THE UPPER WEST SIDE STYLE BLOG

Romney’s defense of Bain Capital reminds me a good deal of Bill Hicks’ joke the Rodney King Trial.  He says the testimony of the officers amounted to “It’s how you look at the tape…if you play it backwards you see us help King up and send him on his way.”  This is essentially Romney’s argument: if you play the tape backward then KB Toys invested in Bain and then sent us on our way.  

Civil service trend alert: as advanced in the TWU local 100 struggle and the NYS budget proposal, is part-time labor.

As the kid of an adjunct professor, I’m sensitized to the sudden interest in part-time work.  From where I stand, this new found panacea for civil servants is a strategic codification of the belief that there are such things as part-time people.  No one is a part-time person.  Families, housing, and well-being are not part-time, and therefore work, that which subsidizes these fundamentally human projects, cannot be truncated or diminished.  Every family needs to eat, go home to an affordable house, and have access to healthcare.  And this needs to happen everyday, not just part of the time.  There is no such thing as part-time homeless, part-time hungry, or part-time sick. Ironically, part-time laborers often work more hours than full-timers because they work multiple part-time jobs rather then remaining in a single, regulated position.  There are legislators whose policies characterize these workers as somehow reluctant to work and luxurious, as if they have chosen a part-time lifestyle and the short-shrift.  Instead they need to understand that compensation and coverage by city & state employers ought to reflect the relentless continuity of the conditions of life.  

The hard and fast of it is that part-time workers are no lesser than their full-time colleagues, and their benefits ought to reflect this truth.  The most interesting aspect of the part-time trend is this: it displaces the prominence of the classic civil v. privately contracted employees scenario, instead pitting civil servants against one another.  The fact that a union, which after all is supposed to be a united work force, is internally divided without proper representation for each party, is cannibalistic.  A union that has full and part-time workers but singular representation is going to sacrifice its own workers for a technocratic end.  As MLK liked to say “whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves.”

Simply put, at this moment the old school private contractor v. public employee tension is not the great explosive divide.  It is the impending internal collapse of unity among workers that is truly daunting.   The use of one type of worker as the sacrificial lamb for the others is a far more festering, implosive problem.  The “We Are One” approach that unions have mastered will be broken down by the disregard for part-time work and the willingness to deny the fundamental union claim that all workers should be fairly compensated for their work.  

The alleged Elysian Fields of adjunct work.

Century 21 opened the 10th circle of hell on 67th street. They don’t have a clearance section, let alone rack. That is Upper West blasphemy, so far as I’m concerned.

I learned an interesting new thing today. It involves repeating the phrase “West” constantly, without having a thing to do with our beloved community, so it has a phonetic relationship to this blogella. To begin, there is a man named Tony West. He now runs the Civil Division of the Dept. of Justice, but once upon a time he represented “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.  Formerly, he made it his task to provide adequate representation for a defected American, and now he is making sure that Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld can’t be prosecuted for war crimes. Between these two men, one a brilliant civil rights attorney and the other a conniving bureaucrat, they have cooked up a delicate legal scheme in order to evade justice.  Citing the Westfall Act, which transfers the liability of a federal employee to an employer, Rumsfeld argued that he was operating strictly within the demands of his federal duties.  West accepted the terms of this assertion, interpreting Mr. Rumsfeld’s position as follows, “the type of activities alleged against the individual defendants were ‘foreseeable’ and were ‘a direct outgrowth’ of their responsibility to detain and gather intelligence from suspected enemy combatants.”

There are two phenomenally interesting things going on here, one is a matter of character and the other is a matter of the transference of legal responsibility.  Tony West, one of the few, brave attorneys who defended the rights of a turned (to use the lingo of Homeland) American student against the ostensibly criminal policies of Mr. Rumsfeld, is now Mr. Rumsfeld’s ticket to freedom.  Is it Tony West’s mission to defend those whose actions are hardest to justify, be them political monsters or defected drifters? 

The second matter, which is a matter of record and judgment, has to do with the a political tautology.  While Mr. Rumsfeld argued that his actions are protected by the Westfall Act, and so any liability for him is to be placed upon the federal government, this premise neglects to mention that Mr. Rumsfeld was the federal government.  His leadership in the Bush Administration is undeniable, and pleading the Westfall Act is all too humble a characterization of his critical role as the Secretary of Defense.  

The tautology is easy: I followed the orders (despite their blatant legal problems) because I made the orders.  I made the orders because it was my job to make & follow the orders.

The Westfall Act, as it is used in this scenario, burns through the entire hierarchy of the federal government through the magic of bureaucratic discombobulation.  It is much akin to a customer support phone tree that sends you round & round from department to department, never offering a substantial explanation for a lapse in service or any acceptance of responsibility.

Santorum looking freakishly like an Urban Outfitters patron.

Urban Outfitters has nestled its way into the UWS.  With a location on 72nd and another on 100th, it’s slowly beginning to resemble a map of 2 train stops.  Ostensibly this is a style blog, so obviously we’re excited to have a wider selection of fashion merchants in the neighborhood, but this particular addition is troublesome.  The customers it intends to attract are often the types it wishes to harm politically. 

Urban Outfitters started off as a sartorial experiment that reconsidered the hippie aesthetic as kitsch.  That’s fine and dandy, but now it’s owned by a conservative billionaire who profits from shirts that defiantly state  “I Support Same-Sex Marriage”  and then contributes to a former US Senator/current Republican Pres candidate who would like to make same-sex marriage “invalid”.

If you’re seriously facing the Santorum v. Style dilemma then just think this way: UO steals a good deal of its designs from indy seamstresses on Etsy, so anything you see in the store probably exists elsewhere.  Ditch UO— unless you’re down with giving money to a pro-life, anti-gay, creep.  

On another note, Assemblyman Danny O’Donnell is getting married.  To a man. Congratulations boys!  Wait…which assembly district is uptown UO located in again? 

I guess Lady Gaga was just born this way.

Alleged gender-bending superstar, performance art hack, and newest board member of Brookfield properties  Steffi, as she is known on the UWS, spent her NYE mackin’ on the Napolean to her Josephine.   

Meanwhile, his “personal army” was busy arresting peaceful OWS protesters, pushing Ellen Barkin, and threatening to confiscate NYT press credentials.