There’s something predictable and almost poetic about the towering hypocrisy of many politicians.
Supposed “feminist” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rails about patriarchy and “unfair pay” even as she pays her female staffers much less than her male employees. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) burns carbon-based fuel traveling across the continent preaching climate change and reproaching business owners for being too greedy to pay their employees $15 for "minimum wage." Meanwhile, he pays his own staffers an average hourly wage far less than that. He claims he’s anti-war, but worked to get Sandia, a nuclear arms contractor, to open an office in Vermont (perhaps for those “living wage” jobs about which he keeps mumbling) and lobbied to have a military aircraft maker do the same.
Oh, and Bernie repeatedly votes to fund these military operations he supposedly opposes. Heck, he even had peace activists for Kosovo arrested when they protested at his office in 1999.
So is it any surprise that hardcore leftist and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg should be caught following in their hypocritical footsteps?
The Intercept’s John Washington just exposed the fact that Bloomie took advantage of PRISON LABOR to make campaign phone calls for the 2020 race:
Former New York City mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg used prison labor to make campaign calls. Through a third-party vendor, the Mike Bloomberg 2020 campaign contracted New Jersey-based call center company ProCom, which runs calls centers in New Jersey and Oklahoma. Two of the call centers in Oklahoma are operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign.
How charming, especially for a multi-billionaire who repeatedly rails against low wages.
As Washington notes, the folks over at Bloomberg’s campaign confirmed the use of the prison labor. It was up to Washington to find out the actual details on his own.
According to a source, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, people incarcerated at the Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center, a minimum-security women’s prison with a capacity of more than 900, were making calls to California on behalf of Bloomberg. The people were required to end their calls by disclosing that the calls were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign. They did not disclose, however, that they were calling from behind bars.
That’s a heck of a way to save money, Mr. Bloomberg, especially since it comes from a charmer who is one of the wealthiest men in the US, yet who is rabidly in favor of unconstitutional wage statutes to tell everyone else who runs a business that they must pay employees $15 per hour by 2025.
But why should anyone expect consistency or even a hint of principle from a politician who says he will abide by the US Constitution and has already spent tens of millions of Dollars since 2014 to crush the right to keep and bear arms via his Everytown for Gun Safety organization? That would be the right that is supposedly protected by the Second Amendment of the Constitution.
Now that his use of the cheap prison labor has been exposed, Bloomberg and his team have discontinued working with the contractor that exploited the caged humans to make the calls.
But this serves as a lesson to the rest of us who aren’t physically behind bars.
Bloomberg’s hypocrisy about wages runs in line with his two-facedness about the Bill of Rights. Just like many others who say they believe in the US Constitution, but who are actively working to disregard the document, Bloomberg appears slippery as an eel.
Bloomberg has no problem telling others they have to pay their employees more, yet he tries to get away with cutting costs by hiring prisoners, and if he has no problem attacking the right to self-defense even as he claims he will uphold the Constitution, it’s not difficult to see that he might have no problem attacking the right to self-ownership.
In fact, his positions already tell us he has no problem attacking the right to self-ownership, just like most of his political ilk. Telling people they cannot peacefully own firearms, telling people they cannot keep the fruits of their labor or engage in peaceful wage contracts with others – all of those positions are manifest attacks on the right to self-ownership; unilateral attacks on the sovereignty of other people to decide for themselves how to live.
Is it any shock that Bloomberg and his acolytes got caught exploiting prison labor? Under the ever-expanding forces of the federal, state, and local governments, we are increasingly enslaved, ourselves.