ACORN'S JUDAS KISS

Today's New York Post has a picture worth 10,000 words: it shows Bertha Lewis, executive director of N.Y. ACORN -- the grassroots 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 huge tax-breaks and direct subsidies to the business interests 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 pass "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 cocked 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).

But instead of using cross-endorsements in New York State as a carrot-and-stick to force the Democrats to the left, the WFP -- with few exceptions -- has basically only been feeding carrots to the Democratic donkey and getting little in return, except for some narrow special-interest legislation that benefits the unions which cough up the cash to run the WFP and provide troops on Election Day for this mostly-on-paper party. And the party hasn't been aggressively serious about expanding it's non-labor citizen components, for the simple reason that the labor leaders who run the party are afraid they just might lose control, or at least have some significant internal dissent to some of their more opportunistic (or sleazier) endorsements. And that's sad. Even when they endorse a Republican -- just to give themselves a little phony cosmetic balance of, yes, "bi-partisanshihp" (ugh!) and futilely try to get more leverage on the Republican-controlled State Senate for narrow-gauge legislation the labor leaders want -- they screw that up. Take last year's endorsement, in a Yonkers-Westchester district, of the essentially conservative GOP incumbent State Sen. Nick Spano, an opportunist hack, over a very progressive grassroots black woman, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who came out of the poverty of the projects to become a journalist, an English teacher, and a county legislator. She lost by only 18 votes, thanks to the shameful WFP endorsement of her GOP opponent -- her victory would have cost the Republicans a key Senate seat and whittled away at their very slim majority. The latest WFP move that makes my stomach turn is their all-out embrace of Hillary Clinton (who, it should not be forgotten, brought Dick Morris into the White House to craft the welfare "deform" that threw a lot of poor folks into the street -- a tale recounted in George Stephanopoulos' memoir of the Clinton years, "All Too Human.").

In any case, this photo of Bertha bussing Bloomie is worth a lot to the Bloomberg campaign, whether the WFP and ACORN wind up endorsing him or not. Shame on you, Bertha, for betraying the interests of the working poor the WFP (which you chair) claims to serve, as well the poor people ACORN has so ably organized, by handing Bloomie this huge propaganda victory.