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Pirates of the New Economy

Skylar Deleon should have waited five years. The former child actor (he was a bit player on “The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” not, alas, an actual Power Ranger) was sentenced to die by lethal injection for the murder of Thomas and Jackie Hawks. In November of 2004, Deleon responded to an advertisement that the Hawks had posted to sell their yacht, the Well Deserved (and, no, I’m not making this up), and joined them for a test drive (or whatever the nautical equivalent of a test drive is). When they got out into the ocean Deleon forced the Hawks to sign over the title to the yacht, tied the couple to an anchor and dropped them to the bottom of the ocean.

Deleon planned to get away from his financial problems and sail to Mexico. Apparently, after the “Power Rangers,” Deleon had a Forest Gump-like knack for stumbling through the cultural zeitgeist and swindled a living as a mortgage broker and “entrepreneur.” Today, a lot of us have financial problems, and owning a yacht is a luxury that people seem all-too-willing to walk away from. According to the NY Times, as boat owners face difficulty making payments on loans and dock slips, many owners are simply unmooring their boats and letting them float out to sea. These abandoned boats are an environmental hazard, and localities are rushing to pass laws to outlaw the abandonment of a sea vessel.

Florida officials say they are moving more aggressively to track down owners and are also starting to unclog the local inlets, harbors, swamps and rivers. The state appropriated funds to remove 118 derelicts this summer, up from only a handful last year.

In South Carolina, four government investigators started canvassing the state’s waterways in January. They quickly identified 150 likely derelicts.

[snip]

Crab Bank, a protected bird rookery in the harbor within sight of Fort Sumter, is home to a dozen derelicts — two sunken, two beached, the other eight still afloat. They range from houseboats to a two-masted sailboat.

It’s not hard to see where this trend will end up: Piracy! I’m only half-kidding. If a two-bit punk like Skylar Deleon could resort to double homicide and theft to realize a fantasy of sailing away to Mexico to continue a career of pettier larceny and confidence schemes during a relatively decent economy, what we’ve got now is a whole lot more desperate unemployed people out there, a small flotilla of houseboats, yachts and speedboats and the compelling example of the very successful Somali pirates.

I’m almost tempted to spit on my hands and hoist the black flag, myself. Of course, as a pacifist, I need to tweak the Somali model of piracy. Perhaps I could sail alongside civilian yachts, climb aboard, look really menacing and then announce that I have Snickers bars for sale “not to raise money for my basketball team or my school, but to put money in my pocket and keep me out of trouble.”

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Things the Grandchildren Should Buy

Eels frontman, E., has long mined personal tragedy to make uplifting art. Starting with 1997’s beautiful “Electro-Shock Blues,” a visceral elegy to the twin tragedies of his sister’s suicide and his mother’s death from cancer (events that occurred within months of his scoring his first big hit with “Novocain for the Soul”), and culminating with 2006’s sprawling “Blinking Lights (And Other Revelations),” E has incorporated his family biography into his music. But in the last two years, the erstwhile Mark Oliver Everett has gotten explicitly autobiographical. First, he hosted a documentary, which aired in the U.S. on PBS’ “Nova,” about his troubled genius of a father, Hugh Everett III, who directly challenged Niels Bohr with his “many worlds” theory and was crushed, professionally and spiritually, as a result. Finally, E published a sprightly memoir, “Things The Grandchildren Should Know,” late last year.

The book reveals Everett as a memoirist on par with Sedaris and as a smart ass philisopher who could hold his own with Vonnegut. The Vonnegut comparison is particularly apt. All that’s missing is the “So it goes” refrain as death compounds death. The tragic slow decline of his older sister is well-worn territory, but brings extra poignancy to both the book and the earlier eels LPs, while his bizarro accounts of a mad scientist father who spoke not more than a dozen sentences to his son during his life would be too fantastical, if it were not corroborated by the “Parallel Lives” documentary. Meanwhile, a beloved dg is put to sleep (so it goes), a ghost-watching neighbor unexpectedly passes (so it goes), a beloved roadie OD’s on heroin after a joke made in bad taste (so it goes) and a cousin is a flight attendant on the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 — probably into the side of the building where Everett’s dad once worked (so it goes and goes and goes).

There is a certain lump-in-the-throat quality to E’s memoir that is nicely cut with sweet reminiscences, plain-spoken confessions and good old fashioned piss and vinegar. There are few rock-n-rollers today who are as vital or as relevant as Everett. Would he to publish the Vol. 2 of his “Chronicles.” In the meantime, we can rejoice in the impending release of his first album of new material in four years, “Hombre Loco” (due out June 2nd).

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Is It Too Late To Make A Different Choice?

The Employee Free Choice Act might have died this week. Arlen Specter refused a deal wherein labor unions would encourage their members who are registered Republicans to support the Senator in a tough primary in exchange for his vote for cloture. Instead, the entire Republican caucus will filibuster the Act. Now is as good a time as any to ask: Why did the entire labor movement choose to make the Employee Free Choice Act the all-or-nothing focus of labor law reform?

The Free Choice Act is a fairly narrow tweaking of a legal framework that has become a union-busting machine. It does nothing to address so-called “Right To Work” rules that allow scab workers to utilize union resources without paying a dime in dues. It does nothing to outlaw, or even curtail, the use of permanent replacement workers by employers during strikes and lockouts. It does nothing to repeal the sections of the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts that outlawed union solidarity in the form of unions taking a fight with one employer to a related secondary employer. It does nothing to expand the right to organize to the millions of employees whose rights have been systematically stripped from the Act: supervisors, graduate employees, temps and on and on.

The Free Choice Act does provide for some financial penalties for employers who violate the terms of the act and the basic human rights of their employees. That would be put some teeth in a regulatory machinery that routinely gives employers a slap on the wrist for firing union activists. It would also curtail ability of an employer to thwart a successful unionization effort by subsequently going through the motions during bargaining and never agreeing to a first contract, by subjecting first contract negotiations to binding arbitration after three months. And, finally, it would allow unions to organize through majority sign-up procedures.

I’ve been organizing under a majority sign-up law in New Jersey for a few years now, successfully. Does it make organizing easier? Only slightly. In the private sector, card check has been used very successfully by UNITE HERE and SEIU, usually in combination with a neutrality agreement with the employer. Perhaps that combination of card check neutrality has dazzled too many labor leaders and caused us to put all our eggs in one EFCA basket.

Make no mistake: card check is not neutrality. Even with financial penalties, employers will still campaign against unionization. Employers will still fire union activists and threaten to go out of business. They will be fined, after the fact. In the meantime, union supporters will lose their resolve and give up. Under the curent framework, even after a majority (usually 60% or more) have voted for a union by signing authorization card, they still must vote a second time, some months later after enduring a phalanx of legal hearings, captive audience meetings and the firing of activists. All too often, when that second election is held, many of the employees who had signed cards are frightened into not voting or voting no. All that EFCA gives us, then, is that the initial cards count as the votes, and those votes are impounded at the National Labor Relations Board while the employer beats up and scares the shit out of the employees who voted for the union. EFCA will get you a bargaining unit, but it will not get you a union.

As best as I can tell, the fantasy is that moments after the Employee Free Choice Act is signed into law, the large industrial unions will send hundreds of organizers out into the field to collect cards at major employers in retail, shipping and even manufacturing – Wal-Mart, Toyota and so on – get the cards, get the bargaining unit and get get the first contracts by arbitration. Then, hopefully, with new dues resources, the unions would turn around and actually organize these new union members, gain thousands of new labor voters and press for greater reform. It sounds wonderful, but it it, I believe, a fantasy. Unfortunately, I don’t think that most unions are prepared to run major nationwide campaigns like that. At least not effectively. And at the AFT, the Free Choice Act will do very little for us since most of the private sector workers in our field are still not defined as “employees” under the act.

Gaining card check and doing little with it is far worse than never gaining it at all. Just think of how much fund the Wall Street Journal would have fun with that. Labor gets its dream bill to make organizing “easier” and workers still don’t sign up in droves. It seems to me far better to focus on winning fines against union-busting employers, compulsory arbitration for first contracts and expanding the Act to define as “employees” the workers in the information economy whose unionization is as crucial to labor today as General Motors’ was 70 years ago.

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Developmental Diversity

My hometown’s getting a bit of a black eye from the NY Times this weekend. On Friday, the Grey Lady published a profile of Bellerose (a few blocks from my Floral Park and “across the street from Nassau County,” take note), where our local drive-in Frozen Cup ice cream shop is being bulldozed to make way for a new sex hotel.

This is one of many changes, notes Times scribe James Angelos:

The closing of the beloved neighborhood spot strikes many residents as simply the latest sign of the death of old Bellerose. The bowling alley, another local hangout that some considered the beating heart of Bellerose, closed a few years back, to eventually be replaced by a Staples, among other stores. Several years ago, the nearby movie theater closed, and the building now houses a martial arts supply business.

I played in a youth league at the Bellerose Lanes, mind you. My dad worked a part-time job there. I was sorry to see it go, if only because it’s damn hard to find a decent bowling alley in New York these days. Around the same time, two bowling alleys near my old Kew Gardens home also closed down, muscled out by new developers who will likely also replace them with hotels or office supply stores. And when I moved in to Bay Ridge, it was hot on the heels of a protest over the shuttering of the local Key Food grocery store to be replaced by – wait for it – a Waldgreens drug store, while the nearest supermarket, Coney Island’s Pathmark, is swamped with shoppers from four under-served adjacent neighborhoods. It’s all just capitalist development, no? Another example of Jane Jacobs’ theory of success driving out success when it comes to real estate development, leading to numbing homogeneity and the “death of great cities?”

But the Times smells something else at play. At that something else is the faint whiff of curry:

“They’re turning the neighborhood into a third-world country,” Mr. Augugliaro said. “We don’t want it over here to look like Richmond Hill or Jackson Heights,” he added, speaking of Queens neighborhoods with sizable South Asian populations.

As he spoke, Ms. Augugliaro shook her head in disapproval at some of his remarks, and he seemed to pick up on her unspoken criticism.

“I’m not a racist,” Mr. Augugliaro quickly added. In fact, he said, he was tired of the subject of race coming up so often. “What does race have to do with it?” he asked.

Indeed. What does race have to do with it? I have a strange sort of pride that the neighborhood I grew up in is now New York’s Little India; that slumming yuppies make pilgrimages to Floral Park to sample the vindaloo (pity my bland palate can’t handle the stuff); that my parents’ home has quintupled in value, and when they cease to live there, it will be painted purple and adorned with brushed nickel metal accents.

Others, like Mr. Augugliaro (whose name sounds familiar; I think he volunteers for the same community theater group as my folks), are threatened that the changes to the neighborhood look and talk different from the Irish and Italian stock that formerly constituted northeast Queens. But they are letting The Man pit us against each other. The problem is not that another generation of immigrants are pulling themselves up by the boot-straps, buying in to the community and adding a taste of curry to the proverbial melting pot. The problem is that land, and usage, and community service are for sale to the highest bidder, and that local real estate desperately needs some limits and controls placed on it, to ensure a continued diversity of use and community, and that the endless sea of Wal-Marts, Walgreens, Applebees and Home Depots are still dotted with the occasional bowling alley and ice cream shop so that our neighborhoods remain communities.