Neil deMause

If you’ve been wondering where my non-baseball writing has gone to recently, I have a bunch of stuff in the pipeline that’s going to start showing up in print (and in pixels) in coming weeks. And the first of these is now out, a profile of Brooklyn developer Bruce Ratner for the Jewish Daily Forward, on the occasion of his firm’s reported ties to a state senator accused of bribe-taking:

When federal prosecutors charged New York State Senator Carl Kruger with taking more than $1 million in bribes in March, few were surprised to see seven others indicted with him. The colorful Kruger, who represents the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach, Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay, has long attracted media attention for high-profile deal-making among a wide network of politicians and lobbyists… [read more]

A multi-year campaign to require that all employees in New York City receive paid sick time (which I first wrote about last fall) was quashed in October by city council speaker Christine Quinn. What happened, and what does it mean for worker rights and the city economy?

Last winter, it seemed all but inevitable that New York City would become the latest city to pass a law mandating that all city businesses provide paid sick leave to their employees.

A coalition of worker-rights groups, including Make the Road New York, the Working Families Party and the legal advocates A Better Balance had lined up to push for the legislation; a veto-proof majority of 37 city councilmembers had not just endorsed but co-sponsored a bill that would require at least five days of annual leave for all workers. And with the nation in the grip of swine-flu panic, visions of restaurant cooks showing up sick for work had even some small business owners admitting that some kind of sick-leave law was probably inevitable… [read more]

Can Mikhail Prokhorov’s business dealings with Zimbabwe derail his plan to buy the New Jersey Nets and move them to Brooklyn? Well, maybe:

It’s Day Three of the Great Zimbabwe Flap, and the rhetoric over a New Jersey Congressman’s challenge to Russian bazillionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s purchase of the Nets is heating up. Prokhorov fired back at Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-My-Constituents-Don’t-Want-to-Drive-Through-Two-Tunnels-to-Watch-the-Nets-Lose) yesterday, calling the charges that he’d violated economic sanctions against Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe “erroneous,” and saying that “we have no dealings whatsoever with companies or individuals on the sanctions list.”[read more]