Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey, Creative Commons License: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5471912349/sizes/m/in/photostream/
This 1979 profile of Donald Trump in the Village Voice should be mandatory reading–in the Know Your Enemy department. The corruption, refusal to acknowledge responsibility, self-aggrandizement, and use of other people’s money are not at all surprising. Only two things surprised me: 1) the racism goes back so far in time. I’d always thought that was a “party dress” he put on in order to run a demagogue campaign for president–but he was apparently the enforcer keeping blacks out of his father’s apartments.
2) The notorious McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn, one of the sleaziest figures in 20th-century US politics, was one of the family’s lawyers.
If Donald Trump becomes the nominee (or runs 3rd-party), we need to distill some of the central points into a highly readable one-page flier and get it absolutely everywhere. If Trump is the nominee, I will personally do that flier. And I want a legion of volunteers to distribute it.
Side note: I’m proud to say my mom was one of those white Urban League volunteers mentioned in the article, who determined if an apartment was *really* “already rented” after a family of color was refused. I have no idea if she was involved in the Trump Village investigation–probably not, since she lived far away in the Bronx.
I do find it deeply ironic that he has managed to build a meme that as a “self-made man,” he has so much money, he can’t be bought. He and his father got their money in the first place by leveraging political connections and doing deals with little or no skin in the game, if the article is accurate (and I have high confidence that it is). What is self-made is not his wealth, but his image.
A petition crossed my desk this morning that called for President Obama to unilaterally ban oil exports. Here’s the text:
With the crude oil export ban lifted, oil companies will be pushing to speed the export of fracked crude oil and ramp up production, and we’ll be fighting every step of the way to prevent it. The budget deal preserves a straightforward way to do so: President Obama can declare a national emergency and prohibit exports.
In rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, Obama acknowledged the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. In his final year in office, he can still build a positive climate legacy if he prohibits oil exports under the new law and ends new auctions of publicly owned oil, gas, and coal on federal lands as hundreds of environmental organizations and community leaders have petitioned him to do.
I totally agree that oil exports will be a big step backward in the struggle to stave off catastrophic climate change. But not with this method! I not only won’t sign, I’ll work against it, as I’m dong by writing this blog.
I don’t think they’ve thought through the implications here.
This budget deal was a hard-fought compromise where both sides had to give a lot to get anything through. To stab that agreement in the back while the ink is barely dry would be to put a stake through the heart of bipartisan government. It would be, quite frankly, a betrayal. And I would call it unethical.
And the Republicans would not forget, and not let anybody else forget. If you think they beat the drums on Benghazi or Hillary’s email issue, you “ain’t heard nothing yet.” NOTHING that would require Republican cooperation would be passed again, for decades. As we enter into the 2016 campaign, the mantra would be “you can’t trust the Democrats; they betrayed us and they will betray us again.” And this time, they’d be correct.
I’m guessing the consequences would include 12 to 20 years of Republican presidents with veto-proof Congressional majorities. No, thank you! I don’t want to hand them the ability to wreck everything we’ve worked for during the 250 years of our country’s history.
So what can we do instead? So glad you asked. Here are a three ideas (among many other possibilities):
Start a massive lobbying campaign aimed at Republicans in Congress. Let them feel big pressure from their own constituents, telling them that climate change is a deal-breaker issue for you at election time, reminding them that the US pledged to make serious climate change progress at COP21 (the Paris climate accord signed earlier this month) and that fossil fuel exports—incompatible with that commitment—are not acceptable. Use the argument that the US needs to be seen internationally as a government that keeps its promises and honors its commitments if we want other countries to work with us. Add a national pressure campaign at the top GOP legislators, those in positions of great power within their own party. Push the Republicans to introduce a ban on fossil fuel exports as if it were their idea. If the Democrats can run with Obamacare, which was based on Republican proposals in the 1990s, why can’t the Republicans steal Democrats’ issues?
Turn to the business community for binding pledges NOT to participate in fossil fuel exports. If necessary, pick one company at a time to threaten with boycotts and shareholder resolutions. Organize stock divestment campaigns and large public demonstrations in front of the corporate offices, not just of the targeted company but of any of the “players” if they move forward. Get a few smaller players to move before going after ExxonMobil.
Use the stick of negative pressure, but also the carrot of what they could do with that investment money that would build their reputation and their profits while avoiding all this unpleasant controversy. Have meetings with their executives to strategize better ideas.
Big corporations hate to be seen as enemies of the people and don’t like being in the center of controversy; they’re also risk-averse.
(This is probably the hardest one.) Create an international pressure campaign on many fronts: Get foreign governments pledging they won’t accept US oil, gas, and coal. Get the United Nations to pass legislation making fossil fuel exports a crime against humanity. Start international boycotts and pressure campaigns against participating companies. This would not be easy to organize and might also have unintended consequences. The US is an importer of fossil fuels, so this would apply what Naomi Klein calls “the shock doctrine” to the US, forcing a mad and potentially destabilizing scramble to convert a much greater share of the US economy to renewables, and fast. So let’s start with the first two ;-).
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
Justice Sonia Sotomayor works the crowd (Photo by Shel Horowitz.
By Shel Horowitz
Justice Sonia Sotomayor works the crowd (Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Yes, you can be a United States Supreme Court Justice and still keep your humanity. In an hour and a half of Q&A at the Springfield Public Forum in Springfield, Massachusetts, Justice Sonia Sotomayor not only kept her content humble and hopeful, but did her best to make herself one with the audience.
She answered the first question from the stage, but then left her comfortable armchair, announced that she wanted to make herself more accessible to the people at the far corners of the room, pleaded with the audience not to do anything that would make the Secret Service agents too nervous to let her wander, and then answered all remaining questions while walking around the room shaking hands and getting photographed—and leaving the moderator (another female judge) gaping and wondering where her speaker was at times. I’ve certainly seen speakers mingle, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one who spent virtually the entire speech mingling. It’s especially remarkable in a government official; most of them stay firmly behind their podiums, clinging tightly. I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton doing that. But Sotomayor is like that; she spent her first weeks at the Supreme Court not just boning up on the then-upcoming Citizens United case but also visiting the far corners of the building and greeting the staff. She claims to be the first Supreme Court Justice to visit the telephone operators up on the third floor.
Hillary also probably has help writing her books. Sotomayor–like President Obama–writes her own, even as she acknowledged that writing didn’t come easily to her until a college mentor observed that she was thinking in Spanish (her first language) and translating.
Like Sotomayor, I grew up poor in the Bronx (and actually fantasized about becoming a social justice lawyer and eventually, a Supreme Court Justice—though I love the career I chose instead). And I was thrilled to hear her say things like:
“I wanted to write a book that would give people hope…if I [the child of an immigrant alcoholic, raised in the tough housing projects of New York] can do it, so can you.”
“Squeeze as much as you can out of every day. Give to others. Don’t take a moment to not live life at its fullest.”
“Affirmative Action was a door opener for a door that had been closed to people of my background. Many institutions like to do the same thing over and over. But that success formula excludes certain people. The question is, what did I do with that opportunity? I wanted my career to be a bridge between my community and the wider society.” She noted that others had been given similar opportunity but chose not to make the most of it.
“As a prosecutor, I learned how to seek justice not just for society but for the defendant.
“Every mentor has made a positive mark on my life, and I hope that I have for them.”
“Accept your limitations and your strengths.”
Surprisingly, when asked where in her career she had the most fun, she didn’t hesitate to respond “as a trial judge. Every day, you’re surprised! When I retire from the Supreme Court, I want to go back to it.” She misses the human contact with the plaintiffs and defendants, who are generally not present in appeals or Supreme courtrooms.
When asked why the greatest legal minds in the country have so many split decisions, Sotomayor pointed out that this is part of the Supremes’ mandate. “The case wouldn’t come before the Supreme Court if the answer was clear. We don’t take cases unless there are disagreements in the Circuit Court decisions. That’s why we have 5-4 decisions. It doesn’t mean that the four are wrong, but that the five thought another way. Some people say [the split decisions lessen their faith in government]. I hope the split means you have more faith in the government, because if everything is 9-0, we’re not taking the care we need to. And if there’s a [written] dissent, at least somebody heard you.”
Dissents, for her, are also cause for optimism. “We can write our dissents and hope to influence Congress or a future Supreme Court decision. You have to feel optimistic that things can change. You have to hold that hope, so you can let go” and accept being on the losing side. “I remain optimistic, despite what’s happening in Congress right now.
And she asks each of us to take responsibility, to do our part for a better world, even if it’s as simple as casting a vote or calling a loved one. “Whatever you do, do it with passion and caring. Not voting is the greatest act of being a traitor. What counts is caring enough to make your voice heard. Every day, I try to become a better person, a better Justice. How many of us forget to call a friend who’s sick or suffered a loss? Every day I try to remind myself that the world doesn’t revolve around me. Every night before you go to sleep, ask yourself these two questions:
What have I learned that’s new today?
What good have I done today?
“If you can’t answer those two questions, don’t go to sleep. Send someone a [‘thinking-of-you’] email. Go on Google and learn about something.
Known as a Justice who asks a lot of questions during oral argument, Sotomayor was asked if she often changed her mind based on the lawyers’ responses to the Justices’ questions. And she said that she changes her thinking based on the oral argument, though not necessarily her vote, about 20 percent of the time. To future lawyers in the largely student audience, she advised, “Be happy when we ask questions. We engage you in engaging us.” But she said often, the real benefit to her in oral arguments is from listening to the questions of her colleagues. “I see what road they’re going down, what they’re thinking.” The Justices don’t discuss cases before oral arguments, so these are the first insights she gets about a case’s direction.
In the past, the Court was a very contentious place, with some Justices not speaking to each other for years. That changed, she said, when Sandra Day O’Connor (the first woman Justice, appointed by President Reagan) came onboard. She insisted on building collegial relationships, through instituting several changes including a weekly lunch. “She made a huge difference. There’s an ethos now that if someone says something they shouldn’t have, they call and apologize.”
She chose law, she said, because “I wanted to guide people into making decisions that were fair to themselves and to other people.” It was a way to help people solve problems, and it did not require singing, dancing, or drawing, didn’t require the patience of a teacher, and did not involve medicine; as a diabetic since age 7, she felt she’d spent far too much time in hospitals to want to work in one. When the moderator shot back that Sotomayor was the best salsa dancer she knew, the 61-year-old Justice said she’d taken lessons at 50, when she got tired of being the only Latina she knew who didn’t dance. She asked her mother why she’d never been taught to dance as a child, and her mom replied, “You were always outside chasing fireflies. We could never get you to be still long enough.”
Her final advice was to remember the people who helped you and to overcome your fears. “Every job I’ve had, every obstacle I’ve overcome, I’ve been afraid. None of us gets anywhere in life without the help of others. Nobody accomplishes alone. We are each of us blessed with the good and the bad I hope each of you can appreciate the blessings in your world.”
Note: material in quote marks and not in brackets are as accurate as my notes, memories, and ability to decipher my scrunched handwriting allow (I had no paper so I was writing on the backs of business cards). I apologize for any transcription errors I may have made. Material within square brackets is paraphrased.
The last hundred years have also seen a similar ratchet (amplified, I’d argue, by the technology of media and of the economy) in civil rights. It’s unlikely (with the exception of despotic edicts) that women will ever lose the vote, that discrimination on race will return to apartheid-like levels, that marriage will return to being an exclusionary practice… once a social justice is embraced by a culture, it’s rarely abandoned.
Unfortunately, those “despotic edicts” are all-too-common. While the general trend is not to reverse progress, there are far too many exceptions:
Women’s rights in Iran under the Shah or Kabul pre-Taliban versus today
Rights of Jews, Gypsies, and LGB folks in prewar Germany vs. the Nazi years
The collapse of Sarajevo’s much-vaunted multiculturalism into massive racism and “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s
Although this is a pessimistic post, I am ultimately an optimist. I think Godin is basically right–but there are many, many exceptions. Let’s work together for a world in which those exceptions are no longer tolerated–we can do this!
Remember the World Trade Organization, which slipped into the shadows after massive Seattle protests in 1999? The same day last week that Congress initially blocked the possibility of fast track approval for the TPP trade agreement, the House voted to overturn rules requiring country-of-origin labeling for meat. Those supporting the vote said they were responding to a World Trade Organization ruling, judging US country-of-origin labeling unfair competition with meat coming from foreign countries like Canada and Mexico, and therefore a violation. They said they had no choice for fear of triggering sanctions or lawsuits from countries exporting meat across our borders.
I don’t know about you, but I like knowing whether my meat comes from Iowa or Uzbekistan, Montana or Mexico, Kentucky or Kenya. So do 93% of Americans, according to a Consumer’s Union survey. People like supporting US farmers, cutting down distance travelled, knowing there will be at least minimal inspection standards, even if the delights of e coli occasionally slip through. It seems commonsensical that we’d want at least the chance to become informed consumers, whether with the origins of our meat, GMO-derived crops, or the amount of sugar and calories in our baked goods.
Maybe the House members are wrong in insisting that the international tribunals that adjudicate trade disputes would deem this a violation. But if this particular House bill passes the Senate and gets signed by Obama, even the mere possibility of a lawsuit will have struck down a wholly reasonable law that protects our health and supports our local economies. And if TPP passes the Senate, other attempts to regulate commerce for the common good will be potentially gutted as well, from attempts at financial regulation to limits on the prices charged for drugs, to environmental rules and seemingly innocuous actions like requiring accurate labeling. Some of this could occur through legal action, and some through the mere fear that such action could occur.
Now maybe TPP won’t contain rules on meat. Maybe it will simply limit other ways we might try to exert our sovereignty over critical choices that affect us. But we do know that this agreement—involving countries constituting 40% of the global economy—through what’s called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement process, will establish unaccountable tribunals with the power to let corporations collect damages for loss of profits. We don’t know the precise reach of the agreement because ordinary citizens haven’t seen it. Even Congressional opponents were prohibited from taking notes when they looked at it, and “cleared advisors” who’ve seen it have been legally prohibited from talking specifics. Yet we’re told it represents an inevitable future, that the benefits will trickle down to ordinary citizens, and that those who ask reasonable questions about its profound implications are merely obstructionist whiners.
So do we demand full transparency before moving ahead? Or do we trust that the corporations that negotiated these rules have our interests at heart, and would never, in the slightest, harm our democracy? Whether or not the country-of-origin labeling on meat survives or is ended by the House bill and WTO ruling, TPP plays for far larger stakes, the ground rules that affect our very potential to take common action. The meat bill is one more warning that there are some rules and agreements where we should be careful to eagerly swallow.
Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While
No big surprise, there was lots of pushback when word got out, and HC removed the atlas from circulation and said it would pulp any remaining copies. Even the UK Bishops’ Conference Department of International Affairs condemned the publication as a blow against peace in the region.
The company sheepishly withdrew, saying,
HarperCollins sincerely apologises for this omission and for any offence caused.
But the company is talking out of two sides of its mouth. Earlier, as reported in the Washington Post, it tried to justify the omission:
HarperCollins has quickly found out that it’s also unacceptable to abandon truth in a volume that claims to offer
“in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.” Its stated goals include helping kids understand the “relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”
Ummm, hello, and just how do you intend to put the region in context if you ignore the most conflicted issue it faces? Do you really think students in Arab countries haven’t heard of it? Did you really think this would stay a safe little conspiratorial secret just for the cognoscenti?
HarperCollins would have been totally justified in marking the West Bank and Gaza as disputed territory held by Israel, following conquest. But there’s no dispute about Israel being a nation.
This is a time when we all have social media at our disposal. That means it not only should have been totally obvious that this would backfire, but HarperCollins had the tools at its disposal to make the governments demanding this absurdity to be the ones looking ridiculous. If any governments insisted on refusing entry to accurate atlases, the company could have had a skilled social media manager explain why HC would no longer sell atlases into these countries, and create a pressure movement both from outside the country and from those inside who recognize that not knowing geography is a handicap in the global economic arena, and the Gulf states would have lifted the restriction.
Instead, what HarperCollins has done is to eliminate its own credibility. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the future trusting any reference materials from this publisher. Blatant and deliberate repudiation of truth is not a recipe for success in the world of reference books—especially reference books about the world.
This week, a judge ruled that the Business Improvement District in Northampton, Massachusetts was organized without following certain laws. The judge ordered the immediate dissolution of the BID, putting several people out of work and leaving the city bereft of services it had performed.
For the past few years, the BID has cleaned the streets of downtown Northampton, maintained its planters, helped the city with snow removal, funded the holiday light decorations, and organized or assisted with various special events to promote the downtown business and arts communities.
No one doubts that the organization did great work. But from its inception in 2009, it’s been fraught with controversy. Northampton BID was empowered by the City Council to negotiate contracts to perform these services in March, 2009—and just five weeks later—even before the BID was officially formed in July, 2009—a group of dissenting downtown property owners filed a suit claiming the petition signatures for the formation of the BID were not properly collected or certified. The BID could only form if at the owners of at least 297 properties within the proposed district agreed.
There was controversy over whether the enabling law wanted the count based on parcels or property owners—an important distinction, since many property owners owned multiple parcels. As the BID collected them, owners were allowed to vote once for each piece of property they owned or controlled in the district. One owner signed 15 times.
But there was also controversy about several other areas:
Had enough diligence been expended to verify that the signatures were legible and that they were from people with ownership or delegated authority? The judge invalidated 63 that he could not read, bringing the critical mass well below 297, and strongly criticized the city government for failing to check the signatures carefully.
Was it ethical to redraw the district’s boundary lines prior to formation, to include more properties owned by supporters (including Smith College, by afar the largest landowner in the downtown area) and exclude several owned by opponents?
A July, 2014 vote on whether to extend the BID’s charter through 2019 used voter eligibility rules that excluded all the people who were forced to join in 2012, and passed 40-0.
As someone who has written two books and used to write a column on business ethics, I find that these other issues sway me. No matter how much good the BID does, it cannot justify its actions as an organization that tramples on the rights of its opponents.
When you tell people that an organization has a voluntary membership, and then you make it mandatory to join and pay dues, that’s wrong. And it’s even more wrong to then exclude the recalcitrant members from voting on the organization’s future. It brings to mind words like “deceitful” and “slimy.” And yes, when your charter depends on certifying participation, you make sure those participants are properly certified.
The Sky Won’t Fall
It is a hardship when people are put out of work just before the holidays, with no notice. I feel sorry for the BID’s workers, and I hope the business community steps forward to hire those folks, even if the jobs are temporary. While it would have made more sense to me if the judge had ordered a more gradual phaseout, letting the organization honor its commitments and its payroll for a couple of months to deal with past obligations and commitments already made, I disagree with BID proponents who seem to think the sky will fall.
Yes, it will be a scramble to get a holiday lighting program in place in time for the retail season. But it can be done. Presumably, it will not be difficult to transfer the contract from BID to the Chamber of Commerce or some other organization.
Yes, it’s going to impact the downtown when the BID employees who’ve been picking up trash stop doing it. But the city has a Department of Public Works.
The BID did not exist until five years ago. And the downtown thrived. When another program, the Northampton Honor Court, stopped picking up the downtown trash, it was a hardship and the downtown definitely looked more tired. But others stepped into the breach.
Again, I support the good work that the BID performed. But I do not support a process that’s tantamount to bullying, don’t support a double standard for BID supporters and opponents, and think it’s completely immoral to bring the organization in as a voluntary effort and then change the rules. Yes, I recognize that it was the state, and not the local BID, that changed the rules, but the blame for rigging the election to continue under the new terms is most definitely local, and deeply unfair.
But I left out a huge one—did I think back then, that it was so obvious it didn’t need to be listed?
Getting. Money. Out. Of. Politics.
That means not only repealing the wretched anti-democratic Citizens United decision, but much more. It means making politicians once again responsible to the people, and not to well-funded lobbyists. It probably means public funding of candidates, and limits on the dollars that can be spent. Ideally, it would mean an end to TV advertising of smear ads, and replacing them with a list of candidate websites (not just the largest parties but any party that achieves an agreed threshold of support) where people could learn the candidate’s positions on actual issues—in more depth than attack sound bites.
I hope Obama and the Democrats learn their lesson. when they refuse to comprise on things that should not be compromised on, when they stand up for their principles, they win.
What a great president he might have been (and perhaps still could be) if he had figured that out in 2009. There is a difference between conciliation and giving away the store, and every time he kowtowed, the other side saw him as weak, and took out their lances again to whittle things down even further.
Of course, it helped that progressives and liberals came out in force to tell him he was doing the right thing. One of the lessons Obama should have taken from the 2008 election campaign is that he can organize a large constituency that “has his back.” and we progressives can also organize to push him leftward when he dirfts like a rudderless boat in the face of pressure from the right.
