A Tale of Two Cities… and A Lesson in Reformist Mayors
by Alan Goodman | September 28, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A city is simmering from years of living under a mayor who disdains to even try to conceal his fixation with building up the central business/arts/tourist district, who exudes contempt for the plight of everyone else, and whose relationship with the Black community is more or less modeled on the “relationship” between a prison warden and the inmates.
In this atmosphere, an election for a new mayor drones along until a dynamic candidate emerges from the pack. That candidate has ties to minority communities. The candidate is attacked for a past that includes “leftist” and “socialist” associations–attacks that serve to bolster the candidate’s credibility with a deeply disenchanted electorate.
Readers following the meteoric rise of New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio might recognize the scenario. Campaign ads featuring de Blasio’s African-American teenage son denouncing NYC’s racist stop-and-frisk policies captured the imagination of voters. The attraction was noted by the city fathers. And overnight, de Blasio was catapulted to the head of a crowded pack of otherwise dull reformists to win the primary election for the Democratic Party candidate for mayor of New York City.
But that’s not the election I was describing in the opening paragraphs. Instead, I was replaying an election three years ago in Oakland, California. For eight years, Jerry Brown (who had previously served as governor of California, and went on to become governor of California again) had reigned as mayor of Oakland. Brown was fixated on developing Oakland’s coastal high-tech and tourist areas, built up an element of an arts community to facilitate that, and “branded” and marketed Oakland as “closer to San Francisco than San Francisco.” All the while, vast stretches of the city rotted, and social services declined. Police brutality raged unchecked, cheered on by Brown.
After eight long years, with whatever non-establishment veneer he once exuded long worn off, Brown was succeeded by Ron Dellums. Dellums’ term was marked in large part by his absence from public life, and he accomplished little to chill out anger at the state of things—anger which burst out in protests after the outrageous transit police murder of Oscar Grant.
Early on New Year’s Day, 2009, while Oscar Grant was being detained on a transit platform, transit cop Johannes Mehserle shot him in the back, killing him. The murder was captured by bystanders on cell phones, and the videos went viral, sparking outrage around the country and beyond. In the face of sustained and determined protests in Oakland, Mehserle was charged with murder. Mehserle’s trial was moved out of Oakland to Los Angeles, and on July 8, 2010, Mehserle was found not guilty of second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, and convicted only of involuntary manslaughter. The unjust verdict was met with more protests, more police brutality and repression, and dozens of people were arrested. Sections of the city seethed with anger, even more broadly, there was a profound sense of disgust at how the city was being run.
In November 2010, at the end of Dellums’ term, a contentious and complicated election took place where ten candidates—many if not most of them posturing as radicals or reformers—competed. Jean Quan emerged the winner. She had run on her credentials as a former UC Berkeley student activist, and it didn’t hurt her appeal that she was detained by Oakland police during a protest against the verdict of the transit cop who murdered Oscar Grant. Quan and another mayoral candidate had linked arms and placed themselves between protesters and police to form a buffer space and diffuse confrontation, but the Oakland Police Department detained her anyway.
Quan’s campaign featured walks through the oppressed neighborhoods with her son and husband. Sympathetic news coverage portrayed a “grass-roots” campaign that was listening to people’s complaints. And Quan portrayed herself as the progressive alternative to a conservative establishment candidate who was leading in the polls for most of the campaign and had more funding and support from some of Oakland’s traditional power-brokers.
One activist wrote of the election, “I and so many others were overjoyed not only that she had become Oakland’s first Asian American and first female mayor, but that Jean Quan the progressive activist had become mayor.” (see: http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2011/11/jean-quan-and-death-asian-america#sthash.WH8geyb2.dpuf)
The Legacy and Lessons of a “Reformer” Mayor
So how did that play out?
None of the fundamental problems that people hoped Quan would change actually changed. Police brutality continued unabated. Overcrowded, underfunded schools for the Black, Latino, and Asian communities were not built up but shuttered.
But Quan’s mayorship has left one lasting historic legacy.
Early in the morning of October 25, 2011, hundreds of police attacked Oakland’s Occupy encampment with “shock and awe” tactics. Police trashed 150 tents including Occupy Oakland’s collective kitchen, medical resources, library, and day care space. In protest, Occupiers and their supporters rallied at Oakland’s Main Library (which librarians, in solidarity, refused to close, in spite of police orders), and marched back to the encampment site to reclaim it. Police met them with a shocking display of tear gas, clubs, and “non-lethal” projectiles fired at people. The wanton brutality included nearly killing Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, who was shot in the head by police with a “non-lethal object” fired from about 15 feet away. (See “Occupy Oakland: Courageous, Determined Resistance in the Face of Brutal Police Assault” at revcom.us).
The attack was met with widespread outrage, in the U.S. and around the world. And it left Quan’s supporters in a state of shock and dismay. One group of Asian American Oakland residents who had supported Quan circulated an open letter after the assault that said in part: “It is a sad day. We once believed you to be an ally to low-income, communities of color; to progressive politics; to real democracy. What happened?”
What happened was that the rulers of the United States, at a central level, agreed that the Occupy Wall Street movement, limited as its demands were, posed an intolerable threat to the functioning of U.S. capitalism-imperialism, and that it had to be shut down. And they made the most compelling “argument” they could for that—they sent their police forces in city after city to not only dismantle the Occupy sites and disperse and arrest the activists, but to administer shocking brutality to essentially institute a reign of terror against anyone who resisted or thought about resisting. And if that meant having the Oakland police fire a “non-lethal projectile” at the head of a protester, well… message delivered.
In the aftermath of the attack on Occupy in Oakland, movement activists, including some whose raison d’etre is working through the electoral system to bring about supposed change, engaged in a flurry of angst-filled debates, with some claiming that this whole attack was orchestrated behind Quan’s back in direct communication between federal law enforcement officials and the Oakland Police Department.
The whole story behind the attack on Oakland Occupy has not been revealed, but what is known points to Quan functioning as an active cog in the machine that brought down so much violence against Occupy. Shortly before the attack, Quan was part of a conference call with 18 U.S. mayors to discuss what to do about the Occupy protests. Some news coverage asserted that unidentified “top police brass” also participated in the call. And shortly after the call, there were police attacks on Occupy encampments around the country including in Salt Lake City, Denver, Portland, Oakland, and New York City. (see “Mayors and Cops Traded Strategies for Dealing With Occupy Protesters,” Mother Jones, 11/16/2001).*
And right after the attack on Occupy Oakland, Quan made the outrageous statement that “We want to thank the police, fire, public works and other employees who worked over the last week to peacefully close the encampment.”
Whether the police attack on Oakland Occupy took place with Quan’s full approval in advance, or not, the whole experience serves as an indictment of the worthlessness of, and harm in putting faith in electing “reformer” mayors to bring about meaningful change. The essence of the nature of this society is a monopoly of the use of repressive violence by the ruling class. And that is a problem that can only be solved with a real revolution.
Lessons for This Moment
Right now, there are critical political battles that need to be waged around real outrages and abuses including the struggle to stop mass incarceration and police brutality and the political battle to stop the onslaught of laws that force women to bear children against their will by banning abortion. There is a very pressing need to change the whole way people view these and other outrages, and to go right up in the face of the ways the system gets people to go along with these attacks on people.
It is understandable why those who are deeply invested in upholding and shoring up this system of global exploitation, oppression and violent repression would seek to divert discontent into electing “reformer” candidates like Quan. Or de Blasio.
But from the perspective of those who should NOT be starting from how to help this system continue to grind up spirits and lives, throwing energy and hopes into electing people like Quan works against building the kind of consciousness and resistance so needed today.
The rise of the candidacy of Bill de Blasio for Mayor of NYC comes at a moment of widespread discontent and anger over a whole range of abuses. It comes at a time when many people are questioning, or can be challenged to question the legitimacy of this system. Sharpening extreme income and social inequality is blatantly on display in NYC—where glittery luxury stores and corporate skyscrapers tower over record numbers of homeless people. A recent report revealed that a family made up of people making minimum wage would have to work three and half full time jobs to afford an apartment in New York City. Very central to the anger and discontent is stop-and-frisk. Actions like protests organized by Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party and Cornel West and the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN) have exposed and called that out, and SMIN is leading determined political resistance. A recent federal court ruling that challenged some elements of stop-and-frisk (without ending it) further posed issues of legitimacy for the ruling powers.
This discontent was revealed, in a sense, by the response to de Blasio’s ad claiming “Bill de Blasio, the only candidate to end a stop and frisk era that targets minorities.”
But de Blasio is being deployed not as a way to end all these abuses—he couldn’t even if he wanted to. His candidacy is being promoted, by those who have the power to define whether or not a candidate is “credible” as a safety valve to delude and pacify people, to draw them away from fighting the power and to divert them away from raising big questions about this system and back into the killing embrace of the system that is responsible for all these outrages and that has no future for billions of people, here and around the world.
This is a deadly game. People should take a lesson from Oakland and refuse to play it, and instead put their efforts and resources to where it will make a positive difference—the movement for revolution.
* Possibly shedding more light on how the real levers of power functioned in the attacks on Occupy, a story at Examiner.com, based on an interview with a federal law enforcement official said that while police in each city devised their own specific plans, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies. The article reported that “According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.” (See “Update: 'Occupy' Crackdowns Coordinated With Federal Law Enforcement Officials,” Examiner.com 11/15/2011) [back]
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