Say it’s so, Joe

 Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have fallen into the Hillary Clinton trap.

Which is really the Donald Trump trap.

Biden and Harris seem to be spending the bulk of their time campaigning against Trump rather than letting us know their vision for America.

Unfortunately, as the nation learned in 2016, saying, ‘I’m not that guy’ over and over might win the popular vote, but it may not be enough to win the White House. Sure, highlighting the fact that the President minimized and mucked up the coronavirus, leading to 200,000 deaths and an enfeebled economy, makes sense. And denouncing the President’s Twitter racism and authoritarianism is entirely appropriate. But these are empty gestures if you don’t show exactly what you are going to do and how it’s going to save America.

Here’s the thing: everyone, including every single one of Trump’s supporters, knows his faults. In focusing on them, the Democrats convince no one. But they allow Trump to keep everything revolving around him.

This may seem useful if your strategy is to win back middle-of-the-road Republicans. But this is not a route to victory – because there are too few middle-of-the-roaders to matter. And forget about trying to peel off various sects of right-wingers. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are a COVID death cult. The white supremacist gangs called militias are pumped out of their minds, parading around with their assault weapons. And the so-called Christian right is so gleeful at the possibility of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that they seem to have signed away their own values.

So what’s an everyday Joe to do? First, Biden needs to let people know who he is. After a lifetime in politics, it may seem as if we should know this – but we don’t. He needs to demonstrate once and for all that he’s not a typical pol, twisting and turning in focus-group-tested opportunism. The President, George W. Bush famously said, is the decider – and the public needs to know what kind of decider Biden will be. We need to get a sense of his gut.

If Biden truly wants to be President, he has to start acting like one. He and Harris need to frame out, in firm, proud terms, what they will do about the biggest issues facing America. Call it a get-your-hands-dirty agenda for the first hundred days. We need to know what in their first three months in office, they will do about the following issues:

•         People are dying, both literally and economically, from a virus. Biden and Harris have to show us what they will do about coronavirus – and they should challenge the current administration to do it now, even as the campaign is progressing, because it will save lives and save the country.
•         Biden and Harris need to speak to their policies on climate change – which has scorched millions of acres in Oregon and California and, in coming decades, is sure to require drastic changes in how American does business.
•         They must speak, in serious and emotionally resonant terms, about their plans on immigration and systemic racism.
•         Biden and Harris need to travel to the rust belt and the farm belt. They must speak to working people all over the country, stating unequivocally that they will be valued in every decision they make.
•         Finally, they must promise the public they will restore our country’s reputation in the world.

If Biden and Harris think that simply shaking their heads at the things Donald Trump says and mumbling platitudes offers a risk-free route to the White House, they have gravely miscalculated – in fact, they might as well simply campaign together every day wearing matching T-shirts that say “I’m with stupid,” with arrows pointing at each other.

America is on the edge. Our institutions, the checks and balances created by the founders of the republic, are crumbling. America’s democracy is on the ballot in this election. People need to see that Biden and Harris understand this, that they have a vision that will restore and repair and reclaim the country.

Say it’s so, Joe. Make it so, Kamala.

A Scale Model of the Global Economy

 

‘Come Together’

It’s the cliché of the moment, the phrase repeated over and over as news of the pandemic gets worse and worse: “We’re all in this together.”

And yet everything around us – from fights about facemasks to frights about fascism – tells us we’re not.

It’s time to make the phrase real. Here is a simple agenda – a half dozen things the city can do in a New York minute to make “We’re all in this together” a self-evident truth.

1.            Abolish the adversarial system in housing court and make every eviction subject to extended arbitration. Eviction is the capital punishment of the housing world: the one matter from which, if the tenant loses, there is no recovery – one strike and you’re out. This is not how it should be. There were 200,000 evictions pending when COVID-19 shut the courts. Many tens of thousands are surely about to be filed when the courts allow it. Yet think about it: eviction should always be a desperate last resort. Therefore, we need a new system dedicated to the presumption that people need a home. And landlords should agree not only because it is the right thing to do during the pandemic but because, hey, as they say, “We’re all in this together.”

2.            In early March, some of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s staffers convened a kitchen cabinet to come up with policies to help the city through the coronavirus era. The report was suppressed, but one of its ideas was revelatory: create permanent affordable housing in vacant tourist hotels. In fact, the city has already moved in this direction. In late July, the Department of Social Service reported that, during the pandemic, it had moved 13,000 homeless people into hotels. The 4-star Omni Times Square now houses all the guys who used to live in the Jerome Avenue Men’s Shelter. The Lucerne, on the Upper West Side, is home to 283 homeless substance abusers who used to bunk in two group shelters in the Lower East. We have proved it’s feasible: we can have a city with no street homeless. Now let’s make it permanent. And if any of the NIMBY crew starts grousing about formerly homeless folk living it up in or next door to fancy digs (some Hell’s Kitchen and Upper West Side residents have already complained that their new neighbors are menacing), let’s remind them to show some patience and forbearance because it happens to be true that, “we’re all in this together.”

3.            In the post-pandemic future, landlords are going to have to do something with all the empty co-working spaces that no one will want to use so long as there’s even a tiny risk of viral contamination. Let’s help them out and convert these vacant co-working spaces and other obsolete open-space offices (newspaper newsrooms, for instance) into permanent affordable housing. This will not only ensure an income stream for landlords, but will guarantee that streets throughout the city will have 24/7 life. And, you know what to say if the developers demur: “Fuggetaboutit. We’re all in this together.”

4.            As people lost their jobs due to COVID-19, volunteer mutual aid groups have sprung up to distribute free groceries to desperate families. Now it’s time to hire these groups to do the door-to-door contact tracing of people who have been potentially been exposed to the virus. The city has been hamstrung at this – with more than ½ the people who tested positive refusing to disclose who they came in contact with. Mutual aid organizations know their communities and are trusted, so they will be able to do a more complete and efficient job of finding at-risk neighbors and convincing them to isolate. Plus, they understand the dangers of over-surveillance, and will not pry into people’s lives. And should anyone in City Hall balk at defunding city agencies and instead funding communities, let’s just tell them: “Come on, I thought we’re all in this together.”

5.            Education is a critical public service and the city is still improvising when it comes to figuring out how to reopen schools. How about bringing all the stakeholders into the classroom. Let’s set up a team – including administrators, teachers, custodians, the various unions, parents, students, plus ventilation professionals and public health experts – to figure out a real plan. Then empower fundraisers to ensure we raise the dollars to do it (recovery bonds? a pied a terre tax? reviving the stock transfer tax?). I mean: didn’t these politicians and administrators get the memo: “we’re all in this together.”

6.            Finally, let’s set up a system of community adjudication for non-violent offenses. As things currently stand, if a person doesn’t deal with a citation for setting foot in a park after dark or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk or walking between subway cars, a warrant will be issued for their arrest – and they will be put in cuffs the next time a cop runs their ID. Retooling this would be a great start toward abolishing the police and breaking the street-to-prison pipeline. And should the thin blue line of cops, prosecutors and judges protest, let’s give ‘em a good Bronx cheer, while shouting our common refrain: “Don’t be an oppressor! We’re all in this together!”

Once upon a time, calling New York home gave a person a sense of ownership, even if the majority of us owned nothing. Now, with these six simple actions, protestors in the five boroughs will finally mean it when they chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” And we will have provided ourselves an opportunity to rediscover the principle that has always made our city great: we really are all in this together.

the Old Testament provision that can repair contemporary America

COVID-19 has crippled the American economy. Businesses are shuttering. Unemployment is growing. More than 160,000 people have died. Hundreds of thousands of families fear eviction and falling into homelessness.

Trust is crumbling, and people all over the country wonder if our system can pull itself out of this death spiral – whether we will unceremoniously crash or, with determined effort, survive.

As a 100 percent non-religious person, I can say this sincerely: the political and economic way forward is contained in the bible. The jump-start the country needs is inherent in the concept of jubilee framed out in the Five Books of Moses.

The jubilee, outlined most fully in the book of Leviticus and reiterated in Deuteronomy, is a once-every-49-years commandment to rein in speculation and re-establish ethical economic norms. Proclaiming “liberty throughout all of the land unto all the inhabitants" (a phrase inscribed on the Liberty Bell), the jubilee commands that we restore people to their properties (“return every man unto his possessions”), forgive all debts (“this is the manner of the release: every creditor that lendeth aught unto his neighbor shall release it”), free all slaves and prisoners (“return every man unto his family”), make reparations (“give again the price of his redemption”) and generally agree to treat each other fairly and equitably, politically or economically (“not oppress one another.”)

The jubilee is not some impossible utopian paradise. Indeed, a number of societies in the ancient world were organized around regular jubilees. Babylonian rulers, for instance, celebrated many occasions when they wiped outdebts, freed prisoners, and broke up concentrated land holdings, a process some historians have dubbed “clean slates.” The Theodosian Code, elaborated in the Byzantine Empire some 1700 years ago, also called for similar forgivenesses. And, for thousands of years, the great dynasties of China presided over mass amnesties, during which various emperors freed prisoners, forgave debts, and paid reparations.

There are modern examples as well. You might call what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did during the Great Depression a mini-Jubilee. He used a little-noticed law called the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 to close every financial institution in America for two weeks, giving them a clean slate during which the Federal Reserve could recapitalize them so they could withstand sustained withdrawals. And here’s a more recent mini-jubilee: in 2016, when a hacker exploited a bug to steal $56 million worth of the ‘ether’ cryptocurrency, the managers of the currency essentially opted for a clean slate – though they called it a “hard fork” – which involved a Star Trek-style reversal of the space time continuum to turn the clock back to the moment just prior to the rip-off, allowing the currency to continue as if the theft never happened.

Now look at many of the demands people are making today:

·       Ban evictions and cancel rent: this is a call for a modern jubilee in housing.

·       Have government provide a universal basic income or make continuing direct payments to all Americans – most particularly to the unemployed and financially burdened: this accords with a description of the jubilee in Deuteronomy -- “if there be among you a poor man … thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: but thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him.”

·       End the carceral state (the prison population pipeline that incarcerates so many people of color), abolish the police, and stop imprisoning undocumented kids and adults: this is essentially a demand for a jubilee in so-called criminal justice – an amnesty and legal make-over as we figure out how to do public safety and immigration with true equality and equity.

The pandemic has shown that we need to make an exodus from our unfair system. We need to create a new economy of giving to replace the old, punitive economics of taking. We need to create a politics of inclusion as we excise the old, oppressive and repressive politics of exclusion.

The genesis of our renewal is in the bible: a 21^st century Jubilee.

Busted!

Black demonstrators who were busted during New York City’s Black Lives Matter rallies in late May and early June were four times more likely to be charged with felonies than white demonstrators.

According to stats provided by the NYPD to New York State Attorney General Letitia James, 15.66 percent of the 808 black demonstrators who were arrested in New York City between May 28th and June 7th were charged with felonies, while only 3.47 percent of the 927 white protestors arrested were similarly charged. The statistics come from the AG’s preliminary report on the NYPD’s response to the marches and rallies that spilled into the streets after the Minneapolis police killed George Floyd on May 25^th for the purported crime of trying to pass a counterfeit 20 dollar bill.

The report suggests that the numbers of felony charges (for reasons the report does not explain, the percentages do not yield whole numbers) might be skewed by events on May 31st and June 1st, when some stores in Midtown and the Bronx were broken into and looted. On those nights, 130 of the more than 600 people arrested were charged with felonies. Nonetheless, the report notes, many of the damaged and plundered stores were not on the routes of Black Lives Matter marches and therefore demonstrators were likely not involved in those criminal activities.

These statistics generally corroborate the problem that brought demonstrators to the streets: that law enforcement agencies treat Black people differently than white people and that Black people continually face harsh and sometimes deadly force when confronted by police.

The felony charges brought against demonstrators included burglary, assault, rioting, criminal possession of stolen property, and criminal mischief. These same crimes could also be charged as misdemeanors: criminal possession of stolen property, resisting arrest, rioting, and trespassing. The implication is that white demonstrators were charged with lower level offenses while Black demonstrators received more severe charges.

The report also showed that demonstrators were four times more likely to get arrested in Manhattan than elsewhere in the city. Almost ¾ of the 2,087 arrests the NYPD made during those 11 days and nights of marching and chanting were in Manhattan. The NYPD arrested approximately 350 people at demonstrations in Brooklyn and 250 in the Bronx. The report does not contain any specifics about arrests at demonstrations in Queens and Staten Island. 

The AG’s report does not reveal important facts such as how many of NYPD’s 36,000 officers were put to work policing the protests, how much overtime was involved in the police work, nor how many times the NYPD pepper sprayed demonstrators, beat protestors with batons, or kettled demonstrators (this controversial NYPD tactic involves corralling people in places where they cannot comply with orders to disperse and then arresting them for failure to disperse.)

In the report, Attorney General James offers a series of recommendations for reforms in policing, including changing the NYPD’s rules on the use of force, creating a statewide police certification program, and decriminalizing certain minor offenses, but does not engage the protestors’ principal demand that politicians defund the police.

smothering the fire of people's anger

All 302.6 square miles of the City of New York are currently subject to a nighttime curfew. The curfew started Monday night at 11 pm, announced by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio. On Tuesday, the Mayor expanded it to 8 pm and extended it for the entire week. So, through the morning of June 8th, all 8.4 million New Yorkers will potentially be subject to ticketing and possible arrest if they venture out between 8 pm and 5 am. The police -- as the many viral videos of them using pepper spray, batons, and even squad cars to drive people off the streets show -- have been using the curfew as a weapon against people protesting police brutality.

Many of the initial news reports have attempted to normalize the curfew, presenting it as unusual but not unprecedented. Here's The New York Times of June 2, 2020:

The last time New York City was under curfew was in February 1945. Fiorello H. La Guardia was mayor. Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The Allied forces had just bombed Dresden, Germany, and the United States was facing a coal shortage. The director of war mobilization imposed a nationwide midnight curfew on all “places of entertainment.” It lasted until May.

But let's be honest: what went on in 1945 wasn't a curfew. It was a law that forced nightclubs to turn off their lights at midnight. People were still allowed on the streets.

For here's the sad truth that no one seems to want to acknowledge: this is the first full-city curfew in New York City's history.

There was no curfew imposed on the city during the draft riots in 1863, when anti-black mobs killed 120 people. There was no curfew after Malcolm X was gunned down in 1965, no curfew after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The was no curfew during the 1977 blackout and no curfew after the Tompkins Square Park Riots in 1988, when Mayor Edward I Koch tried to close the park at one in the morning (yes: not so long ago, you could relax in the city's parks at night, but today we have a permanent curfew and it's a crime to be in any park after 1 am, according to parks department rules.) Significantly, Koch left the streets open and protestors were free to move around the streets all night long. Despite this, the pushback was so strong that the famously strong-willed Mayor rescinded his attempt to close the park the following day.

There was no curfew in 1991 after Rodney King was beaten in LA and no curfew that same year after seven-year-old Gavin Cato was killed by a car in the motorcade of the Lubavicher Rebbe, which led to three days of violent contention in Crown Heights. There was no curfew in 1999 after police killed Amadou Diallo in the Bronx, and none after Patrick Dorismond was shot for no reason by an undercover officer. There was no curfew after Sean Bell was blown away on his wedding day in 2006, no curfew in 2014 when the cops choked Eric Garner to death and shot Michael Brown on the street in Ferguson and Akai Gurley in a housing project stairwell.

In fact, in my search of newspaper and city archives, I could only find one time a curfew had been imposed in New York 77 years ago -- and it was partial, neighborhood-based, and very short: Mayor La Guardia shut Harlem down in August 1943 after a cop shot and injured a black member of the U.S. Armed Forces who intervened in an arrest on 126th Street. The street protests that burst out after that incident of police brutality left six people dead. Yet, even with the deaths, La Guardia tried to keep the curfew proportional. It began at 10:30 pm, impacted just one community, and lasted just two days.

The word curfew comes from the French -- covrir (to cover) feu (fire). And we've returned to that root today. Cuomo and de Blasio, who both claim to be progressive, have given the NYPD a handy tool to kick dirt on the fire of people's righteous and non-violent anger.

A message to America’s mayors, governors, city managers, local officials, police chiefs

You had one job -- to protect and defend your people -- and you failed.

It should go without saying: Do not kill your people. Do not put your knee on the neck of your people or tackle them and put them in a chokehold. Do not shoot them in their cars or break down their doors as if you were leading a violent home invasion or pull the trigger on them when they’re playing cops and robbers with a toy gun in the park. Do not attack your people. Do not squirt chemical mace or pepper spray in your people’s faces. Do not drive your cars into your people as they are exercising their First Amendment rights. Do not club your people with nightsticks. Do not shoot your people when they congregate to demonstrate, even if your guns are only loaded with rubber bullets. Do not fire tracer rounds at your people. Do not arrest reporters and medics: whatever you think of the jobs they do or the views they hold or what they write about you: they are your people, too.

You have done all these things – and thus proved the anger of your people to be righteous.

The only question now is how you will make amends.

The answer is basic – and like many basic things, it’s not particularly hard but it does take courage.

You have to meet with people you disagree with. You have to sit down with many who have organized the protests or been the victims of your policies. You have to listen. You have to hear their anger. You have to accept that their anger is directed at you, personally. And then, working jointly, respecting and understanding that rage, you have to spend the time to come up with concrete steps for the future – a plan of action that you will announce together.

It is likely that this process will take you far out of your comfort zone. The people you meet may hold views you consider radical. They may be former residents of your jails. They may speak differently than you do. But you have to seek them out and break bread with them. You have to drill down into your community. If the flyers or texts about demonstrations were sent out by groups you don’t know, have your staffers find out who these people are and go talk with them. If you have no way of finding out who they are, you do not deserve to be leading your cities.

And remember: this is bigger than politics. Some of your constituents will no doubt disparage you and will claim that you surrendered to violence. The guy in the White House, for sure, will flame you. Pay no attention to their derision. This is not about your image or your polling data or your projection of strength or your victory in the next election. It’s about a fundamental principle of governance that you have been neglecting. In this country, government reflects the will and consent of the governed and, at this moment, the governed have made it amply clear: they never gave their consent to these things you have done.

Also: stop blaming others. It’s time for you to shoulder your burden. You’re in charge. When you ran, when you took the oath of office, all the old problems became yours. In fact, you probably started in politics by asserting you could fix these things.

It’s also disingenuous for you to blame the current unrest on outsiders. People visit your cities all the time. When they are in your house, they are your people too.

Know, too, your rank and file cops are scared of many of your people and treat the very people they have sworn to protect and defend as less than human. It's time for you to take responsibility. If you cops kill or maim or mistreat someone -- whether with a knee, a chokehold, a baton, a toilet bowl plunger, or a bullet, or simply by accosting them for no reason other than the color of their skin -- it is as if you have killed or maimed or accosted someone, for they are all your cops, under your command and control. You need to take responsbility. When your cops have done wrong, you have done wrong, and it is your job to hold yourself accountable and make amends by fighting for serious, lasting change so that these things can never happen again. If you can't do this, you are in the wrong job.

This is not rocket science. It is common sense. What is needed right now is for you to get out into the community, to listen to the people whose voices have not been heard, whose voices you have hitherto not respected, and then work with them to create the lasting solutions that will ensure these deaths and injuries will never happen again. Then, and only then, people will get out of the streets.

This is the moment. Seize it and make the change you know is needed.