Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, who is one of the wealthiest people in the world, reportedly used prison labor to make campaign phone calls promoting his campaign.
“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,” The Intercept reported. “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.”
A source told The Intercept that one of the prisons that was used was a women’s prison where the women were making calls to California and disclosed that they were paid for by the Bloomberg campaign, but did not disclose that they were making the calls while incarcerated.
The Bloomberg campaign confirmed the story in an email to The Intercept, claiming that they would not have engaged in doing business with the subcontractor if they would have known that prison labor would have been used.
Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News, responded to the news by saying, “The use of prison labor is the continued exploitation of people who are locked up, who really have virtually no other opportunities to have employment or make money other than the opportunities given to them by prison officials.”
“John Scallan, a ProCom co-founder, said his company pays the Oklahoma minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which then pays the incarcerated people working in the call centers,” The Intercept continued. “The Department of Corrections website lists the maximum monthly wage for the incarcerated at $20 dollars a month, but another policy document says there is a maximum pay of $27.09 per month.”
According to Forbes, Bloomberg is worth more than $55 billion and has “donated $8 billion to gun control, climate change and other causes.”
A separate report this week from CNBC revealed that Bloomberg created a secret company run by tech executives with its intended mission being to defeat Republicans across the country. CNBC reports:]
Bloomberg, who was dedicated to denying President Donald Trump a second term before he entered the Democratic race, built Hawkfish with the intention of overpowering the formidable data operation assembled by the Republican National Committee and Trump’s cash-flush campaign.
Hawkfish appears to have been assembled in secret. It has no public website. A search of elections databases turned up no financial records connected to work for other Democratic causes.
Bloomberg has indicated that he will spend at least $100 million in digital ads in an attempt to defeat Trump in 2020. Bloomberg already $57 million in TV advertising immediately after entering the race, according to a CNBC report from early December.
Bloomberg spent over $110 million to advance his far-left agenda during the 2018 elections and Hawkfish was reportedly involved in turning Virginia into a Democrat-controlled state where Democrats have since floated extremist ideas like confiscating firearms from law-abiding citizens — which has been met with overwhelming opposition across the state.
CNBC added:
Hawkfish will be the “primary digital agency and technology services provider for the campaign,” Julie Wood, a Bloomberg campaign spokeswoman, told CNBC. She added that the firm “is now providing digital ad services, including content creation, ad placement and analytics” for their campaign. It will also help Democratic races across the country in future election cycles, she said.
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Hawkfish’s leadership ranks include longtime Facebook Chief Marketing Officer Gary Briggs, who recently posted on his social media page that he is now a digital director at “Mike Bloomberg 2020,” and Jeff Glueck, former CEO of location-tracking firm Foursquare.
In 2018, Democrats relied in part on a massive dark money group, that was only revealed last month, to propel them to pick up massive gains in the House of Representatives and state-level seats.
‘The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a little-known nonprofit headquartered in Washington, spent $141 million on more than 100 left-leaning causes during the midterm election year, according to a new tax filing from the group,” Politico reported. “The spending was fueled by massive anonymous donations, including one gift totaling $51.7 million. … Most of the group’s funders are likely to remain a mystery because federal law does not require ‘social welfare’-focused nonprofits to reveal their donors.”