The End Of The Year

A few thoughts at the end of the year:

1) I hate award shows, agreeing with the sentiment expressed by Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall: “Awards! That’s all they do is give out awards, I can’t believe it. “Greatest Fascist Dictator: Adolph Hitler.” But there is great news for award show haters everywhere. The Writer’s Guild strike has the potential to outright kill the Golden Globes and force the Academy Awards to ad lib all performances and have no access to film clips. Many movie, tv and rock stars will boycott award shows because they will not cross picket lines. Union, forever!

2) While I hate award shows, I love year In review lists. Top 10, Best Of, Worst Of–I read them all. I have found the motherlode of lists, the website Fimoculous. The website describes itself: “A fimoculous is a micro-organism that consumes its own waste for sustenance . . . and Fimoculous.com devours the filth expunged on the mediascape.” Fimoculous has a link to hundreds of best of lists on topics such as books, movies, art, architecture, sports, business etc. Currently, there are 176 lists just on the best music of the year.

3) I will remember 2007 fondly, but I will also always be reminded that behind the joy was a tinge of sadness:

We moved into our beautiful new home and had my wife’s parent’s move into our old home, less than a mile away. While we enjoy our house and the proximity of our family, I’m reminded that the passing of my father and my inheritance is what enabled us to finance both projects.

Bruce’s new album and tour (especially the concert we saw in Albany!) were impressive events: full of the inspiration, hope and joy that his music always inspires. But the music is shot through with the acknowledgement that our everyday lives are being played in front of a backdrop of war, torture and government mendacity.

The Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the second time in four years, establishing themselves as the dominant team in the game. OK–no sadness whatsoever behind that one! Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in 44 days. Happy New Year.

Thinking Outside The (Yellow) Box

Recently the local media had a few go rounds with the donation boxes popping up around town.  The big yellow boxes from Planet Aid solicit used clothes and shoes and allegedly fund charitable works in the Third World.  As Ed Griffin-Nolan pointed out in the Syracuse New Times, the charity behind the boxes was highly suspect.

According to Griffin-Nolan’s article,  the American Institute of Philanthropy has determined that only 31% of Planet Aid’s spending actually goes to charitable programs.  To be considered an effective charity, an organization should spend at least 60% of its funds for programs.

What made this an interesting media scrum was that the Syracuse Newspapers, just a couple days after the New Times story, editorialized on the good intentions behind the boxes.  To save face, the paper later ran its own investigation of the boxes and Planet Aid, running the piece as the lead article of the day.

SUN was actually approached by Planet Aid’s sales rep. and asked if we wanted to put a box in our parking lot.  I took the information, said I’d have to run it by our Board of Directors and promptly recycled all the information as soon as he left our office.  It just smelled fishy.  The sales pitch was mainly about the money we could make.  I had read about the booming business of used clothing in the New York Times awhile back, so I just put one and one together and assumed: SCAM.

It is interesting to note that almost all the boxes are placed in low income neighborhoods, usually next to the small corner stores that plague our neighborhoods.  These  stores serve as one-stop addiction shops: alcohol, tobacco, lottery, drug paraphernalia–and the drugs themselves out in the parking lot.  The corner store owners are ethically-challenged, money-grubbing thieves, so it’s no coincidence that they’d be interested in a cheap exploitation rip-off like Planet Aid.  The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the stunted tree.

One of the other interesting parts to this story is the claim from established charities that they have seen a reduction in donations since the yellow boxes appeared.  This may or may not be true.  If it is, I attribute the drop-off to the attitude of the established charities.  Most drop off centers for clothing are outside the inner-city.  The thinking may be that folks down here don’t have much to give.  The charity is given to inner city folks, not accepted from us.   But what if we have always had things to give and Planet Aid was the first to recognize that to tap a new market you make donations as easy as possible?  They may be crooks, but they’re not stupid.    

The Unbearable WASP-ness Of Being

A very interesting discussion is currently hiding in the comments section of a recent post on NYCO’s Blog. The post, ”Limbo”, is a review of a book whose subtitle is “Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams.” The book looks at persons with working class backgrounds as they enter into a more middle class existence–college education and a white collar profession.

NYCO and Sean Kirst of the Post Standard trade observations on what that feels like, the pressures, trade-offs and family reactions. I haven’t commented because I initially thought that this feeling of limbo was not my experience. In fact, it is part of my experience, but I come at the issue from a totally different angle.

I grew up in a professional, college-educated family. While my family was not rich, we were comfortably middle class–two kids, two cars, stay-at-home mom, colonial in the suburbs. My family tree includes lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, historians and government officials. College was not only expected, a prestige college was expected. I attended an Ivy League school but realize that Bob Dylan most accurately summed up my college years: “you went to the finest school alright . . ./but you know you only used to get juiced in it”. I started law school, but dropped out after a year.

I realize now that I was rebelling against those expectations that my class had placed on me (and that I was lazy.) If I had listened to my father I would have graduated from the best business school in the country right at the beginning of the financial boom of the go-go ‘80’s. I could have made, lost and re-made another fortune by now in accounting or investment banking. Even if I’d buckled down and finished at the lower-tier law school that my grades got me into I could have made an extremely lucrative living.

That never interested me and it took me almost 10 years of floundering to find the career that has afforded me happiness and professional satisfaction–community organizing. I help low-income folks learn how to to wrest some power away from the powers-that-be, in order to improve their neighborhoods.

So I have experienced this sense of class limbo. I have turned my back on upper-middle class definitions of success, yet I don’t have the working class roots that sustain other organizers with a sense of solidarity and purpose. Mike Gecan, a lead organizer in the Industrial Areas Foundation network, is able to spin tales about how he learned the true nature of power by watching his father being shaken down for protection money to keep his working class tavern in Chicago open (and how it was burned down when his father missed a payment.) A young female labor organizer I know is able to trade stories with grizzled union vets by drawing on her first-hand knowledge of her father’s life in the Laborers union.

My passion for social justice is cerebral, like any good Ivy Leaguer I drag my erudition around with me. I am left with a hunger for a more authentic working class experience, something that my white bread, suburban upbringing doesn’t provide. I value the labor unions, the ethnic social clubs and bars, the machine politician balancing corruption with the ability to uplift his people, all things that I have experienced only in books and movies.

So, I am betwixt and between. I’m not a titan of industry and I’m not a knight of working class resistance. My tenacity was forged on the tennis court, not on the shop floor, but I’ve found my own way to bridge the class divide. I use my knowledge and skills to help those not fortunate enough to have my class advantages and education. I give back in the best way I can.

Envelopes We Know. Mortgages? Not So Much.

A Citigroup analyst recently wrote a report to its investors recommending that they sell stock in Netflix and instead buy Blockbuster. The report hinged on a recent audit of the Postal Service by the U.S. Inspector General’s office. That audit found the Postal Service has to spend $21 million per year on hand sorting envelopes that will not go through the automated sorting machines.

The Citigroup report notes that the most likely offender in this problem is Netflix’s return mailer for DVD rentals–70% of the mailers’ adhesive strips gum up the sorting machines and have to be sorted by hand. Netflix has 7 million subscribers, so you can see where the blame will be placed. Citibank also notes that Blockbuster seems to have designed a return mailer that doesn’t screw things up.

Since the Inspector General is suggesting a 17 cent surcharge on all hand-sorted mail, if Netflix doesn’t fix its envelopes it will lose approximately 67% of it’s revenue, falling from revenues of $1.05 to $0.35 per subscriber.

Two thoughts on this:

1) Fix the goddamn envelopes.

2) Citigroup investment strategy can get this detailed on arcane things like the envelopes used to return DVD’s–but it can’t figure out that sub-prime mortgage loans with exotic terms, no collateral and little-to-no information on buyer finances may not be such a good thing: either for Citigroup or the nation?

Springsteen Grammy Nominations

Well, bumping up the release date of Magic on vinyl by a week helped Bruce snag four Grammy nominations, but none in the main categories of the night: Album, Song or Record of the Year.

Bruce did get several nominations in the Rock genre category:

Best Rock Album–Magic (competition: Daughtry, John Fogerty, Foo Fighters and Wilco)

Best Rock Song–Radio Nowhere (Lucinda Williams, White Stripes, Daughtry, Foo Fighters)

Solo Rock Vocal–Radio Nowhere (Beck, Paul McCartney, John Mellencamp, Lucinda Williams)

Bruce also snagged a nomination for Rock Instrumental performance for his contribution to the Ennio Morricone tribute album (We All Love Ennio Morricone): “Once Upon A Time In The West.” Listen to the competition here: Metallica, Rush, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai!

I’m betting that the Grammy’s will return to form and dis Bruce this year. Foo Fighters will win both rock song and album, not because they were any good, but because they were also nominated in the major categories of the night–record and album of the year and they definitely will not win those. Grammy’s like to give consolation prizes in the genre categories.

“Magic” wasn’t nominated for album of the year? It certainly should have been. However, “Radio Nowhere” will be hard pressed to beat out the collection of former Beatles, Chevy commercials, American Idols and indie heroes it’s up against. It’s an OK song, but not the best on the album.

My guess is Bruce may only take the instrumental award, since the Grammy’s have never liked hard rock. He’s the “safe” choice in that category. “Magic” gets shut out.

The Grammy Awards, they hate rock anyway. The greatest rock band ever (Rolling Stones) never won a Grammy for a song or album–just a belated “career achievement” award. Remember Christopher Cross? His album beat out the Clash’s London Calling in 1980. Enough said. Rockers should just rent a movie on Grammy night.

Two Interesting Rock Blogs

I’ve stumbled across a couple of real interesting rock music sites recently. The first, Professor of Pop, is written by Andrew Goodwin who actually teaches a course at the University of San Francisco on Led Zeppelin. While it all sounds like so much juvenilia, the blog is well written and interesting. He is a drummer as well as a scholar, so his critiques range way beyond the typical “this band sounds like a cross between The Beatles and Ozzy Osbourne” school of rock criticism. Why couldn’t my school offer a course on Led Zeppelin? That’s a class I wouln’t have skipped. This blog will probably heat up with the big Zep reunion show coming up, as well as the rumored tour and recording to follow.

The second site is Bill Wyman’s blog Hitsville. No, not that Bill Wyman, this one has written about rock for places such as SF Weekly, Chicago Reader, Slate.com, Salon.com and worked for NPR radio. He writes insightfully and very tartly about the new economics of rock music. Ever wonder how Lenny Kravitz can indulge his taste for the extremely expensive homes he seems to purchase regularly, despite not having any real album sale royalties in recent years? This blog spills the beans.

He also is the creator of the Moby quotient, a mathematical formula that he and a friend came up with to chart exactly how badly an artist has sold out. They named the formula after Moby since he once bragged that he had licensed every single song on his 1999 album “Play”. The formula is pretty good, because it weighs offenses to our sensibilities based on the evilness of the licensing client, the sacredness of the song to the rock canon and the reputation of the band for being either revolutionary or an outsider. Hence, they believe that Kelly Clarkson can sing for her supper pretty much anywhere, while a serious tear in the world’s space/time continuum has been created by The Clash’s shilling for jeans and automobiles.

If you want more infomation on the Moby quotient and a handy calculator go here.

I’m Sticking With The Union

The Post Standard’s lead article on Sunday focused on a common problem with our current work culture, unfortunately the Post attempted to sensationalize the issue, rather than look at the underlying issues they uncovered.

They even asked the right question–would you still have a job if you were caught soliciting a hooker on work time, while driving a company car that the police subsequently searched and found marijuana? To the newspaper the answer to this question was self-evident. Most workers would be out on their ass, that afternoon.

The worker in question, a DPW paving crew chief for the city of Syracuse, is still employed. How did this happen? The worker is unionized and has certain rights in his union contract that ordinary workers do not have. The worker was dismissed by the city and under union rules was able to have an independent arbitrator examine the charges against him and determine if he should be reinstated.

Much later in the article we discover that the arbitrator found significant problems with the alleged solicitation of a hooker. According to the arbitrator, a lawyer and former mayor of Penn Yan, the undercover officer screwed up. This was the officer’s first attempt at this type of sting and it was not at all obvious that the worker was intending to solicit the officer for sex. As for the marijuana charge, the amount was extremely small and the worker sought addiction counseling. Based on these facts, the arbitrator had the employee reinstated.

At this point, the article could have discussed how most workers in America are employed ”at will.” They do not have a contract and they may be fired at any time, for any reason. The only recourse most workers have is to attempt to prove that the employer violated their civil rights by firing them on account of the worker’s race, sex, age, religion or national origin. This is a very difficult thing to prove, the government bureaucracy is time consuming and the cost for legal representation is borne by the worker.

This issue gets to the heart of unions and collective bargaining. One of the most important benefits of forming a union is not economic. A union acts as a collective voice for its members, allowing individuals a say in their work lives. Without a union, the worker in question would have been shuffled out the door without a second thought. Unions extend the protections of our democracy into the workplace–it allows workers to present their case and be heard.

So the answer to the Post Standard’s question is an easy one. The worker in question still has his job because his union has his back. If only all workers were so lucky.