ACORN Sells Out in New York

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

NYTr ACORN Sells Out in New York

Note: Doug Ireland, like Hentoff, can't be trusted on international affairs, especially Cuba, (and should't write about them -- espeically Cuba, since neither of them know anything about Cuba except gusano propaganda). But Ireland, like Hentoff, is usually pretty good on local issues.-NY Transfer

sent by Steven Robinson (activ-l)

Note also Doug Ireland's criticism of the Working Familes Party, created with Labor leadership backing to deflate support for the Green Party and for a Labor Party while butturing that the Democrats got the votes they needed in all the races that counted.

P.S. - The story above this one on Doug Ireland's site is a piece on the latest doings of Fulana and the old New Alliance Party, for any who are interested.- SR

Doug Ireland - May 20, 2005

ACORN'S JUDAS KISS

by Doug Ireland

Today's New York Post has a picture worth 10,000 words: it shows Bertha Lewis, executive director of N.Y. ACORN -- the grbuttroots campaign for poorer Americans that is overwhelmingly made up of people of color here in the Big Apple, where I live -- planting an enthusiastic kiss right on the lips of Republican billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who's up for re-election this year.

The occasion was the announcement of a few new low-income housing units to be built in Brooklyn, a Bloomberg election-year ploy that is in stark contrast to the rest of his record. The development is one of the projects of Bruce Ratner, a powerful and rapacious New York City real estate developer with a large influence in politics (bought by money, natch.) ACORN is going to manage this housing project -- which will displace an awful lot of existing housing for low-income families -- for Ratner, which means they've jumped into bed with a developer who not only doesn't give a fig for the poor, but supports pols and policies that are anti-poor -- and destroys neighborhoods where the poor live. For an organization like ACORN, dedicated to advocacy for "the least of these," to do this is, at the least, disturbing (and the implications may be even worse.)

What makes this photo even more significant, and damning, is that Bertha is the co-chair of the Working Families Party, the labor-funded party in New York State for which ACORN provides a lot of troops. The WFP (which endorsed Democrat Mark Green against Bloomberg four years ago) could well hold the balance of power in the mayoralty race, where the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to be either black or Hispanic. As mayor, Bloomberg has been slashing social services for the poor and favoring the continued rape of the city by real estate developers and subsidized corporate behemoths (symbolized by his plan for a new sports stadium on Manhattan's West Side, that will destroy a lot of low-income housing and give building it--in fact, the stadium will mean tearing down a lot more housing for the poor than the project that occasioned that Bertha-Bloomie liplock will build). And Ratner has been a big contributor to Bloomberg's re-election.

The Democratic mayoral field is, unfortunately, decidedly lackluster--a collection of unimaginative, second-rate hacks. Most of the smart money in town is betting on a Bloomberg victory this fall. But if this photo of labial extravagance (and Bertha is too politically savvy for these moist expressions of friendship to have been a simple excess of enthusiasm) signals a Working Families Party and-or ACORN endorsement for Bloomberg, the Democrats might as well chuck in the towel: a WFP endorsement would give Bloomie a lot of cover with independent voters, and the votes he could get on the WFP's line could well spell the difference between victory and defeat in a close race. Although I wrote the very first newspaper article on the WFP (in the Village Voice) prefiguring its imminent creation and hailing it as a new, progressive alternative to the bipartisan duopoly, I've since been extremely disappointed in the WFP's evolution, and have written elsewhere rather critically about what it's turned into (one example: a piece I wrote in The Nation on the last mayoral election here, in which I chided the WFP, provoked some spirited letters, to which I provided a detailed response.)

WFP has, in the past, endorsed an alarming number of hacks, including pols who could never be considered progressive, and even some who accepted Conservative Party endorsement. The WFP has done some good work -- notably helping to pbutt "living wage" legislation in a number of smaller cities and towns around the state, and working successfully to increase New York's minimum wage. But, instead of being an alternative party that gives its endorsement only to those progressives truly deserving of it, the WFP is for all practical purposes a liberal ballot line adjunct to the Democrats that has rarely sought to play the independent, balance-of-power role progressives hoped it would when it was created.

New York is one of the few states that allows cross-endorsements by third parties, which have played an important role in electoral politics here for six decades (unfortunately, the 1997 Supreme Court decision in Twin Cities New Party vs. Minnesota, approving the states' right to ban cross-endorsements -- or "fusion" -- had the effect of making a national third party with deep local roots impossible. See my column on this decision at the time, or the chapter on it in Micah Sifry's fine book on the prospects for third parties, Spoiling for a Fight.) Dan Cantor, a talented organizer, quit as executive director of the New Party to run the WFP, an admission that the Supreme Court decision had knocked the New Party's original strategy into a chickened hat (for example, the court's decision spelled an end to the possibility of significant national labor support for the New Party's organizing efforts at state level, just as the AFL-CIO was considering it).

iQCVAwUBQpO31UamV5Um0R3tAQKdFQP+NfNj8KR1t2dAnqXUJiAQvGiT6vvEei+S Q3GgN3lRuzlfwUGN9ZyFFSmxWyP5Th2dTl8TauO1lKncGUayIR6ssCwtjQdLlWKs hsiVsX9GyXCl-OPoT57xS5bp6kjL-CBojcWUGGunWvFL8dSMiXJBXd27QuQYH6RS 3tgf831ZSTk= =N4TZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----