New Democratic Political Club Seeks to Bring Power to the People

“We are very grass roots,”  said Renee Collymore, standing outside the new Parliament Democratic Club, housed in a narrow storefront on Putnam Avenue, between Grand Avenue and Downing Street.  Ms. Collymore is just coming off her work as Deputy Campaign Manager for Queens Democratic Council Member David Weprin during his run for city comptroller and is still geared for action.  “Democracy has to be exercised and it is not being exercised to its fullest here in Brooklyn.  The people have to be energized.  Political freedom is very important and the people have been giving up their power to the elected officials because of lazy voting and inertia.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While there are other political clubs in the area, Ms. Collymore says that the way for a political club to have an impact on the community is to actually perform useful services, and that is where her club will differ.  “It cannot be just politics while people are not getting assistance.  Politics mixed with social programs is the key,” says Ms. Collymore.  “Politics alone makes  a club handicapped.   We have implemented a pilot program, The Fundamentals of Citizenship, to sixth-graders where I will be teaching them their responsibility as citizens, and what their duties are as citizens.  Even as sixth-graders, they are citizens. 

“This is a Democratic Club with an independent voice.  We have Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians in this club. This is a club of inclusion.  I want to popularize the idea of political clubs again.  I want to pull people out of poverty and give them political clout.  I want the little political club on the corner to be like a small branch of government.  We will be working block-by-block to include people so that they can exercise their power locally.” 

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.

THE BEST MAN

Bill Thompson was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of hard-working parents, an educator and a judge.

 

He’s lived almost all of his life in Central Brooklyn.

He grew up in Bedford Stuyvesant on Putnam Avenue between Stuyvesant and Marcus Garvey Blvd. (then Reid Avenue) in the house his grandparents William and Louise Thompson succeeded in purchasing 70 years ago.  They were the second Black family on the block.  They later took pride in their grandson being an acolyte at St. Phillips Episcopal Church on Decatur Street.

Mr. Thompson’s mother, Elaine Thompson, who taught at various public schools, including P.S. 262, was a member of a team of compassionate educators — Almira Coursey, Elaine DeGrasse Perkins, Virginia Pope, June Fleary and others — who privately pushed young strivers to reach their potential.  And they never took public credit for it.

Over the years, Mr. Thompson has lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Heights and other areas, before finally returning to his boyhood home where he resided until last year; he now lives in Harlem.

And while the years have been good to him, he has not forgotten where he came from or where most hard working New Yorkers are coming from.

“My parents taught me to work as hard as you can, do the best job you can, and know that no one is going to give you anything; you have to go out and earn it.”

And Mr. Thompson has earned it.

In fact, the best man for the job of Mayor of New York City — it’s being decided by admirers from the tony penthouse apartments on the Upper East Side to the brownstones of the Comptroller’s old neighborhood — is Mr. Thompson.  Plus, they say, he is asking for your vote based on his ability to lead and to talk eye to eye.  He’s not paying for it. 

In 2001, Mr. Bloomberg spent $74 million to run in the mayoral race. He said then that his spending was “obscene” and that he would not spend that much on a campaign ever again.

In 2005, he spent $85 million for his re-election bid in 2005.

This year, his spending is estimated upwards from 100 million dollars, pointing out not so much how powerful he is as much as how fearful he may be of Thompson’s power.

In some respects Mr. Bloomberg’s wealth is not the central issue; after all, it is his money.  “No matter how much money is spent, our votes can’t be bought, that’s the message,” Thompson has said, and adds in a reference to Mr. Bloomberg’s successful push in reversing term-limits rulings. “Eight is enough.”

This Tuesday, November 3^rd Central Brooklyn will have an opportunity to vote for new leadership. If this does not happen, apathy will win the election, not Mr. Bloomberg.

- Bernice Elizabeth Green