Park Slope Reader

Roberto Paul

The True Progressive

By Filed Under: Community Spirit Tagged With: , , ,

On September 12, New York City’s incumbent Mayor, Bill de Blasio, sailed through the mayoral primary with 74.6% of the vote. The next day, Park Slope resident Libby Edois-Alb, one of the mayor’s longtime advisers and friend of the family, announced she was running a write-in campaign against him as the “true” progressive candidate. I sat down with her ahead of the November 7 general election to discuss what made her decide to run, whether the decision has created a rift between her and the mayor, and what she means when she says “true” progressive.

 

Roberto Paul: So you recently announced that you’re running for mayor on a “true” progressive platform. Can you tell us more about what you mean by this distinction?

Libby Edois-Alb: Sure. So many times we see candidates campaigning as progressives and then once they are elected they abandon nearly everything progressive they promised. My good friend Mayor de Blasio is a prime example of this. He campaigned on police reform, affordable housing, green energy, etc., and then once elected he started taking millions of dollars from real estate, doubled down on Broken Windows arrests targeting the very people he promised to defend on the campaign trail, softened his stance on police, and refused to address the cloud of smog hanging over the New York City metro region every day.

And why do you think he did this?

Well, I think once candidates get elected they realize that if they want to get re-elected there are powerful lobbies and interest groups with the money and political influence they need to raise money. They end up selling out their values in order to build a war chest big enough to scare off any potential challengers in the current money-takes-all system.

Those are strong words, and I know the mayor is a longtime friend of yours. Do you worry that by speaking so candidly you might jeopardize your relationship with him?

Honestly it’s too late for all that. Leading up to the 2013 campaign he spent hours upon hours consulting me. Night and day he labored over each and every point of his platform. I spent years helping him hone a progressive message that was moral, just, incorruptible, one that erred on the side of defending society’s vulnerable. All the ideals he personified during his first campaign, the real talk with police, spending a night in public housing, the tale of two cities – all of that came directly from his consultations with me, while he lay awake at night, tossing and turning in his bed, and then to seem him win, move into Gracie Mansion, and so abruptly abandon everything we planned hurt me very deeply.

So you would say that you were his conscience, his voice of reason, if you will?

Yes, definitely, his progressive mother protector alter ego.

And so now that you are running against him how will your campaign be different?

It’s quite simple, really. I’m going to run on the progressive platform that we perfected together over the years, the one he abandoned. I’m going to commit to raising no money, ever. Not from individuals, not from corporations, not from anyone.

Well, I mean the obvious rebuttal to that is that you won’t be competitive. Without money you won’t get on the ballot, qualify for televised debates, receive matching public funds, the list goes on and on. How will you get your message out to voters?

I think that the majority of the public is as fed up with money in politics as I am, and they will hopefully understand and appreciate why a candidate would commit to such a drastic course of action. We’ve got to start relying on voters, particularly those who claim they are part of the “resistance,” to go the extra mile and help us get our message out without money. I’d also like to take this opportunity to publicly challenge Bill to do the same, to commit to raising and spending no money, ever, but sadly I know that he won’t do it.

And what is the message you hope that voters will get out there for you, since you won’t be able to pay for any advertising or campaign materials on your own?

Because I accept no money, I’ll be able to spend all of my time working on my five-point platform for all New Yorkers, rather than scurrying from fundraiser to fundraiser like my opponent. One: No money, ever. That one’s simple. Two: Make New York a real sanctuary city. Three: Police reform. Four: Affordable housing. Five: Make NYC green.

Do you care to elaborate on these further?

Yes, of course. Point One I explained. Point Two: I will make New York a real sanctuary city. Federal agents were recently caught lurking around a Brooklyn courthouse, arresting people with no prior criminal records. On day one I am going to issue a blanket trespass warning to all ICE agents on city property. If you don’t have a warrant signed by a judge in your possession, you are trespassing. And if you don’t stay away from the city’s courthouses, schools, MTA stations, etc., the NYPD is going to escort you off the premises and arrest you if you fail to comply.

That sounds like a provocative, but relatively easy legal measure to implement. Why do you think the mayor hasn’t done this yet?

As I said, I think it’s about being progressive in name only. Of resisting with words, and symbolic gestures, rather than implementing real policies with legally enforceable teeth.

Okay, and the rest of your platform?

When Bill ran he talked constantly about police reform. Then he got elected and realized how powerful and politically connected the police unions were and backed off. On my first day as mayor, I plan to end Broken Windows policing and other low-level arrest dragnets and devote all of the police resources this frees up to solving hate crimes and infiltrating and arresting members of known white supremacist terrorist hate groups.

I also plan to appoint an independent panel of officers who objected to the illegal conduct of their superior officers during Stop and Frisk, like Edwin Raymond, Adhyl Polanco, and others like them, and I’m going to task them with conducting an exhaustive internal review of all NYPD (and NYC Corrections) personnel files. Any cases where probable cause exists that a crime was committed by a city employee will result in the filing of the appropriate criminal charges forthwith. Further, officer(s) with three or more misconduct judgments will be deemed unfit for service and terminated without pay, pension, or benefits. From the moment I’m elected and as long as I’m mayor, the taxpayers of New York will pay one misconduct judgment per officer. Accidents happen. For any and all subsequent judgments officers will be held personally liable. We’ll see how long police and COs continue to rack up civil rights judgments while paying them out of pocket;

Don’t you think that this will cause the police and corrections lobbies to turn their backs on you, and refuse to work, like they did to Mayor de Blasio?

No doubt, and the union bosses will crimson and spittle and call me a bunch of names, too, but this was why I spent years with Bill trying to steel his moral resolve. It’s why we discussed how this is in reality a pro-police stance (because by committing misconduct and getting away with it, the police have eroded the public trust that undergirds a working criminal justice apparatus). By holding them accountable, I’m restoring faith in them and the important work that they do. The police take an oath to uphold and defend the law. I am simply asking them to keep their word, and, if they can’t, to find a new line of work.

What will you do with the money the city saves on misconduct, and on benefits and pensions for terminated officers, which in recent years has risen into the hundreds of millions, and even billions?

Yes, exactly. Experts in corrections and public safety have known for 30 or 40 years how to effectively prevent recidivism and reduce crime. Yet despite a host of proven programs and rock-solid data showing us how to keep New York City safe without aggressive and alienating law enforcement tactics, we keep adding more officers, more money, and more military-grade war gear to an already bloated $4.8 billion police budget, while spending a paltry fraction of that amount on programs that the data shows are far more effective.

There has been a lot of talk during the campaign about affordable housing. You said you plan to address this issue as part of your platform. How?

Yes, I do, I plan to address it specifically as it relates to displacement by gentrification. During the primary people kept highlighting how Bill froze rent increases and created more affordable housing than any mayor in city history. This was a great sound bite, but quite literally everyone I know in New York saw their rent increase during the last four years. Very few could’ve passed the intensive credit check and salary vetting to qualify for one of the supposedly “affordable” housing lottery units even if they’d beaten the one in a million odds of getting selected to apply for one (though nobody I know did, you?).

These are obviously cosmetic gestures and woefully insufficient to meet the amount of need for affordable housing that exists throughout the five boroughs. Starting on day one, I plan to turn all parcels of city-owned land over to community-run public land trusts that will determine how to best convert the properties into affordable housing.

Any real estate developer that wants a permit for a private project will need to commit to hiring 75% of workers from the area surrounding the site. They’ll be required to deed 10% of new units to recently displaced residents of the area, and devote an additional 40% of units to affordable rental housing as measured by an amount equal to or lesser than the lowest median income of the proposed site’s zip code for a period covering 20 prior years, with first rental lottery preference given to residents with longest residence.

I also plan to give tax breaks and multiple operating incentives to businesses that hire and train young people previously involved in the criminal justice system, and specifically those that live in neighborhoods directly in the crosshairs of blistering gentrification. Gentrification lives in this gap, where incoming businesses refrain from hiring long-time residents, and especially those who have previously been involved in the criminal justice system – or if they do hire them, it’s for menial labor that doesn’t pay a living wage – and I will implement a schedule of incentives and penalties designed to close this gap ASAP.

Are there any other issues you plan to address?

Another issue that needs to be urgently addressed is traffic congestion and pollution around the city. I was in Sunset Park the other morning and the massive cloud of smog leering at the city was horrific. How this has not been addressed in any meaningful way by a progressive mayor with four years under his belt is preposterous. Accordingly, I plan to phase fossil-fuel powered vehicles out of New York City by the end of my first term.

Year one, if you drive a fossil-fuel powered vehicle during rush hour you’ll pay $10 on your way in and $10 on your way out. If you use a commute-sharing app, which allows commuters from nearby areas to find one another and carpool, the toll will be $7.00 per trip with two people checked in, $3.00 with three, and $0 with four. Year two the top charge for solo drivers will increase from $10 to $20, year three from $20 to $40, and so on. The charge for a four-person check-in will increase from $0 to $2, $2 to $4, etc.

Electric and solar-powered vehicles will pay no toll, and the city will create tax and parking incentives that will promote the increased purchase and use of environmentally friendly vehicles. I plan to introduce similar penalties for buildings and businesses, with similarly generous incentives for those that choose to go green. The substantial revenue generated by the penalties for delaying or refusing to go green will go towards revamping and improving the city’s crumbling and embarrassing public transportation infrastructure, which the governor and state officials have proven they cannot be trusted to manage.

The bottom line is that so-called progressives can no longer allow a brown cloud of exhaust to hang over the city every morning during rush hour while just about every car sitting in traffic is occupied by a single person – I mean literally nothing could be stupider for a city surrounded by water on all sides than to continue allowing this.

So, let’s do a quick recap: No money in politics; taxpayers no longer pay for repeat official misconduct; create enough affordable housing to meet need; reduce pollution; improve public transit infrastructure.

Yes, that’s right.

You know, if you threw in universal health care and a freeze on military spending, you might have a platform that could be used as a litmus test for all progressive candidates.

Yeah, maybe, like an ALEC for progressives, or something.

How about PALEC?

Haha, I like that.

Which leads me to ask: if New York is widely regarded as one of the most progressive cities in America, how is it that you find yourself in this position?

Which position? Waging a longshot write-in campaign a month before Election Day?

Precisely. In this day and age of supposed “resistance,” the positions you have outlined, or some modified iteration of them, should be automatic it seems, part of every platform. How isn’t there a single candidate in the mayoral race that already supports them?

It’s a good question. These are all pretty basic reforms that would most likely have been implemented a long time ago if money and powerful interests hadn’t commandeered our local, state, and federal election processes. But commandeer them they have, and they show no signs of returning them to us voluntarily. Which means we’ll have to hope and pray that Bill comes to his senses in his second term, realizes that his mother protector, his progressive conscience – that is, me – is not a real person, and that I can’t run for political office. We’ll have to hope he remembers where he left me four years ago, in his attic on 11th Street when he moved into Gracie Mansion, and that one day he’ll find the time to stop in and visit me on his way home from his workout at the Park Slope.

 

 

Let’s Make New York City A True Sanctuary City

By Filed Under: Persisting in Park Slope Tagged With: ,

In 1985 in Arizona, a Presbyterian minister learned that a group of refugees fleeing death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador was in need of safe passage across the US border. More concerned about their lives than the law or the political leanings of his neighbors, he helped them over the border and into his church basement, assuring them he would refuse to turn them over to the authorities. In doing so, according to the New York Times, he unwittingly spawned the use of a term that has recently come back into fashion: “sanctuary.”

While the anti-immigrant crowd is busy enacting travel bans on Muslims, telling Spanish-speakers to “go home” even if home is here, threatening to withhold federal funding for noncompliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and cheering on agents as they lurk outside schools, courthouses, hospitals, and other government buildings for families to disband and livelihoods to disrupt, officials in cities in California, Massachusetts, and New York have responded by defiantly proclaiming themselves “sanctuary cities,” promising protection to immigrants and their families.

[pullquote]Let’s show our undocumented friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and other loved ones that when we say we’re going to do everything in our power legally to protect them, we mean it.[/pullquote]In New York, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have in recent months detained a 39-year-old man in Manhattan Criminal Court, three people waiting outside Queens Criminal Court, a 19-year-old Ossining student on the night of his senior prom, and scores of others in both city and countywide sweeps. In response, local officials have beefed up funding for immigrant legal services, instructed school officials to turn away agents without warrants, and advised local police to no longer grant voluntary detainer requests. On the state side, the New York Assembly has passed or introduced legislation barring cooperation with ICE (The Liberty Act), granting pathways to citizenship (The DREAM Act), and allowing undocumented drivers to obtain licenses (A4050)—though some Senate leaders have fiercely opposed these bills and others like them.

While these are important efforts, and they should be lauded, the truth is that they don’t go nearly far enough. With this in mind, here are three steps city and state leaders in New York and beyond can take right now to become true sanctuaries for their undocumented residents:

1. Preemptively issue trespass warnings to all ICE and DHS agents and employees:

For decades in just about every city in America, police, prosecutors, judges, and an array of staff at different municipal agencies have used written and verbal trespass warnings to keep people they deem “problematic” or “undesirable” away from parks, schools, public housing developments, busses and subways, and they have done it under threat of arrest and prosecution. Today, however, when these same city leaders in “progressive” enclaves such as Boston and New York promise undocumented residents protection, they seem to keep forgetting that this powerful legal tool is at their disposal. It’s time we remind them.

Elected officials with the appropriate jurisdiction should immediately begin ordering the posting of signs such as the following in prominent positions on all courthouses, schools, hospitals, parks, pools, ice rinks, busses, subways, bus and subway stations and terminals, and all other buildings or facilities where essential local government services are offered:

“Any Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employee or agent conducting immigration investigation work on these premises without a valid warrant signed by a judge in her or his bodily possession is trespassing pursuant to NYS Penal Law 140.05 and, if in possession of a firearm, NYS Penal Law 140.17.”

This is an important first step that elected officials can take to demonstrate to immigrants and their families that they are serious about using all legal means necessary to provide the largest amount of physical and geographical protection possible. It’s also something that homeowners, landlords, and business owners can do, because private property owners have the authority to post written trespass warnings prominently on their own premises. The message to federal immigration agents in any city claiming to be a sanctuary city must be crystal clear: if you are trying to detain and deport our friends, neighbors, and loved ones, you’re not welcome here. Go and get a warrant, Redcoat, or kick rocks.

2. End Broken Windows, and criminal and civil enforcement of petty infractions:

Broken Windows, marijuana arrests, turnstile-jumping (known officially as theft of services), and other so-called “quality of life” arrests have been responsible for funneling thousands of immigrants at risk of detention and deportation into searchable criminal record and fingerprint databases that contain court dates, places of abode, employment details, and other highly sensitive identifying information.

In February, after ICE conducted a citywide immigration raid that landed 40 people in custody, Karina Garcia, an organizer with the ANSWER coalition, told the Village Voice: “We cannot claim to be a sanctuary city when police flood immigrant communities with cops who are racking up summonses and arrests in huge numbers.”

Ms. Garcia is dead-on. If elected officials in New York and other cities want to be taken seriously when they invoke the word sanctuary and offer protection to immigrants, they cannot continue to support dragnet police practices that substantially heighten the daily risk of detention and deportation. The city has proposed back-end measures to reduce the number of days of certain sentences to avoid triggering immigration consequences, but this is not nearly enough. A true sanctuary city cannot—and would not—allow its police department to continue indiscriminately funneling immigrants into a system that places them in imminent danger of the very thing they’re supposed to be protecting them from.

3. Repurpose the NYPD Gang Division as the Immigrant Protection Division:

According to a 2015 report by Babe Howell, criminal law professor at the City University of New York, the NYPD’s Gang Division has quadrupled its ranks in recent years despite violent crime being at its lowest level in decades. This deployment has occurred in the face of a massive body of criminological data showing that a public health approach to gang violence is far more effective at preventing shootings than law enforcement operations, and that it achieves better results at a fraction of the cost.

In 2016, for example, five employees at an organization called 696 Queensbridge cut shootings down to zero in 96 public housing buildings in Queens for more than a year. If the City of New York wants to protect its 3.7 million-plus immigrants who largely live in the same areas being targeted by the NYPD’s gang raids—neighborhoods like Harlem, East Flatbush, Queensbridge, and parts of the Bronx, to name a few—then the city should fund and scale programs like 696 Queensbridge with the same power of mandate as police.

Properly funding and scaling such programs would allow the city to safely and more effectively prevent gun violence while reducing the burden on gang division officers to solve entrenched societal problems that law enforcement is unequipped to address by nature of its job description. A data-driven allocation of public safety resources would free up legions of patrol officers for more strategic real-time deployment. This would allow them to respond to calls of ICE and DHS agents violating trespass warnings, to confirm whether or not they have the requisite legal paperwork to be on the premises, and to escort them off if not. It would also allow patrol officers to respond to calls of agents in the area, so that they could escort those at risk of deportation into court when they need to report crimes or obtain protective orders, visit city hospitals, and safely drop their kids off at school (just imagine the amount of community trust such efforts might restore in the NYPD).

Perhaps more importantly, scaling successful public health intervention models like 696 Queensbridge to all of New York’s gun violence hotspots would all but eliminate gang-related gun homicides and nonfatal shootings citywide. This would free up detectives to clear an alarming and growing backlog of unsolved anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-Semitic hate crimes that have spiked by as much as 100% in New York since November. And lastly, such a move would give detectives more time and resources to infiltrate and detain white supremacist terrorists before they can kill, as in the case of the 28-year-old Baltimore man who killed 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in Hells Kitchen in March.

New York City and New York State have implemented some important measures to protect immigrants, but there is still a long way to go. Queens Borough President Melinda Katz recently said the presence of ICE agents “severely disrupts and obstructs justice”. Not only is she right, but her argument also extends by way of logic to all essential city services—honestly, can there be anything more disruptive to students learning, victims going to court, patients seeking medical care, commuters navigating crowded bus and subway platforms, etc., than the specter of federal agents lurking around every corner trying to snatch people out of crowds without warrants?

So, let’s get serious, New York. Let’s show our undocumented friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and other loved ones that when we say we’re going to do everything in our power legally to protect them, we mean it. We can start today, by demanding that our elected officials implement these three simple steps forthwith.

 

Resources:

696 Queensbridge

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/queensbridge/local-resources/healthy-community.page

 

ANSWER coalition

http://www.answercoalition.org/

 

How to Contact your Elected Officials

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials/

 

 

Persisting in Park Slope: Getting Our Boycott On

By Filed Under: Community Spirit

With news of record high temperatures holding over the Arctic, visa bans stranding travelers in mid-flight, Congress still toying with the idea of messing with millions of Americans’ health insurance, and myriad other crises of law and justice that seem to be bombarding us with surreal frequency lately, it has become clear that we as a citizenry are going to have to get more creative in how we unite and defend our environment and one another.

History shows that one of the surest ways to get bad actors to behave is money. Whether it is a private citizen, corporation, or government behaving badly, boycotts that threaten a significant loss of funds have witnessed centuries of success. In the 1760s, a tea boycott worked for the Daughters of Liberty, causing the British Crown to repeal the Stamp Act. In the 1950s, a bus boycott forced the city of Montgomery, AL to integrate its busses. In 2015, a Mizzou football team boycott caused the university president to resign, and justrecently the #deleteUber campaign brought the ride-sharing giant’s CEO to his knees.

So, which of the many injustices out there should concerned Park Slopers target with a boycott today?

 

 

One the most urgent crises facing all humanity, Park Slope and beyond, is the changing climate. Earth’s glaciers are melting, carbon gases are pouring into the atmosphere, and vulnerable species of plants and animals are disappearing faster than scientists can keep track. That’s not to say that visa bans, immigration raids, and lost health insurance are not urgent or important – they are. It’s just that if current warming trends continue, and our ecosystem hurtles toward collapse, those and pretty much all other issues are moot.

According to Defund DAPL (www.defunddapl.org), nearly every financial institution American consumers do daily banking business with is invested in one or more fossil fuel infrastructure projects that accelerate climate change and threaten drinking water. The Dakota Access Pipeline alone is funded by Citigroup, TD Securities, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Mizuho Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, HSBC, and just about every other large bank that comes to mind.

Multiple cities, including Seattle and Davis, CA, have led the way and divested more than $4 billion in public funds from these banks. Many private citizens have done the same, taking more than $74 million out of their savings and checking accounts and transferring it into credit unions and locally owned banks. While this is commendable, these sums are thus far merely drops in a bucket for banks with profits in the trillions.

 

According to the 2010 Census, the neighborhood of Park Slope has 65,000 residents, a number that grows to 105,000 when including Community District Six. Annual income mapping shows that residents of this neighborhood, were they to decide on a cause to unite around, could strategically deploy $6-10 billion in annual economic leverage — meaning a united Park Slope could by itself quadruple the size of Defund DAPL’s boycott right now.

Which leads to the main question(s) for those considering making the move to divest: What will it cost in terms of risk, lost time, and daily big banking convenience?

To find out I sought out Jules S., a teacher in Park Slope who recently made the switch from JP Morgan Chase to Amalgamated Bank:

“I’ve been meaning to do this for a while,” he told me over the phone when I spoke to him last week.

“How long did the switch take?”

“About a month in all, including direct deposit. I set up the new account, made a list of my deposit and bill pay accounts, and then switched them over one at a time.”

“And were there any services that you lost?”

“So far it’s been the same. Direct deposit, online bill pay, photo check cashing—it’s all there, none of it has changed.”

“What about ATM locations, though?” I interrupted, referencing what I expected to be the biggest issue in terms of convenience.

“Amalgamated uses Allpoint ATMs. They’re in 7-11, CVS, Walgreens, and a lot of bodegas and shops. I’ve honestly never had a problem finding one.”

The only other point of concern I could find was deposit insurance coverage from the FDIC, but it turns out most credit unions are insured by NCUSIF, roughly equivalent to the FDIC, and most small banks retain the same FDIC deposit protections as large ones.

As long you do your homework first and find the right credit union (which you can do at culookup.com/), or bank—Amalgamated Aspiration, Carver, and Spring are four good local options—you can find virtually all of the same services, access to ATMs, deposit insurance, and other conveniences as before, which means that for those Brooklyn residents who do most of their banking in and around New York City, there’s no good reason not to switch.

So, Park Slopers, District Sixers, and the rest of our Brooklyn family with accounts at banks that fund environmentally destructive infrastructure projects such as DAPL, I’d say it’s about high time we got our divestment boycott on, wouldn’t you?