Restricting global corporate access from the local level

Following up on the last post, I'm posting a cool piece Robert Reich wrote on his blog:

Comparative advantage is nice in theory, but in a world where powerful global corporations are using every strategy imaginable to maximize their profits and powerful governments are strategically employing market access to develop their economies, it’s just theory.

Economics writers like those affiliated with Forbes Magazine surely are sophisticated enough to know this as well. So why are they so eager to trot out such economic nonsense?

Perhaps because so much profit is at stake that those who pay their salaries – and who have also put many academic economists on retainers – prefer that they mislead the public with simplistic economic theory that appears to justify these profits rather than to tell the truth.

 and

Many of the world’s most successful economies – among them, China and Singapore – owe their successes in part to their conditioning market access on certain kinds of jobs and investments, including research and development. That’s the way they have come to use global corporations, rather than be used by them. 

In other words: resist corporate control by restricting corporate access. That's the NO711 program in a nutshell. He's thinking of restrictions from above. We're thinking of it from the local level.

 

Restrict access?

Saw this comment on EV Grieve about a street cart become a new store that everyone likes:

This is how it starts. The cart moves inside, the store becomes two, then three, and eventually an evil franchise that must be stamped out -- a symbol of "corporatocracy". Meanwhile, somewhere else, the process begins again, and is cheered.

EXACTLY!!! Just think, if we had a zoning law restricting chain stores (usually defined as 12 stores or more), then NYer's could enjoy places like this without watching them turn into huge global corporate human smuggling operations. 

We *can* improve the world if we speak out and take action. Resist corporatocracy, restrict global corprorate capital's access to our our streets. Join NO711! Join Occupy! (Yes, it's still active -- headed to a meeting tonight about coordinating all the local neighborhood Occupations in the city and all the Occupy policy groups.)

Hope in organizing?

The panels I attended at the Left Forum on Saturday (mostly analysis) were depressing, Sunday (engaged activism), optimistic.

It's a public forum, so I shouldn't expect any revelations, but still, familiar boilerplate analysis is tired. Even the solutions were depressing since there was no hint of how to get the world to implement them.

Cathy O'Neil, from Occupy's Alt Bank group, provided the only positive suggestion I heard all Saturday: a people's lobby. She thinks office holders are completely in the dark (she seems to ignore their aids some of whom ought to know something) about the complexity of the financial system. All their information comes from corporate lobbyists with a biased slant that serves the immediate corporate interests' grasping. Electeds hear no one from the general public looking out for the overall health of the economy. Office holders, she maintains, need education in the dangers that those narrow corporate interests pose to the overall economy.

There's a big 'if' here: electeds will respond to knowledge if they are not already bought by the corporate interests. If they are bought, then the lobbying is really just providing electeds with their corporate-friendly talking points.

Money is not the only leverage on electeds. Voting is the counterbalance to corporate campaign money, but the voters also need education.

Sunday was more optimistic. Occupy held a round table about current local Occupy efforts including Occupy Astoria/LIC, Occupy Kensington and Occupy Sunset Park. These folks are engaged and getting somewhere. Occupy Kensington is focused on a labor struggle with a specific store, Golden Farm, but they've also become a hub of community discussion. That's also true of the Astoria/Long Island City and Sunset Park groups.

No tired analyses in this room, the discussion was about how to be more effective: how to connect with each other, how useful is the Occupy horizontal organizing, how to sustain momentum, how to get more people off their asses and make a difference, how to take advantage of not-in-my-back-yard & pocketbook issues to expand them into larger social justice activism.

At the last panel the last presenter, Nabil Kamel, gave us the most optimistic history: two instances in which rebuilding from a natural disaster became an opportunity for community groups to improve their circumstances, rather than yet another opportunity for capital to displace the disempowered and rebuild for the revenue-creating rich. Kamel finds that community successes are facilitated by 1) the existence of a prior community organization (e.g., Black Panthers in Oakland, where, decades after their creation, they managed to redirect the rebuilding of a bridge, eventually getting the municipality to train and employ and pay the community to build it themselves), 2) a network of organizations, 3) focus on a single site and 4) 'carving out' of capital interests to gain assistance.

On the downside, any local improvement tends to gentrify the neighborhood. So the Marxist analysis may have the last word if capital turns every reform to its benefit. Chomsky offered a bit of light observing the leftward turn in Latin America. It was fitting that the closing speech was given by the Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera. He made this point that local struggles must be placed in the largest context. Good advice.

Right to the City

The group that started it all in Turkey was Istanbul Right to the City. The U.S. has a Right to the City too. The slogan has been around for a while. David Harvey wrote about it in a broad economic context here in the New Left Review. It raises a question: right to the city for whom? Of course, it's for residents, not for capital which preys on them. But which residents? Labor? The dispossessed? The disempowered? Artists? Professionals? Students? Gentrifiers?

The protest in Istanbul began with a confluence of middle-class interests including park conservancy and community groups: Taksim Gezi Park Protection and Beautification Association along withTaksim Solidarity and RttC, according to Jadaliyya. So do the middle-class have a right to the city? Is resistance in itself a progressive act against the powers that be, be they corporate or government or the collusion between them?

No. Community self-determination can be racist or reactionary. And it can be both regardless of class and income. I know upscale NoHo residents who support a new measure that will harass street vendors with hefty fines. (When I asked why, the answer was, there are too many. Sort of begs the question.) I attended a CB2 meeting at which Greenwich Village gentry angrily protested a small school's proposal to use a street for a playground during the day. Too much noise. I attended a meeting of low-income, subsidized residents who did not want a low-income assisted living facility next to their property. Beyond NIMBY, they asked that the facility be built in someone else's backyard a couple of blocks north -- it goes without saying that they didn't consult those residents. It made no difference to them that this assisted living facility was needed in the wider community, that two large senior facilities had just been closed not far away, and that this facility was dedicated to the disempowered and the dispossessed. Residents can be harsh and selfish. "Right to the City" is a romantic slogan. In reality, it can mean anything to anyone.

The credit goes to Istanbul RttC for seeing the park issue as more than a NIMBY issue, connecting it to a broader empowerment issue. That's what I see in NO711 -- the city-wide zoning amendment allowing community resistance to giant corporate control from afar, restricting access to capital, the Right to the City as Harvey means it, not just another reactionary NIMBY fight.

From shopping mall to political transformation

The protest in Turkey, like Occupy Wall Street, began with middle class discontent. OWS was ostensibly about money in politics, welfare for banks too big to fail and income inequality, but the pocketbook issues were student debt and unemployment. Critics thought these were spoiled, over-educated, middle-class kids, but we learned that they were economically and socially not the EV gentrifiers. When Penley tried to bring OWS to Tompkins Square Park, EV newbies howled and screamed: not in our backyard (here, also see the negative comments on Grieve's post.)

In Istanbul the protest started as a defense of a local green space from another shopping mall. It almost sounds like a bourgeois NIMBY story from Greenwich Village protesting NYU. Police repression fanned the flames into a much broader anti-government repression movement. But the central issue is still community self-determination. From RT: 

"...respect must come back to the political approach and implementation… That has to do with the way people feel fed up with the interference, micromanagement of their lifestyles." -- Istanbul-based political columnist Yavuz Baydar 

Beware capitalist tools

Robert Reich, Clinton's Labor Secretary, posted Monday on his blog a piece arguing limiting access to giant corporations:

If global corporations obeyed all national laws — the spirit of the laws as well as the letter of them – and didn’t use their inordinate power to dictate the laws in the first place by otherwise threatening to take their jobs and investments elsewhere, there’d be no issue.
It’s the fact of their power to manipulate laws by playing nations off against one another – determining how much they pay in taxes, as well as how much they get in corporate welfare subsidies, how much regulation they’re subject to, and so on – that raises the question of how citizens can countermand this power.
Consumer benefits may sometimes exceed such costs. But, as we’ve painfully learned over the years (the Wall Street meltdown, the BP oil spill in the Gulf, consumer injuries and deaths from unsafe products, worker injuries and deaths from unsafe working conditions, climate change brought on by carbon dioxide emissions, and, yes, manipulation of the tax laws – need I go on?), the social costs may also exceed consumer benefits....

...Comparative advantage is nice in theory, but in a world where powerful global corporations are using every strategy imaginable to maximize their profits and powerful governments are strategically employing market access to develop their economies, it’s just theory. 

 Wouldn't it be great if NO711's zoning proposal were the beginning of a wide-spread resistance against global corporate access at the ground level? Instead of relying on our failed political system to defend us from global capital, start with community self-determination growing from a grassroots movement? Could this be the second wave for Occupy -- occupy our own community?

Call to action!

Constructing in an occupied building has become one of the most aggressive means of harassing tenants. Shaoul used it often, and Kushner, who recently bought nearly 30 parcels in our neighborhood, informed the community board last month that he intends to construct building expansions wherever he can. 

The case of 515 East 5th Street may become the precedent for all future expansion harassment. Please come to the Board of Standards and Appeals and spread the word. From GOLES:

GOOD OLD LOWER EAST SIDE, INC



TENANT ALERT!

FIGHT ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF ADDITIONAL FLOOR AND PENTHOUSE ON 515 EAST 5TH STREET!

DATE: TUESDAY, MAY 21ST, 2013

TIME: 10:00 AM SHARP!

PLACE: BOARD OF STANDARDS AND APPEALS (BSA)

22 READE STREET, SPECTOR HALL

NEW YORK, NY 10007

(ONE BLOCK FROM CITY HALL)

COME TO THIS IMPORTANT HEARING AND SHOW YOUR OPPOSITION TO LANDLORD’S APPLICATION TO LEGALIZE THE ADDITIONAL FLOOR AND PENTHOUSE WHICH HE BUILT. THIS CONSTRUCTION WAS FOUND ILLEGAL IN BSA DECISIONS IN 2007 AND 2008. NOW THE LANDLORD IS SEEKING TO REVERSE THEM. IF LANDLORD IS ALLOWED TO KEEP THIS ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTION IT WILL SET A PRECEDENT FOR OTHER LANDLORDS TO DO THE SAME LEADING TO DANGEROUS CONSTRUCTION THAT CAN CAUSE DAMAGE TO STRUCTURE OF SUCH OLD TENEMENT BUILDINGS.

FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL GOLES 212-533-2541

NO 7-Eleven city-wide petition on line!

NO 7-Eleven: resist chains and corporate control has a city-wide petition on line. Take a look at the great comments along with the signatures. 

To the New York City Planning Commission and City Council: Allow community self-determination to resist chain stores.

To: 

The New York City Planning Commission and City Council 

There are over 7,200 chain stores in New York City with more opening every year. 7-Eleven Corp alone is planning to open 100 new stores in Manhattan by 2015. Chain stores raise commercial rents, crowd out our commercial variety, our choices our mom-and-pops and our diversity. They efface our neighborhood character, erase our ethnic roots, erode our community relationships. They leverage wages down and, once cornering their market, leverage prices up. I call on the City Planning Commission and the City Council to amend the city's zoning text to require that no corporate formula store or bank open a new location without approval from the local community board. Such a zoning amendment will not only allow communities to restrict the number and location of chain stores, but also allow community boards to negotiate legally binding stipulations on all elements of chain store character from signage and closing hours to wage scale.

Allow community self-determination on chain stores, franchises and banks.

Sincerely,
[Your name]

http://www.change.org/petitions/to-the-new-york-city-planning-commission-and-city-council-allow-community-self-determination-to-resist-chain-stores?utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition

NO 7-Eleven, a grassroots movement resisting the spread of chains and franchises, is holding a neighborhood-wide meeting this Wednesday. Their goal is to require that all corporate clone stores, including banks, be required to obtain approval before opening a new location so the community can have a say in the number and location of corporate chains and franchises. Details below. Please spread the word.

MEETING

NO 7-ELEVEN

Limit corporate clone stores

before they limit our food, our commerce, our labor, our streets and our New York City character

7-Eleven is opening a new location on the corner of 11th Street and Ave. A in June. 7-Eleven already opened 32 locations in Manhattan and has an additional 100 stores on the way! If you are as concerned about protecting the East Village and future of the city, please attend

Next 'No 7-Eleven' Meeting

Wednesday April 24

6:30-8:00pm

93  St. Marks Place

(Btwn 1st and Ave. A)

Web: www.no7eleven.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/no7eleven

Twitter: www.twitter.com/no7elevennyc

Something urgent from CAAAV

The Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence

We Need YOUR Help to Send Out 100 Letters in 100 Hours!

Dear friends and supporters,

Many of you have been supporting the residents of 81 Bowery, who were evicted by the City's Department of Buildings on November 13, 2008 for safety violations the landlord failed to correct. Since then, four more buildings in Chinatown have been vacated leaving more than 100 residents homeless.

In these harsh economic times and cold weather, the City should not be forcing people out of their long-time homes. There are other alternatives the City can adopt that will require landlords to fix the violations while at the same time ensuring that residents can remain in their homes safely.

The Department of Buildings has not agreed to a meeting with the displaced tenants and CAAAV. We need YOUR support to hold DOB Commissioner LiMandri accountable by meeting with us. No longer should they be allowed to hide behind closed doors and bureaucracy.

We hope you support the Alternatives to Mass Evictions (AME) Campaign.
Our demands are simple:

1) For the displaced tenants to be able to return home immediately

2) In the future, for DOB to put in place a policy of having landlords correct violations instead of evicting whole buildings in the name of safety, leaving people homeless.

Here is how you can support:

Send a letter to DOB. We are doing a push to send 100 letters to DOB in 100 hours via fax and email beginning 9am on February 2nd until 1pm on February 6th. The more the merrier! We appreciate letters sent on organizational letterhead and as individuals. Below and attached is a sample letter. Please cc Helena once this is done so we can keep track!

Come out with your members to actions. We will be doing actions at DOB and in Chinatown in the coming months. If you are interested, let Helena know.

Spread the word! We cannot allow this to happen to anyone else. And we need all the support you can give in order for DOB to change their practices. As this campaign goes on, there will be periodic updates, and we hope you will talk to others about this campaign and all other efforts to fight gentrification and displacement in New York City!

For more information, contact Helena Wong at hwong@caaav.org or (212) 473-6485.

SAMPLE LETTER TO DOB

FAX to: (212) 566-3785
Email to: rlimandri@buildings.nyc.gov
Subject: Housing Justice for Chinatown Tenants

February ___, 2009

Robert LiMandri
Commissioner
Department of Buildings
280 Broadway, 7th floor
New York, NY 10007

Dear Commissioner LiMandri:

I am writing in support of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and the approximately 100 long-term Chinatown residents – from 81 Bowery, 32 Market Street, 15 Catherine Street, and 103 East Broadway (a FDNY vacate that was assisted by DOB) – who are left homeless because of vacate orders issued by your agency between November 13 and December 16, 2008.

In all four buildings the issue was secondary egress, which is a hazardous violation that should be corrected by their landlords immediately. I do not question that secondary egress is a fire hazard and that your agency has an obligation to ensure all tenants' safety. However, there is a more viable policy the Department of Buildings can and should adopt to address safety violations that do not lead to forcing people out of their homes during the coldest months of the year with no notice whatsoever. For example, the DOB can require that landlords hire fire guards at their own cost while they correct the violations. These vacate orders penalize residents who are paying rent, when the DOB ought to hold the landlords responsible for not complying with the law. The landlords allowed these violations to exist for years, putting tenants' lives in danger. The DOB should work to ensure that tenant safety issues are addressed in ways that protect tenants and ensure they live in safe and habitable homes. By issuing vacate orders that penalize the tenants, the DOB is in fact condoning these landlords to continue to violate the laws of the City.

It is in times of economic crisis that the DOB should take even more care to ensure that no one is forced out of their homes, yet current cuts to social services essentially guarantee that residents' need for these services will exceed what can be provided, adding more strain on scarce and valuable resources.

I urge that you meet with CAAAV to discuss the following:

1) The DOB allow all residents from 81 Bowery, 15 Catherine Street, and 32 Market Street to return to their homes immediately.

2) The DOB require the landlord to hire fire guards at all buildings until the landlord has corrected the violations.

3) The DOB should not approve any new Certificate of Occupancy applications for these three buildings that do not allow for current residents to return to their homes.

4) The DOB puts into place a policy that allows for landlords to fix violations at the landlord's expense, rather than issuing vacate orders that penalize tenants and make them homeless.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
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Park Row press conference

Press Conference on reopening Park Row
Friday, Jan. 23, 12:15
Park Row at Worth Street

Our new state senator Danny Squadron is holding this press conference on the city's unwillingness to reopen Park Row, a crucial route connecting Chinatown to downtown. Please attend if you can.

The closing of Park Row following 9/11 has been a problem for Chinatown ever since, impeding traffic, slowing business and endangering pedestrians trying to negotiate the tortuous traffic detours.

Park Row was closed in order to protect Police Headquarters at 1 Police Plaza from terrorist attack. The transfer of this putative terrorist target away from the immediate vicinity of one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city -- in the world -- does not seem to be a concern for this administration.

Rather, the neighborhood remains under attack by the city administration itself, as residents are evicted from their homes by the Department of Buildings following years of neglect by landlords and city agencies whose responsibility it was to have ensured proper living conditions. Soon the city plans to dig up Chatham Square in a traffic-rerouting construction mayhem, spread over years, that will bury yet more Chinatown businesses in the midst of this recession when businesses will be most vulnerable.

The city's priorities are clear. They do not include the residents and businesses of Chinatown.

Public Notice: Chatham Square Task Force Meetings

The public is encouraged to attend these meetings on Chatham Square’s reconstruction. The Task Force was set up by CB3 to address community concerns over Chatham Square’s reconstruction. Your input is essential to this process.

CB3’s own traffic engineer, Brian Ketchum will be present to answer questions and to review the City’s plans to tell us what works and what does not work so far.

Wednesday, January 21st at 6:30pm
Confucius Plaza Community Room, 33 Bowery

Wednesday, February 18th at 6:30pm
Confucius Plaza Community Room, 33 Bowery

Monday, February 23rd at 6:30pm
Public School 124, 40 Division Street

M8 hits the news

Local activism can make a difference -- the campaign to save the M8 bus was featured in both copy and photos in the Times and Post and in the copy of AMNY. It ain' over 'til it's over.

Prevent an eviction

If you read Howard Hemsley's letter in the Villager, you know the irony of this case: squatters-turned-owners evicting their mentally handicapped neighbor to sell his apartment at a huge profit. Please take a moment to help out the defenseless by signing
this petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/barreto/petition.html).

Here are more details of Alfredo's case, courtesy of Paul Newell:

Please take a minute to sign this petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/barreto/petition.html) to prevent the impending eviction of Alfredo Barreto from his Lower East Side apartment.

Alfredo is a 47-year-old disabled lifelong Lower East Sider. His mother, Carmen Barreto, is a pillar of this community, longtime activist and personal friend. Alongside his mother, Alfredo has participated in most of the struggles for justice and decency in this neighborhood over the last decades.

The Lower East Side once was a haven for squatters who championed the rights of homeless and mentally handicapped individuals to occupy buildings. Today, however, those same squatters, made powerful by a City's generosity, pull the same stunts they formerly attributed to greedy landlords.

Such is the case with Alfredo Barreto. Barreto, who has lived quietly at the squat on 7 ½ Second Avenue for 7 years, now faces homelessness as his former comrades become property owners who stand to benefit from the sale of his apartment.

"This is the latest phase of gentrification on the Lower East Side," says Howard Hemsley, Alfredo's court-appointed guardian and community activist. "As a mentally handicapped man Alfredo was never a part of the clique at this squat, but we never expected he would be treated to this kind of hypocritical brutality. They've gone from embracing the rights of all to housing to forcing someone with just as much right as they under the law into homelessness."

In 2002, the City of New York transferred title for one dollar to 7 ½ Second Avenue to UHAB, a not-for-profit organization that creates tenant-owned cooperative apartments. One might think that would make the squatter-residents appreciate generosity. Unfortunately, that's not the case. As the holiday season begins, Alfredo Barreto, is being evicted by his neighbors and UHAB. UHAB's excuse for taking Mr. Barreto's apartment and selling it is a dispute with the apartment's previous tenant, a dispute that has nothing to do with Alfredo, who tended to his cats and caused no trouble. UHAB has refused to even consider giving Alfredo a rental apartment in one of the many units it manages.

"We were so proud and happy that Alfredo could live on his own," said his mother. "It's a dream our family has had - that Alfredo could be a functioning adult, living in his own place. I guess that doesn't mean anything to UHAB."

Please take one minute to sign this petition. We are fighting in court and in the streets. Last week we held a protest outside UHAB's Wall Street headquarters. Please join us in this fight.

http://www.petitiononline.com/barreto/petition.html

Thank you very much. Please also let me know if you would like to be more involved in this effort.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Paul Newell

Wanna save the Bowery? Send this e-mail real quick

At yesterday's hearing both Council Member Gerson and Council Member Mendez extended support for the rezoning of the Bowery through a Follow Up Corrective Action (FUCA).

The City Council Subcommittee will vote on it Monday. That means we have until tomorrow morning (Friday) to get through to the City Planning Commission. Without CPC consent, it won't happen.
Please send a quick email (text below) to:

aburden@planning.nyc.gov,avella@council.nyc.ny.us,gerson@council.nyc.ny.us,rmendez@council.nyc.gov


RE: FUCA to rezone the east side of the Bowery

Dear Chair Burden:

I write to request that, in conjunction with the current East Village/ Lower East Side Rezoning, a Follow-up Corrective Action (FUCA) be initiated immediately by the City Planning Commission to extend the Special Little Italy District (SLID) from the west side of the Bowery to the east side of the Bowery.

At the November 12, 2008 Subcommittee Hearing on Zoning and Franchises, Chair Tony Avella, Council Member Alan Gerson, and Council Member Rosie Mendez all stated their support for an immediate protective rezoning of the Bowery. In addition, we have the support of Community Board 3, the Greenwich Village Society For Historic Preservation, the Historic Districts Council, the Society for the Architecture of the City, the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, and the Coalition To Save The East Village.

Although the Bowery has always had a unique place in the history of the City of New York, in recent years we have watched large, out-of -scale development going up on the east side of the Bowery, the result of which has been the destruction of the context, historic character and diversity of the community.

The City has recognized the historic significance of the Bowery by protecting the west side of the Bowery in the Special Little Italy District, and the NOHO Historic District. The East Village/ Lower East Side Rezoning will protect the area just east of the Bowery. However, the east side of the Bowery itself has been left out of all these rezonings.

The east side of the Bowery must be rezoned today to ensure that it is in context with the rest of the community -- the Special Little Italy District, the NOHO Historic District, and East Village/ Lower East Side. If a Follow-Up Corrective Action is not initiated as part of this current East Village/ Lower East Side rezoning the historic Bowery will be replaced with a wall of towers.

CITY-WIDE TENANTS' UNION
Sixth Street Community Center
638 East 6th Street
(between Avenues B&C)
Monday, May 14, 6:30pm.

New York is under assault from developers and landlords. Our legal rights have been eroded, loopholes have been exploited and there is little or no regulatory oversight. Affordable housing that sustains communities is rapidly disappearing. We are in crisis. We are losing our rights.

Landlords and developers have organized; so must we.

This is an important project that fills a dire need. We got a good start at our last meeting, creating a program committee which has been working and communicating all week. We're moving forward. Join us.

Tenants unite!

Hope to see you there,

Rob Hollander
LES Residents for Responsible Development
622 E 11, #10
NYC 10009
212-228-6152