The Terrifying Prospect of Trump vs. Clinton
There is no prospective match-up for the November presidential election that is more terrifying than Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. The violence and “Heil Hitler” salutes practiced by his supporters make any semantic debate about whether his politics can be defined as “fascist” kinda moot. Ask yourself why he even bothered to schedule a campaign rally in Chicago when the likelihood of protestors outnumbering Trump supporters was all but certain? How long until the open carry gun activists make common cause with his campaign and make good on his threat to turn out Trump supporters to Bernie Sanders rallies? The man is dangerous and unpredictable.
Also unpredictable is what suicidally stupid thing Hillary Clinton is going to say on the campaign trail today. In just the last couple of days we’ve heard her praise the Reagans for starting a “national conversation” about AIDS (by notoriously refusing to utter the word for over half a decade), repeating the easily – and snarkily – refuted lie that Bernie Sanders hasn’t done much to advance the cause of universal healthcare, and issuing a pathetic word salad about Chicago’s anti-Trump protest the tl;dr version of which is apparently that Dylann Roof started a national conversation about the Confederate battle flag.
These were not gaffes or gotchas. These were unforced errors. These were planned, practiced and vetted campaign strategies. Put aside any consideration of Clinton as a public official. She sucks as a campaigner. As Erik Loomis recently put it, “Hillary Clinton is a Martha Coakley-level campaigner with a once-brilliant campaigner for a husband.” As people are slowly realizing that Hillary has based her path to the Democratic nomination on winning southern states that she doesn’t even plan to campaign in for the general election, she struggles to beat a cranky old socialist in states that will be essential in November (and where Trump is doing disturbingly well in his primaries). I’ve noticed a new line of defense popping up in the blogosphere, “reminding” people that HRC won “statewide election in a deep blue state by 12 and 36 points.”
One would need to be a child or an amnesiac, but certainly not a New Yorker, to believe that crap. The Republican party in New York state is an empty vessel. It’s available for rent for the occasional billionaire to run a vanity campaign, but otherwise puts up school board level candidates for high office. Hillary ran against, and handily defeated, nobody of substance in her two Senate campaigns. She didn’t even face a serious opponent in the Democratic primary, which is where elections are actually decided in New York. Her 2000 and 2006 Senate campaigns were coronations, much like her 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns were supposed to be.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think too much is made of Trump’s appeal to white working class voters. Two cycles of Obama elections (which were supposed to be close, but were won by millions of votes) have demonstrated that the racist white working class can be outvoted. But what is essential is inspiring and mobilizing the base. Hillary’s campaign of no se puede is actively demoralizing to the voters she needs to energize. And her propensity to make terrible campaign decisions will create opportunities for her opponent.
The people who are already calling for voters to fall in line behind HRC to prevent a Trump presidency would do well to wake up to the notion that Trump’s only possible path to the White House may well be in a head-to-head match-up with Hillary Clinton.
A Robo-Survey from Rep. Donovan
I just received an official telephone survey call from my newly-minted Republican Congressman, Dan Donovan. The 20 or so questions ran the gamut from raising the debt ceiling to abortion rights to putting troops on the ground in Syria. I’ve been exposed to the sausage-making of enough surveys that I know the wording of this one was designed to produce the highest percentage of support possible for Donovan breaking with his party on issues of controversy in our swing district.
Things are getting interesting out here in the 5th borough.
Trump and the Art of the (Union) Deal
The ascendency of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a joke that both bores and terrifies me, but that is not the subject of this blog post. An article in today’s NY Times, “Donald Trump and the Art of the Public Sector Deal,” provides an interesting insight into his shrewd use of public/private deal-making to build up his real estate empire, but misses an even more interesting story about an early example of Trump’s pragmatism around unions.
Unlike his more ideological counterparts in the business world, or his Koch-funded competitors for the Republican nomination, Trump has treated unions as a cost of doing business – when, that is, those unions have organized and demonstrated the power to make their existence a fact of life.
The Times story tells of how Trump, in 1978, secured a 40-year tax abatement from city and state officials in order to redevelop the “closed, blighted eyesore” that had been the truly grand Commodore Hotel into the shiny glass monstrosity that we now call the Grand Hyatt Hotel. What the story does not mention is that part of the price tag for that tax abatement was a card check neutrality deal with the NY Hotel Trade Council, the union that had represented the workers at the Commodore when it had closed six years earlier. Although not well known, it is probably one of the earliest examples of such a neutrality card-check agreement in the modern era.
But the union just won the card check by the skin of its teeth. It is difficult to reconstruct precisely what happened. It’s possible that the neutrality was quietly subverted by lower ranked managers who conducted a whisper campaign of lies or intimidation. (Early neutrality agreements didn’t build in strong penalties for violations of the agreements.) It’s also possible that, like the workers at the VW plant in Tennessee a portion of the Grand Hyatt workers psyched themselves out that the union could make the hotel less profitable and lead to layoffs. (After all, the previous workers at the Commodore had all lost their jobs.)
Whatever the case, the union went to the table in a weakened position…which Trump exploited. All hotels represented by the NY Hotel Trades Council are under the terms of the same collective bargaining agreement, and have been since 1939. Trump pushed for concessions, not in wages but in working conditions. He got them in a side agreement, while the hotel nominally signed on to the Industry-Wide Agreement.
But then he did something truly clever. He signed a “Me Too” agreement with the union for the upcoming round of negotiations. A “Me Too” is basically a “pre-signing” of the next contract. It means that an employer agrees in advance to all the terms that its competitors will ultimately settle upon, while securing a no-strike pledge during the contract campaign and beyond. You can see the value of a “Me Too” to a non-ideological employer. But the value is also huge for the union, freeing it to single out particular members of the employers’ bargaining coalition for job actions and pressure.
Trump signed a “Me Too” for every round of negotiations, and after he sold his stake in the hotel the new owners continued to do the same. There actually was a lengthy industry-wide strike in 1985, but the Grand Hyatt Hotel remained open for business.
It wasn’t until the year 2004 that the Hotel Trades Council finally got the Grand Hyatt fully signed on to the Industry-Wide Agreement and won for the workers at the Hyatt the same work rules as the rest of the city, which is, itself, an interesting story but one for another time.
Tuli’s Archives
Gothamist has a pretty incredible story about some newly discovered Bob Dylan lyrics, to a song-never-recorded about Robert Moses. It’s easy to assume that the lyrics sheet is a hoax. But, because, it was discovered in the Tuli Kupferberg files, I’m inclined to regard it as legit.
Tuli was a true American character. He was a member of the musical avant garde jug-band the Fugs, an early progenitor of the Village underground, a leftist and a proto-zinester. I first learned of him when, accompanied by a (paid!) intern, I poured through David McReynolds’ archives to find suitable material for the Socialist Party’s 100th anniversary conference journal.
McReynolds was a long time leader of the SP, a pacifist and student of Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste, a two-time candidate for President (I managed his second campaign in 2000; his first, in 1980, is purportedly the first time that an openly gay man ran for the office) and a long-time bohemian and Village resident. Before David complains about this post, I use the past tense because I am describing an event from 2001, not because he is dead. He is very much still alive (and blogging!).
David’s archives included many incredible photographic negatives of Socialist Party and War Resisters League events from the prior 40 years, including some of the last “new” pictures of Martin Luther King – from a WRL (or possibly Fellowship of Reconciliation?) – awards dinner in the early 1960’s.
It also included a shot from that same dinner night that I has developed into a 11″ x 14″ print that has adorned the walls of every home I have since called my own, of A.J. Must and Norman Thomas locked in an intense yet casual conversation at that same awards dinner, (I think) with the glass reflection of MLK’s back behind them.
So, what convinces me of the authenticity of these new Dylan lyrics because they were found in Tuli’s archives? Well, many of Tuli’s archives wound up in McReynolds’ archives – most notably a zine called “FUCK GOD!” When we came across that one, McReynolds chuckled and said, “That was pretty controversial back in its day. I don’t know how Tuli got away with that one!”
A few minutes later, I came across Tuli’s sequel to that particular opus, a mimeographed volume entitled, “FUCK GOD IN THE ASS!,” its cover adorned by a crude line drawing of a be-robed man with long grey hair, from behind, spreading his butt cheeks. “Yeah,” I said, “I think this would still be pretty controversial today.”
So, do I think it’s possible that young Bob Dylan threw a lyrics sheet of a song taking the piss out of “master builder” Robert Moses Tuli Kupferberg’s way? Yeah, you betcha.