Midweek: Dems' existential battle, Bezos's humiliation
Plus: Minimum wage workers strike back, affordable housing wins, book bans, and more
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The NYC mayoral election is down to the wire
Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg has donated $8.3 million to Andrew Cuomo's Super PAC in the last week alone, matching the amount of money that Mamdani’s campaign took in from more than 20,000 donors over a six month period.
The enormous deposits are helping to fuel a relentless ad campaign trashing Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who currently sits in second place in the polls. Billionaires have poured at least $20 million into Cuomo’s campaign in an attempt to buy the election for a disgraced pervert who would be kind to their agenda. It makes a mockery of democracy, but will it work?
Democrats have over-relied on traditional media in recent years, as best exemplified by the more than billion dollars they spent on TV ads for Kamala Harris’s campaign. Millennials and Gen-Z are far more likely to get their political news and have their opinions shaped by social media, which Mamdani has utterly dominated. Whether that translates into new voters remains to be seen, but at the very least, Mamdani’s campaign can take credit with getting young people out to the polls earlier than usual, which is fueling a huge spike in early voting numbers.
I’m not in the elections prediction game, but if Cuomo’s donors do flood the zone enough to hand him the election, I do think that will prove tremendously damaging to the Democratic Party, both locally and nationally. Both because of how he’ll have won the election, and what so many Democratic officials’ rush to re-anoint him after calling for his downfall just four years ago says about the party’s unwillingness to move on from its tired past, refusal to embrace young new voices, and happiness to surrender its elections to conservative billionaires.
Because to be clear, in a sane world, Cuomo has no business being mayor: he hasn’t lived in NYC in 30 years, he treated the city with contempt and actively made life here worse during his decade as governor (see: the subways, a fully funded 3K program, and housing prices). He was forced to resign in disgrace after being outed as a rampant sex pest by more than a dozen women, he helped cause the deaths of thousands upon thousands of senior citizens during the pandemic and then ordered the coverup to maintain a $5 million book deal about “leadership,” and was caught in multiple corruption scandals during his time in office.
Cuomo’s reascension would undermine every criticism that Democrats have lobbed at Donald Trump and Republicans who refuse to quit him amid so many personal and political scandals. It would be a promise and a threat to young people that any sincere effort to enact change will be crushed by the richest people in the world, and that the party is not actually interested in them.
⚾ Speaking of liberal cities: Perhaps it’s because our current mayor could not be any more aligned with Donald Trump, but the question of who would be willing and able to stand up to the president had not played a meaningful role in this election, at least up until Brad Lander was accosted and arrested by ICE earlier this week. It really should be a big issue, though, because it has far more impact on a city than, say, what a candidate thinks about the political leadership of Israel.
Just look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where the Dodgers, a team long known for its engagement in the civil rights movement, stayed completely silent as Trump flooded the city with 5,000 soldiers. Disappointed fans wondered why the team had gone silent, only to find out today that it’s because Dodger Stadium is an ICE hosting ground. Protestors have rushed to the site, while the club’s promise that it would today announce a series of measures to help the immigrant community suddenly seems a whole lot less sincere and altruistic.
Working Class Heroes
🤌 Bellissima: Activists in Venice, Italy are gearing up to rain on Jeff Bezos’s wedding day. The No Space for Bezos campaign will protest the €10 million event, scheduled for June 28th, which they call the perfect embodiment of the city’s growing emphasis on luxury tourism at the expense of its residents. They also object to Amazon’s exploitative business model and resistance to unionization, as well as Bezos’s cozying up to Donald Trump over the past few years.
“We are not protesting the wedding per se, but a vision of Venice … as a city that people come and consume,” one of the group’s leaders told Euronews. “We will create some inconvenience and delays and make the protest visible.”
The protest will see people clog streets and canals, which may prove inconvenient to Bezos’s fleet of super-yachts. Protestors also plan to have music playing at their various demonstrations, calling the event a party for the city.
🔄 Michigan: In January, Democrats and Republicans came together to gut a court-ordered increase to the tipped minimum wage for service workers. Now, a coalition of labor and community groups says it is organizing a ballot initiative to reinstate the court-ordered wage and free service workers from having to rely on tips to survive.
There is one awkward element to this: because the initiative would ask voters to repeal a law, once it qualifies for the ballot, it will pause implementation of the law. As a result, that would temporarily give tipped workers a pay raise while requiring other minimum wage workers to take a 44-cent pay cut until the election.
🛒 Supermarket sweeps: Workers at another 12 Safeway grocery stores in Colorado have voted to authorize a strike, putting more muscle behind the UFCW’s hardball approach after more than seven months of failed negotiations with parent company Albertsons. There are currently seven stores on strike, all but one of them in Denver. The 12 stores that voted to join them if necessary are all located in Colorado Springs.
UFCW Local 7 also represents King Sooper’s workers in Colorado, thousands of whom went on strike in February over stalled contract negotiations. The union agreed to pause the strike for 100 days while it continued haggling with King Sooper parent company Kroger; that moratorium expired last month, but they have yet to return to the picket line.
All of this is happening in parallel to a far bigger potential grocery store strike in California. More than 45,000 workers at Ralphs and Albertsons-owned stores in the Golden State voted to authorize a strike amid dragging negotiations. Talks resumed this week, and without a breakthrough, UFCW Local 770 will hold a practice picket on June 25th and potentially ask workers to walk out days after that.
🏢 Ooops: DOGE’s draconian cuts to government functionality included giving up leases for 10 critical NLRB field offices around the country. But after Trump’s own NLRB nominees cried foul, the administration is rolling back those decisions.
Here we go again
😡 Disaster impending: Polls show that nobody wants to go to war with Iran, but AIPAC lobbyists are going to push us into one anyway. Sadly, Democratic leaders, who benefit most from the largesse, are showing absolutely zero interest in trying to prevent Donald Trump from playing dictator and unilaterally joining a foreign war.
Republicans themselves are divided on whether the US should enter the war, and even those who fall into the pro-war camp can’t decide on the justification. Some say Iran must be prevented from building a nuclear weapon, while others just come out and say that they want to topple the repressive regime in Tehran. It sounds a whole lot like the run up to the Iraq War, but there’s one difference: US intelligence doesn’t think that Iran is even working on a nuke right now.
Relentless culture war
🏳️⚧️ Bigots in robes: The Supreme Court continues to legalize discrimination; yesterday it was against trans kids, using cynical and circular logic to justify bans on gender-affirming care in half the country. Several justices also used the opportunity to question the many studies that have shown the benefit of such care, despite that not at all being germane to the decision.
📚 Philistines in Florida: School librarians have now removed more than 11,000 physical books from the shelves in Hillsborough County, home of Tampa and St. Petersburg. The county removed more than 50 additional titles last week after the school superintendent received a lashing from the state Board of Education, which ordered Hillsborough to ignore the review process required by Florida law and pull books as soon as they’re challenged by parents.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent Hillsborough a letter about the books last month, threatening action by his new Office of Parental Rights if the county did not accede to his demands. Hillsborough went one step further, removing books that were banned in other counties. Orange County’s school board then proactively removed all the books pulled by Hillsborough, continuing a chain of repression.
Here’s some good news:
Idaho: The state Supreme Court ruled in favor of pro-choice activists and ordered Idaho’s scummy attorney general, Raul Labrador, to write a more accurate ballot line and description for the upcoming abortion rights initiative.
California: A new bill introduced in the legislature this week would ban law enforcement from wearing masks that obscure their faces. It is a clear response to plainclothes ICE agents wearing facial covers as they accost and arrest immigrants and protestors.
Arkansas: A group called For AR Rights has resubmitted a ballot initiative that would undo many of the changes made to the ballot initiative process signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The first time that the group submitted the initiative, it was rejected by the state Attorney General for not being written on an eighth grade reading level — one of the new requirements that the initiative seeks to repeal.
New Jersey: A coalition of nearly 30 well-heeled towns suffered a setback in their legal attempt to exempt themselves from an affordable housing mandate dictated by the state Supreme Court. Towns have been fighting tooth and nail against modest quotas of affordable housing in a state with a severe cost of living crisis. Litigation goes on, but because the towns are complying while pushing their challenge, each victory for the state is significant.
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Thank you for giving the backstory about why ICE was at Dodgers Stadium in the first place.
St. Petersburg is not in Hillsborough County but in Pinellas County on the other side of Tampa Bay. Next time check your facts or a least a map before posting.