Category Archives: politics

reasons to go get an MBA

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Today, the NY Times’ business section finally noticed something that’s been glaringly obvious for some time, at least if you’d paid any attention to the past few years of landlord-tenant strife. No longer are tenants fighting the traditional landlord, who is penny-pinching to keep his profit-over-expenses margin healthy. Now, they’re facing companies with names like Cardinal/Vantage/Pinnacle/GFI Investment Corporation, who bought their buildings with loans that cannot te repaid if their current, rent-stabilized tenants remain in their homes. As Gretchen Morgensen’s piece explains:

As regulatory filings and promotional materials show, the companies expect to generate higher returns quickly by increasing rents after existing tenants vacate their units. Their success depends upon far higher vacancy rates than are typical in rent-regulated apartments in New York.

I’ve also looked at those “promotional materials,” though I’m glad someone more numerically adept than I is looking at the financial data. No, short of me going off for a third masters’ degree, I have one question– for Morgensen, James Surowiecki, and perhaps the Court of Appeals:

Do our current banking/lending laws not proscribe giving a loan that can ONLY be repaid if the creditor breaks the law?

I asked that of Al Amateau, a smart and sage writer whose desk is next to mine. He shrugged. Is that really our final answer?

“the intervention that makes change possible is love”

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About two weeks ago, I offered a few thoughts on the latest work by Jeanette Winterson, offering one sideline smart passage while mostly urging you to seek out the book itself. Whether you did or not, I advise you to check out this review + interview in Gay City News. (One of the perks of my current job is that I sit next to GCN’s brilliant, singleminded editor, Paul Schindler.)  Michael Ehhardt’s smart review articulates the themes and more of the story than I did; I do feel gratified that one of the passages he chose to quote is the same one I did, which he calls typical of Winterson’s  “fierce Voltarian satire of future society.”

Interestingly, though, the author herself sounds less like Voltaire (who was, after all, one of the literary world’s first human rights campaigners) than like a cross between Barack Obama and Harvey Milk:

Everywhere I look, kids want to feel, want to care, want things to matter, but strength of feeling is frightening. One of the things that art can do is find a channel for strength of feeling at the same time as prompting thought – so the old split of head and heart is relieved.

This is something I have always followed in my work, and in the repeating worlds and circular mistakes of “The Stone Gods,” the intervention that makes change possible is love. Love of all kinds is crucial, not least because it resolves the head/heart tension too, and when I listen to music or read a poem or go to the theater, I am opening myself up to difference and to change — the possibilities of love. I think the artist is someone who is always falling in love — with life itself, and with the creative playful spirit of human endeavour.

Which means we get our hearts broken  every five minutes. Thank god the heart is muscle, and can lift far more than seems possible.

what’s in a name? A lot, if that name is The Chelsea Hotel.

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I always miss my former editor Larry Lerner, who left in February — but never more than when the subject of the Hotel Chelsea comes up. Long before I arrived, Larry had made the famous artist’s denizen a second home; with the help of his camera, his terrific prose and the hotel’s own Ed Hamilton, he charted its ways and the diverse group of artists and writers still within its walls. And when the big story arrived — the sudden expulsion of beloved owner-manager Stanley Bard by fellow shareholders– Larry knew its soul and got it right.

Now, it looks like Big Story #2 has arrived, and I’m completely unprepared.

Of course, the Chelsea wouldn’t deserve the name if it weren’t in upheaval, though in the past year rock and roll drama (think Sid and Nancy) has been of late replaced by Chelsea’s surreal real estate dance. shareholders. Last July longtime owner Bard was replaced by BD Hotels, the brainchild of boutique hoteliers Richard Born and Ira Drukier, and a host of changes followed, including ominous eviction threats from the new 28-year-old manager. Numerous tenants have complained about BD’s sluggishness in performing repairs, according to longtime residents Ed Hamilton (of the hotel’s blog Living With Legends) and Linda Troeller, whose exhibit on the hotel’s artistic history opened this week.

And BD’s renovations, said Troeller, did not match the vision of Bard’s daughter Michelle, who “was always so careful when she upgraded the rooms, in choosing which of the artist’s work belonged in the space. BD was more like one of those European spas – kind of cookie-cutter.”

So what’s the new Big Story? I only found it first through Ed’s invaluable blog: the hotel’s board has ousted both Travis and BD. “[Board member] Marlene Krauss has filed a suit against them. We think that her reasons for firing them are that they are losing money and not fixing the place up,” Ed Hamilton writes.

According to Hamilton, BD at first contested its firing in court, claiming in its defense that since last July its management increased net operating income of the hotel by 225%, revenue per available room by more than 35%, occupancy from 73% to 88%, and room nights sold by 41%. But on Monday BD withdrew its petition, leaving the hotel currently without a manager at all.

Rumors that longtime shareholder David Elder would be taking over have met with high scorn from Hamilton. who points out that a long-running lawsuit by author Piri Thomas is seeking to have Elder removed from the hotel’s board entirely. Meanwhile Troeller, when I called her this afternoon, would say only that Elder had been “very kind last December, when we knew nothing” and helped her secure the hotel’s ballroom for this week’s exhibit. “I’m not that privy to the real estate gossip,” Troeller added. “But it’s clear that BD didn’t share the vision of the hotel – for so many years, we has leadership that made this place somewhere that welcomed artists, so much so that when Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in the 1980s, they only knew one thing: ‘The Chelsea Hotel’….Now,” she said, “We don’t know what it will be like.” Troeller suggested that the hotel’s new direction might take a page from the Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Embassy, the 75-year-old hostel in Amsterdam now turned boutique hotel, called by Guardian UK “a riot of creativity” that showcases top Dutch designers such s Marcel Wanders and Jurgen Bey. “That owner turned the first floor into a gallery,” Troeller said. “You can do a lot, if you have vision.”

All of which is very diverting, but leaves out a lot – like Ed’s last-minute discovery of asbestos at the hotel, and whether the web of housing-court precedent being set by the losses of last year will mean to artists trying to live in this town. And all of it leaves out the history of the place itself, and what it has meant to generations of New Yorkers.

A big story? No story, because too diffuse? I’ll figure it out in the next few weeks, I guess (Meanwhile, my least favorite story has just done the fizzling into air that many expected..)

Update, May 17; After I wrote the above, things kind of exploded. Here’s the story I wrote about it all….

republicans against privatized health care?

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I can’t believe I’m posting twice in one afternoon. But this is quietly extraordinary: the famously pro-privatization mayor of my city realizing that for-profit health care may not be the best idea.

Bloomberg noted the city had gotten its health insurance from the two companies — Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York and Group Health Incorporated — for more than 60 years, adding: “We don’t need city dollars intended to protect hard-working city employees and retirees used instead to pad the compensation of healthcare executives.”

The state stands to reap nearly $1.8 billion over several years from the conversion as it would be the biggest shareholder in the new combination, but Bloomberg fears the city won’t be able to afford the higher insurance premiums for public employees and retirees that he said will result.

Maybe the city employees live in the few remaining Mitchell-Lama apartments can next persuade Bloomberg that development deals cannot be the solution to he city’s 50-year-old housing crisis.

the courage not to bomb

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Amid primaries, protests, and my quixotic effort to make progress on my book, I’ve kept headlines like this and this tucked away at the side of my brain, where my belief in the strong possibility of an October surprise lives and worries.

But now, I hear Tim Russert has taken time off from Hillary-bashing to let the cat out of the bag.  Dday notes that

… yesterday, Tim Russert kind of came out of nowhere by basically announcing to Barack Obama that we’re about to drop multiple bombs on Iran. I’m guessing that Russert, who talks to all sorts of foreign policy elite members and figures inside the Bush Administration and presumes those conversations to be off the record unless specified, knows a lot more about this than he’s letting on. And over the last week, we’ve paradoxically seen Administration rhetoric over Iran grow more heated, with the head of the CIA claiming that Iranian policy is “to help kill Americans in Iraq,” while the US has joined major powers in offering a package of incentives to Iran to get them to curtail the nuclear program that the latest NIE says they’ve already stopped.

We already know what song John McCain will be singing. Will the Dem nominee have the guts not to sing along? Or will they do as Tim O’Brien says grunts in Vietnam did – kill for fear of being called cowards?

a villanelle for betrayal

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I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to note this piece by the incredible Col. Ann Wright. Its title skittered over military history listservs, but in question form — Is There an Army Cover-Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers? — that made it appear academic, and not the rigorous prosecutorial brief that it is.

When you talk to military rape survivors, and their families, they are usually more anxious to describe not what their attacker did but what their command did or did not do. With the military mission top priority, commands often stint prosecutions (which require scarce investigative resources and the risk of losing soldiers esteemed by their peers). This was true in peacetime, when I wanted to write a book called “Twice Betrayed,” about the way victim/survivors felt about that fact. To them, the second betrayal cut longer than the first.

More brilliant journalists than I have kept on that case throughout this war; Wright’s piece is a careful reminder not to look away. To me, to whom so much is painfully familiar, it reads like a villanelle: a poem whose themes resound more and more with each echo.

I’ve reproduced below some of the villanelle-bits of Wright’s brief that highlight the double betrayal (go to the piece for the supporting facts)

The Army attempted several explanations, but each was debunked by Mrs. Priest and by the 800 pages of materials provided by the Army itself. The Army now says Tina used her toe to pull the trigger of the weapon that killed her. The Army never investigated Tina’s death as a homicide, but only as a suicide.

Rape charges against the soldier whose sperm was found on her sleeping bag were dropped a few weeks after her death. He was convicted of failure to obey an order and sentenced to forfeiture of $714 for two months, 30 days restriction to the base and 45 days of extra duty.

—

The person identified in the diary as the rapist was charged by the Army with rape after her death. Many who knew her did not believe she shot herself, but there is no evidence of a homicide investigation by the Army.

—-

The sergeant pleaded guilty to drinking in a war zone, drunken driving and consensual sodomy with an underage, incapacitated junior soldier to whom he had supplied alcohol. A military judge ruled McKinney’s death was an accident and the sergeant was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment, demotion to private, but he would not be discharged from the Army.

—

Peterson reportedly objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners and refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Members of her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Peterson objected to. The military says all records of those techniques have now been destroyed. … She was also sent to suicide-prevention training. On the night of September 15, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle. Family members challenge the Army’s conclusion.

—–

Col. Wright is a heroine in my book (literally), who gave up a lifetime career when the Iraq war made contined honorable service untenable. Her editorials should be being published by the Times (or at least the Huffington Post), not relegated to the essential but marginalized Truthout.

neither soldier nor civilian

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Yesterday, I went to a benefit performance of the Off- Broadway show “The Castle,” in which four former inmates tell their stories and praise The Fortune Society. For 40 years, the society has worked on such folks’ behalf, and ten years ago bought the castle where this movie was filmed and turned it into a halfway house. The group’s director, Jo Ann Page, told me last week that the play felt like a return to the origins of the group, born of founder David Rothenberg’s play “Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” “David was saying, ‘look—we started on Broadway, now we’re back almost on Broadway!’ And meanwhile, one of the players was saying, ‘Last year I was in lockup. Now I’m Off-Broadway!’”

The play itself is a touch didactic – while Variety called it “immensely eloquent,” the Times said drily, “This is theatre verging on a public service announcement” – but it made me think about something I’d noticed since I first started covering prison stuff: the extent to which these ex-offenders reminded me of so many of the GI’s I used to counsel. Serious people, who’ve been through something I can’t claim to share (and likely wouldn’t want to).

That impression was redoubled last night by a conversation I had with the wife of one of the leads in the play, herself a graduate of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. After we bonded talking about a friend of hers I’d written about, she spoke of some programs at the prison that had been restored with the help of “some civilians.” I’d not known that former prisoners also talked about “civilians.”

“Are you a veteran?” hotline callers used to ask me, back in the day. “You just seem like you understand.” Not a soldier, I would reply softly, but maybe not quite a civilian either. Maybe my task as a writer is to hover in that not-quite-civilian zone. Because, as my brilliant friend Jine pointed out a few weeks ago, the most important thing journalists can do is not the stories we tell, but that we listen.

yearning for the engineers?

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My friend Lily was one of the first on the net with this story you might have seen on CNN — the first, that is, after the dad whose desperation threw on Youtube the substandard housing contractors had built at Fort Bragg:

The screen capture to the left is a soldier plunging a clogged bathroom drain, on a bathroom floored filled with inches of standing water and raw sewage. Ft. Bragg’s living conditions, at least as shown in this video by a suitably outraged father, bring to mind those at Walter Reed, profiled by the reporting team at the Washington Post last year. The Fayetteville Observer has weighed in with an article on the conditions at Fort Bragg, prompted by the release of this video, and they’re asking for answers, too. Do yourself a favor and watch what one citizen journalist did to document the conditions facing some returning military. We are not remotely giving them the care that they deserve. And it’s shameful that public pressure has to be brought to bear, by videos like this, before conditions are improved for returning servicemembers.

Others drew connections to last week’s GAO report on the outsourcing of Iraq reconstruction, also know to some as why we went to war in the first place:

In addition, the audit said many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not. In one case, the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. in 2004 to construct a $50 million children’s hospital in Basra, only to “essentially terminate” the project in 2006 because of monthslong delays.

But rather than terminate the project, U.S. officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. As a result, a U.S. database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete “when in fact the hospital was only 35 percent complete when work was stopped,” said investigators in describing the practice of “descoping” as frequent.

But how do we get this stuff done without hiring someone to do it? I hear you cry in agony. But here’s where the history slut comes in: we seem to have forgotten what was learned from costly wars in earlier centuries, that outsourcing war doesn’t work. Those underfed, mutinying troops I talked about from the Revolution were supplied by private companies, who couldn’t keep up with the demand.

That’s why when we had to get serious, during World War II, whole companies of the U.S. Army were only about building stuff — not the defense plants, but literally putting supplies together right in theatre. I learned about this when reading about the great wartime journalist Ernie Pyle. As his biographer notes, Pyle spent weeks with the Army 75th Ordnance Company, which made

…trucks and tanks and supplied the ammunition, for though “the layman doesn’t hear much about [it] … the war couldn’t keep going without it,” [Pyle wrote.]….It was a grievous distortion to imply, as all newspapers did, that the only parts of the war that mattered were the high commands and the line of battle. All the tankers and riflemen and bombardiers put together made up only the sharp point of a long, long spear constructed of signalmen, cooks, quartermasters, engineers, drivers and clerks.

Now, that long spear’s been subcontracted to KBR and its spinoff subs, who are too busy counting their money to evaluate whether the job they were hired to do is well done. Or even done.

I better stop writing before I start talking about this film, which is about the thousands of Asian employees those companies are busy retaining, and endangering, in Iraq. These are the days of miracle and wonder only in the Paul Simon sense – I have to take myself to the last line of that song.

gentry less faded, more “ified”

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I’ve loved my neighborhood since before the realtors renamed it “Hudson Heights”; my best friend has lived in various corners thereof for 20-some years, and I soon knew both the assets and the liabilities of this small town at the top of the island.

But by the time we moved  up here five years ago, the renaming had happened, taking with it any hope we had of buying. The rent stayed reasonable, but barely. And every time we hope that things will soften, our neighbors who write for the Times ensure that an article like this one appears to perk things up:

Over the years, Hudson Heights — a quaint enclave that stretches roughly from 181st Street on the south to Fort Tryon Park on the north, and from Broadway on the east to Riverside Drive on the west — has attracted more affluent residents than the rest of Washington Heights, where the overall average household income in 2006 was less than $45,000, according to the United States Census Bureau. In Hudson Heights, one-bedroom apartments can fetch as much as $1,800 a month in rent and two bedrooms for nearly $3,000. Two-bedroom co-ops and condos can cost as much as $800,000. Much of the construction is prewar, and there are even some Tudor-style facades. A fortresslike wall stands along the community’s western edge.

Ostensibly, the piece is about the recession-era travails of small businesses on the block, focusing on the spa (!) that opened up on our block three years ago.  I wondered why the reporter didn’t check in with Mr. Anh, the tall chainsmoking Korean man who sells produce on the corner. I bet he’s actually seen an uptick in business, as more folk realized that Fresh Direct is really no bargain. (Besides, they miss Anh’s surreally good cilantro.)