Blooomberg's Power Grab Proves Him Unfit to Rule

Today the City Council of NYC voted to give billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg (and incidentally themselves) a free shot at a third term in spite of the fact that New York City law limits him (and them) to two terms.

This raises sharply a question I’ll frame as fitness to rule. Bloomberg’s power grab has been rationalized with the assertion that he is uniquely competent to steer the ship of city through the troubled waters of the ongoing economic meltdown.

That’s a big fat lie, and one that is readily refuted.

First, Bloomberg’s backers cite his expertise in practical economics. Well, this bozo heads the world’s premier economic news service. He has easy access to information that the average citizen of NYC will never get to see, and he was blindsided by the crisis as surely as George W. Bush and the financial establishment. In fact, the ballyhooed letter signed by 30 prominent “municipal leaders” to tout his third term bid included the names of the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley. Oh, well, if they want him around for another four years, it must be okay…

Second, while he deserves some credit for keeping the city bureaucracy running smoothly, Bloomberg also spent the last seven years pushing policies that have made NYC more vulnerable to the crisis which is engulfing us. He promoted financial and real estate speculation; he gentrified the entire island of Manhattan and chunks of the other boroughs with luxury condos and rentals; he continued the erosion of manufacturing, costing New York a broader economic base and many unskilled and semi-skilled jobs; he hammered upper level unionized workers, like teachers, transit workers, firemen, who comprise the social and economic backbone of NYC; he worked to turn the city into a tourist destination for an global elite who aren’t going to be able to afford luxury stays in the Big Apple in the middle of a worldwide smashup either.

Third, with this move Michael Bloomberg shows his deep contempt for democracy and the right of New Yorkers to choose our leaders. You can argue the merits and problems of the two-term limit for elected officials all day and all night, but it was passed by New York City voters—twice—in referendums in the 1990s. Now Bloomberg has made an end run around that decision. Worse, his accomplices in the City Council voted down a resolution which would have put the question before the electorate again in a special referendum and instead arrogated to themselves the right to kick New Yorkers' decisions to the curb. This is a guy who switched from Democrat to Republican to find a ballot line the first time he ran and now calls himself an “independent,” a guy who used his fortune to buy his way into office in two straight campaigns. spending $85 million on his 2005 re-election alone. That’s a million more than John McCain has collected in public funding for his whole campaign since the Republican National Convention!

We’d better lose the idea that anybody’s going to ride in on a white horse to save working people in this growing mess, let alone some billionaire who thinks that following the rules is for peons like us. We've got to organize ourselves to stop the rich from sticking us with the whole tab, to support and defend each other, to develop new methods of survival and solidarity, to start to design a NYC that serves our interests and betters our lives, not those of the high and mighty. They are not fit to rule.

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Teen Breakthrough, Part 2: "Resistance Bisexuality"

[This post addresses another positive development on the gender front among teens, not as recent as the erosion of male homophobia I reported on earlier this week, but among girls.]

About 3 years ago, I noticed that girls in the NYC high school where I work were starting to call themselves "bisexual." Lots of them. Wearing rainbow logos on all kind of clothing articles. And it was becoming almost impossible for a guy to upset a girl, or pressure her into sex by calling her a "lesbian," because the term was losing its stigma. (It's still possible for guys to pressure a girl into sex, but one maneuver has been eliminated).

For teenagers, identifying as "bisexual" has often been a step toward acknowledging that they're lesbian or gay, a milestone on the road to coming out. I knew this from the literature and had heard it anecdotally from friends whose teen kids went to more elite schools. But until that point I had seldom heard the term used as a self-identifier by the predominantly Black and Latino working class kids whom I counsel.

The new self-identification, which has also been observed by my friends in other cities who are either teachers or parents of teens, has many sources as well as multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings for the girls who use it. Some of my colleagues see it as a simply a ploy by girls who are basically heterosexual to attract more boys or have more leverage in a relationship ("I don't need you, I can have romance and sex with girls") or to titillate boys with the thought of two girls doing it (and the paradisiacal possibility of joining in). These colleagues say that this new trend, which I've seen affect maybe up to 25% of the girls in a school, doesn't represent any erosion of or challenge to male supremacy.

I think that this view is a bit one-sided. Kids often try out several identities through the teen years; they'll come back in September with a whole new look, self-label ("emo," "ghetto," etc.) and group of friends. So the fact that some girls may later go straight doesn't mean that their bisexual self-classification was simply phony or a ploy. What I pick up is that they're often turned off to men by seeing how women are put down and abused by men, and they're grappling with how to live and have some agency in what is still a "man's world." That's why I like to call this very mixed and contradictory phenomenon not a conscious political act or rebellion, but a kind of "resistance bisexuality."

One girl, for example, said to me in discussing her bisexuality, "I guess I don't like the way I see men treat women, " She had a stepfather who had tried to cop a feel once or twice when he was drunk (and since that hadn't occurred recently, she didn't want to give her mother heartache by telling her about it). She'd seen her mother hit by an earlier boyfriend. She felt more connection and empathy with her female friends, and that led her to explore physical closeness with them. I heard similar statements from other girls who had experienced domestic violence or sexual abuse.

One encouraging by-product of the bisexual self-identification is that it cuts against the widespread "I don't have no females for friends" attitude, which I used to hear all the time from girls: "They act nice, but then they talk about you behind your back and stab you in the back and steal your man." While I'd be the last to minimize how mean girls can still be to each other, the bisexual girls do seem to value their female friendships more highly and are often very conscious about giving each other support.

On the down side, as someone who does conflict resolution, I have to note that this phenomenon creates endless new possibilities for drama. Two female friends find they're attracted to each other but then often they're also attracted to the same boys. So part of the girls' relationship is comparing numbers of suitors and getting jealous if the other girl is getting more male attention, and confusing or toying with a lot of guys--who then get angry and into beefs with each other...

Still, I would hold that the option of claiming bisexuality represents an advance in the deep, ongoing cultural revolution (or, using Gramsci's formulation, "war of position") against male supremacy.

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Teen Breakthrough, Part 1: "I'm Not Racist Against Gays"

In my workaday world in the NYC public school system, this year's big news was the growing acceptance of and sympathy for gay guys. And because male homosexuality has been, in my experience, so deeply stigmatized among youth, I think this is a tremendous breakthrough. I still don't hear many guys in high school saying flat out, "I am gay," but there's definitely less attempt to deny or repudiate or hide attributes that might brand a young man as gay.

Little things like young men casually mentioning, "My uncle is gay," or an African-American senior who is into fashion design, tends toward the flaming in his manner and shows no romantic interest in girls being elected a class officer. Or a young man saying to a female classmate who called him "fa--ot" in an argument: "Well, I don't appreciate that because you must not think too much of gay people, and my brother is gay. " In the past, the likely response would have been to hurl back an insult, and the main concern would have been to assert his own straightness in front of the peer audience. But now, he takes the offensive and critiques heterosexism!

Another example that impressed me occurred in the context of a school art project for which students chose the theme of taboos. There was a fair amount of art about gay/lesbian relationships, but one of the most intriguing paintings showed what looked like a man in his twenties and a man in his sixties embracing, The young Latino artist, who as far as I know is straight, definitely wanted to provoke reactions and sought out feedback. It really blew me away that he was challenging two stigmas by portraying, in a compassionate way, both gay male sexuality, and the need of older people to express their sexuality (which is often is often a big yuck factor for teens!).

At the same time, teens, like all of us, have contradictory consciousness and they still come up with some disturbing anti-gay practices. One glaring example is the custom of saying "That's gay" when they think something is stupid or silly. I often will challenge this by asking, "How would you like it if when I thought something was stupid, I said 'That's so Dominican' or 'That's so Black'?" Many students will reply, "It's just a saying," "It doesn't mean anything" and vehemently assure me that they get along with gay classmates or friends or relatives, etc.

One young man listened thoughtfully and replied, "No, Miss, I'm not racist against gay people." I really dig this phrasing, because it reflects the reality of racism as the primary form of oppression and put-down that he is experiences and sees in the world. And I'm encouraged that many teens are becoming less racist against gay people.

[Next up, Part 2: Resistance Bisexuality]

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In NYC, It's Not Fear of Immigrants...

In reading Jimmy Higgins' earlier post here on anti-immigrant sentiment and the danger of nativism--and the interesting responses--something struck me sharply. Living for my whole life in New York City, it’s hard for me to analyze or even relate to the fear and loathing of immigrants that grips some parts of the U.S. What we in NYC fear is somewhat different, and was clarified for me by a conversation with a cousin at a recent family gathering.

My cousin, whom I’ll call Tony, has a semi-skilled job with a telecommunications company and recently moved with his wife and kids from Staten Island to a New Jersey suburb. Tony’s widowed mother, now about 70, had made her global proletarian passage from a small town near Naples to the industrial Red Belt of Bologna to a textile factory in Scotland to a laundry in Staten Island—where she met and married my late uncle, and still lives.

“I don’t feel good about where my mother lives,” Tony was telling me. His mother is in the house that had been my paternal grandmother’s, across the street from a city bus depot in a racially mixed poor and working class neighborhood. Though not an activist or a self-identified progressive, Tony is married to a woman of part-African descent who looks like a person of color (as do their kids), and he is sensitized to racial stereotyping on a gut level. He groped for words to articulate his concern about his mother’s neighborhood. “There’s too many people who—I don’t know what’s the right way to put it—lowlifes, people who don’t work.”

“People who don’t work” really captured for me what many folks in New York City fear. People who don’t follow the rules of civil behavior because they have no stake in keeping it together and getting ahead, in getting up in the morning and functioning. People who will turn a little brush or disagreement into a big fight because they have nothing better to do and no other way of feeling effective or gauging their impact on the world. People who leave their garbage in the hallway because they’ve given up on taking any pride or pleasure in how their surroundings look. People who might mess with your elderly widowed mother or throw garbage in her yard just for the hell of it….

Now, often the expression of fear and loathing of people who don’t work can be white people’s code for dumping on Black and Puerto Rican people, or a way of simply blaming the victim and ignoring the historical and structural economic dynamics that cut off some racially and nationally oppressed peoples from stable jobs, viable home mortgages, etc. But it’s not always that, or only that. And it’s not expressed only by white people.

I remember about eight years ago when I was working in a second chance high school for older teens, counseling one African American young woman who was very proud and happy that she was holding a part-time job. With no parents around, she was living in the projects with her grandmother and also with two uncles who were dealing drugs. Their apartment had recently been raided at 6 a.m. by a SWAT team who put 9 mm pistols to everybody’s head and asked where the drugs were. My student, with help from nobody that I could tell, had gotten her self back into school and found a job. Looking toward the future, she said, “ I just wanna come home at night and have to ask what was on Jerry Springer--‘cause I was working all day.”

For many working class people, especially those with the least economically secure lives, the contempt for people who don’t work is fueled by the terror of what you know could happen to you if you lose your grip and can’t make it into work—and could happen very quickly.

All of which goes to say that in New York City, most people seems to know that most immigrants work their butts off for very little money and came here because they do want to get ahead. And therefore, from what I can tell, there is very little of the classic anti-immigrant hysteria, but a lot of fear and loathing of people who don’t work.

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