Mike Bloomberg suggested denying cancer treatment to elderly and called farmers brainless, show videos
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is yet to contest in the primaries of the 2020 presidential election, but he is frequently in the thick of headlines.
Recently, an audio surfaced claiming that Bloomberg encouraged policing in minority neighborhoods that saw President Donald Trump blasting him as a “total racist”. Thereafter, reports revealed him talking insensitively and rudely with his female employees. He even asked one of his pregnant employees to "kill it".
Now, the billionaire Democrat is facing more charges such as denying cancer treatment to elderly Americans or belittling jobs in farming and factory as something that doesn’t require much of grey matter.
In 2011, during a conversation with a Jewish family, Bloomberg said that a 95-year-old prostate cancer patient should be told to enjoy life as there is no cure and nothing can be done about it. He said instead, a young patient should be paid attention to.
"If you show up with prostate cancer and you're 95 years old, we should say, 'Go and enjoy… live a long life. There's no cure, and we can't do anything,'" Bloomberg, then 69-year-old, said. "If you're a young person, we should do something about it. Society’s not ready to do that yet."
Bloomberg, who became a Republican in 2001 and continued till 2007, was also critical of Obamacare, which he called a "disgrace" in 2010. He became an Independent till 2018 before returning to the Democratic Party.
Bloomberg's controversial remarks over denying cancer treatment to the elderly came after one of the members of the family he attended told him about their ordeal of waiting in an emergency room in New York for 73 hours before their loved one died.
After offering his condolences, Bloomberg spoke about the healthcare scenario. He said Obamacare was increasing healthcare costs and if this went on, then the policy could bankrupt the nation.
"It's going to get worse with the health care bill and with the government's cutbacks. All of these costs keep going up. Nobody wants to pay any more money, and at the rate we are going, health care is going to bankrupt us," Bloomberg said. He joined the 2020 presidential race last November and is self-funding his campaign.
Bloomberg dismissed agricultural, industrial jobs as brainless in 2016
Five years after those talks, Bloomberg made another contentious claim. This time at Oxford University in England.
In a viral video clip from his November 2016 conversation with Peter Tufano, the dean of Said Business School, Bloomberg dismissed agricultural and industrial jobs as simplistic that required no merit.
"I could teach anybody, even the people in this room to be a farmer," Bloomberg had said, calling agriculture "a process".
"You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn," he said. The former NYC mayor also reflected similarly on factory jobs as something mechanically repetitive and did not require any action of the brain. "You put the piece of metal in the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow, and you can have a job," he said.
Throwing light on the work in the information economy, Bloomberg said it is "fundamentally different because it's built around replacing people with technology and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze". "And that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter," he added.
The video sparked controversy with left and right voices hitting back at the billionaire politician and calling his idea of agriculture outdated. Some even compared his words with former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's infamous term called "deplorables". Donald Trump Junior, the eldest son of President Donald Trump, said in a tweet that Bloomberg would not survive three seconds as a farmer and accused him of hating regular hardworking Americans.
Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass said Bloomberg was doing no favor to the country's unity by mocking American farmers.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said, "The arrogance and ignorance of Mini-Mike about American Agriculture today is alarming. He has NO idea how technical farming is today-made harder by a gov't made of guys like him who make it harder w/ idiotic regulations. Don't let this guy NEAR the @WhiteHouse."
Last Saturday, Bloomberg was heckled by several pro-gun rights activists during a campaign event in Virginia who slammed him as a "fascist" and "racist". Also, on the same day, the Drudge Report came out with an exclusive report saying Bloomberg is considering having Hillary as his running mate — a news that would see even more divisions in an already fragmented Democratic Party.