- Is It Too Late To Make A Different Choice? (3/28/2009) - 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… …
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- Developmental Diversity (2/22/2009) - 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… …
- Champion of American Labor? (1/25/2009) - Too often Social Democrats are consumed by their grudges. Getting through the biographies they write about their heroes can be a tedious chore. Worse, the subjects of these biographies are poorly served by books that devote more attention to attacking enemies than defending their subjects' virtues. Arch Puddington's biography of Lane Kirkland is an egregious offender. Kirkland, President of the AFL-CIO following George Meany's retirement in 1979 until he was pushed out of office in… …
- It’s Hard To Find a Soft Cadre (1/19/2009) - In Michael Harrington's remarkable deathbed autobiography, "The Long-Distance Runner," he describes attempting to pick up the pieces of the shattered Socialist Party and a movement split between "Old" and "New" Lefts. The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that he formed from his old wing of the party and the diaspora of unaffiliated socialists in the labor and feminist movements was structurally a "mass" organization (albeit, one with few illusions of attracting the masses to it) with… …
- Standing Up, Sitting Down (12/10/2008) - It figures that it would take the United Electrical Workers union to try to rally the fighting spirit in America's battered working class with a sit-down strike at a shuttered factory in Illinois. The UE have a proud history of daring and desperate fighting stands that culminated in their expulsion from the Congress of Industrial Organizations early in the Cold War for refusing to purge their ranks of Communists. That fight resulted in the loss… …
- Belle and the Beeb (11/29/2008) - With the departure of Isobel Campbell and a turn towards straight-forward power pop, Belle and Sebstian morphed into a new band earlier in the decade. This was not a totally unwelcome development, as the genre is desperately in need of a savior and the band's "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" and "The Life Pursuit" were two of the best releases in recent years. And, yet, we lost a delightfully idiosyncratic voice in the old B&S. Matador Records… …
- Musings From the Campaign Trail (11/8/2008) - I first noticed Barack Obama on the campaign trail for the New Hampshire primary. He annoyed the shit out of me. Granted, I was dispatched there by my union to campaign for Hillary Clinton. Neither of them would ever get my vote, but at least Hillary had a track record. You knew what you were getting with her. With Obama, a very eloquent and inspiring (to everyone but me) speaker, he was so vague that… …
- Spoiled Ballots (10/15/2008) - I cast my absentee ballot today, and, yes, I voted for Nader just to be contradictory. I had the odd timing of being at the Board of Elections at the exact time they were running a public demonstration of new voting machines. In New York, we've been voting on the same machines that sent Kennedy to the White House. New machines have been long promised (or threatened, depending on your perspective). Apparently fearing voter backlash,… …
- A Real Hat (9/28/2008) - After a morning that saw me put a bid in on a spacious two bedroom apartment with a formal dining room in Bay Ridge - $10,000 down with 75% financing and a very adult activity, if ever I engaged in one - I decided to go shopping for a new hat. I've been wearing hats for a little over a year now: a straw hat followed by a light felt black fedora. Fashionable as it… …
- Woody Allen’s Later, Darker Ones (9/7/2008) - "Vicky Christina Barcelona" is the most thoroughly enjoyable hour and a half you could spend at the movies this season. At what point does Woody Allen's "comeback" (as each of his last few movies have been hailed by critics) get to stick? Liberated from the upscale Manhattan locations that his characters could no longer afford, as well as from the crutch of casting himself or a famous impersonator as the romantic lead, Allen's films have… …