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Helen Pontani, Peekaboo Pointe, and Astrid
By J. D. Oxblood
I may have previously indicated my distaste for the holiday season, but one factor that always piques my interest—and is especially true in the City to End All Cities—is the holiday party quotient. They come in all shapes and sizes: the office holiday party where people who see each other every day are suddenly thrust into an alcohol-laden free-for-all. People who hate each other grope in the copy room or do it standing up in the executive washroom and everyone spends the rest of the year wondering if their husbands/wives will find out about it. Fortunately, New Year’s clears the plate and no one remembers come the post-holiday return to work. Then there’s the annual holiday party thrown by groups of friends who never see each other except for the annual holiday party, providing ample opportunity for former lovers to eye each other suggestively across not-crowded-enough rooms and uncomfortably make small talk with each other’s current beaux. Then you have the large, fantastic house parties thrown by people who just love to throw parties and don’t see a demonstrable difference between Cinco de Mayo and Christmas: cue the cocaine, the tequila, and hooking up with random people because, hey, the more the merrier, and these are the parties where you meet people you’ve never seen in your life and will never see again. And then there’s the truly weird, spontaneous “OMG it’s Christmas!” parties that you never see coming and never completely recover from. (Please don’t ask how I ended up dancing at 7 a.m. last Boxing Day, whacked on E, with grown men stuffing cash into my pants.)
This year … not so much.
A study released on Monday showed that from 2003 to 2007 New Yorkers (such as myself) left their cars at home — or abandoned them entirely! — to take the train or bus. An article in the New York Times give the details. Bruce Schaller, New York’s deputy transportation commissioner for planning and sustainability, is quoted as saying, “What you see is that for the first time since at least World War II, all of the growth in travel in the city has been absorbed by non-auto modes, primarily by mass transit.” I can tell you from personal experience that leaving car culture and living in the dense urban core was a fundamental and life changing choice for me. And as I have argued elsewhere, it is a choice that many Americans are also ready, willing, and able to make. Let’s hope that President Obama is able to use this pivotal moment in history to write a new chapter for America, one that does away with SUVs and ushers in cheap, efficient public transit.
It ain’t easy for a pimp. It’s less easy for the rest of us. Check it out people!
This is the headline from the AP: “Did Obama team have contact with Ill. governor?” The first paragraph isn’t much better:
Barack Obama insists he didn’t have any contact with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich or anyone else who might have been scheming to sell the president-elect’s U.S. Senate seat. But he has not yet given his transition staff the same clean bill of health — perhaps with good reason.
Jon Stewart showed Wednesday night how Fox has been trying to tar and subvert Obama by subliminally implying he and Blagojevich were best buddies, but in a rare nod to subtlety, Sean Hannity went to great lengths to say Obama had no connection with the soon-to-be-former governor. Leave it to the AP to take the fight to the next level.
The New York Times article on the scandal today tries to mitigate some of the right-wing echo chamber. But as I said in a previous post, Obama must make this an opportunity to purge any and all corruption in government. Our future depends on it.
Should Democrats, and specifically Barack Obama be worried about corruption scandals? Yes they should. It is true that conservative = corrupt. From Iraq to Katrina to Wall St. to The Big Three, success has bred corruption throughout our culture.
Now is the time for Barack to do a Hank V and renounce any and all shady buddies. They’re just skeletons in the closet, waiting to sabotage the necessary reforms that must be implemented in the next four years. Bill Clinton tried to play the middle, and his presidency was hobbled by conservative attacks (gays in the military, socialized medicine) within his first 100 days. He played a rearguard action against the conservative hate machine for the rest of his tenure.
Please, please Mr. Obama, don’t let your presidency be scuttled by scandal before it even begins. Purge all corruption now, make it public, make it a crusade. Only then will you be able to give us the rest of your agenda.
Zach B.
P.S. Also try to avoid doing an Eliot Spitzer. For the next four years at least you have to be holier than Mother Teresa.
This ain't no sausage party.
By J. D. Oxblood
Friday, December 5, at the Slipper Room. It was a cold night and the oglers were queued up outside the roller doors, waiting for the Slip to open up and let us in. I’d been invited by the inimitable Jo Wheldon, headmistress of the New York School of Burlesque (a.k.a. Jo Boobs), to check out the latest fresh talent. For those who haven’t been to the Slipper Room, it’s a fantastic combination of dirty downtown watering hole and faux glamour—a small, thrust stage and a gorgeous red curtain, with a handful of tables, booths in the back, standing room, and, of course, a bar. A perfect venue for burlesque, the Slip has, indeed, been hosting such events for nine years—or, as Jo put it, “longer than Flashdancers.” And she should know.
Jo hosted in a stunning gold brocade on black dress, giving a shout out to all the peeps who came to see their “friends strip for the first time.” It didn’t hurt that the peanut gallery closest to the stage was full of performers—cue hysterical screaming at every drop of joke or stocking.
by J. D. Oxblood
After that fateful day in September, 2001, I was shocked by how many long-term New Yorkers told me, “I never went to the top.” It’s a common behavior. When you live in a town, you tend to eschew the “touristy” destinations and activities, unless family comes to town and you’re suddenly dragged along to some god-awful destination that usually fades off into the background of your own piddling, self-interested life. It’s easy, as a New Yorker, to get caught up in the unending drama of your friends’ love life, your hatred of your landlord and your apartment’s idiosyncrasies, your unending search for a better gig. In short, it’s easy to forget that tourists from all over the world come here to see the sights, and just as easy to forget that there are sights to be seen. The Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Twin Towers (now no longer an option)—how many New Yorkers have never bothered?
The New York Times reported today that a bus driver was stabbed to death in Bed-Stuy on December 1st, 2008. It was the first fatal attack on a bus driver in 27 years.
We also found out today that the country has officially been in a recession since 2007. Coincidence? The times article notes that though murders are up this year compared to last year, they are a fraction of the murders committed in 1981. That’s cold comfort to the residents of Bed-Stuy. The killer who stabbed a man to death because he would not give him a free bus pass is still at large.
George Pataki is laughing at you.
The metropolitan transit system is the most developed mass transit system in the United States. It carries workers (including me) from their houses to their jobs inside and outside the five boroughs. It is an essential piece of infrastructure for New York City, New York State, and the Tri-State area. Its importance cannot be overstated. The economic activity made possible by the transit system produces the lion’s share of taxes that go to Albany, and a sizable income for Newark and Hartford. Without the MTA millions would be unemployed.
So why did Governor Pataki try to starve it in the 90s? This is from an article in the New York Times:
At first the programs were financed with a combination of money from the state and city and borrowing. After George E. Pataki became governor in 1995, he sharply cut state funds for the capital programs and told the authority to borrow more. As a result, the last two five-year plans have been, in the words of the authority’s current executive director, Elliot G. Sander, put on a credit card.
The massive irresponsibility of the governor’s policy is all the more glaring now that the MTA is gasping for air. So why wasn’t there more of an outcry when the electorate could do something about it?
The answer is The Great Conservative Tax Swindle, also known as the Laffer Curve. The Laffer Curve is some spurious (and typically conservative) economic snake oil sold to the masses by Reagan and his legion of followers. At first it seems reasonable: if taxes are too high people won’t work. But taken to the extreme It says that all taxes are bad, and that rests on the assumption that only private capital is able to finance the public weal.
Some things are too important to be left to private initiative. In order to form a more perfect Union (as our Founding Fathers believed) we must come together as a people, and that means we will elect a government. Conservatives, deeply suspicious of government, have for the last twenty-eight years elected sabateurs whose explicit vow was to dismantle government. Deeply suspicious of public capital, they actively and openly raided the public treasury to enrich private capital. The time has come to roundly condemn this insanity. In the words of Roger Toussaint, president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union:
With a dramatic and historic increase in ridership, more service – not less – is needed on our subway and bus lines. Failure to maintain and reinvest in our transportation infrastructure now will result in huge costs to riders and all taxpayers down the road.
Ronald Reagan and Lee Iacocca, Detroit, 1980
The clamor is coming from all sides: extend the bailout to the car companies.
The rationale for doing so is that it is responsible fiscal policy: only by saving automobile manufacturing jobs will we be able to save Michigan. And as Michigan goes, so goes the country.
The holes in this argument are big enough to drive a Hummer through.
In the first place, whatever happened to the jobless recovery of 2003? I thought all the manufacturing jobs were already gone?
In the second place, as I have argued before, bailing out failing industry is a mistake. A firm line must be drawn between what is public capital and what is private capital. We have worshipped in the temple of private capital for two and a half centuries, while the idea of public capital has never been adequately articulated. The agopee of “privitization”, that is making what was public capital private, came with Reagan.
Reagan privitizing a Michigan State Fair T-shirt
The end of that privitization happened when Henry Paulson was handed the keys to the Treasury and used them to write checks to his former pals in the financial industry. “Don’t worry boys — you’ll get your Christmas bonus this year!” The same is about to happen to the Big Three if they get their “bailout”: Executives will get to save their houses, while the workers’ jobs are eliminated and shipped overseas, and their retirement is left to a non-existing public dole. GM will not be able to build giant inefficient machines in the future. The market will not allow it. To prop them up will not save jobs for workers, it will only hold open the fire escape doors long enough for the rich to get out while their house is burning down.
Real fiscal stimulus has to do what the New Deal did: guarantee the future of the Re – Public by funding public capital.
Nancy Pelosi says we should bailout GM and Chrystler. Coming on the heels of the financial bailout, this will rack up more trillions of Federal debt, and it will set a bad precedent, as I argued in an earlier post. But more to the point, as Paul Farrell has forcefully argued at Marketwatch.com today, it is an inexcusable extension of Reaganomics.
[Naomi] Klein further exposed this insanity in a recent Rolling Stone article, “The New Trough: The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq, a ‘free-fraud zone’ where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create.” Paulson’s privatization, outsourcing and management of the $700 billion bailout has the exact same Reaganomics ideological, strategic and deceptive footprints that President George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to privatize, outsource and mismanage the costly Iraq War blunder. Yes, Paulson is America’s new Rumsfeld!
And they keep going at it! Where is Krugman’s vaunted conscience? This needs to be shouted from the rooftops until someone in government grows the testicular fortitude to do the right thing: Fiscal stimulus is an investment in public capital — not private capital.
…according to some lads who wrote the following song:
save the dinosaurs!
The Democrat leadership has obviously not gotten the memo on ideological shift. Here is the article from the wires.
Democratic Congressional leaders urged the Bush administration on Saturday to consider using the $700 billion bailout for the financial system to aid distressed American automakers, in a prelude to what may become urgent negotiations over additional economic stimulus measures.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons. First, it sets a bad precedent. Every progressive policy idea of the next four (let’s hope eight) years will be stained by the memory of this capitulation to corporate interests.
Second, it invites an environmental nightmare. What’s next? Bailing out the coal industry because it’s losing jobs to green energy? Bailing out AIG because they’re “too big too fail”? (Oops. Already done.) These guys are going out of business because they thought cheap gas would last forever. They are dinosaurs who deserve to die. Maybe if we’re lucky their carcasses will provide fuel for someone in one hundred million years. They even knew the good times couldn’t last, but they put that nasty thought out of their heads for instant gratification of quick profit. This is how the AP put it:
At Ford Motor Co. they called it “Blue,” a team set up around the year 2000 to design an array of small, fuel-efficient cars to compete with the Japanese. It didn’t get far because no one could figure out how to make money on low-priced compacts with Ford’s high labor costs.
Besides, the automaker was racking up billions in profits by selling pickups and sport utility vehicles. Times were good and gas was cheap.
If the government commits to maintaining failing technologies because people have jobs that depend on them we are never going to get ahead of the energy curve. If Chevron and ExxonMobil get bailouts there will be an insurrection right here in the good old U. S. of A.
Third, it validates the idea that corporations are the equivalent of citizens. It should not need to be said, so why am I saying it? Corporations are not people. They may have a lot of money, but corporations are not citizens. The business of government is citizens, not collections of citizens, or business syndicates, or legal fictions. If the Dems in Congress want to do something for the people who will be laid off if the auto companies die, put money into infrastructure or unemployment benefits. That at least will tide workers over until a true entrepreneur comes along with a better job to give these men and women. When you work in a factory it doesn’t matter if you build SUVs or hybrids — it’s all the same to the assembly worker. But if you bail out GM and Ford, all you will see for the next ten years are more SUVs and Hummers.
Source: Paul Krugman's NY Times Blog, The Conscience of a Liberal
Look at the dark blue in Indiana. Ditto for the non-Appalachian areas of Kentucky. This is a map of the percent change from Republican to Democrat votes between 2004 and 2008. There are only two, maybe three, plausible reasons for this change. Either people all over the country so were shocked by Bush and Co.’s ineptitude that they voted for an relatively unknown and untested candidate, or they changed their minds about the core truth of conservative political philosophy. Maybe both.
Barack Obama is the president-elect of the United States. Yours truly and some friends watched the returns at the New World Theater in Midtown Manhattan — the name fit the mood.
Tessa Birch, English lass and Obama supporter
The place was packed and richly diverse. Americans of all races were there, as were foreigners, many of whom told me my vote had extra importance because it was also their vote.
Bakar Wilson, Will Kenton, and John Yi
When the first good news came it was from Pennsylvania.
To say the mood was ecstatic is almost an understatement. We all knew we were on the right side of an historical moment: one that will define the truly New American Century. When Barack Obama was officially declared the winner all of New York City erupted.
When the man spoke he left not a dry eye in the house.
Even now, sitting at my desk deep in the heart of Brooklyn I can hear cars driving by pumping triumphant hip-hop. We finally have a president who represents an American hope for the 21st century. Let us have a day of rejoicing before the weight of the world falls back on our shoulders.
I know this is coming a little late, but, yeah. We endorse Obama. It’s gonna be a big party in the old City tonight. I was in the Fulton/Broadway Nassau stop of the subway, travelling from Manhattan to vote in Brooklyn this afternoon. I was reading some political essay in the New York Review of Books, and kind of dancing around the platform, echoing off the tile walls, was the sound of a steel drum. I listened for a minute and realized the guy, probably Afro-Caribbean, was playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. “His truth is marching on!”
Bill Kristol
Bill Kristol’s Op-Ed in today’s NY Times is good for a laugh. Most of the best refutations of his inanity are already given in reader comments on the Times’s web site, so I won’t belabor the point here. Part of his analysis is right though: If self-proclaimed conservatives are out of power for two years, they will come back in a new and virulent new form in 2010. I hope, as Krugman argued, that the hateful, White elements of American conservatism have had their moment and will be thrown on the trash heap of history after tomorrow. But what will the world be like if the Congress has a solid Democratic majority and McCain becomes Prez? Even better, what if McCain dies in the first 100 days and Palin becomes Prez? Do you think the Congress would grow a pair sufficient to impeach her and all the asinine conservative ideas she stands for?
This battle is far from over, and both sides are plenty sore.
Photo by Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
Though this article in the New York Times is feel-good real estate porn, it is also anecdotal evidence that urbanizaton might reverse the sixty year trend of suburbanization. The reasons Keyes and Woods give for moving back to the city sound like the mantra of the post baby boom, urbanist ethos.
In the summer of 2006, [Keyes and Wood] sold the Brooklyn house to friends for $2.075 million and moved to a five-bedroom colonial, circa 1920, in Maplewood, N.J. Their house there cost $930,000. Compared with other places, Maplewood, which reminded them of New England, felt more like a community and less like a bedroom suburb.
Their Brooklyn taxes were around $3,500 annually, but in Maplewood they were paying around $23,000. The good schools, they thought, would justify that amount for a family with several children, but “we could put Jillian in a really nice private school for that,” Mr. Wood said.
And Maplewood didn’t really feel like a community after all. “We had wonderful neighbors,” Mr. Wood said, “but it wasn’t the same as being in the city. Everyone got in cars and went somewhere. The only people you saw were running down to the train or jogging or walking their dog.”
Mr. Wood works from home but travels often. Ms. Keyes, alone with Jillian, now 4, felt isolated. “I underestimated how important the sense of community we developed in Brooklyn was,” she said. “I missed the restaurants and the green markets.”
Taxes are paradoxically lower in the city than in the ‘burbs; the city has more community, and this is largely due to pedestrian traffic, public transportation, and population density; prices of homes are falling in the suburbs as people become desperate to get out. This last point is of particular interest. Though gas prices may fall so far that driving is not a crushing expense and will not be as important a motivating factor moving people to the cities as it was last summer, the housing contraction may take its place as a motivator. The “broken windows” syndrome that drove whites from the urban core from World War II to the end of the Cold War may now drive them from the suburbs as unsellable houses become squats, derelict, or hideouts for crime. The process may be viral, first infecting the last, big, overdeveloped exurbs, then making its way into older suburbs until they too seem like ghost towns. If it is, the next fifty years will look considerably different than the last fifty years.
That will have an effect on politics too. The rural myth, enabled by the automobile and the suburb, that made Sarah Palin seem like a wise choice to Karl Rove will change dramatically. Will it disappear? Probably not. But it will change, and that will change what sort of candidates the rural right chose to represent them.
Sandy and Chris at PPS
Happy Halloween! This is Sandy and Chris, employees of Project for Public Spaces whose offices are in Manhattan.
The New York Stock Exchange on Wall St
As of the closing bell the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up almost 900 points to 9062.12, closing above 9,000 for the first time in a little over a week. Financial news organizations that were pessimistic in the extreme this morning (e.g. Paul Farrell’s piece and David Brooks’s editorial in the NY Times), and are ebullient this afternoon. What’s going on?
Would-be Obama assassin Daniel Cowart
Look closely at his face — is he wearing makeup?
Remember the line in that song, “the freaks come out at night”? Nowadays the freaks come out at the end of October — and this is no Halloween joke! (Actually I can see this becoming a popular costume this year — you know how the news cycle is — and the thought chills me to the bone.)
Check out the story here.
This intervention almost speaks for itself. The Stepford Wives of Orange county are faceless, but their pudenda speak immodestly loud.
Whoever did the bruise makeup on this poster is a genius. Kudos to you my anonymous friend. (Poster Boy, is it you?!)
This is what Reagan really felt about you.
Conservative, free market dogma states that taxes are always bad and always restrict growth. On the other hand, the more money you have in your pocket, the faster the economy will grow as you spend those dollars on goods and services. Lower taxes always and everywhere means greater growth. Arthur Laffer put the idea into econo-speak in the 70s. If you feel like reading the Wikipedia entry (written by a freemarketeer) you can see how scientific sounding defenders of this ideology are. They have spent the better part of 30 years developing ironclad, mathematical proof that taxes are inherently stifling to growth. Alan Greenspan gave the lie to this pseudo-scientific nonsense last Thursday when he said ““The whole intellectual edifice [supporting supply-side economics] collapsed in the summer of last year.”
By J. D. Oxblood
Through a random sequence of events and acquaintances I was invited to attend a party at the Crunch Gym on Lafayette, just below Astor Place. I was a little confused—a party? At a gym? Like a work-out party where we all hang out and pump each other up? Chat with personal trainers and drink some smoothies? Rub each other down in the shower? I am IN. But, no, it was a party party, with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres (that’s French for “snacks”). At a GYM. I had to check it out.
by J.D. Oxblood
I’ve been out of town and fairly preoccupied, and am sorry to say that
I won’t be able to make it to the championship bout this weekend due to
a pressing social engagement. However, as it’s between the Bronx and
Queens, it’s sure to be a nail-biter–vicious and epic. As this is
your last chance to catch Derby fever until next season, I encourage
any and all to get out there and scream for your fave.
Tickets here.
http://www.gothamgirlsrollerderby.com/merch/?item=tickets
Kiss kiss,
JDX
The LIBOR is down and the market is up — hooray!!! I spoke too soon yet again. It looks like the VIX is considerably down too. That means less volatility in the markets and more sustained movement. Could we see DJIA 10,000 by election day? Just soon enough to reverse McCain’s electoral fortunes!
The Fed chief said today that if we spend another $300 billion on direct financial stimulus (e.g. in the form of a WPA style infrastructure build out) we might avoid the worst of this meltdown. Sounds good to me!
I only see one problem (and this is why I’m a conservative douche bag at heart): without a little financial pain d-bags like the ones at AIG who went quail hunting after the government (that is, US) gave them $85 billion will continue to go quail hunting — and I will continue to pay more than a quarter of my income in taxes. Where is the congressional bill to make financial shenanegans illegal?
The other problem I see is the massive federal debt. When is too much debt too much? When will the chickens laid by all the coke snorting, whore banging d-bags on Wall Street come home to roost? Because all debts must be paid, one way or another. Who is going to pay for feckless wastes of skin to go on hunting junkets in Europe? You and me obviously. But so far we haven’t felt like we’re paying it. What will it feel like?
Massive inflation is my guess. Maybe even hyper inflation. Because all debts must be paid in one way or another. It’s as good as the law of gravity.
The New York Post is reporting that nearly 3,000 people showed up for the Chelsea Job Fair yesterday (Wednesday October 15th). They compared it to a bread line. Remember when I said the world-wide intervention by governments to save the banks would at least keep us out of bread lines? <Gulp.>
You’re probably saying to yourself, Zach, have you lost your mind? How can you, a big city liberal, think Palin makes sense?! She is the antithesis of everything you believe in!
Well friends, in the first place Zach ain’t no big city liberal. He’s actually a small town conservative trapped in the body of a big city liberal. In the second place, Zach doesn’t think Palin is competent, he merely thinks she’s qualified for the highest office in the land. Still scratching your head?
It looks like the bank rescue plan is going to work! Yay! Happy days are here again! This was the shortest Great Depression on record, lasting only three days, from Black Friday (October 10th, 2008) to Happy Mondays! (October 13th, 2008). After the DJIA lost over 50% of its value from its peak over the summer, it gained back 11% on Monday, and if the DJIA follows other world wide indexes today it stands to be back at 14,000 by Christmas.
Some Debby Downers are already saying this looks like a classic “Bear Market Bounce”. They say that — markets be damned — until Americans feel enough pain to make them give up their profligate, spendthrift ways the same mindset that brought us the problem will create new and unforseen problems.
But one thing is for sure, government intervention in global capital has never been this big in the entire history of the world. Whatever the new problems are, they won’t look like your grandparents’ problems. There probably won’t be bread lines in Manhattan (thank God!), nor will there be runs on the banks as frightened citizens desperately try to get greenbacks out of battered ATMs.
I’m gonna play Nostradamus here, and predict that the new problems will have less to do with the money supply (a problem the government has found an elegant solution for) and more to do with inflation. Bad debts are inescapable, as is the hangover they produce. It’s just a feature of overproduction and speculation. They must still work their way through global economies. But people won’t lose their cash. Instead the brand new, guaranteed bills governments all over the world are creating to make sure there is still money in your purse will loose their value when it becomes apparent that they aren’t redeemable for real work. (That’s what happens when people default on their debts — you can’t get the work they promised out of them.) How they deal with 2009’s inflation will be something to see.
culturalcapitol.com 