With Some Help from "The Angel of History," my Endorsements for MD's May 14th Dem. Primary follow...
The choices were to "abstain," or endorse with caveats and a good deal of reluctance. The dire thought of a Trumpian Congress, 2025, tipped the scale, along with the ability to vote "Uncommitted."
Yes, that’s the 1920 painting by Paul Klee, entitled the Angelus Novus, currently in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem which was used by the famous cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who bought the painting for 1,000 marks. It was with him until he had to flee the Nazis and Berlin in 1933. It inspired his “Angel of History” thoughts in a famous work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” (1940). This image is from the Fall 2018 cover of the Institute of Advanced Study’s (Princeton, NJ) magazine.
Update, Thursday, May 2, 2024: I invite readers to visit my You Tube interview today with Hal Ginsberg: Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Here is a one hour and 20 minute interview today at Halitics with its host Hal Ginsburg whom many of you know from Montgomery County politics and left causes. Feel free to share with friends and neighbors…
The interview was based in good part on my most recent posting at my substack site, here: https://williamrneil.substack.com/p/with-some-help-from-the-angel-of
Attachments area
Preview YouTube video William Neil on ISRAEL/GAZA, CAMPUS CLASHES, the MARYLAND PRIMARIES 2 May 24
William Neil on ISRAEL/GAZA, CAMPUS CLASHES, the MARYLAND PRIMARIES 2 May 24
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Yes readers, it’s a seemingly strange way to begin something as ostensibly mundane as political endorsements in a primary, citing the “Angel of History” is, but it fits my mood and arguably, the mood of a “World on Fire,” and a country full of college campuses rocking with protests over Israel’s attempt to wipe Gaza and its Palestinians from their already miserable existence.
Over the past month or so, I’ve received memorable Emails from two American stalwarts of the left and I wonder if they’ve spent time also at the Grand Hotel Abyss (by Stuart Jeffries on the lives of the Frankfurt School) the book where I came across, late in my life, the career of writer and critic from Weimar Germany, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
One Email came from labor activist and scholar Jane McAlevey, who told her readers that her long battle with cancer was close to ending, and she would spend her final days at home under hospice care. She’s been on my Email list for a long time, but we never were that close; I was with her half-way. She had a complex strategy for how to organize to win a contested union election under the adverse odds of today’s corporate power and their hired anti-union consulting firms. It made sense, but it was very tough to execute and needed just the right personalities to push it over. My response was that it was missing something important, the deeper context needed to increase the odds of her tactics’ success: a climate of opinion and ideas which fired workers’ imaginations to begin with, to challenge their awful benefits, wages and lack of a voice in the Reaganesque landscape of 1980-….well, almost to today, some 44 years later. Sadly, that climate may be changing just as Jane passes from the landscape. I think she’d recognize the “Angel of History” I’m about to describe below.
The other Email came from someone whom I knew a little better, Rabbi Michael Lerner, who kindly published some of my work in his magazine, online, Tikkun, but I rejected a more generous offer for submissions after he realized that I was not a pacifist, an unconditional one as he demanded. And I understand he could be quite insistent on matters like that. The Email, and it was gracious, announced that the print edition of Tikkun was closing down; the online would continue to feature the archives which go back many, many years. Regardless of our differences, Rabbi Lerner was a fixture on the American left, somewhere between reform and orthodox, religious and secular depending on the issue, and on most of them we would have agreed. I think, for the other pending matters at hand in this posting, my readers should know about the title of one of my essays he published, which you can find here: https://www.tikkun.org/when-market-man-consigns-the-common-man-to-the-dustbin-of-history/ (from July 28, 2011).
And now for Benjamin’s portrayal of Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” which became the Angel of History in his famous 1940 essay, the year of his suicide, on the run from the Nazis, perched in the French mountains near the Spanish border without a passport, and facing a long, uncertain journey to a safer haven. He decided he couldn’t make it, but left us today with these descriptions of his times and perhaps all too sadly, our own:
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he see one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise: it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress. (Grand Hotel Abyss, pps. 172-173.)
Last night I caught the stone-faced Anderson Cooper show on CNN, interviewing the now bearded “sage,” Larry Summers on the turmoil on the campuses. Summers gave a worried assessment somewhere between supporting the right of protest and free speech but not letting it disrupt the educational process, and, in my view coming down on the old side of “law and order” while entirely evading the substance of the issue driving the protests: the pending ethnic cleansing of Gaza, or as some put it, a very modern case of Genocide against the Palestinians. That’s no ordinary issue, in my mind, and deserves a little more room than Summer’s wants college officials to give the encampments.
In Summers’ mind, the causes of the student protests don’t seem to carry much weight, whether in 1970 about Vietnam, or today, again with so many lives in the balance. I’ve seen a lot of Larry Summer’s award acceptance speeches over the past few years, his victory laps over inflation predictions and how the US economy is faring and he is relentlessy upbeat about our prowess in science, IT and AI and especially in the medical-profit picture for our human genome investments. “In the storm… we call progress,” for Summers, there isn’t much pain, and certainly no pain worthy of disturbing the campus status quo. We’ll see if he can keep up his optimism in the face of the Trumpian winds blowing against a democratic republic, fanned by the embers of those left behind by the great upward transfer of $51 Trillion dollars between 1975-2018, and shouldn’t we add to that RAND study from Sept. of 2020, the Presidential Election Year where neither candidate or party mentioned it, the fact that with that $$$ transfer also went much political power. AIPAC is a good example.
Jamelle Bouie’s column in the New York Times on April 30th helped to further clarify my political mood. The column was called “The Price We Pay for Having Upper-Class Legislators”…here at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/opinion/working-class-wealthy-legislators.html.
Bouie, citing a recent academic study, which found that the 50% of US workers who are blue-collar workers - which includes the vast service sector - have only 1.6% of 7,600 state legislators who are or have had a blue color jobs in their recent resumes. It’s 1% for the Republicans and 2% for Dems. It’s part of the huge political drift to the right, with the decay of the old New Deal coalition, which accelerated during the 1970’s, hand-in- hand with the decline of labor.
All this is in the way of background to my own viewpoint, watching the Democratic Party unfold mainly in the hands of its wealthy office holders, donors, lobbyists in the spirit of President Biden’s “I’m for Joe Labor and I’m a Capitalist too; I’m a Zionist and I hope Prime Minister Netanyahu listens to my calls for restraint but I’m not going to withold anything from Israel.” (My paraphrase of the sentiment.) Netanyahu said today (April 30th ) he intends to finish Hamas by going into Rafah no matter what the US says. Biden is forever the broker politician between factions, ending up displeasing most of the ardent causes within his party, with, at this date in Mid-Spring 2024, him behind in polls to Donald Trump. I’m wondering how he keeps the younger Dems with him as Israel goes further and further off the deep-end?
The days of hope on the left, the early Winter of 2019 when the Green New Deal Resolution was introduced and collected more than a 100 Democratic Reps and 9 or so Senators, including Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, but not Senator Ben Cardin nor Congressman Trone. At that point AOC might have been at the peak of her early form and support, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, had a chance to appoint a Select Standing Committee on the Green New Deal. Of course she balked as it threatened all the other standing committees whose turf was touched by the very broad and yet to be refined premises contained in the Green New Deal Resolution. The famous and gifted Speaker missed the chance offered, because nothing that came out of a GNDSC was going right to the floor for a vote, it still had to go through existing committees’ turf claims. So there were built in safety valves for more conservative Dems. And a Green New Deal Committee might have served as a very public forum which could, over a year or more, refine the raft of proposals then coming from excited Greens, Environmental Justice Advocates, anxious Labor fossils, and all the interests in the new grand “all electric” push, which to this date can’t plan, can’t reform FERC, and can’t come up with the money to expand and modernize the electric grid. Which some say will cost trillions, not billions.
It’s a Democratic Party that can’t harness the vision of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights from 1944, which supplied the rough outlines for the Green New Deal sponsors, and is there to this day to remind the party of the missing eight economic rights which the American poor, and the bottom 40% of the population suffer from the most. And at least one more - Nature’s rights - which has to be added.
Will the candidates I’m supporting in this post move towards FDR’s social democratic vision, his foundation and starting blocks to have a fairer “race for life” based on what was missing from the Great Depression days and in Europe, helped make Fascism a brutal reality.
All that colored my views and the less than idealistic trade-offs in contemplating my recommendations for this May’s primary.
Endorsing David Trone for Senate, and Joe Vogel for Congress in the 6th.
Here’s how I reached my endorsements for Representative David Trone for the honor of the Senate nomination to oppose Republican Larry Hogan, and Maryland State Legislator Joe Vogel to run for David Trone’s vacant 6th Congressional Seat, against, most likely Dan Cox on the Republican side, or Tom Royals, who has raised a large sum of money, stressing his fighter pilot background - unless the Repubs want to go with Neil Parrott who has lost the last two election to Trone…
There’s more than a little irony in me supporting David Trone. As Joe Vogel has said - almost all the Dem candidates in both races are pro-women’s rights, good on the environment (Trone is rate 97% by the national League of Conservation Voters for his 2023 votes while the Cong. average, dragged down by Republicans, is only 49%), and good on other cultural issues important to various Dem causes and lobbies. Trone, and this is surprising for a very wealthy businessman who runs a beer and wine empire nationwide and has had lots of legal issues in getting the business to where it is, scored 100% in 2023 according the AFL-CIO scorecard on issues that matter to labor.
Back in 2016, in a House race for the 8th congressional district with 7 very competitive candidates, I wrote a late endorsement for then state Senator Jamie Raskin whom I knew (as most Maryland residents claim to know him - but a little better than that) and I said he had the profile of the American Ivy League elite - which had led this nation down a long path of economic “Market uber Alles” choices and which would eventually supply much of the fuel (wreckage, or if you prefer, “carnage”) for the Trump bonfire, but, that what distinguished Jamie from his elite colleagues was the fact that, apparent to all who knew him and certainly to his Takoma Park base, “he had a heart, a big heart.” Compassion for his fellow man, in other words.
That must have hurt David Trone, given he has since positioned himself as a successful businessman with a big heart, practical wisdom, and generous wallet since winning his Congressional seat.
Raskin went on to win the nomination with just 33% of the vote, and defeated Republican Dan Cox with 60% of the vote in November of 2016 according to Wikipedia’s bio of Raskin.
Now for the downside and conflicts in throwing my endorsement to Rep. Trone. I had not followed the AIPAC saga closely over the years; Ben Cardin’s reputation as “Israel’s Senator” in the US was clear to me early on, but I hadn’t realized that Trone was giving $100,000 per year to AIPAC. He’s not Jewish, but his wife and daughters are. In Maryland, however, AIPAC rides close herd on all the federal candidates and can rely on many educated, capable allies of Israel in the Beltway Region for support.
Just ask Donna Edwards what that meant when she was pinned as pro-Palestinian in her Senate primary run against Chris Van Hollen in 2016. Or in an attempt to win back her 4th Congressional District seat against Glenn Ivey in 2022, where AIPAC threw in $6 million in advertising against her, plus substantial campaign contributions to Ivey. Edwards had J Street on her aside but it was not enough.
I knew Donna pretty well from fund raisers, door-to-door volunteer work and my seat on the Board of Democracy for America in MoCo, which early on threw its support to her initial run for Congress in 2006. I attended her swearing in after her rout of encumbent Al Wynn in 2008, and joked to some congressional staffers watching the ebullient crowd in the balcony that this was the rowdiest celebration in the nation’s capital building since Andrew Jackson’s Inaugural party. (Just a little exaggeration in that.)
Now David Trone is up against a black woman in the primary with “tough on crime” credentials from Prince George’s County, Angela Alsobrooks, seeming to me to be following Kamala Harris’ road map as a Prosecutor and then County Executive, with endorsements from most of the Democratic Party establishment. Ironically, in this race, David Trone, wealthy businessman, is calling himself the outsider and Maverick in the race.
Here’s how I thought this through. I thought Trone stands the best chance to beat Larry Hogan, not only because of his substantial finances, but most of all I still think that a Prince Georges County regular Democratic political professional, no matter how polite or polished, will still carry the taint that unfortunately, unfairly or not, surrounds that county’s politics. I don’t condone it, but encounter it all the time in Western Maryland.
Especially for a black politician. I couldn’t help but recall writer Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” in which the death of a much admired friend and student at Howard University at the hands of a non-uniformed under-cover agent from Prince Georges County, who shot Prince Carmen Jones Jr. near his mother’s home in suburban Virginia, left Coates with the same feelings made infamous by the Black Lives Matter Movement - covering so many in similar grim outcomes. To me, it just recalled once again the stereotypes in so many Marylander minds about life and politicians from Prince Georges County. Fair or not, it’s a huge risk to take against Larry Hogan ( who already has beaten two black candidates in his gubernatorial races: Anthony Brown and Ben Jealous) And the stakes this year are Trumpian, and you know what that means.
Therefore its David Trone who has the better chance against Larry Hogan…
And any hope that Hogan would be better in the sense of distancing himself from the current Israeli PM and that nation’s policies evaporated when I read the Washington Post article about Hogan’s speech in early March of this year to the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington - vowing to equal Ben Cardin’s loyalty and reputation an an Israeli watch dog: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/16/larry-hogan-israel-gaza-cease-fire/
We’ll see if events in the Middle East move Rep. Trone beyond his recent call for a cease fire. In a sense AIPAC hovers over this race as well.
The House Race in the 6th Congressional District
And now for David Trone’s vacant seat, and the battle among the sixteen competing Dems listed on the official Maryland Primary ballot which I’m about to mail in.
I’m not sorry to say that I didn’t at first know who April McClain Delaney was, never having been too close to her husband, former Congressman John Delaney, who never much liked my written proposal for a Civilian Conservation Corps handed to him and one staffer during one of the Congressman’s visits to Western Maryland.
At first, not having been invited to a Potomac or Georgetown Party of theirs, I thought maybe April was related to the late Senator John McCain, but I now see the difference in spelling - but it was her early advertising which had me confused - so “common sensible” and “bi-partisan” is she. The early TV ads on cable had me wondering if she was a Republican. You can understand that, can’t you?
There was a time in 2022 when I too had a nationally known zip code - 21532 - among Democrats seeking office, seeking contributions… “Oh that’s Bill Neil in Frostburg, hit him up…unlimited wallet.” Well, that’s what many 2-5 dollar contributions get you: a lot of begging Emails and no cocktail parties. And not much in terms of helpful legislation either - from my financial perspective.
But I never quite got over her husband in office, just didn’t jell with me, the irony being, on me not lost, that now I’m supporting another millionaire dem businessman to oppose Larry Hogan, in turn himself in the commercial real estate game, but he doesn’t seem to carry a net worth sign around his neck, does he? Wonder what he’s worth?
Next I thought state delegate Lesley J. Lopez had a hardscrabble, worthwhile, noteworthy bio; if I was tired of millionaire dem businessmen, she was not cut from that mold.
Next, and along the same lines, was a new name on me, Takesha A. Martinez, the Mayor of Hagerstown; at first, it was the substantial money she had raised that caught my eye. Then an impressive bio with people skills as I dug further. Endorsed by Progressive Neighbors, a group I knew well back in my MoCo days, 2005-2014. And by NOW. Maybe just a few years short of being a prime time, full time contender at higher state office or even Congress. If I were not in such a pragmatic - or is it desparation mode this year, checking in and out of the Grand Hotel Abyss (well, maybe the motel Abyss) - because of the Trump catastrophe looking more and more possible, I might take political risks closer to my heart. But the head is weighing in heavily this year, and that makes the choices more difficult, more painful. Takesha, don’t give up, you’re getting notice and noticed.
And now for another poignant possibility, but too much of a long shot in today’s circumstances. But please take a look at this website for Mohammad S. Mozumder here:
https://www.mozumder4md.com/ to save you some trouble: here are his stances, and his work for 30 years as a Scientist for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Supports
Universal Healthcare
Public Education
Pro Trade and Business
Women’s & Abortion Rights
Marriage Equality
Voting Rights
Trade Unions
Prosecuting Violent Crime
What’s not to like I ask? Except the nobler by the hour call on the very first platform item; if it were a pure “conscience vote” year he might have mine. But it’s the kiss of death now in MoCo if not MD more broadly, his name and the stance. No pleasure at all in writing that, and I wanted you to see what the brutality of politics entails, if you didn’t know already.
The best I can offer my readers here along these lines is the fact that I filled in the “Uncommitted to any Presidential Candidate” option, and did the same for the six convention delegates on the last page. That was painful because Donna Edwards was on as a Joe Biden Delegate, and I had met Brian Grim, the former Mayor of Cumberland, MD.
Endorsing Joe Vogel
Alright, my choice, which is a bit of a risk too, that I weighed carefully. I back young Joe Vogel, with not much experience but a courageous style, maybe too cutting on AMD’s circle of friends, but he has won the endorsements of the state Sierra Club, not easy to do, I know the process and the vetting - it’s thorough…won two major unions, including the Maryland sign of the Apple Teachers Union, and the very progressive Flight Attendants Union headed by rising labor leader Sara Nelson.
And I might add, Joe was the only candidate to give me a direct call - we had never met or spoken before and we talked then on my hike on Earth Day just by chance, although I have to add that one of Rep. Trone’s staffer’s asked if the candidate could call me and I held off - about a month ago.
I’m going to do now what may be unusual, but it was a factor for me in deciding I wanted a tough sounding candidate to take on the likely Republican candidate, Dan Cox. Here’s Cox’s website:
https://coxforcongress.org/
And here’s his Wikipedia write up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Cox
It’s the type of bio, especially around his stances on the Jan. 6, 2021 Insurrection, and his Trump loyalty that should have any Dem candidate chomping at the bits to get at him. It’s my call that Joe Vogel best suits that opportunity. Good luck Joe and I’m looking foward already to the fall campaign. If its Tom Royale, it may call for a shift in strategy. It looks to me you can handle that.
Best to all my readers,
Bill Neil
Frostburg MD
PS Update May 1, 2024: Dear Readers: none of the 600-800 Emails I routinely send out with a new posting got through apparently and I received none of the usual automated “out of the office” messages from Legislators or Council members in Maryland, nor the usual bounce back for “Undeliverable.” This started happening with Sunday’s posting. It’s never happened before and I can receive Emails from my subs and lots else. So if you’re a member here, send me an Email and let me know if it gets through to the Comcast address. This problem started with my last three emails writing about the Middle East, pending endorsements in the Dem primary…so volatile writing from AIPAC’s point of view and I did not endorse either of the key Dem Party’s choices in the Senate Primary or the vacant seat in David Trone’s District. Comcast tech specialists are scratching their heads, no solution as of noon on Wed. May 1st; I couldn’t even send my safety Email to my Gmail address as I send out my Email for new postings, which are the ones posted here, under 100 at a time…the Comcast emails never even reached my Gmail address. The earliest I think I can resend my endorsements is tomorrow and maybe not even then; so if anyone is asking you who have signed on here, send them the link; clearly no one from the 800 or so Emails that went out last night made it to this site. Thanks.