Political Malevolence Camouflaged as Benignity is More Odious than Trumpism
(The corruption and corrosiveness of “gray-suited grafters” who speak in measured tones and wear smiling faces)
By
David Gottfried
Trump and his allies have been losing strength and clout. The incessant barrage of news reports which appear to incriminate Trump, and the poor showing of Trump-backed Republicans in the 2022 election, have dramatically devalued the Trump brand.
Some people seem to think that the demolition of the Trump brand will usher in a new sort of paradise. Some people suffer the delusion that prior to 2016, we were all living in Nirvana. If you thought we were living in Nirvana, it was because of the narcotic effects of the Oxycontin you were taking.
In the 1960’s, the ratio of CEO income to the income of factory workers was, on average, 50 to 1. In 2015, the ratio of the income of CEOs to factory workers was, on average, 500 to 1. This sort of thing was underscored by Bernie Sanders, but Americans are forgetting everything Bernie Sanders had to say, and the standard bearer of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, is a man whose colleagues in the United States Senate, according to the NY Times, used to refer to as the “Senator from Mastercard.”
In New York, the Democratic Party routinely excoriates Donald Trump, and both the attorney general of the State of New York, and the district attorney of New York County, have investigated and sued Trump. I suppose they have to do this because the Democratic Party, in the past, was among Trump’s most stalwart supporters.
Trump made a mint by getting special favors from leading Democratic party officeholders, such as Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Hugh Carey. It was simple: His Daddy made contributions to the party which purported to care about the poor, and the deceitful Democratic Party bestowed the most lavish benefits on Trump, especially by quashing his tax liability on many very valuable New York Properties. In the “ancien regime,” the French nobility did not have to pay any taxes. In the neo-Bourbon Courts of Ed Koch and Hugh Carey, Trump was a latter-day French aristocrat, sneeringly avoiding the payment of taxes and reveling in a sybaritic and sadistic lifestyle of cocaine-fueled Bacchanals and groundless evictions.
But New York always was a place that posed as Emma Lazarus -- the poet who said, “Give me you tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” -- while behaving like am androgynous monster made of one part Leona Helmsley and one part Bernie Madoff. For example, consider the juggernaut of landlords and liars: The Judiciary. Many of our Judges are elected, and our dimwitted lovers of our debased Democracy think the election of judges is fine and dandy.
Of course, most people don’t know a damn thing about the various judicial candidates on the ballot. In many elections, three or four dozen names appear on the ballot, and the idiot box news media, after reporting on the sound bites of the 2 most prominent national or statewide candidates, along with comprehensive coverage of what various stars are wearing and who they are fucking, has no time to report on judicial candidates.
Since voters don’t know any of the judicial candidates, they simply vote the party line. In New York City, that means that the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Party automatically wins because New York is a one-party town.
Of course, the benighted voters think that by voting for the candidate endorsed by the dumb donkey they are voting to protect the poor, the persecuted, yada yada yada. But then again, most voters don’t know squat about the funding of various judicial candidates.
I know something about their funding. Years ago, I worked for an organization known as the Fund for Modern Courts. I examined all the financial disclosure statements of all judicial candidates in New York City in 1985. (This was in the pre digital era, and I had to go to the Board of Elections, on Varick Street, to examine the disclosure statements and had to endure obese party hacks who told me that I was a “no good troublemaker.”) I found that 80 percent of the funding, of judicial candidates in New York City, came from landlords and law firms representing landlords.
Don’t you just love our democracy: The voters vote for candidates endorsed by the Democratic Party, believing that they must be “progressive” because they are backed by Democrats. And almost all of these voters don’t know that these judges get almost all of their money from landlords and law firms representing landlords.
Actually, this means that many of our “duly elected judges” are violating the ethical rules that attorneys are supposed to adhere to.
One of these ethical rules provides that “attorneys shall avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”
I submit to you that it appears highly improper when a judge gets 100K from a landlord for his campaign because he doesn’t really need any money to get elected because the endorsement of the Democratic party will guaranty his election. If a judicial candidate doesn’t need a landlord’s money to get elected (Because the endorsement of the democratic party will guaranty his election in this one party town), what pray tell, is the money for. Is it to induce Judges to rule a certain way. Oh, but I can’t say that. We all know that men in robes in buildings modeled on the architecture of tyrannical Rome are the very quintessence and personification of all that is just and good.
Of course, judges, and their sycophantic defenders who claim that every allegation of deep-seated fraud and conspiracy is Trumpian hysteria (Yeah, and what about the Warren Commission’s single bullet theory of the Kennedy assassination, a fantastic fabrication which is less persuasive than medieval theorems regarding the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin), will say that landlord contributions to judges are completely wholesome. They will argue that judicial candidates need to get money from landlords because they have to give money to party hacks to get the endorsement of the Democratic Party. For example, in 1985, one Susan Cohen, an attorney who helped orchestrate Ira Globerman’s judicial campaign, told me that Ira Globerman “had to” make contributions to the Harlem Democratic Party. (Actually, I must hasten to add that Ira Globerman and Susan Cohen were, to my knowledge, fantastic people) The problem with this is that it’s patently illegal as judicial candidates are prohibited from making contributions to political organizations. New York Law provides that a judicial candidate is barred from engaging in certain activities, such as:
“soliciting funds for, paying an assessment to, or making a contribution to a political organization or candidate”…
22 N.Y.C.R.R, Section 100.5, subsection (A) 1 (h)
Nevertheless Judicial candidates get slimy money from landlords and give contributions to political campaigns even though this is supposedly illegal. No one investigates and no one prosecutes. Just as no one looked into George Santos save for one small, local paper on Long Island which was ignored because in our supposedly egalitarian society, and very egalitarian New York Liberal Culture, one is completely disregarded and spat on if one is not rich and powerful.
I submit to you that our political system is a vice ridden, vulgar bazaar in which loathsome egotistical bastards are gaming the system with nary a nod for the common good.
(I once represented a tenant before a Judge Scott in NYC Civil Court, Kings County. The Judge had ruled against me. I narrowly saved the tenant from eviction. Toward the conclusion of the case, Judge Scott was arrested because of his malfeasance and patent bias on the bench. The index number of the case was 98650/90 if you want to look it up. Remember: It was the Housing Part of New York City Civil Court for Brooklyn)
My detractors will correctly say that Trump was the ultimate egotistical bastard but will erroneously conclude that my allegations, regarding the vices of pols not named Trump, is false. Trump was evil, and he proudly declaimed that he was an unmitigated son of a bitch.
However, there are people whose malevolence in much more insidious than the malevolence of Trump. I am speaking of those charmed bastards who effortlessly exude a patina of ethical correctness while all the while doing dirty deeds. I am talking about Mr. Sheldon Silver, a former member of the New York State Assembly, who always spoke in measured, mannered tones of respectability and reliability while using his power in the Assembly to make his law firm richer. I am talking about Rabbi Bernard Bergman who reminded us that because he was a rabbi, and because he had suffered the depredations of the Holocaust, he had to be morally upright, who was responsible for keeping thousands of his patients, many or most of whom were Jewish, in his nursing homes, uncared for, wasting away in urine and feces filled sheets, with bed sores and hopelessness because although Bergman got millions of dollars from Medicaid, the money that was earmarked for his patients were siphoned off for his personal interests.
Furthermore, the perpetrators with the measured words and polite smiles have the gumption to commit their graft in plain sight or to tell us that they are really the good guys: A) Chuck Schumer, senior United States Senator from New York and the personification of Clintonian triangulation, has burnished his liberal credentials by spreading bull to the effect that he opposes special tax favors for hedge fund managers, but the big boys in the Senate consider him an adamant defender of that giveaway to the billionaire class; B) A couple of days ago, the New York Times reported that the United States Supreme Court, which has forever dressed itself in cloaks of incorruptibility and moral goodness, has been running what was ostensibly a charity, for the preservation of Supreme Court memorabilia and other stuff lawyers couldn’t care less about, which enabled contributors to influence Supreme Court justices; C) Sam Bankman Fried, the crypto currency kleptomaniac sun-bathing in the Bahamas, had a penchant for throwing most of his lavish contributions to the Democratic party, a gang that pretends to honor men like Bobby Kennedy while pursuing a neo liberal doctrine of acquiescence to corporate privilege.
I could tell you much more about the judiciary, but I think people get bored by process and most of all legal processes; after all, no matter how many progressive remediations are employed with respect to the law, it always remains a byzantine and sadistic quagmire whose most accurate depiction appears in Kafka’s masterpiece, “The Trial.”
So I will remind you that the substance of Democratic Party “Liberalism” is a thin, Dickensian, poor-house gruel that is very low in nourishment save for the common inclusion of protein packed insects which are often a vector for infection.
Democratic Liberalism was even somewhat bent and belligerent when it was, supposedly, at its best, during the New Deal. During the New Deal, about two million Southern agricultural laborers were evicted from their land per the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The Act paid money to farmers not to grow crops as part of an effort to stop farm prices from collapsing. Unfortunately, most of the money went to the landed gentry of Southern Agriculture, the mint-julip-sipping high priests of Dixie and moral debauchery. The gentry got millions not to grow crops, and the gentry evicted their sharecroppers who than moved in masse to the rat-infested precincts of the Northern slums. Also, New Deal programs expressly provided that they would not apply to a) domestic workers or b) agricultural laborers. This meant that the right to form a union, to collect unemployment insurance, to collect disability insurance, to get money in one’s old age, or to avail oneself of a large array of remedial programs was not bestowed upon those workers who were, for the most part, black. This is why, in the early sixties, Michael Harrington had to note that conditions in the South, for black people, still resembled conditions at the height of the Depression.
But this is not only history. Consider Billy Jefferson Clinton.
In the 1992 election, Bush said he was for NAFTA. Ross Perot said he was against NAFTA. And Bill Clinton, in his best aw shucks Gomer Pyle style, said, “I’m still studying Nafta.” Although he affected ambivalence toward NAFTA during the campaign, after he was elected, Clinton worked harder for NAFTA than any other measure that came before Congress. In 1996, corporate chiefs of the Republican Party showed their admiration for Clinton by ensuring that the Republican nominee would be geriatric Bob Dole and that Bod Dole would sound as senescent as a stupefied subject of senile dementia. Also, Bill Clinton demolished welfare, provided that the futures market would be bereft of federal regulation (And this led to the market collapse of 2008), gave the networks a 60 billion dollar giveaway by giving them additional frequencies free of charge per the effort to further HDTV, assiduously courted the moralizing momma contingent of the Democratic Party by stressing school uniforms, castigated “predator” black youths in the course of enacting a draconian crime bill, and furthered our transition from an industrial nation to a rentier nation.
I suppose some people will try to rebut my contentions by alleging that Obama was a progressive force which negated the centrism of Bill Clinton. But these people assume that just because someone is black or Jewish or gay, he must be progressive. With regard to Obama and his presumed progressivism, I refer my readers to an earlier article I wrote, entitled, “Why Obama Might Dislike Black People.” (This article commences with Obama’s relationship with fellow blacks and then discusses his anemic efforts to better the lives of blacks and working class whites. Footnote 1)
I must make one critical concession: Biden is not turning out as badly as I had expected. I believe his administration has gone along with something Obama never dared to support: Giving Medicare the power to bargain with insurance companies.
Given Biden’s long history as an almost quasi-Southern politician (And if you think this remark sounds extreme, don’t forget that his second in command, Kamala Harris, accused him of being a racist in one of the first Democratic Party presidential debates of 2020), Biden’s position on Medicare, and every position that is in tune with pro-worker policies, is occasioned by the electoral power, robust arguments, and steadfast spirt of AOC, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warran. Ergo, if you want Biden to do a good job, don’t support Biden, support AOC, Bernie Sanders etc. who will keep him in line.
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Footnote 1 https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/why-barack-obama-might-dislike-black