Matt Browner-Hamlin of Students for a Free Tibet emails over an action item.

New York – U.S. Tibet Committee ("USTC") is calling upon all Tibetans, Tibet supporters and Tibet organizations that reside or are based in New York City to immediately call or write to New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and demand that she allow a vote on Council Resolution 1299 ("The Tibet Resolution").

The Tibet Resolution was introduced by City Council Member Tony Avella in March 2008. It recognizes Tibet as an occupied country and condemns China for its human rights violations in Tibet. The Tibet Resolution calls upon China to end its human rights violations in Tibet and calls upon all corporations based in New York to withdraw sponsorship of the Beijing Olympics until China respects the human rights of Tibetans.

Council Member Avella has requested a hearing on this resolution, but that request requires approval from Speaker Quinn who has so far ignored the request.
USTC urges all Tibet supporters in the New York City area to immediately call, write, or fax Speaker Quinn and demand she allow the Tibet Resolution 1299 to move forward. You can contact Speaker Quinn at:

Christine Quinn
City Council Speaker
224 West 30th Street, Ste. 1206
New York, NY 10001
(212) 564-7757
(212) 564-7347 (fax)

Tell Christine Quinn that you are a New York City resident, or that your group is based in New York, and you demand she allow the Tibet Resolution go forward for a hearing and a vote before the start of the Beijing Olympics on August 8, 2008.

Also, if you are a New York City resident and voter, contact your own council member and tell them to support Resolution 1299. You can find your council member here.

Such a resolution would obviously have no more than symbolic value, but in the war of symbols that is the upcoming totalitarian spectacle of the Beijing Games, it's worth doing.

Per The New York Times, the Council and Mayor have agreed on a $59.1B budget for the new fiscal year just ahead of the July 1st deadline. The budget shifts funding away from infrastructure and towards taxpayers and consumers of City services.

During the news conference, Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn offered a few of the highlights. The New York City Housing Authority would receive $18 million more than Mr. Bloomberg proposed in May. Libraries would continue to be open six days a week and not five as was originally suggested.

The city’s capital budget would be trimmed by 20 percent. All agencies would absorb across-the-board cuts in operating expenses. And financing for City Council-sponsored programs, now at the heart of a federal investigation, was cut by 38 percent. There would also be less money to pay for security guards at cultural institutions, and a chess program for schools was cut.

A City of this size, complexity and age can get away with cutting capital spending for a year or two; beyond that, due to the age of our infrastructure, deferred maintenance inevitably results in higher costs down the road.

This is, in short, a classic election-year budget. Voters don't see the capital budget in the same way and with the same immediacy as they see their local library branch staying open for an extra day a week.

This past election season, Senator Hillary Clinton proved that a woman can run for president. She astonished thousands of people -- men and women -- who never believed that a woman could get so close to becoming Commander in Chief in their lifetimes.

Although Senator Clinton broke through the glass ceiling, women across the country are still struggling for equality. When you look at the numbers, the inequalities that exist between men and women are staggering. Women earn 80% of what their male counterparts earn right out of school, and in 2007, women were paid 77 cents for every dollar that men were paid. This wage gap costs the average female full-time employee between $700,000 and $2 million over the course of her career. And it's not just wages where women are falling behind -- the numbers on healthcare, education, poverty and reproductive freedom tell the same story.

SATURDAY PM UPDATE: Commercial building owners and SEIU Local 32BJ reached agreement this afternoon. The contract will bring base pay for office cleaners to about $47,000 per year by the end of the 4-year term. Together with some overtime and some second-job work, a single parent family of three could manage on such earnings. Read SEIU 32BJ's contract summary here

You can read it in the morning papers, hear it on the radio, building service workers, members of SEIU Local 32BJ are threatening strikes as their contracts expire on New Year’s Day. The union, representing 26,000 NYC commercial building employees, and the NYC employers' association, the Realty Advisory Board, moved to the Sheraton (53rd & 7th Ave,) for the traditional down-to-the-wire talk fest. The commercial real estate market has been booming and the union wants more of the pie. In time-honored tradition of union struggles they held a rally Thursday and, between appointments, I stopped by.

The rally was huge and high spirited. I stopped counting at a 1,000 purple-hatted protesters. Updated at end, post jump.

Say what you want about our mayor and his modus operandi but he has gotten a few things right over his tenure. I am not a big fan of his but I don’t dislike him either. He was absolutely correct with his ban on cigarettes in certain public establishments; taking the flack in order to get that policy into law. He was correct in putting public education on the front burner; even though I feel that his successes in this area were somewhat exaggerated: but you can’t deny that he has genuinely tried to deal with the issue. I think that in principle he was correct to suggest some type of congestion pricing formula for Manhattan’s traffic congestion problem; hopefully the details would be worked out before pigs grow wings. His positions on the issues surrounding illegal firearms (guns, gun shows, gun sales, etc.) are sensible and timely; and there are other things I could commend him on. Of course there are also many others that I could critique him on, but that’s not the issue here. You can always view my column in the archives (where I called him a leprechaun), to get a better sense of how I felt about him just a year ago.

Lately, the issues surrounding “term limits” have reared their ugly heads again. And maybe some intrepid reporters like Azi Payabarah, Ben Smith and/or Helen Klein, could one day dig deep enough, to find out whether or nor Speaker Christine Quinn did promise to overturn term limits (legislatively), when trying to secure supportive votes during her speakership bid. You see, if she did make some open (or “wink-wink”) promises, then she has reneged on her colleagues. Yesterday, Christine Quinn came out fully against overturning term limits. Did someone say: mayoral bid coming? In recent past Christine had been quite vocal in her opposition to term limits. Did the Angel Gabriel suddenly appear out of her mayoral dreams, with a convincing argument? Or was it intense polling on the issue?

The Eagle has landed Do you love tall sailing ships? The US Coast Guard training ship The Eagle has docked at the foot of pier 17, at the South Street Seaport. The ship is great (no signs of its Nazi origin), the coast guardsmen and women charming; tours from 9:00-6:30 Sat & Sun. If you go Sat. morning, check out the asbestos decontamination exercise run by Fire at the Sanitation garage at the foot of Montgomery Street.

After years of torture and harsh confinement, US officials have decided to allow some "high value" Guantanamo detainees to lawyer-up . (Although at least one of them, already represented by counsel, has not been allowed to get letters from her).

The poor get sicker than the rich. Great and serious congratulations are due to Comptroller William Thompson who (I guess with staff support) has produced a really smart interesting and important analysis of the NYC health impacts of class and cash. Surpise!

File this one under: “Predictions from the Rock”. Watch it blow up and then come back to me later. You see, this is the month that Diane Gordon goes on trial over her alleged bribery caper. Remember the video tapes, where we saw Ms. Gordon seemingly attempt to bribe a developer into building her a dream house in some gated community in Queens; well unless they postpone the trial she will be soon getting her day in court. So what are my predictions?

Firstly; I predict that Diane will be going to jail, not passing go, and not collecting the 200 dollars from passing (monopoly). This of course opens up her assembly seat in a special election. And cousins, this is where it gets sexy (politically speaking, that is).

You see, when Charles Barron announced earlier this summer that he was running for Brooklyn’s borough presidency, he also said some rather interesting things. No; I am not talking about his pledge to finally, “take care of black folks”; I am talking about his observation that no other black could win that race once he is in it. He is correct; profoundly so. Yet, Charles is also quite pragmatic when he is backed into a corner. He must know also that the corollary is just as true: if other blacks run, he too will lose. So what is a man to do here folks?

In a sea of 30,000 bright spandex butts , Sunday May 6, I rode in the 42-mile Five Borough Bike Club tour. As a volunteer, my job was to help riders who were in mechanical, logistical or physical trouble (fix flats, find bike shops, offer drink & encouragement, call backup). Keep the riders safe and happy. It was a crisp bright day – perfect for a moderate ride. One rider’s story of past tours, which captured the flavor well, I thought, appeared in the NY Times City Section . See some of this year’s photos here. You can still sign up for the smaller, shorter Tour de Brooklyn on Sunday June 3, 2007 sponsored by Transportation Alternatives . It’s free, not too taxing and experience is not required. Online registration, it has been said, will close May 31, 2007 -- so do it now.

The Minimum Wage has not gone up –- it’s still stuck where it’s been all these years.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Christine Quinn, Robert Jackson and UFT president Randy Weingarten reached agreement on compromise to the Mayor's third major school reorganization plan.

Under the agreement, schools wont lose money during the next school year. That had been a major danger in the Bloomberg-Klein plan -- that the effect would be actual reductions in money available even as billions more are added the the education budget.

In addition the UFT appears to have won concessions that may mitigate the incentive built into the reorganization which will encourage principals to shed higher paid senior teachers. Other crucial areas: class size, parent engagement, middle school reform etc. appear to be adjourned to later with precatory language. Community leaders who were at the announcement included: Director of the New York Immigration Coalition Chung-Wha Hong, NY ACORN Director Bertha Lewis, and Irania Sanchez representing the Coalition for Economic Justice and Make the Road by Walking. They were the ones clustered around the Working Families Party which, along with the UFT, put considerable resources into the anti-reorganization effort. .

Consistent with the long Bloomberg-Klein hostility to parent groups, it appears that no leader of a Parent Association was present. The press announcment is here while press accounts from the New York Times and Daily News are here and here.

Several news outlets have covered the Duffield Abolitionist homes.

The Real Estate Observer gives us a nice shout out.

Curbed summarizes the last DailyGotham post.

The Gowanus Lounge also wades in, and NY Magazine offers a few words.

NoLandGrab offers original analysis by picking up a point published here. AKRF/NYCEDC chose to print a map without its legend, and NoLandGrab suggests that the missing legend offers support of the residents' oral histories.

Thanks y'all for keeping this on the burner!