Another Bloomberg tape comes back to haunt campaign. And this time it’s about farmers
Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg’s campaign is again getting heat after an old recording resurfaced, and this time it’s about farmers and factory workers.
In a 2016 video from a talk at Oxford University, Bloomberg said, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.” The former New York mayor continued, “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”
Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota called Bloomberg’s comments “incredibly insulting” on Fox News Tuesday morning. She said his comments were “nothing but pompous ignorance.”
“Who does Mike Bloomberg think he is?” Noem said on Fox News. “Every single day farmers work long hours, but they don’t just have to deal with the labor side — they understand genetics and engineering, biology, chemistry.”
The Bloomberg campaign said in a statement that the video is taken out of context. “The video cuts off Mike’s first sentence where he is referring to agrarian society that lasted 3,000 years, not farmers today,” the campaign said.
After the comments about early farmers, Bloomberg went on to say in the video, “Then we had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, today it’s 2 percent in the United States.”
He continued, “Now comes the information economy and the information economy 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.”
Georgia Republican Rep. Rick Allen responded to Bloomberg’s comments on Facebook: “We found a copy of former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s ‘How to Farm Manual.’ Seems pretty simple — right? Unfortunately, it just shows how ignorant and out of touch he is with how much our farmers do to provide the food and fiber our families need to live.”
“Our #GA12 farmers work hard to grow the best peanuts, cotton, corn, Vidalia Onions, blueberries, timber and cattle, and much more goes into it than just digging a hole, putting a seed in the ground and watering it. I’m proud that agriculture is Georgia’s #1 industry and our hardworking Georgia farmers contribute to feeding the world,” Allen said.
The Bloomberg campaign criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders for using the same attacks as President Donald Trump’s campaign.
In a statement, the campaign said, “In just the past three months, Mike has traveled to 26 states. During that time, he has met with farmers and heard directly about the struggles they face. The Bernie Sanders campaign is choosing to push out falsehoods and sow divisions within the Democratic party.”
The Bloomberg campaign was fending off criticism from another recording last week, that one about New York’s stop-and-frisk policy.
“Ninety-five percent of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” Bloomberg said in a recording from 2015, The New York Times reports. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city.”
“We put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes. That’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is,” he said, according to The Times.
This story was originally published February 18, 2020 at 1:03 PM.
