One Valiant Effort: Thompson Concedes Run for Mayor

 

              During his yearlong quest for Mayor, Bill Thompson faced the biggest multi-million dollar campaign juggernaut in municipal history. He did so with style, grace and a gentlemanly comportment. The Thompson campaign spent election night at the New York Hilton, where hundreds of supporters packed the ballroom.

            A Who’s Who of Democratic leadership made remarks. Moderated by Harlem Assemblyman Keith Wright, those who addressed the crowd during the hours as the vote count between Bloomberg and Thompson remained tight (48% to 49%)  included  Norman Seabrook of the Corrections Officers Association, DC 37’s Exec. Dir. Lillian Roberts, President of RWDSU Stewart Applebaum, President of the Uniformed Firefighters Association Steve Cassidy, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Bronx Borough President Reuben Diaz, Jr., Councilwoman Letitia James, Assemblyman Darryl Towns, Assemblyman Espaillat, NYS Comptroller Tom Dinapoli, Assemblywoman Debra Glick, Assemblyman Jeff Genowitz, Congressman Anthony Weiner, and Rev. Al Sharpton. 

            Bill DeBlasio said “our candidate Bill Thompson is one of the most decent people in public life. He has done everything right. He has served with distinction. Bill Thompson has served us well.  John Liu told the crowd that Bill Thompson “has confounded” every pollster, referring to re-election polls that inflated Bloomberg’s lead. Liu said, “we have seen results that speak well of democracy in NYC.” NYS Senate President Pro Tempore Malcolm Smith said, “It is Thompson’s time.”

            As the night wore on, the crowds jubilant mood began to change as word spread that the vote total moved to 51% for Bloomberg, 46% for Thompson.

            Governor Paterson said he could not leave the stage without telling the truth, “The fact is, there are too many Democrats who stayed home today, because they listened to the polls. They stayed home because they listened to people who represented everybody else’s interests except there own. Democrats need to believe in a Democratic party and those that represent the Democratic party – fighting against poor housing; fighting against drugs; crime; unemployment and underemployment. Fighting for decent educational facilities. Fighting to save the environment. And fighting for the education of our children.” Paterson added, “I want to congratulate Bill for not giving up.”

            Bill Thompson was called to the stage with the crowd chanting, “Billy! Billy!” and was greeted by warm, enthusiastic applause.

             Thompson’s words announcing he had just called to congratulate Michael Bloomberg was met with disapproving boos at the election results. Thompson said, “Although we have had our differences, we have always found common ground in our deep desire to serve this city. And to build a better future for this city.” He added, “And I pledge to do whatever I can to put the differences of the campaign behind us. And help him move this city forward as we work to address some very serious challenges.”

            With his head held high, Thompson said, “Tonight when the final votes are counted, the results will not be in our favor yet we still have much to be proud of.  This campaign was about standing up for your core values. This campaign was about standing strong, standing tall, and never backing down in the face of a formidable challenge. We are New Yorkers, That’s what we do.”

            “The work we started during this campaign doesn’t end tonight, in fact, it’s just beginning,” said Thompson. “I’ll continue to work with you to  make this city better. For others. It is our duty to make sure the issues we highlighted do not fade back into the shadows of our public dialog.”

            Thompson said he learned about public service from parents, a school teacher and an appellate court judge. He said, by their example, “I dedicated my life to giving back to this city that has given so much to me.”

            Citywide voter turnout was 1.1 million votes. Preliminary results are Bloomberg 51%  (557, 059  votes);   Thompson 46% (506,717 votes). Thompson won Brooklyn by 18,331 votes, and took the Bronx with 32,755 more votes than Bloomberg.

            Mayor Bloomberg spent upward of $90 million dollars, outspending Thompson by 14-to-1. With an average of $157.27 per Bloomberg vote compared to $13.12 per vote for Thompson, some attendees noted that Thompson may indeed be the better money manager.

            Thompson ended his remarks by saying, “Your support, your enthusiasm and desire for change is what carried me to this point.  We may not have won this election, and yet I know, this campaign had to be waged. I’ll never forget how much you gave to our cause”

            In central Brooklyn, election night affirmed the results of the primary. Councilwoman Letitia James won with 92% of the vote; Al Vann 63%; Mathieu Eugene 94%; Darlene Mealy 95%; and Charles Barron 93%. Jumaane Williams, who unseated Kendall Stewart, won with 76% of the vote.

            Public Advocate elect Bill DeBlasio won with 77% and John Liu, Comptroller elect, won with 76%.

View From Here: Why William Thompson for Mayor

Bill Thompson grew up on Putnam Avenue between Stuyvesant and Malcolm X Blvd.   The journey from those streets to being elected City Comptroller in 2001, managing a staff of more than 700 with a budget of $68 million and being overwhelmingly reelected in 2005,  is a long one with middle-class struggles, and successes achieved by hard work.  It is a journey that has attuned Comptroller Thompson to the problems that the middle class and middle class aspirants feel every day.  It has also given him the confidence to use the strategy necessary for this mayoral battle.  “The only way to compete with the richest man in New York City is to build from the ground up.  If you’re going to get into a dollar battle, you’re going to lose very quickly.” 

Thompson was speaking at a fund-raiser in the UN Plaza home of Edward Bergman and his family, high above the East River and about as far from Putnam Avenue as you can get. Here, Bill Thompson was speaking about education  and the need to go in a different direction.  “Our young people are being taught to take standardized tests,” he said.  “Our children are not taught critical thinking.  They’re not taught comprehension.  Not taught the skills they will need in the future.  We’re being given a false sense of accomplishment and all it is leading to is that our children are not being taught to compete.” 

Bill Thompson has an empathy with ordinary people that Mayor Bloomberg feels can be achieved by riding the subway four or five times a week.  But the Brooklyn Papers reported that in their interview with the Mayor, they asked about community benefit agreements, such as that signed by Bruce Ratner for the Atlantic Yards Project.  “I’m violently opposed to community benefits agreements,” the mayor replied.   “A small group of people, to feather their own nests, extort money from the developer? That’s just not good government.”    This statement alone disqualifies him as a choice for Mayor of New York City.  Here he is the richest man in New York, oblivious to the irony of his being “violently opposed” to small groups of unemployed Black men, many living pressed in by the explosion of construction in downtown Brooklyn, feathering their public housing nests, by demanding the opportunity to do hard work. 

He accuses them of extortion for insisting that developers of the gilded city rising only blocks away, put aside a portion of contracts and work for local people and companies.  He has $16 billion dollars, but helping someone bring home a paycheck for rent, food and clothing is “not good government.”  His concept of good government would have met with a vigorous nod of approval from Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who, the apocryphal story goes, when told the starving masses had no bread, thought she’d be cute and said, “Let them eat cake.”  True or not, it was 1793 during the French Revolution and the people objected to the haughty attitude and the lady lost her head.  

The mayor’s team seems to have lost their collective heads as well or they must have read something in the polls saying it won’t be a double-digit win, to risk bringing in Rudy Giuliani, the biggest loser in the Republican presidential primaries, and someone anathema to the African-American community, to campaign with the mayor. Giuliani knows as much now as when he snickered at the Republican Convention at the thought of a “community organizer” becoming president.

Rudy’s connecting an election of William Thompson with a probable rise in crime and Bloomberg, frankly dishearteningly, going further, saying that New York can go the way of Detroit if Thompson were elected, was certainly the most offensive local politicking we’ve seen in some time.  Why does a billionaire have to resort to running a morally bankrupt campaign? Maybe it is as former mayor David Dinkins said at the Manhattan fundraiser, they have forgotten the great Negro Baseball League player Satchel Paige’s admonition, “Don’t look back, they may be gaining on you.” 

I don’t know what the calculus is here, perhaps the old tactic of tricking poor whites that they and the plantation owners share a bond, but it is certainly dismissive of the Black vote and those who would rather have the men of the neighborhood going to and from work rather than standing around chronically unemployed.   The mayor’s office has to become centered on the problems of regular working people and those who want to be working, and the city budget has to be used to not only deliver services but to circulate in the communities that need them most, lifting the quality of life for all New Yorkers.  It’s time for the Bloomberg era to come to a close.   Polls open 6am, November 3rd.  Every vote counts.

Building a New Africa With its Soil and People

 

 

The new Africa starts here: how to make the people prosper.  If Africa is to thrive, a revolution in thinking is needed — and it must begin out in the farmers’ fields.

      By Wangari Maathai

      The Times (London)

      June 6, 2009

      Not long ago I was in Yaoundé, Cameroon, as part of my work as Goodwill Ambassador for the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem, a position to which I was appointed in 2005 by heads of state of the ten Central African nations. I was meeting the secretariat of the Congo Basin Forest Partnership and the Commission for the Forests of Central Africa (Comifac) based in Yaoundé, as well as economic and environment ministers from the region.

      As I stood outside the hotel in a light rain I looked across to one of the seven hills that surround the city. My eyes focused on a woman in the distance who was making rows of small depressions in the soil parallel to the gradient of the hill. “She shouldn’t be making furrows in that direction on such a steep slope,” I thought, “because when the rains come, very quickly all that soil will be lost.”

      But when I asked a hotel security guard why the woman was cutting furrows downward, instead of across, he explained that the rain would run along the furrows and therefore not disturb the crops.

      This directly contradicted every principle of soil conservation that I know, because when the rains fell the soil that the woman farmer had so carefully formed, and so desperately needed to make her bananas, maize or yams grow, would be swept down that hillside — in the very furrows she had just dug. She was creating the perfect environment for soil erosion, making it less likely that anything would grow on that hill in the future.

      There was an added irony to the situation. I was waiting for a car to take me to meetings to discuss safeguarding the Congo Basin forest — an ecosystem of 700,000sq km (270,000sq miles) that is the largest intact expanse of forest in the world after the Amazon.

      Yet I realized, no matter what else we were doing, unless those of us who would assemble at the Comifac headquarters could work with that farmer, multiplied several million times in Cameroon, the Congo region, and indeed throughout Africa, not only would we not save the Congo forests, but we might also be unable to halt the rapid desertification under way across the continent.

      Of course that woman farmer and others like her are not the primary threats to the forests of the Congo Basin. Mining and timber concessions that feed the seemingly insatiable global demand for raw wood, as well as residual conflict, are more directly destructive. But once the timber Lorries and mining companies have made their inroads and cleared the trees, it is people such as this subsistence farmer who follow — completing the cycle of destruction.

      Soils in tropical forests are often not well suited to agriculture. Unless farmers practice good land management, when trees are cut down the land is degraded, further increasing the risks of soil erosion and desertification. When the rains fall, the topsoil is washed into rivers, leaving the land behind barren.

      No blame should be apportioned to the woman on the hillside for attempting to eke out a living. But as I stood there that morning, she came to represent for me the collective challenges that face agriculture and development as a whole in many African nations. I wondered how much of the revenue of the luxurious hotel where I was staying — owned by a foreign corporation — was making its way into the Government’s coffers and, in turn, how much of that the Government was investing in its agricultural extension service to assist that woman to farm in a sustainable manner. Probably not enough.

      I also reflected that if African states’ agricultural extension services had not been under-funded or neglected in the decades since independence, that woman farmer could not only have learned the right way to prepare soil for planting, but might also have had access to information, modern equipment and governmental support that would have enabled her to grow crops more efficiently and less destructively.

      If, in turn, development practitioners and international agencies had, in their work with national governments, given more priority to investing in Africa’s farmers, the continent’s agricultural systems might not be in such poor condition today.

      If the continent’s governments had set development priorities so that productive land had been distributed more equitably and used more wisely, natural resources conserved and suitable urban planning undertaken, that woman might not have been forced up that hillside. If they had addressed the inequities of land distribution left from the colonial period and taken advantage of by the ruling elite, then this farmer might not have been tilling such unproductive soil.

      If African leaders had invested more in education and the creation of sustainable employment options and inclusive economies, and if they had been more concerned with the welfare of their people and not their own enrichment, then perhaps this farmer would have had more opportunity. Today she might be in another profession altogether, or be managing a larger, more efficient farm that could have freed her from grinding poverty.

      It is my many experiences similar to that encounter in Yaoundé that lead me to believe that if Africa, particularly south of the Sahara, is to progress so that it no longer depends on aid or remains a byword for poverty, conflict and corruption, it is on hillsides such as these, and with women such as that farmer, that we must work.

      For too long Africa has been on its knees: whether during the dehumanizing exploitation of the slave trade or under the yoke of colonialism or seeking aid from the international community or servicing illegitimate debts or praying for miracles.

      To change the life of that farmer, and millions like her, a fundamental revolution in leadership is needed. This would ensure that Africans experience good governance, respect for human rights, development that is equitable and sustainable, and, eventually, peace. The most important quality that African leadership needs to embrace, and that is desperately lacking across the continent, is a sense of service to the people in whose name leaders govern.

     But this revolution cannot be confined only to the ruling elites. Even the poorest and least empowered of African citizens need to rid themselves of a culture that tolerates systemic corruption, inefficiency and mismanagement of state affairs. Such a system also privileges one ethnic or socio-economic group over another. This, too, should be unacceptable.

      For decades African elites have ignored small-scale agriculture because it is assumed that it is only for the uneducated. But much of Africa is represented by that woman farmer on the hillside. Clearly African governments need to invest in making small-scale farmers more productive, especially as the effects of climate change intensify and growing sufficient amounts of food becomes even more challenging.

      At the same time, other regions have increased food production and have used subsidies, fertilizers, mechanization and sheer hard work to not only feed themselves but also to produce food so cheaply that it undercuts local African markets. Because of corruption, mismanagement and unstable international commodity prices, the cash-crop economy has not enriched ordinary Africans.

      At the very least one would want to see co-operatives that provide farmers with accurate and timely information about their crops and weather. Affordable inputs and vibrant local and regional food markets that are sustainable would be a better option. Governments should institute and enforce policies that ensure fair prices for their farmers in the global economy.

      Governments and individuals in Africa need to do all they can to improve land management — principally, preventing erosion. Africans should continue to welcome the international agencies, donor nations and private ventures that have an interest in helping the continent to develop in a manner that is sustainable and just.

      But, ultimately, the fate of Africa depends on its own leaders and its own citizens. Only Africans can resolve to provide leadership that is responsible, accountable and equitable. It is Africans who must decide whether they will manage their natural resources responsibly and distribute them equitably, using them for the good of fellow Africans. It is they who must determine whether they will continue to allow outside forces to seduce and bully their governments into arrangements that allow those resources to be siphoned from the continent for a pittance.

      It is for Africans to choose whether they will work hard to build up their own talents and abilities, strengthen their democracies and institutions of governance, and foster peoples’ creativity and industry.

      Can Africa take a different path so that her future generations will not look back and shake their heads at the expanding deserts and degraded lands? Or lament the large numbers of people migrating in search of water, land, food and work, and the inevitable conflicts over scarce resources? This is the challenge for Africa, including that woman on the hillside in Yaoundé.

      Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, is founder of the Green Belt Movement and the author, most recently, of The Challenge for Africa: A New Vision