Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Searchlight covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"Do I believe that the behavior of Walmart is outrageous? Yes. Do I think that Walmart is beginning to feel the pressure? It is clear they are. Will they get to a place where we could call them a responsible member of the corporate community? I hope so, but they aren't there yet."
- Speaker Christine Quinn on the need for employers like Walmart to pay for health care benefits.
MEETING SUMMARY:
HEALTHCARE FOR GROCERY WORKERS
The New York City Council overrode its first mayoral veto under the leadership of Speaker Christine Quinn in an effort to require grocery and "big box" stores like Walmart to provide health care coverage for their employees.
The veto override relates to an amendment (Intro 758-A) to the Health Care Security Act, a previous bill passed last year that requires employers to contribute $2.50 for each hour an employee works, or $5,000 a year for a full-time employee toward the worker's health costs.
The amendment changes the act so that it applies to stores with more than 50 employees (the previous bill said 35 or more employees) and excluded temporary and seasonal workers. The bill also applies to large stores, like Walmart, which use a significant amount of their space to sell food.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed both measures, arguing that they violate federal law, which limits state and local government involvement in employee benefits.
The council overrode the mayor by a vote of 48 to 2; Republican Councilmember Andrew Lanza and Democrat Simcha Felder sided with the mayor. The council only needs a two-thirds majority to override the veto.
Still, it is unlikely that that the council's action will have much impact on the 27,000 workers it is intended to help. In February, New York's highest court ruled that the mayor does not have to enforce city laws that he deems to be illegal.
Quinn called the court ruling "a challenge, not a problem" and said it was important for the council to send a message that businesses should be expected to give their workers benefits.
"Do I think that Walmart is beginning to feel the pressure? It is clear they are," said Quinn.
The mayor and council will likely continue the battle over the legislation in court.
Despite their differences on the bill, Quinn said that she hoped there would be fewer mayoral vetoes and City Council overrides than in the previous council under Speaker Gifford Miller.
"Vetoes and overrides should be extraordinary acts," said Quinn. "I hope we have to do them infrequently."
TAX LIENS
The council also passed a measure that extends the Department of Finance's authority to sell tax liens for another six months, until August 31, 2006. The sale of tax liens allows the city to collect property taxes on buildings that are in foreclosure that would otherwise not be paid.
Over the next six months, the council also wants to review the program to ensure that senior citizens and disabled New Yorkers do not lose their homes.
"Seniors are having trouble paying their taxes because their properties are now more valuable [due to a rise in real estate prices]," said Councilmember David Yassky. "They should not be forced to move out of their homes because they can't pay those taxes."
The bill passed unanimously at the request of the Bloomberg administration.
CITY COUNCIL REFORM
Shortly after being elected as Speaker, Christine Quinn vowed to reform the internal rules that govern the City Council to make the legislative body more open and transparent.
One aspect of the promised reform is to set up a task force to review the current rules and work with good-government groups to come up with ways that they can be improved.
Quinn appointed Councilmembers David Yassky and Dan Garodnick to head up the task force, which will also include Gale Brewer, Leroy Comrie, Robert Jackson, Oliver Koppell, Michael McMahon, and Dominic Recchia.
FLATBUSH AVENUE BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT
The council passed a measure (Intro 92-A) that begins the process of establishing a Business Improvement District on the corner of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues in Brooklyn.
Business improvement districts provide activities or amenities that promote business in a specific area, including maintenance and sanitation, and holiday decorations. They are funded by assessments on property owners within the area.
The next Stated Meeting is scheduled for March 22, 2006.
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Marjane Satrapi's drawing about a teenager's life in Iran
There are many ways of looking at what is being called the cartoon crisis, even in New York.
A dozen cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad –- one of them with the prophet in a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse -- were first published last September in a newspaper in Denmark. It was not until January of this year, according to an account in The Washington Post, that the cartoons began sparking violent protests around the world, resulting so far (as of mid-February) in the deaths of at least 45 people, according to a count by the Associated Press.
There have been demonstrations in New York City as well: About 1,000 Muslims protested in front of the Danish Consulate on a Friday in February; there was an earlier demonstration at the United Nations.
Several European editors have lost their jobs for publishing the cartoons, and 11 Muslim journalists in five countries, including Jordan, Algeria and Yemen, were arrested for doing so.
In New York City, four members of the staff of the New York Press quit when the publisher yanked the cartoons right before publication. (The articles, and 12 cartoons, that were going to run have been published on a Web site called New Partisan) So far, no local newspapers have published the cartoons except the New York Sun.
While in Qatar, U.S. Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes said U.S. newspapers generally did not reprint the caricatures ''because they recognize they are deeply offensive, even blasphemous to the precious convictions of our Muslim friends and neighbors.'' Others say it is from fear.
When Daryl Cagle talks about a cartoon crisis, he is not only talking about the reaction to the Danish cartoons. A cartoonist himself for MSNBC, Cagle runs a popular Web site that offers both an index of political cartoons and news about cartooning. (It probably has the most comprehensive updates about the events surrounding the Danish cartoons).
It is clear from his site that he feels that political cartoonists are under siege in the United States as well, albeit for different reasons. The number of full-time staff editorial cartoonists has shrunk from more than 200 in the 1980's to under 80 today. Major newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun are now without a staff cartoonist, and even the newspaper cartoons that remain (as cartoonist Scott Santis observed on Cagle’s blog) “are more often jokes than commentary.” Recently, Cagle wrote: “A knowledgeable source tells me that the Village Voice, the New York alternative tabloid with a great tradition of editorial cartoonists going back for decades -- including Jules Feiffer and Ed Sorel -- will stop running editorial cartoons, and any future cartoons will be non-political.”
There are a half-dozen offensive cartoons –– not online, not from Denmark, but in a New York City museum. They are ugly caricatures of black New Yorkers, wearing ludicrous costumes, speaking in ignorant but pompous dialect, and generally putting on airs.
“Not a single image of black New Yorkers survives from their first 170 years in the city,” explains a wall label in “Slavery in New York,” an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. Then, in the 1790s, “black people appear in the pictures of the city for the first time.” The first pictures are landscapes dotted with a couple of “hardworking if nameless blacks.”
It was not until slavery was abolished completely, in the 1820s, that caricatures of black New Yorkers started appearing in the local press. They were not the only group to be caricatured; immigrants too were a target. But “black New Yorkers came in for especially vicious lampooning” – and some half-dozen examples hang on the walls of the exhibition.
On the second floor of The Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial To The Holocaust, is a room with some half-dozen Nazi-era caricatures of Jews, most of them on the front page of a notorious German newspaper called Der Sturmer – a Jew accosting an innocent blonde in a train station, Jews collecting the blood of children, a Jew looking like a kind of bloody King Kong destroying a German town. There is also a children’s board game called Jews Out. “The objective of the game is to collect Jews, who â€mar’ a German town by their presence and their â€parasitic businesses,’ and deport them to Palestine.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition is a poster by American artist Ben Shahn, created in response to a Nazi massacre in the town of Lidice, Czechoslovakia: Under the title, “This is Nazi Brutality,” it shows a figure with a hood over his head, his hands chained (an image that in 2006 startlingly evokes a more recent event.) Although commissioned by the U.S. Office of War Information, the wall label notes, “it was deemed too violent for mass distribution.”
Nobody is calling the Danish cartoons works of art -- indeed, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman called them “callous and feeble” provocations meant to “score cheap points about freedom of expression.”
Still, The Washington Post’s account explains that Flemming Rose, the editor for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the cartoons, did so in part after having read “that museums in Sweden and London had removed artwork that their staff members deemed offensive to Muslims.”
Many non-Muslims looking at the cartoons see them as bland or unclear, and don’t understand what all the fuss is about; some of those offended reply that this lack of understanding is part of the problem.
The question of whether the religion of Islam deems any depictions of Muhammed to be offensive is reportedly one debated by Islamic scholars. In The New Yorker magazine, Jane Kramer writes: “The Koran says that there can be â€nothing like a likeness’ of God, but in fact it makes no reference to images of the prophet to whom the interdiction was revealed. (It is the Hadith, Islam’s early narrative, that forbids the faithful to represent him.) And, as Islam spread to Persia and India, civilizations with strong representational traditions, artists did paint him.”
It is worth noting that an analogous prohibition exists in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as expressed in the King James Bible translation of the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image [in other words, an image sculpted, carved or engraved], or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
A Web site called Religious Tolerance points out that “a strict interpretation of this verse would prohibit…erecting nativity scenes at Christmas, hanging religious art in churches, allowing wedding photographers into the sanctuary, installing stained glass windows…that include images of people and animals, using children’s Bibles which are decorated with pictures,” etc.
In his article on the Danish cartoons, “A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery,” Kimmelman asked: “Have any modern works of art provoked as much chaos and violence?” He noted that the 1926 painting by Max Ernst, The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses, was recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art without protest. He brings up a handful of past controversies, such as the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which is best-known for inspiring then-Senatorial candidate Rudy Giuliani to create a Decency Commission and threaten to bankrupt the museum. But Kimmelman left out the long litany of battles in the culture wars taking place in New York -- including, mostly recently, the successful effort to chase the Drawing Center out of the World Trade Center site, and the attacks on The Last Supper also at the Brooklyn Museum, and on artwork by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Richard Serra, John Ahearn...
There is, in fact, a great deal of artwork in New York that one group of people or another have found offensive. Kimmelman attributes this to what he calls the "knee-jerk baiting of traditional authority" inherent in modernism, the efforts by modern artists to "pander to a like-minded audience by goading obvious targets hoping to incite reactions." We live in a society where it is considered a compliment to call something "irreverent."
Others say that the artist's role is to show a culture things about itself that people do not want to see, or are not ready for; "it's through art," Arthur Miller wrote, "that the generations converse with one another."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has three portrayals of Muhammad in its collection, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“A spokeswoman said none of the Met's depictions of Muhammad -- one from 15th century Afghanistan, one from 16th century Uzbekistan, one from 16th century Turkey -- had been displayed for years. The Met's Islamic galleries are closed for renovation until 2009.”
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which also has such work, Islamic art curator Linda Komaroff said: "We've always known about these images, and no one's ever had a problem, because they are respectful.... I wish this whole issue would go away because it's so incendiary."
"Speechless" by Shirin Neshat |
The label “Islamic Art” does not appear in a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Without Boundary: 17 Ways Of Looking,” even though 15 of the 17 artists “came from the Islamic world but do not live there,” in the words of curator Fereshteh Daftari. The artists were born in Iran and Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt, Istanbul and Beirut. They live in London and Paris, Buenos Aires and (six of them) in New York. Some of their work takes the classic traditions of Islamic art as they are understood in the West –- calligraphy, carpets, miniatures -– and turns them on their head in some way. “The most Islamic-looking object,” Daftari points out, is by one of the two American-born artists, Mike Kelly, whose woven silk carpet replaces the traditional red with the green of his ancestral Ireland, and throws in a few shamrocks. “The purpose of this show,” the curator said, “is to prove how reductive â€us-them’ is.”
The most startling image may be “Speechless,” by Iranian-born New York artist Shirin Neshat’s, in which a woman is wearing a gun barrel as an earring, and her face is covered with calligraphy-like text, the writing (as the catalogue explains) “a eulogy to martyrdom in the name of Islam, quoted from the writings of the contemporary Iranian poet Tahereh Saffarzadeh.” It is part of a series she called “Women of Allah.”
The most ironic work in the show is surely Marjane Satrapi’s drawings, taken from a comic book she entitled “Persepolis,” named after a capital city of an ancient empire, that chronicles the life of a teenage girl in the post-revolutionary Iran of the 1980s who is drawn to Michael Jackson and denim jackets and Nikes sneakers. In a series of panels, the girl is stopped by “guardians of the revolution” who interrogate her about her sneakers, her jacket, and her Michael Jackson button, “that symbol of decadence.” (Remember, this takes place in the early 1980s, before he had become a symbol of decadence in the West as well.) It’s not Michael Jackson, she lies. “It’s Malcolm X, the leader of black Muslims in America.”
In the forward to her comic book, Satrapi (who now lives in Paris) laments that “this old and great civilization” where she grew up is being discussed entirely in connection with “fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism….I know this image is far from the truth.”
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In the month since she was selected as the new Speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn has made an effort to define herself as a unique leader of the legislative body - announcing a series of reforms aimed at making the council more open and democratic and joining Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a crack-down on unscrupulous lobbyists at City Hall.
Then, Speaker Quinn made her mark in an even more tangible way: she fired 61 people.
The Friday before the Presidents Day holiday weekend, Quinn undertook what aides called a "significant restructuring" of the council; nearly a quarter of the staff were handed letters informing them that they had been fired and were told to leave by the end of the day.
The massive layoffs affected every level from receptionists to lawyers to the fiscal experts who are responsible for negotiating the city's $50 billion budget with the mayor's office. Larian Angelo, the longtime finance director, was fired along with 17 of her staff members in the budget office.
Recently, the council announced some of the new people being hired. Key members of Quinn's new appointments include:
- Michael Keogh, who worked in the mayor's Office of State Legislative Affairs, as the new finance director.
- Elizabeth Fine, who worked for President Bill Clinton, as general counsel.
- Kevin Wardally, a former advisor to Gifford Miller, as a deputy chief of staff.
- Maura Keaney, who worked for the Bloomberg campaign, as another deputy chief of staff.
- Ululy Martinez, a former aide to Bronx Democratic Party boss Jose Rivera, as another deputy chief of staff.
- Rob Newman, who has worked at the council since 1999, as legislative director.
- Lucy Mayo, who worked for the organization Demos and State Senator Tom Duane, as policy director.
- And Maria Alvarado, who worked for Gifford Miller, as press secretary.
Observers choose to see Quinn's house cleaning in different ways.
Some said it was expected; when Gifford Miller became speaker in 2001 he did a similar thing and let about 60 staffers go.
Some said the layoffs were Quinn's way of making a clean break from some of the scandals (like the Allan Jennings sexual harassment suit) that plagued the previous council.
Others worried that Quinn was merely making room to hire party loyalists from the Democratic organizations in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx whose leaders who helped her win the position.
Still others - including several members of the council's Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus - expressed concerns about the ethnic diversity of those let go and those filling the open positions.
Whatever the reasons behind the move, Quinn also wants the staff to take their jobs - or at least their appearance while they are on the job - more seriously.
Last week, the speaker also announced a new dress code and put an end to "casual Fridays." "All employees are expected to be in appropriate business attire during business hours, regardless of the day," a council memo reportedly stated.
For more on the council's changes, see the City Hall news section of Gotham Gazette.
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