Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 9, 2014 there is a rather momentous primary. There’s an Upstart Reformer v. an Entrenched Pol under the cloud of a corruption scandal. There’s a fight that’s uncovering the People’s growing discontent with the status quo. There’s a battle over the environment, the privatization of education, and tax giveaways to the rich at the epicenter of plutocratic glory. There’s a clash that, at its heart, is a battle over what it means to be a Democrat.
Saturday I handed out flyers at the Inwood Farmers Market for the Zephyr Teachout – Tim Wu campaign. They are running against Andrew Cuomo and another pseudo-democrat named Kathy Hochul (formerly Kathleen Courtney) for Governor and Lt. Governor of the Empire State of New York, whose capital, Albany, is perennially corrupt and issues get decided by “three men in a room.” It was hot as hell and the first thing I had to do was negotiate some sidewalk space with a couple of Dominican ladies who were handing out flyers for Adriano Espaillat, the State Senator for the 31st District. I loved these ladies. They were at first perplexed about what I was doing there, this Irish-looking guy in dark T-shirt, shorts and sunglasses wearing a baseball cap from the Soggy Dollar Bar in the British Virgin Islands, which are about 400 kilometers to the east of Punta Cana, DR. We tried some broken English then I threw in some Spanish and they understood that yes I was voting “for the lady for Governor” despite some unspoken feeling that shouldn’t I be voting for Cuomo?
“Andrew Cuomo es amigo de los ricos. Ellos le pagan mucho dinero, entonces el gobierno es para los ricos,” I said, in my usual blunt Irish way. My grandfather, who was born on Pearl Street in 1894, when Chambers Street was way uptown, was blunt like that. His daddy was an artisan, a painter of gold leaf upon plaster swirls on eggshell blue ceilings in the Halls of Power. He died of blunt force trauma when he fell off a scaffold onto his head as he was helping to develop the real estate in Lower Manhattan. Today as a real estate broker I, his great-grandson, help all sorts of people negotiate for real estate in a city of Billionaire Buildings and Poor Doors.
Give me your poor, your huddled whatnot, as they say. New York remains the Gateway to Empire for the entire world. People representing every nation on earth live here. In post-racial New York, everything is about race. We’ve got a Dutch-American female Fordham law professor who is an expert on governmental corruption and an Asian-American Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality” running against an urban Italian-American authoritarian who got his B.A. at Fordham, and an Irish-American lady who sounds like a Republican who married a what? A German-American? I don’t really care, she’s from Upstate.
When I studied at Fordham a long time ago, two years behind Andrew, little did I know that years later I would become annoyed at the Jesuits in the Bronx for preparing Malcolm Wilson, G. Gordon Liddy, John Brennan, and Andrew Cuomo for government. These characters don’t even listen to the first Jesuit Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Italian-Argentinian, who said “I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth and not ruled by it.” Obviously not listening to this, Andrew, the Neoliberal, reaps hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations and the various plutocrats who build and buy gleaming houses in the sky with poor doors around the back. He is a champion of the “free market”, which is actually rigged, and while he’s at it helps hedge-fund-types privatize education because they need to squeeze some more profit from the People. The money must flow.
The money flows uptown to Washington Heights, to Inwood and the Farmers Market, which accepts EBT, or food stamps, and where I was sweating and passing out flyers for Zephyr and Tim. Then Adriano Espaillat showed up to pass out some flyers for himself and, curious, he came over to me and we distributed literature side-by-side. He was puzzled about how Andrew could open himself up to a challenge from the left. I was puzzled about why he was puzzled. One of his Dominican ladies shouted over to me, asking if I knew who he was, and I said “of course, he’s my friend.” Dominicans and Jesuits usually get along.
Me and Adriano
Adriano smiled but looked kind of tired because he lost a different primary in June for the 13th Congressional District against ancient Entrenched Pol Charlie Rangel. He would have been the first Dominican in the House of Representatives. Now he has to defend his current job against African-American serial politico Robert Jackson and a rival Dominican named Luis Tejada. There’s a bit of tension between the blacks and the Dominicans. There was a lot of tension between Charlie and Adriano, who slammed him over abuse of rent stabilization for his personal use, not to mention his making a killing on real estate in Punta Cana. Adriano said that he won the Election Districts uptown, but Rangel locked in Harlem. Plus Rangel had the Clintons and the flowing money and how the hell do you fight that? Now Adriano has to keep his regular job so he can fight another day.
He stood in the shade of a farmer’s tent next to the native corn and the green peppers, while he smoothly chatted with folk in the very mixed crowd on Isham Street about little league and fracking and schools. He made fun of me for wearing black in the Punta Cana-ish 90-degree sun, and I said it gave me energy, and he smiled and said “yeah, you’re like a solar panel.” I told him he could set himself apart in Albany by pushing to turn all the buildings in New York into power plants. We can make every brick a solar power collector, and then we wouldn’t have to frack. Adriano says he is “radically” against fracking. He wants a permanent moratorium.
Zephyr wants to ban it outright. This is the correct position, because if we allow fracking in New York then the largest and cleanest unfiltered water supply around will be poisoned and the gas that is later burned will simply accelerate climate change and the destruction of ecosystems. Neoliberal Hillary Clinton, Andrew and Charlie’s friend, warned about climate change the other day in Las Vegas at the National Clean Energy Summit as she also, according to Politico, “cited the potential benefits of producing and exporting natural gas and oil.” Pandering to Everyone is the Clinton Way. Saturday I also got a pandering flyer in the mail from Andrew, and there he is, marching next to Adriano, and everyone is smiling, and how often do you see Andrew smile? Andrew’s Way is to study the problem until he has to allow his sponsors to frack.
Andrew and Adriano
The Way to Power in Albany leads to the room where Andrew and the Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and the Democratic House Majority Leader, the Nosferatu-esque Entrenched Pol Sheldon Silver, decide what’s going to happen, regardless of whether or not Adriano has an idea about solar.
This Way to Power is not the only way, though they would like you to think that. Letting the rich squeeze the poor is not the only way. Tax inversions and sucking the wealth away from the People to offshore accounts in the British Virgin Islands, 400 kilometers east of Punta Cana, is not the moral way.
A vote tomorrow for Zephyr and Tim will be the best way to open the door to that room and kick those guys in the butt and kick them out, so that we can let inside the people who help build lives for other people, so we can let in those Dominican ladies and the guys on the scaffolds, so we can let the World into that Room.