Last year, the Mayor of New York City and his supporters in the animal rights movement failed twice in their expensive and often cruel campaign to ban the New York Carriage Horses from the city. The campaign was based on the increasingly controversial and debunked notion that it is somehow cruel for working animals – dogs, horses, ponies, all elephants – to work.
The most experienced trainers and equine veterinarians in America were nearly unanimous in saying the New York Carriage Horses are among the luckiest animals in the world, they are loved, content and well cared for. Still, animal rights organizations persisted in their relentless assaults – many of them physical – on the carriage trader, the drivers and owners.
We know now that the horses are not abused, they are the most regulated and monitored working animals anywhere, five different cities agencies participate in regular checks and tests as to their well being.
Still, the attacks on the carriage trade continue. An animal rights activist punched a carriage driver as he was trying to load some children into his carriage. A carriage horses supporter was recently arrested on absurd charges that she grabbed a pamphlet from a vegan protester. There is absolutely no evidence of any kind that the horses are suffering in their light work in the city.
Today, a new page was launched on Facebook called “Friends Of The New York City Carriage Horses,” a place where supporters can gather and where animal lovers can learn the truth about the New York Carriage Horses.
In America, the truth is now under fire as never before, facts don’t matter, fake news and wildly false accusations are everywhere, people invent their own reality in the name of justice. Lies are not just. In New York, the animal rights movement has abandoned facts and truth, but the truth is ultimately more powerful than any lie. I will always believe that.
I know the people who are publishing this page, and the truth and facts live there. Check it out.
Everywhere in our world, animals are disappearing.
Here in our largest city, hard-working people, most with a long tradition of working with animals, have found a way to keep these magnificent animals among us in a humane and much loved way. Please consider supporting the carriage horses, liking their new page and joining them in what is by now a heroic and stunningly successful campaign to keep these working animals in our world.
Several years ago, a retired carriage horse driver named Eva Hughes, a warrior for the horses, told me that the carriage horses were triggering a new social awakening, changing the narrative that is so mindlessly driving working animals away from people, out of sight and out of our world. You can support this new awakening.
We need a new and wiser understanding of animals if we are to save them. The animal rights movement has failed to grasp the real dangers facing animals like the carriage horses – it is not staying in our sight and consciousness, it is being taken away. They are in good hands.
Many people seek to ban the work of working animals, but very few bother to wonder what will become of them when their work is gone. The answer is readily available, most die and are never again seen by human beings. There is no place for Asian elephants, 2,000 pound draft horses, ponies in farmers markets to go when they are taken away.
And there is absolutely no evidence of any kind that work is abuse for these animals or that they are being mistreated or neglected.
More than 200 draft horse have been saved from rescue farms and slaughterhouses by this new social awakening. But their struggle to survive is far from over. The carriage drivers have suffered greatly in recent years, they need all of the support they can get. So do the horses. If you love animals, please consider helping to save them. Please check out this important new page if you wish, it is about more than the carriage horses, it is about keeping animals in our world and among us.
It is quite clear by now to any rational observer that there was never any reason to ban the New York Carriage Horses from the city, there has never been any evidence that the horses are abused, or suffer in any way from working and living in New York City. There is no longer any doubt that here was never any justification for the cruel, unjust and continuing persecution of the carriage drivers and medallion holders.
In all of this year (and last) there was not a single official allegation of abuse or cruelty or neglect lodged or proven against a single carriage driver, according to the New York City Police Department, which monitors the well-being of the more than 200 carriage horses at the behest and direction of a hostile mayor and city government that would dearly love a reason to justify their outrageous persecution of the carriage trade.
A former carriage driver named Eva Hughes told me on one of my first visits to the carriage stables in New York that the horses were sparking a new social awakening about animals, a new narrative for our work with them and their survival. She was prophetic.
In my book Talking To Animals, out next Spring from Simon and Schuster, there is a long chapter about the New York Carriage Horses, I wrote about them for nearly two years before the disturbing, and often dishonest effort by the animal rights movement to destroy the work and lives of the horses and drivers failed so spectacularly.
As famed horse trainer Buck Brannaman wrote of the carriage horses, they are among the luckiest horses in the world.
The book calls for a new and wiser understanding of animals than we currently seem to have, and includes stories of my own efforts to communicate with animals and listen to them. The carriage horses are, to me, the heart of the argument. The horses could always have told us they were content and well cared for, if we only knew how to listen. Thankfully, some people did:
Here is a short excerpt from that chapter: “Our western culture has forgotten the long and precious history that people and animals have. If the horses leave, they will take the wind and rain with them. And much of the magic…
When someone asks me what the carriage horse controversy is truly about I say it isn’t about real estate or animal welfare or traffic safety. It’s about an attitude of the heart. The animals need us. Their most elemental right is the right to survive on the earth, and our most elemental task is to understand them well enough to know how to make that happen. If we ask them, they will tell us.”
Talking To Animals: How We Can Understand Them And They Can Understand Us, will be published next May. It can be pre-ordered now through Battenkill Books, my local independent bookstore. People who order the book through Battenkill will receive a signed and personalized book, a free tote-bag in support of independent bookstores, and also a chance to win a potholder or a Maria-designed Bedlam Farm tote-bag.
Battenkill takes credit cards and Paypal, and they are almost shockingly nice.You can pre-order here.
All over the country, animal rights groups and misguided animal lovers are targeting the carriage horse industry, as well as many farmers and people who give pony rides to children and people who are poor or eccentric or who have a different view of their lives with animals than some of the people who claim to speak for the rights of animals and force their very rigid notions on the rest of us.
Why, then, did the New York Carriage Horses survive two different efforts to ban them in a single year, especially in one of the most politically correct communities in America? For the sake of animals and their future in the world, it is worth studying and considering. There is a lot to be learned from it.
Eva Hughes, a retired carriage horse driver and one of the architects of the carriage trade struggle to defend itself has argued that the horses have triggered a new kind of social awakening, a re-evaluation of the very idea of animal rights and animal welfare, and a growing rejection of the rabidly angry ideology that is driving so many animals away from people and into oblivion, irrelevance or extinction.
Hughes saw the larger implications of the carriage horse controversy, she has been battling in the trenches of this war for a long time.
If you spend any time at all with the carriage drivers, or in their stables, or in Central Park, and you know the smallest thing about domesticated animals, you can see right away, and for yourself that the horses are healthy, content, much-loved and well cared for. There is nothing more abusive for large working animals than to be denied work, that is neither humane nor healthy for them, or for us.
Science and truth seems to matter little in the animal wars raging around the country, sparked by a liberation movement that does not believe animals should ever be owned by, work with, entertain or amuse human beings, or live close to them.
The animal rights movement is characterized by rage, humorlessness and a belief that people are not fit to care for animals. It is dangerous to generalize about so large and vocal a movement. But the movement demonstrates an outrageous ignorance of the real needs and lives of animals. They seek to arbitrarily redefine abuse without foundation, history or any kind of research. If you examine the rhetoric and statements of the groups spearheading the effort to ban the carriage horses, it is instantly apparent that the effort was not grounded in facts or reality.
The carriage trade attracted a small but dedicated army of warriors in various fields and media – actors, videographers, writers, photographers, animal lovers – who supported them, told their story, went on social media to fight for the horses and defend the drivers. Over time, they changed some minds and began to challenge the animal rights story. The media – especially papers like the New York Daily News – began to rouse themselves and actually go see for themselves. Working people identified with the carriage drivers and resented the arrogance and cowardice of the mayor – he refused to meet with the carriage trade or visit the stables.
Liam Neeson drew 200 reporters to one of the carriage horse stables, a place no reporter had bothered to visit in years. The reporters were quite shocked to tour the stables and see how well the horses were treated, how clean the stables were, how committed the driver were to their work and the horses care. This was not what they had been told or expected to see. The narrative began to change.
Bill deBlasio, the mayor, took the lede in promising to ban the carriage horses on his first day in office. From the first, he was his own worst enemy.
He also took a busload of money from NYClass, the animal rights group fighting for the ban. Since the group is headed by a real estate developer – he owns a string of garages, some near the stables – the campaign was tainted almost immediately by the appearance of impropriety. Since the mayor had never once ridden a horse, owned a pet, taken a carriage ride or mentioned the carriage horses in his long and very public political career, his sudden passion to get rid of the horses seem bizarre. And very suspicious. Whatever it really was, it looked like a bribe.
The mayor turned out to be a disastrous choice to campaign against the horses. A so-called progressive who promised to fight for the little guy, he began his tenure by picking on some of the best-loved little guys in a tough city – the carriage drivers, who have driven many kids, tourists, lovers and officers workers around the park.
Nobody really bought into the ludicrous idea that they were cruel thieves and drunks and abusers of animals, charges repeatedly leveled by NYClass and other animal rights groups.
The multi-million dollar campaign against the horses – coming at a time when the city faced so many staggering social problems – alienated many residents of the city. There were much bigger things to worry about, and a slew of equine advocates, veterinarians and behaviorists came to New York and unanimously found the horses were the luckiest horses in the world, the carriage trade had become a model for keeping the horses in an urban area safely and humanely.
The mayor ought to have given them all medals, rather than try to take away the property, livelihood and way of life of the immigrant families who have worked in the trade for more than a century. It just didn’t work. When the mayor began his campaign against the horses, 64 per cent of the city supported the horses.
A year later, and after an ugly and expensive and prolonged assault on the carriage trade, 64 per cent of the city supported the horses. Not a single voter changed their minds or bought into the nasty propaganda.
A visiting friend suggested recently that the carriage horses were saved because people in the city liked them. But that doesn’t make sense to me. Most people in New York had little to do with the carriage horses and rarely, if ever, even saw them. Carriage horses have been banned in a number of other communities, people in some of those cities accepted the idea that work for working animals is abuse.
I believe the animal rights wave has peaked, it no longer seems relevant or rational to the lives of animals, and to the growing concern of animal lovers to keep animals among us, rather than take them away because humans are believed to be too weak or vulnerable or cruel and lazy to care for them in populated areas.
This is a movement that calls for animals to be returned to nature, and doesn’t seem to know that there is no longer any nature left for animals to return to. We have ruined almost all of it. Nor do they understand that there is no greater gift for a working domesticated animal than work. The real abuse comes when the work is taken away, not when it is offered. New Yorkers seemed to grasp this idea.
If the horses leave New York, they will never be seen again in our greatest city. The last domesticated animals – they helped build New York and inspired Central Park itself – will vanish, they might as well be sent to slaughter. This was a mistake that could never be undone.
The mayor missed a glorious opportunity to affirm the importance of animals in our lives, and it would have taken little. He could have been a progressive hero by standing up for the idea that horses are just as important as cars, and have been helping humans for a much longer time.
He could have done a lot with very little: some special traffic lanes, a development deal with a greedy real estate developer on the West Side (the NYPD got a spanking new stables built into the basement of a car dealership in exchange for a development deal. The mayor never explained why that was not abusive, but a carriage ride in Central Park is.)
He seemed unable to see beyond the money he was given or the outdated and very narrow vision of the people who gave it to him.
I believe Eva Hughes grasped the real significance of the carriage horse controversy. All over America, animal lovers are waking up to the damage done by the movement that claims to speak for the rights of animals, but does not. They are tired of the bullying, hypocrisy, elitism and cruelty that has characterized a once well-meaning and important movement. The movement just doesn’t work any longer, if it ever did. It has no real vision for the future, in the new and awful reality of animals.
Animals need rights, but not our rights. They need the right to survive in our world and live and work among us, as they have for centuries. Animal lovers are now demanding a movement that treats animals and people with love and dignity and respect. No movement that uses animals to promote the hatred and persecution of people – innocent farmers, carriage drivers, pony ride operators, elephant trainers, cat and dog lovers – can promote the rights and welfare of animals.
This is a movement that harasses farmers and homeless people with dogs but seems powerless against the giant industrial factory farms that are homes to more than nine billion animals, many of whom – not all – live in horrific circumstances.
If we do not all work together to save them, they will not be saved. Even as the animal rights movement came to prominence in the 70’s and grows fat on the donations of gullible animal lovers and Hollywood stars, animals continue to vanish from our world at a horrifying pace. The World Wildlife Federation reports that half of the animal species in the world have disappeared since 1970.
The animal rights movement is a case study in denial and bigotry, it rejects both science and truth. It has no plan or program or vision to save the animals in peril. The Native-Americans believe the horses called the furies down on the mayor and his allies. Their victory was so resounding it may well be true.
New York is our biggest stage, and the horses have won a very powerful victory. I believe is the first victory in the new awakening, their own Appomattox.
Dave, Carriage Driver, Reading His Daily Journal. Photo By Christina Hansen
“I hold my peace, sir? no; No, I will speak as liberal as the north; Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, all, cry out in shame against me, yet I’ll speak.” – Othello, William Shakespeare.
Once more, from the unnecessary story that will not die, the controversy that wasn’t, the crisis that isn’t:
Mayor Bill deBlasio of New York City told reporters yesterday that he would try again to curb or restrict the New York Carriage trade and that he still believed the horses should be prohibited from working and living in New York City.
it is easy enough to insult the mayor and call him names, social media is full of that, and the people in the carriage trade are foaming at the mouth, but it is more challenging to try to understand him.
I am drawn to tragic public figures and their stories – and quite mesmerized at the parallels between people like Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton and the mayor, all powerful and intelligent men who set out with the most noble of intentions and ended up setting themselves on fire for the most personal and inexplicable – and unnecessary – of reasons.
I did not expect to ever see a man who calls himself progressive behave in so oppressive a way.
Aren’t we supposed to at least pretend to listen to the people? ( I confess to having daydreams about Teddy Roosevelt, a former New York City Police Commissioner, who rode his horse right up a dusty and unpaved Broadway to attend meetings with the city’s civic leaders. What would he have said to the idea that horses were too fragile to be in New York?)
We never know about these people in power, it is really a great roll of the dice, for all our devices, we can never really see behind the curtain.
Sometimes events overcome and destroy them, sometimes they are simply broken in some way we can’t see, and sometimes they just destroy themselves. When this happens, they leave the temporal realm and enter the world of mythic imagination, we have to leave them to the historians to pick over, they are beyond us.
We can never understand the people we hate and insult, we have to step back and let others take a deeper and more detached look.
“One may smile and smile, and be a villain.” – Hamlet.
Trying to figure this out, I reached back into cultural history for some explanation, I found a clue in Shakespeare. The mayor, in his now-historic pursuit of the much-loved and healthy horses, has stepped out of the realm of conventional politics and into the world of Shakespearean tragedy.
Shakespearean tragedy is the classification of drama written by William Shakespeare. In his most famous plays, he created a protagonist who has lofty, even noble ambitions but who is flawed in some way. The hero is placed in a stressful, perhaps controversial and complex situation, the story ends poorly for him, often in a fatal conclusion.
The hero is powerful, but blinded by hubris and poor decisions.
The plots of Shakespearean tragedy focus on the loss of power and reason of the central character, once feared, but broken or disturbed. Their rigidity and arrogance leads to their ruin. (King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth).
“Madness in great ones, must not unwatched, go.” – Hamlet.
Here, we have the powerful mayor of great city, swept into office on a great wave of support and hope, defeated resoundingly twice and nearly done in by the descendants of immigrants and some rescued work horses from the farms and slaughterhouses of Pennsylvania. I wish I had written a book like that. It may yet be a movie.
The main characters in a Shakespearean tragedy obsessively pursue a central conflict to the point that their social and political structures are destroyed. They inevitably fall and fail, blinded by ambition and loss of reason. Something about power corrupts their instincts for self-preservation, you can see their inevitable ruin coming a long way off, and it’s very inevitability makes the story so compelling.
All Bill deBlasio had to do was forget about the carriage horses, and move on. Few people in New York thought about them or cared about them, at least at first, while so many larger and more pressing issues cried out for attention. The mayor who ran on the promise to help the poor and forgotten declared instead that his number one priority was to ban the carriage horses from the city. It was an awful note on which to start, it echoes still.
Bill deBlasio has brushed aside his many advisers and friends who were pleading with him to drop the carriage horse issue and move on to things people cared about, and were much more pressing. It is understandable that the carriage drivers hate and fear the mayor, his campaign against them has been cruel and unjust.
Just ask their families who are not sure from one month to the next if they can feed their children or send them to college.
Imagine being pursued so relentlessly by someone as powerful and unwilling to talk, negotiate or reason. What more Shakespearean image could there be than the King Of The Progressives, suddenly bent on the destruction of good and honest working men and women who have broken no laws and done no wrong? Most of these people are classic figures in the Great American Dream, the poor and the children of the poor to came to America to keep their way of lives and escape government oppression.
But wait, the story gets even better.
Seemingly drunk on power, awash in money from millionaire real estate developers and animal rights activists who hate the horses – they all seem as flawed as he is – the mayor turns these once obscure horse tradespeople into powerful heroes who gather support from everywhere and, against all odds, thwart him at every turn and grow ever more powerful and entrenched, even as he grows more isolated and disliked.
Imagine the poor in their cramped and outrageously expensive apartments – those are the lucky ones – looking over their shoulders at the gentrifiers, saving pennies for heat and rent – while the mayor they elected spends vast amounts of time and energy and good will to drive some horses who are bothering no one out of Central Park? Shakespeare would have had a few of them confront their King, challenge him with angry words.
And then there are the gentle and beloved horses put in peril. What rational hero would want to be on the wrong side of that story?
Wow, the other Bill would have loved to write a play about it.
“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” – King Lear, William Shakespeare
The more the mayor pressed on, the more corrupt and disingenuous he appeared, the more he insisted he was acting out of principle, the more people believed he wasn’t.
Now, after two humiliating, almost catastrophic defeats, some of the most powerful labor unions in the city are calling for state and federal investigations into the mayor and his connections to the people who gave him so much money, after which he vowed to ban the carriage horses on his very first day in office.
These are people attorney generals listen to. The labor unions and some media organizations are demanding to know what the money was for. I am not one of those who insists the mayor is corrupt, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But he is now under a cloud of mistrust and seeming impropriety.
And the appearance of impropriety is what prosecutors investigate.
It is difficult to sympathize with the mayor, I can’t recall a once popular politician so hell-bent on ruin, and I feel for the suffering of the carriage trade. But it is possible to feel for him. Flawed kings go hard, but they always go. That is the very essence of tragedy.
“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” – Hamlet.
Lost In America: Where Have All The Teamsters Gone?
Last night and this morning, I got some anguished, even desperate messages from some New York Carriage Horse drivers and owners.
One was from the grandson of Irish immigrants. He told me his grandfather was driving through a small town in Northern Ireland one Spring day a long time ago and some British soldiers stopped him, punched him, spit on him and tried to take his horse. He left for America the next month, he said, because he knew that in America, nobody could insult and intimidate him in that way or ever trouble or threaten his horse.
“I’m glad he’s not alive to see what is happening to us,” his grandson told me, “he would be lost in this America, where they can take your work and horse away from you for no reason other than that a rich man gave them money.” There were several messages like that, one from the son of Russian immigrants, one from an Italian driver whose grandfather immigrated to American in the late 1950’s to raise his family in peace and safety. “They have taken our dreams from us, “he said, “I won’t let my son be a carriage driver, I don’t want him to ever go through this.”
___
The first message I received this morning was a cry for help:
“Can you explain why the Teamsters Union agreed to this bill? (Bill number 573, to move the carriage horses to Central Park, restrict the number of horses and their hours, eliminate the pedicab trade. The bill will be voted on by the New York City Council this Friday.) Who in his right mind would have signed this? We carriage drivers have never given our consent to this bill, most of us were never consulted. And why do the Teamsters refuse to speak up and go against this bill now when they know almost all of us are against it, and that it would destroy us?.”
“We are frightened and confused,” messaged another driver today. “We only want to go to work and take care of our horses and our families, we make so many children and visitors and other people happy. This is very sad. Can you tell us why the Teamsters agreed to this?”
I will do my best, I said.
In politics, silence is often much louder and more revealing than speech. Since it was reported last week that the Teamsters Union and the mayor’s office had reached an “agreement in principle” to move the carriage trade and restrict it to a new stables in Central Park and work only within the park itself, the Teamsters Union, which represents the carriage drivers, has been silent.
I take the drivers request seriously and I talked to the people I know who are close to the story in New York and there is great confusion and uncertainty about this, but some things are pretty clear. I don’t know what the Teamster’s ultimate motives are, I can’t speak to that, I am not in their heads or at their meetings. I do know they have kept the mayor off of the back of the carriage trade for some time and were instrumental in fending off the effort to ban the carriage trade last summer.
It is clear that the Teamsters made a deal with the mayor’s office without fully consulting all of the people in the carriage trade. Or, it seems, caring much about how they felt. Some medallion owners agreed to the deal, they loved the idea of moving to Central Park, selling their stables to real estate developers, and renovating the new stables at taxpayer expense. They jumped at the chance to be rid of the pedicab industry, which has given them fits with their ubiquity and sometimes shady competitiveness.
One official close to the negotiations told me that the Teamsters made the best deal they thought they could possibly make, given the mayor’s obsession with the carriage trade. “Nobody really understands how irrational this man is, how remote and disconnected from reality he is. It’s like dealing with a crazy man, no negotiation we have ever had has been like this, he is off-again, on-again, sometimes bends, mostly doesn’t, and never meets face to face with anyone. Even his own close advisers have no idea what he is thinking or why. He just seems obsessed with this issue, it is really beyond reason.”
The Teamsters, their eyes on many upcoming negotiations, not just one, are extremely cautious about what they say in public. There is always the next round to face.
From a union perspective, it did seem like a good deal. The 68 medallion holders would get to keep their licenses and their horses, the pedicabs would be gone, the future of the industry would be assured. The agreement, one Teamsters official told me is a long way from being banned. But as the other details of the agreement – the ones the mayor refused to bend on – leaked out, opposition grew, not only from the carriage trade, but from all over the city: newspapers, carriage horse owners and drivers, park lovers, pedicab drivers, most animal rights groups, good government advocates.
The Teamsters seem to have vanished from the firestorm raging over their own agreement. They are neither defending it, explaining it, or opposing it.
The silence of the Teamsters in the face of so much anguish and so many questions is telling. One reporter who covers labor negotiations in the city told me “you have to understand that this is a small thing for the Teamsters, they do a lot of business with the city, they represent a lot of people. You can bet they got what they could get and decided to move on. They saved some jobs and got the best deal they could get. That’s what labor unions do. They have moved on.”
But it does appear they have left the carriage trade and the drivers vulnerable, and very much in the lurch.
Several drivers told me that even the carriage trade lawyers were mostly shut out of the negotiations and did not know of the provisions to severely restrict the carriage trade and reduce the number of horses. The mayor has been operating in the back room on the carriage trade issue for two years, and it seems like the Teamsters joined him there. Behind closed doors a deal was done. A very old story in politics. We may not fully grasp the dimensions of this “agreement in principle” for a long time, if ever.
The poor pedicab drivers were caught in the crossfire, in the wrong place at the wrong time, disposable bargaining fodder. So now, about 900 people and 100 horses will be out work, given the damage to both industries if the bill passes this Friday. Perhaps not such a good agreement in principle, and the carriage drivers who went along with it, have mostly flipped and seen that in many ways, the bill is just another means of banning the trade.
The new stables are unlikely to ever get built, if the bill passes, the stables will be forced to sell, and few owners or drivers can survive long under the noxious and restrictive proposed regulations.
It was a trap, and the Teamsters either fell into it or walked into it with open eyes. I can’t say I really know, at least not yet. To date, only three entities are supporting this legislation: the mayor, the Teamsters Union, and NYClass, the strident animal rights group that has spent millions of dollars in New York (including many of those dollars on the mayor’s election campaign) to ban the carriage horses. I see no report of any other significant public group in the city that supports this noxious legislation, especially now that is tied to a 30 per cent raise for City Council members.
The mayor may be arrogant, but he is not stupid. Or, given the outcry, maybe he is.
But you can connect the dots yourself.
Why on earth would NYClass, a group that has been so fiercely committed to banning the carriage trade, has spent millions in the effort, suddenly agree to keeping them there forever, and in the middle of Central Park? This is an organization beset by rabid and unyielding ideology, they have never negotiated, retracted an erroneous statement, admitted there was one moral carriage driver, believed one scientist, trainer or veterinarian, agreed to meet with the carriage trade, or softened their stance on abuse and overwork of the horses. Not once.
The reason for this seems clear to me: the proposed agreement would, in effect, ban the carriage trade, something NYClass understands but the carriage drivers are just coming to see.
“The mayor has given the City Council members cover,” my city council source said of the mayor yesterday. “The Teamsters back the bill and are not lobbying against it, the mayor and the City Council Speaker strongly support it and NYClass supports it. Our backs are covered if we pass it. The only cloud on the horizon is the pedicab issue, they didn’t foresee the explosion about that.”
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The Teamsters cut a deal, and you can understand it by seeing who supports it and who doesn’t. That is how we end up seeing behind the closed doors.
The carriage trade surely bears some responsibility as well. They are a tribal collection of diverse and very independent and quarrelsome personalities, they have never identified or defined a clear goal for themselves in this conflict other than being left alone. The sad truth is that they are split, as always. There is no single leader of the trade, no universally-supported position other than to survive.
They have never even managed to organize a strong public protest against the harsh, unjustified and relentless campaign against them.
That has left an enormous vacuum for the mayor and the Teamsters or anyone else to fill. The trade left the negotiating to the Teamsters, and is now up in arms because they don’t like what the Teamsters have done.
Is all this hopeless? Not at all. This issue belongs in the courts, which is precisely where it is heading. In America, we go to the courts, not the streets, to resolve conflicts between an overreaching government and a persecuted citizenry. You can’t ask a judge for relief if you have not been injured, and once this legislation passes, the carriage trade will have clear proof of injury and threat. The mayor is, in fact, irrational on this subject and the city has no legitimate public interest in destroying an industry that is profitable, popular, safe and law-abiding.
That means that under city and state law, the new regulations are very likely illegal.
I told my carriage driver friend that it doesn’t matter any longer what the Teamsters did or didn’t do, or what the mayor wants to do or what the animal rights activists say or don’t say. The carriage trade, for all of its twists and turns, has great lawyers in Norman Siegel and Ron Kuby, they seem to grasp the civil rights and constitutional issues involved in this invented and corrupt crisis.
And there are many. Civil rights are a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations and private individuals, and which ensures the ability of individuals and organizations and businesses to participate in the civil and political life of the community, city and state without discrimination or repression.
In almost every way, the civil rights of the carriage trade and the drivers have been infringed upon by government, social organizations and, in this case, wealthy private individuals who have used money to alter the political and regulatory process.
It’s time to see beyond the back room and into the courts.
I told me friend this is no time to be sad, it’s a time to be mad in a clear and focused way.
The issue belongs in court, there is good reason to believe the carriage trade will prevail. Their cause is just, they have enormous support, and the mayor has, in some ways, done them a favor. He has exposed the unfairness and arbitrariness of his campaign against a private industry and forced his own hand.
They will have no choice but to stand in their own truth and be united and focused now.
I don’t think there is a lawyer in New York who thinks Bill 573 will stand.
