Brooklyn Is Booming

We need more housing, more affordable housing, resources for better mass transit and a host of other investments to service the growth.  Schools. Parks. Sewers. 

I welcome the growth - better here than paving over farms and forests for unsustainable sprawl - but we've got to be smart about infrastructure support for our growing borough.

Brooklyn Growing Faster Than Other Boroughs

"Brooklyn's population has grown 3.5 percent in just three years, according to new census data, The New York Daily News reported. That makes Brooklyn the fastest growing of any of the boroughs. It is also one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. We added 87,400 people, for a total of 2,568,435. The growth is mostly due to immigrants, who settle mostly in Brooklyn and Queens, plus a slowdown of people moving out of New York City, according to a story in The New York Times."

Growth can yield a lot of benefits, or it can yield overcrowding, stretched services and ultimately, a retrenchment.  Proper planning and foresight is needed to favor the former over the latter.

College: Minor League Farm System

The NCAA is an exploitative system. Allowing players to unionize is a good first step. NCAA sports are not an extracurricular activity - they're a multi-billion dollar industry.

The Antitrust Today law blog has a deeper look at the subject:

The well-reasoned decision by a regional director of the NLRB was premised on a flat-out rejection of the notion that big-time college sports are amateur pursuits by “student-athletes” who are students first, and athletes a distant second.

The NLRB found the opposite to be the case – that in every way, the university and its scholarship athletes have an employer/employee relationship where academics and student status play little, if any role.  The NLRB pointed to the following for support:

●  These sports programs bring in a massive amount of revenues to their universities, with Northwestern generating $235 million over the past 10 years through ticket sales, television contracts, merchandise sales and licensing agreements.

●  In exchange for the athletic services they provide, players receive substantial compensation in the form of scholarships which can amount to as much as $76,000 per year in the form of tuition, fees, room, board and books.

●  The coaching staff has “strict and exacting control” over “every aspect of the players’ private lives” throughout the entire year.

●  The players devote 40 to 50 hours per week to their sports duties – with academics often taking a back seat – despite the NCAA’s rules that are supposed to limit to 20 hours a week the amount of time athletes play or practice.

The NLRB’s 24-page ruling severely undermines the NCAA’s claims that its collegiate athletes are all “amateurs.”  This spells trouble for the NCAA in defending its practices in numerous pending antitrust cases, where the NCAA has touted maintaining “amateurism” as the primary procompetitive justification for its rules restricting collegiate athletes’ compensation.

To be sure, the NLRB’s ruling does not end the controversy over the NCAA’s “amateurism” rules.  Northwestern University will undoubtedly appeal the decision.  The ruling only covers scholarship athletes.  And, it has no direct implications for state universities, which are governed by their own set of labor laws.

Latest In LICH Saga

Just when I thought I'd lost my capacity for surprise. The Brooklyn Eagle has the latest:

The Long Island College Hospital (LICH) saga continues: A panel rating the bids for the Cobble Hill hospital has been told to ignore some unauthorized last-minute instructions by SUNY and DOH, and head back into sequestration.

After attorneys for LICH supporters raised hell on Wednesday about alleged interference by SUNY and the state Department of Health in the voting process, the parties hashed out an agreement to extend the deadline to give panelists a chance to reevaluate the proposals.Panelists were supposed to submit their votes on Wednesday, March 26, at 3 p.m. The new deadline is Monday, March 31 at 5 p.m. Court approval of this extension is still necessary.

A court document instructs the panel to “disregard” what they were told during an unmonitored conference call made by SUNY and DOH officials on Monday, a day and a half before their votes were due.

After the panelists’ sequestration ended on Wednesday, attorney Jim Walden of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher was told about the conference call.In a letter he fired off late Wednesday to attorneys for SUNY and DOH, he alleged that the state agencies, which have been fighting for a year to close LICH, might have fed incorrect information to panel members about the odds of getting a hospital license from the state, and did not inform panel members that a temporary permit could be obtained under Public Health Law 2806-a.In his letter he alleged that the agencies incorrectly instructed the panel members that bids proposing full-service hospitals “could not receive regulatory authority to take over operations at LICH.”According to insiders, at least one panel member refused to turn in their vote after receiving these instructions from the state agencies."

Nothing is ever easy, is it?

Obama Defends Iraq Invasion: At Least America 'Sought' To Get UN Backing

This is cringeworthy, embarrassing stuff. To use a totally inadequate analogy that is nevertheless universally understandable to children:  It's even worse to take the cookie after you've been told "no" than to take it without asking. 

Obama Defends Iraq Invasion: At Least America 'Sought' To Get UN Backing

The entire article by Grim is worth reading and addresses other good points:

Obama's assertion also hinges on how broadly one construes the word "our." Taxpayers on the one hand are worse off, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq haveadded $2 trillion to the national debt, according to one study. But contractors reaped tremendous gains, and Halliburton -- a company often associated with the invasion, of which former Vice President Dick Cheney served as CEO -- saw its stock price surge from under $10 a share to over $50, before falling along with the rest of the market in 2008. (It has since recovered.)

The Private Sector Fetish

Outsourcing to the private sector is not an end in itself.

In the most technologically advanced countries, filing a tax return is free, easy and fast: Instead of taxpayers painstakingly calculating figures themselves, the government provides estimates of what they owe based on the very bank records and wages it already collects. Intuit, maker of the popular tax preparation software, TurboTax, has funnelled millions to oppose every effort to make tax day less painful. Intuit has spent $11.5 million lobbying the federal government — more than Apple or Amazon. Former California Senator, Tom Campbell, who felt Intuit’s power during his proposal for an easy-file system in California, wrote that he “never saw as clear a case of lobbying power putting private interests first over public benefit.”

1. Lobby to prevent government from providing simple, free service that would make millions of lives easier.
2. ???
3.  Profit!

Secret Bombing For Freedom

This is horrifying enough, but the detail that 100 people a year are still being killed by the bombs we left behind is nauseating.

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped around 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos. While the American public was focused on the war in neighboring Vietnam, the US military was waging a devastating covert campaign to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines through the small Southeast Asian country.  The nearly 600,000 bombing runs delivered a staggering amount of explosives: The equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years, or a ton of bombs for every person in the country—more than what American planes unloaded on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on earth.

But it was all for a a good purpose, right?  This wasn't just a catastrophic loss of life, epic environmental disaster, and an insidious undermining of our own democracy, right?  Right?

On Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I had the pleasure of seeing Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak at the ACLU conference in 2003.  So much heart in such a tiny package. May she live to 100 and never retire.

Leave RBG Alone

"Over at the Atlantic, professor Garrett Epps has just written in defense of Ginsburg. You should read the whole piece, but two important points he makes are worth repeating: Ginsburg plays a crucially important role in the Roberts Court as the senior justice on the liberal bloc, not just in terms of assigning opinions but in terms of writing them. If anything, Ginsburg has been stronger in recent years than ever and has been a crisper, more urgent voice for women's rights, minority rights, affirmative action, and the dignity of those who often go unseen at the high court than ever before. She has gone from rarely reading her dissents from the bench to doing so with great frequency, calling out the majority for what she sees as grave injustices and proving that her voice is both fiery and indispensible. Telling her that her work is awesome, but it's time to move on is tantamount to saying that a liberal is a liberal and that Ginsburg brings nothing to the table that another Obama appointee will not replicate. That analysis suffers from exactly the same realpolitik flaw Ginsburg's critics ascribe to her:"