The anti-sagging campaigns are nothing new.  Every few years for the last two decades the campaign has reappeared to little affect.  Although there has been no statistical correlation between sagging and delinquencies, it’s a cause that many politicians will periodically pick up – presumably to keep kids away from bad behavior and prison.

Currently, there are other anti-sagging campaigns in cities around the country, including Dallas where a rapper named Dooney “Da Priest” has provided the campaign a theme song (listen here).  The reappearance of these campaigns may have something to do with an American Idol audition in which a man raps about the foolishness of sagging pants; ironically, the man auditioning looked pretty foolish doing it.

by Tihti Meiret

The face of the Fulton Street BID is poor. Four black men share the face. They sweep Fulton Street in bulgy, baggy, dirty, dark, hooded jumpsuits that say “FAB” in great big bright green letters on the back. That’s what the BID calls itself.

"...are now easily identifiable by their uniforms that have them looking... FAB!" Source: FABAlliance.org

Councilman Charles Barron has long objected to Fulton Street’s being named for the racially hopeless 19^th Century

steamboat inventor and has tried more than once to rededicate it to Harriet Tubman. “FAB” is good enough for Councilwoman Letitia James, though, and also for Deb Howard, whose celebrated civic sensitivities snagged her the top spot at Pratt Area Community Council (PACC), the onetime tiny volunteer group now the largest real estate holder in Clinton Hill. James and Howard sit on the FAB Board alongside a large number of other parties with interests in Fulton Street beyond those of diversity.

The FAB sweepers, from Africa, arrived on Fulton’s shores last year, sent over by Atlantic Maintenance, a firm that jobs out indigents mostly to BIDs. The FAB four are on schedule to make $11, 927.58 this year — that’s $7.41 an hour, seven hours a day (four on Saturday), six days a week — no breaks. On January 18, for example, the country, the City and the 60-odd employees of PACC and FAB got the day off in honor of an African-American who famously marched with garbage workers for equal rights. The FAB sweepers collected and bagged garbage all day.

The much esteemed Myrtle Avenue BID gets their sweepers from The Doe Fund, which specializes in ex-cons. The gratification that comes from transforming criminals into street sweepers is obvious, so naturally FAB wanted to team up with The Doe Fund, too, but backed off when it came under surprise attack from malcontents and BID-bashers who took to denouncing Doe’s low pay ($15-a-week to start) and forced-rental group housing as 21^st Century indentured servitude.

Which goes to show how hard it can be to be the new BID on the block. The mighty Myrtle isn’t bothered by vendor scruples and besides, how ironic is it that FAB’s sweepers look (and act) like convicts in their stained, shapeless, padded onesies while Myrtle BID’s actual convicts look comfortable and move with ease in their royal blue coordinated Doe Fund Dockers-type separates with the famous three-tone muscleman logo, “Ready, Willing & Able.”

The Brooklyn Paper ran an article a couple of weeks ago about the effort to form a BID on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. In a sloppy aside, it slurred FAB as “the Fort Greene BID;” said it had been voted in by a majority of merchants; and the backlash against it had blown over. Letter to Editor:

1. It’s “the FAB,” stupid!, not Fort Greene.

2. An overwhelming majority of merchants voted against it. (PACC refuses to release the votes it says it holds as the “winning 51%” on grounds of “Council/client privilege.”)

3. The bitterness toward the FAB runs deep, especially in the immigrant-owned stores that don’t fit FAB’s plans (think Myrtle Ave.) for Fulton Street’s future.

BIDs didn’t start out part-government/part-not like Public Authorities, but that’s how they’ve ended up. The first BID was formed in the 1970s when the City was broke and services at an historic low. A group of corporations in Midtown came up with the idea of hiring their own security and cleaning crews for the crunch, but while the crisis would pass, the BID would stay. The City took the BID out of its corporate big box, humanized it, “A tax for everyone!” and took it wide: Today there are BIDs in every borough, and in neighborhoods like Fort Greene/Clinton Hill where all the businesses are small and all the shops are Mom-n-Pops.

Of course the Mayor loves BIDs; they take the wear and tear off NYPD (unarmed guards walking around a couple of days a week) and Sanitation (incessant sweeping) yet leave the agencies free to punish as usual. Under FAB, in fact, a number of stores have been ticketed more than ever. FAB District Manager Phillip Kellogg is unconcerned, possibly unaware, because he ignores these unMyrtle-like places even though their struggling owners pay his $70,000 salary by the linear Fulton foot.

Mr. Kellogg doesn’t thank them because according to the BID their earnings are his due. Never mind he has no idea how you run a little shop, PACC doesn’t either, therefore it doesn’t matter. On issues like designating committees, having fun events, writing and editing important studies, however, Kellogg has to dazzle or he’ll get kicked out of PACC’s big house on Fulton Street where they’ve been living together since October. Kellogg had been out there single for a long time, looking, and wants the relationship not just to feel good but to mean something — which augurs well, PACC being in the meaning business.

PACC opened its Fulton Street mission about ten years ago when it sent a 20-something novitiate over from the motherhouse on DeKalb Avenue to teach families on Fulton Street how to run businesses they’d been running for years, in many cases for generations. She came with the title of Director for Economic Development, which made no impres-sion on the Fulton merchants, but a big one on the Ford Foundation, which hired her away after a couple of years. The next Director came and went (to work for the Mayor) without anyone even noticing. Her successor has made a definite impact shilling for vendor friends and hustling assorted improvements and amenities that don’t materialize. She had her eye on FAB District Manager until word leaked and a nasty backlash dashed her chances. Whatever…she’s still dealing the street, still Director for Economic Development, still very important; in fact, she holds the highest rank of many in the PACC/FAB office at 896-900 Fulton and she sits (if as a “D”) on the big FAB board.

That old joke about a great big board with a little bitty BID applies to FAB: There are four tiers of directors, “A” through “D.” The “A”s are your property owner overlords, including a lawyer, a developer, a Realtor, a daycare operator, and non-profiteer Deb Howard (whose Brooklyn Area properties have accumulated with time and tax dollars.) The “B”s are mostly tenants of the “A”s; the “C”s elected officials, staff and other City prefects; the low-grade “D”s, from Community Board 2, Brooklyn Academy of Music and PACC don’t get to vote. The meetings are closed. Once, the President invited two guests from the neighborhood. The appalled board quickly took a vote and expelled them within minutes. What the directors caucus on and decide among themselves, while necessarily guesswork, can be gauged to some degree by the crappy lights haphazardly hung for the non-eventuating Christmas shopping crush, the facetious name “FAB,” the blowsy (yet invisible) banners on every other lamppost, and promotional materials and website of punitive blandness.

The board’s work being of such seriousness as to be done only in secret, anyone wishing to transmit a thought, word or idea has to go through District Manager Kellogg. But the merchants don’t trust him and don’t talk to him; so the entertaining Mr. Kellogg recently packaged up a show, “21 Blocks in 21 Days,” and took it on the road, playing shop after shop with a mimeographed sheet of marvels and miracles in the near and far FAB future.

It is true that FAB regards itself as transformational, but so far has not advanced much past the wishing stage. After Thanksgiving, “FAB”-emblazoned cardboard boxes appeared in all the stores, often in the owner’s absence. Upon investigation, they turned out to be the containers for a sweepstakes to win tickets to the December 23 Radio City Christmas Show. Unfortunately, the boxes were left unguarded and a number of them got stuffed with names like Ivana Trump, Judge Judy, Tiger Woods, Queen Elizabeth, Hulk Hogan, Bernie Madoff — and other boxes disappeared entirely. The pranks, the boorishness they laid bare, shocked Phillip Kellogg, and disappointment followed when no one showed up for the Grand Drawing. — The rules stipulated the winner must agree to picture and information for “posting on the websites and any other publicity purposes,” but the winner remains anonymous, possibly because the little-visited FAB website could have run the picture without anyone seeing it. — It hurt, too, that everyone was calling the Christmas lights schlock. Phillip Kellogg said he had talked to “a lot of people who like them,” but wouldn’t say who (and anyway claimed he came after the lights, even though he came before Halloween.)

Around the time of “21 Blocks in 21 Days” there was also, suddenly!, “FABulous Friday,” an emergency program for a couple of blocks in the BID’s Ninth Ward (Vanderbilt to Classon). Stores were asked to offer bargains for the evening and FAB would bring out the crowds with targeted advertising. The stores reported “F. F.” came and went like any Friday, not the result the board was hoping for, or Phillip Kellogg. The relief effort will continue. To find out how you can help, go to www.faballiance.org.

Monday is another day…and the BID springs eternal. To his credit, Phillip Kellogg admits FAB isn’t hitting all its marks yet, and does try to “get down” with the silent majority storekeepers when he can. On the other hand, when called upon to speak at brownstoner associations worried about Fulton Street (“When will it be Myrtle?”), his message is strong and persuasive and listeners leave pumped having learned Fulton Street is responding to remediation and is already safe to stroll before dark.

Brooklyn’s attractiveness as “the borough of churches” has not been lost on the FAB marketing department, hence the program, “Rolling Back the Gates,” with its powerful evocations of Easter, hope, starting over. On a given day, all the lockedup storefronts are made available for looking over by potential renters. On a sunny mid-March Saturday “Rolling Back the Gates” featured yellow balloons, sunny skies, shorts and shirtsleeves and a confectionary “New York Trolley” bus to schlep happy lookers up and down the 21 blocks FAB deems to be raising from the dead.

“Rolling Back the Gates” makes the immigrant merchants uneasy because they see themselves being rolled right out of their nail salons, bodegas, takeouts and 99c stores. These owners let it be known last year that the BID tax would hit hard, especially coming after two years of sales lost during DOT’s brutal sacking of the street (sidewalks, too). Talk about no business. Councilwoman James and PACC’s Howard extended a $500 bailout, but the deadline has closed without a single application because their “distress fund,” with its intrusive questions, came off as a vehicle for gathering proprietary information for a FAB/PACC data base.

Two Saturdays before the sunshiney “Rolling Back the Gates,” the scariest nor’easter in thirty years slammed New York. 70-mile-an-hour winds lashed the beaches, whipped up huge waves, peeled off rooftops, blew down utility poles, and split and uprooted more than 1,000 trees. The subways flooded, cars stranded. 500,000 homes lost power. 65,000 calls blitzed 911; emergency crews couldn’t keep pace. Non-stop radio and tv PSA’s telling everyone “Stay home!” didn’t reach FAB, which sent its slickered sweepers out to “calm” the garbage. The corner cans they fitted with fresh plastic bags filled with the four inches of rain that fell in 24 frightening hours. Six people died in the storm. The sweepers survived. And were $29.64 richer at the end of the day!

Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush all failed at health care reform.   For one hundred years we’ve told poor and desperate people, “Sorry, you’re not privileged enough to get sick.”  Today, President Obama affirmed that health care is not a privilege.  It is a right as fundamental as air, water, shelter, love and compassion.

The bill signed into law is historic and monumental, but it is also just the first step.   There is more to be done to ensure that every American regardless of mean, national origin, or legal status is afforded the basic right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Under the old system, the MTA would have booth clerks count the number of turnstile jumper and report that numbers to the MTA.  In addition to the clerks, the MTA would also have a kind of mystery shopper placed once a month in each subways station and count the number of fare-beaters.  The two numbers are then aggregated and inputted into some formula, which the MTA has not disclosed, and pops-out an estimated number of fare-beaters and lost revenue.

Under the old system the total number of fare-beaters was 5 million.  Under the new system it jumps to about 19 million.  This is a big difference, and certainly for many New Yorkers a reason to be angry.  However, before we all have steam shooting out of our ears, let’s take a deep breath and crunch the numbers in the bigger context of MTA policy.

First, fares are too expensive.  When did we conclude that poor, working class families, students, artists, and those looking for a job don’t deserve affordable public transportation?  Fare increases are NEVER acceptable.  In a time of an economic recession, high unemployment, and with families struggling to put food on the table, it is unreasonable at best and downright criminal at worst to ask New Yorkers to shell out $4.50 for a roundtrip subway ride.  Increasing fares is an invitation for desperate people to break the law.   And unfortunately, there are far too many desperate people put into desperate situations by devices outside themselves and simply cannot afford the MTA.  Given the circumstance that we are all in, we should be asking how do we reduce fares and open up the MTA to all New Yorkers instead of just for those fortunate enough to be fortunate.

Second, there are very few public agencies whose priorities are as screwed up as the MTA.  Instead of asking questions like “How do we reduce fares so that we reduce fare-beaters?” the MTA is asking questions like “How do we improve monitoring and policing?”  If you think about this for a second, you’ll quickly discover that reason is missing from their thought process.   The reason we have so many fare-beaters is because the MTA is expensive.  So if the solution is to increase policing and monitoring to reduce fare-beaters, you will inevitably increase operational costs for the MTA.  If costs go up, what do you think will happen to fares?  If you answered they will also go up because the City and State budget don’t include a line item for stupid logic, you would be correct.  In other words, monitoring and policing cost money, so in order to pay for that monitoring and policing, we have to increase fares.  If we increase fares, the number of fare-beaters will go up.  When the number of fare-beaters go up, we have to increase policing and monitoring.  When we increase policing and monitoring, we have to increase fares. If we increase fares, so on and so on… Do you see the lack of logic?

Third, why do we need booth clerks to begin with?  Most of the time they are either, sleeping, chatting, reading, or just not there.  The very few times they are asked for help, they usually are rude, dismissive, and unprofessional at best.  Yet according to a 2005 New York Times Article, the average booth clerk (officially known as Station Agent) makes $51,000 a year in base salary.  This excludes benefits, retirement, disability insurance, and other standard employee costs.  Moreover, more than 10 percent of the MTA’s employees (about 8,200 individuals) earned more than $100,000 in 2008.  Employee salaries and benefits represented 58 percent of the MTA’s budget; the average for other city’s is about 38 percent (click here for the salary report).  These are people living very comfortably out of yours and my tax dollar.  And yet, we are discussing on how to criminalize poverty.

Finally, the MTA as an institution has been broken for decades.  So why should we suddenly believe that the old estimated number of fare-beaters is wrong?  The MTA has been caught red-handed cooking the books.  It is not known for its integrity or good business practices.  It admits that it wastes millions in contracted services.  It over pays its employees on all levels.  Subway stations are falling apart – literally.  Bus schedules are wacky at best.  The leadership blames the unions; the unions blame the leadership, and poor New Yorkers get screwed.

Turnstile jumping is rapidly amounting to conscientious objection to an unjust, unfair, and unsustainable policy that’s doing in the MTA itself.   Poor people should not suffer simply because the MTA is clueless on how to operate itself.  Students, artists, and those looking for work should not be punished because MTA leaders have no spine when it comes to standing up to the unions.  What’s worse is that there are two more fares hikes scheduled over the next two and half years.  By 2013, New Yorkers will be paying $5.50 for a roundtrip subway ride – YES $5.50!  The current system and thinking is completely flawed.   We cannot continue as we have done.  It’s not good for poor people, the City as a whole, or the MTA itself.

I am not condoning breaking the law, but in this case, what choice are we giving many who have no other choice.  The City is rapidly abandoning poor and working families.  The MTA as an institution has itself become a dooms-day device against its own existence.  So, I personally have no hard feelings for those who are jumping the turnstile and neither should you.

“He, who has money, has power, influence, and ultimately politicians.

It is a sad day in Brooklyn when basketball rules over affordable housing, schools, playgrounds, youth centers, libraries, and MetroCards for students.  This ceremonial groundbreaking best represents the priorities of a few misguided men, and will do nothing to fix the budget deficits on either the State, or local levels.

The proposed Atlantic Yards Project is not about jobs or housing, but about bailing out a developer with friends in high places, for a NBA team that is the worst in the league.  Governor Patterson and Mayor Bloomberg should commit today to refuse any additional public dollars towards this boondoggle and demand that the affordable housing be built immediately.

I will now take on the fight to keep Forest City Ratner Companies true to their promises: to build much needed affordable housing, provide opportunities for local women and minority businesses, and to mitigate the adverse affects of ongoing construction and traffic congestion in this district.

I refused to celebrate with FCR today, and I renew my objection to this entire project, the process, the land grabbing, and the waste of public funds.

www.prattarea.com for information on bookings

— Sarah Mann

Travel& Leisure Editor

At first they handed the brochures out, but began taping to street lights after noticing how heavily layered over they were with campaign posters.  The Oltons assumed it must be okay if politicians do it.

Politicians plaster their faces on public property all the time knowing full well it’s against the law.  Occasionally they’re slapped with fines, considered incidental campaign costs.

After the elections were over in November, Paws-n-Claws received a surprise visit by Agent Victor Thomas from the Department of Sanitation to present a bill in the amount of $8,700 for his four-month collection of tickets to Paws-n-Claws for wrongful promotion.   Payable immediately.

The Oltons, plausibly innocent, sought forgiveness from Sanitation Court, i.e.,  Environmental Control Board.

ECB didn’t care that Sanitation ran a sting on the store, didn’t care that the Oltons wouldn’t have taped up their fliers if they had been told not to, didn’t care that they can’t pay, didn’t care the mountain of fines threatens to push an industrious family into disabling debt.   ECB sided with Sanitation, finding all 116 handbills guilty even though Agent Thomas managed to produce just a single tattered one at trial.  116 x $75 = $8,700!  Due NOW!

Since then Ricardo Olton, who drives a UPS truck at his day job, has appealed at ECB — and lost.   Olton has nothing to show for paying off about $1,000 since Sanitation keeps the total up by piling on penalties.  He’s taken the case to higher court, but has been told even if he wins, Sanitation will still demand its mountain of flesh.

Councilwoman Letitia James has tried to intervene but ECB stonewalled even her!  Ms. James and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have written a bill to make such bureaucratic extortion illegal in the future;  it won’t help the Oltons, though, because they’ve already been extorted.

The hearing at City Hall will be scheduled in the next few weeks and all interested parties are urged to come and speak.

You may have gotten an email chain letter with the subject line “MOST BLACKS DONT READ? feedback now, thanks. ” You may even have gotten it several times. It’s a provocative subject line. What’s more provocative is the title of the supposed article: “THEY ARE STILL OUR SLAVES” – in caps. Furthermore the article is written by “Dee Lee.” Who is Dee Lee? Being a common name notwithstanding, according to the article and her picture in the email, she seems like a lovely lady in 50s, who happens to be white. And that’s the real the provocation.

If you read the article, you would assume that Ms. Lee is the grand master of the KKK . In the article, she claims black people are still enslaved to whites, they are ignorant, selfish, and greedy. It’s these characteristics, according to the author (whoever that maybe), that whites can still enslave blacks -without black people actually knowing that they are enslaved.

Unfortunately, this is all wrong. Ms. Dee Lee is indeed a lovely woman who has dedicated her life to educating all people about financial literacy. She writes books and provides seminars on retiring early, on making women smarter with money (all women), on how to save, and more. In fact if you Google her name, her homepage pops up and you can easily find this out in a matter of a few seconds. In fact, here is her website: http://www.deelee.net/index.html

One startling fact is that she states on her homepage that this email chain has been circulating for six years. That’s a long time. And clearly she is bothered by it or the consequences of it because she addresses it on the first of her website. This is sad. This is a woman who doesn’t deserve to be ridiculed as some bigot with an axe to grind when with all likelihood the opposite is true.

STOP the email chain. It doesn’t serve any of us. Yes, we need to stop buying Nike, because Nike as a company is racist. Yes, we need to read more because an informed public will always make better decisions. Yes, we need to save money and prepare for the future because the future is unpredictable. But destroying someone’s reputation, especially when her reputation is the source of her bread and butter in the process of making a point is unnecessary and wrong.

By the way for those who have not received the email chain and are curious to read it, here it is:

THEY ARE STILL OUR SLAVES
We can continue to reap profits from the Blacks without the effort of physical slavery. Look at the current methods of containment that they use on themselves: IGNORANCE, GREED, and SELFISHNESS.

Their IGNORANCE is the primary weapon of containment. A great man once said, ‘The best way to hide something from Black people is to put it in a book..’ We now live in the Information Age.. They have gained the opportunity to read any book on any subject through the efforts of their fight for freedom, yet they refuse to read. There are numerous books readily available at Borders, Barnes &Noble, and Amazon.com, not to mention their own Black Bookstores that prov ide solid blueprints to reach economic equality (which should have been their fight all along), but few read consistently, if at all…

GREED is another powerful weapon of containment. Blacks, since the abolition of slavery, have had large amounts of money at their disposal. Last year they spent 10 billion dollars during Christmas, out of their 450 billion dollars in total yearly income (2.22%).

Any of us can use them as our target market, for any business venture we care to dream up, no matter how outlandish, they will buy into it..  Being primarily a consumer people, they function totally by greed. They continually want more, with little thought for saving or investing.

They would rather buy some new sneaker than invest in starting a business. Some even neglect their children to have the latest Tommy or FUBU, And they still think that having a Mercedes, and a big house gives them ‘Status’ or that they have achieved their Dream.

They are fools! The vast majority of their people are still in poverty because their greed holds them back from collectively making better communities.

With the help of BET, and the rest of their black media that often broadcasts destructive images into their own homes, we will continue to see huge profits like those of Tommy and Nike. (Tommy Hilfiger has even jeered them, saying he doesn’t want their money, and look at how the fools spend more with him than ever before!). They’ll continue to show off to each other while we build solid communities with the profits from our businesses that we market to them.

SELFISHNESS, ingrained in their minds through slavery, is one of the major ways we can continue to contain them. One of their own, Dubois said that there was an innate division in their culture. A ‘Talented Tenth’ he called it. He was correct in his deduction that there are segments of their culture that has achieved some ‘form’ of success.

However, that segment missed the fullness of his work. They didn’t read that the ‘Talented Tenth’ was then responsible to aid The Non-Talented Ninety Percent in achieving a better life.. Instead, that segment has created another class, a Buppie class that looks down on their people or aids them in a condescending manner. They will never achieve what we have.. Their selfishness does not allow them to be able to work together on any project or endeavor of substance. When they do get together, their selfishness lets their egos get in the way of their goal Their so-called help organizations seem to only want to promote their name without making any real change in their community.

They are content to sit in conferences and conventions in our hotels, and talk about what they will do, while they award plaques to the best speakers, not to the best doers. Is there no end to their selfishness? They steadfastly refuse to see that Together Each Achieves More (TEAM)..

They do not understand that they are no better than each other because of what they own, as a matter of fact, most of those Buppies are but one or two pay checks away from poverty. All of which is under the control of our pens in our offices and our rooms.

Yes, we will continue to contain them as long as they refuse to read, continue to buy anything they want, and keep thinking they are ‘helping’ their communities by paying dues to organizations which do little other than hold lavish conventions in our hotels. By the way, don’t worry about any of them reading this letter, remember, ‘THEY DON’T READ!!!!

(Prove them wrong. Please pass this on! After Reading)

Below is a great op-ed piece by David Brooks of the New York Times. Although I don’t see eye to eye with Mr. Brooks on most issues, I do agree on this particular issue. It’s incredibly sad that we have politicized the education of our children to the point where educating our children is secondary to the politics of education. If we prioritize and ensure that our children are getting the proper tools to succeed, then the issue becomes easy and we will do what works. And Charter Schools are working.

The Harlem Miracle

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 8, 2009

An inner-city school eliminated the white-black achievement gap by establishing a rigorous no excuses standard for learning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opinion/08brooks.html