We'll let this op-ed piece which appears on the Long Island Business News Web site speak for itself.


Durso: A fresh start for America and LI

by John R. Durso

Published: November 20th, 2008

In an unlikely quest that began 20 months ago in Iowa, Sen. Barack Obama’s transforming election as our 44th president offers America a fresh start.

Despite a deteriorating economy and two wars, on Long Island and across our nation the mood is ebullient. Yes, labor unions are ecstatic.

Labor’s outreach effort for Obama touched 13 million households in 24 battleground states, helping unleash a record-breaking turnout of Hispanics, Asians, blacks and young people – an electorate as diverse as the labor movement itself.

Fresh leadership in Washington, D.C., has sparked a sense of hope, of moving forward. On Election Day, Suffolk County passed a budget that funded needed services and doesn’t raise property taxes. Long Island Realtors are cautiously upbeat, telling us we’re doing OK so far compared to other parts of the country.

Polls show that Americans are demanding long-term, structural solutions to the deep economic problems we face. A Time magazine survey found that 82 percent favor government-funded, public work projects to jump-start the economy. That’s just what Obama has in mind.

The nation’s unemployment rate soared to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent in October as another 240,000 jobs were lost. Obama will make grants to state and local governments that have been hard hit by revenue losses from the economic downturn – Mayor Bloomberg’s new budget cuts 3,000 jobs in New York City. On Long Island, a federal stimulus package will energize projects already underway and open the door for new opportunities.

Creating jobs and rebuilding America’s middle class is what Obama’s presidential campaign was all about and voters gave him the most lopsided election victory for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson whomped Barry Goldwater in 1964.

With that mandate, he can pursue the aggressive agenda America needs. And that includes the Employee Free Choice Act. Workers know that a union is their ticket to the middle class. The EFCA will give them the freedom to make their own decision about whether and how to form a union. There is no better economic stimulus – unions allow more people to bargain for better wages, which helps rebuild our middle class and create a prosperous economy.

Democrats didn’t have enough votes in the Senate last year to pass the EFCA, but the election changed all that. No need to tiptoe around the issue this time. Six newly elected senators strongly support the bill that President-elect Obama co-sponsored.

The legislation is overdue to raise the standard of living for workers, an essential ingredient of America’s fresh start.

John R. Durso is president of RWDSU Local 338 and international vice president of the United Food & Commercial Workers. He is also president of the Long Island Federation of Labor.

Sometimes Symbolism is Everything

If your brother-in-law showed up at your house looking to borrow a ton of money, and as he was talking you noticed his Mercedes Maybach in the driveway, you might not be too sympathetic to his cause, would you?

That's pretty much what happened yesterday in Washington, D.C. The leaders of the Big Three automakers came to Washington looking for their share of the federal government's bail out money. Each of the leaders flew to Washington in their respective company's private, corporate jet. The cost of these individual flights are estimated to be $20,000 each - and that does not even take into the consideration the environmental impacts.

Strong, effective arguments have been made about the use of corporate jets. Warren Buffett railed about them for years until he actually used one, and then he had an epiphany: An executive's time is better spent being whisked in and out of airports so he or she can focus on making major, money-making decisions.

An argument can also be made that politics focuses too much on the symbolic. President-elect Obama's campaign was almost derailed by the flag-pin-on-the-lapel controversy, for instance.

But in this case, Congressman Gary Ackerman was correct to point out the Big Three executives' collective hubris. We get that the automakers are hurting, and that the demise of these companies will lead to the demise of many others. We're all hurting. Wouldn't a demonstration that the executives are feeling that pain have been the proper thing to do? Can you blame Congress for turning its back? Would you lend money to someone tooling around in a Maybach?

Thriving In Real Estate

As a change of pace from the downbeat of bad news so pervasive today LIBI presents the gems linked below. As Mr. Citarelli likes to say, "When life hands you a lemon, make a lemonade." A cliche? Of course. But true nonetheless.

Click here to read Marcelle Fischler's story from yesterday's real estate section in the New York Times about Lawrence Citarelli and his aggressive real estate plans.

Click here to view the upbeat outlook presented by R. Donald Peebles, real estate maven and adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, on how he's finding opportunities in this vexing economy.

Miracles Do Happen

It took ten years, but Trammel Crow got the go-ahead to demolish the Courtesy Hotel in West Hempstead and replace it with a beautiful new project.

You would think it wouldn't take ten years to replace something bad (by all accounts the Courtesy Hotel is a blight on the community) with something good, especially when that something good HAD THE FULL BACKING OF THE LOCAL CIVIC ASSOCIATIONS.

But Long Island being Long Island, it still took 10 years.

Going forward, I would love to see an ongoing dollar ticker on sites like this that demonstrate how much tax money is lost through municipal foot-dragging - a money clock along the lines of the one in Manhattan that tracks our national debt.

Balancing the Budget

There is an excellent op-ed piece in this morning's Newsday. The author, former Gov. George Pataki spokesman Christopher Chichester, warns of the sturm und drang to be caused by the budget slashing Governor Paterson is sure to propose.

Perhaps Governor Paterson should call on our builders for guidance. There's not a LIBI member who hasn't made some painful decisions in the past year or so. Very few people enjoy tightening their belts. But it has to be done. Nobody wants to return to the 1970s, where New York City and New York State stood on the precipice of financial ruin because nobody had the political courage to cut spending. This is why we have elected officials - just like this is why we have bosses. We need leaders to keep an eye on the big picture and to make decisions that are in the best interests of the greatest number of people. And we need people to understand that sometimes you have to bear a little pain in life.

In other words, suck it up New York.

Business Lessons Learned

I was working for an Internet company when the "tech bubble" of the late 1990s burst in 2000. The company conducted manager meetings around the same table the founding partners used as a desk during the day and, all too often, as something to sleep on during the night when the demands of running a start up called for an all-nighter.

At the end of one of the meetings the CEO announced that the company, Invision.com, would be getting new conference room furniture. "It's really nice stuff, too," he said. "One of the companies that owes us money is going out of business. The best they can do in terms of paying us is to give us their conference room furniture. Of course, if they hadn't wasted so much money on fancy conference room furniture they might still be in business."

Based on what I read in the newspapers of late, I have to wonder if that business lesson has been forgotten or was never learned by the men and women running some of America's biggest corporations. As I watch companies everybody thought would be around forever fade from the corporate landscape, I become more convinced that the bigger the company is, the more likely it is that it succeeds despite itself.

Take General Motors, for instance. How does a company with so many resources at its disposal find itself in a situation where it can't last much longer without government assistance?

What's truly amazing, however, is the talk we hear of how the "Wall Street bonuses" won't be as large this year, and also about how the executives who ran AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch are entitled to billions of dollars in exit fees. Excuse me for sounding naive, but shouldn't bonuses and exit fees be tied to performance? How can anyone involved in creating the mess we find ourselves in today even THINK about taking an extra dime?

Those business people who take risks and succeed are entitled to whatever it is they can get, legally. It's the rewarding of failure, incompetence and quite possibly criminal behavior, however, that best explains how we find ourselves on the precipice of economic doom today.

Hoping for the best

Maybe a fresh start is what we all need.

Maybe the new guard will deliver the goods and turn the local, state and national economies around.

We certainly hope so.

There's an old saying: "Be careful what you pray for, because you might get it."

The Democrats prayed to be in control and, God bless them, now they are. Now we are going to find out if their ideas and their direction provide the answers. It's a lot easier to sit in the back of the room and shoot spitballs than it is to actually govern. The Democrats believe they are capable of running New York State better than their Republican counterparts and so did a majority of New Yorkers, apparently.

Again: we certainly hope so.

LIBI supports any effort that seeks to maintain a healthy balance of economic development and quality of life. We plan to support any elected official who proposes legislation with that end goal in mind. LIBI members live here and want to see our children stay here. We want what's best for our fellow New Yorkers just as much as everyone else.

The long, hard campaign is over. The even harder task of governing lies ahead. Let's have at it and let's make Long Island and New York healthy again!

Hail to the Victors!

The results are in. History has been made. Congratulations to those who were victorious last night.

The Long Island Builders Institute looks forward to working with our elected officials. The challenges are great and time is short. Let's have it!

Pondering the Imponderables

If you're in the building industry there's a good chance you have dealt with lay-offs within your organization over the past year. At no point, however, would you let on to your customer base that you are "cutting back on services."

So why, then, it is accepted without comment that government layoffs will result on fewer government services? Why can't government workforces do more with less just like the private sector? When was the last time you heard a governor, mayor, county executive or town supervisor say he or she is going to cut costs within his or her bureauacy by asking their employees to work a little harder and maybe a little longer? Most likely the next time you hear such a thing will be the first time.

Just something to think about as we watch our elected officials deal with the financial mess created in no small part by the anti-development forces that have stifled the building industry on Long Island.

Dirty Dancing Change Is Coming

Remember the scene toward the end of "Dirty Dancing," where the fellow who's running the resort turns to his staffer and says something to the effect of, "I can't put my finger on it, but I feel we are coming to the end of an era. Change is coming and there is nothing we can do about it."

One can't help but feel that tomorrow's election - regardless of the outcome - is going to bring that kind of change. Perhaps that's stating the obvious, given that we will have new president after 20 years of Bush & Clinton. But the sense I get is painfully reminiscent of 1976, when Americans said they had had enough of Watergate, Vietnam and presidents they could not trust and admire and wholesale changes were made in Washington. Unfortunately the change was not for the better and the leadership void of the late 1970s created the vacuum that led to the Reagan Revolution of 1980, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

Anyone who claims he or she knows where the next few years are going to take us is full of soup. Most likely the people projecting where we are headed are the same people who told us over the summer that oil was headed to $200 a barrel and $5 a gallon gasoline was going to be part of our everyday lives.

I do know this: the banks better get their collective acts together and straighten out the foreclosure mess. If this situation is not resolved soon the four leaders on Mount Rushmore could morph into one and come back to run the country and it would do a lick of good because the economy will be a complete mess.