change in New York, as well as financially supporting various environmental causes Bloomberg was appointed as Special Envoy for Climate Action by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

During the campaign for the democratic nomination, Bloomberg introduced his plan to combat climate change when elected. The plan targets 80% clean energy by 2028, and would be the first of several moves to take the country toward 100% clean energy quickly, ideally before 2045, his campaign said.

It would do so by setting stringent pollution limits on new gas-fired plants, and by ending all subsidies for fossil fuels. Meanwhile, it would create incentives to improve clean-energy technology and invest in poor communities hurt by fossil fuel pollution, or that are struggling to transition to a cleaner energy economy.