tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-330129282024-03-13T16:36:24.866-07:00VIEWS FROM THE BRIDGEVIEWS FROM THE BRIDGE offers a range of opinion and background from local Brooklyn issues to national ones that effect the borough.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-59333887689138284992015-03-10T23:18:00.000-07:002015-03-10T23:18:04.678-07:00<h2>
<span style="font-weight: normal;">The Aftermath to Come</span></h2>
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by Steven Turner Hart</div>
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The problem with low cost housing in Brooklyn is fairly simple and endemic to real estate all over NYC. People want to live here on these islands and there is not enough room for all of them. Most of them don't seem to know that we live on islands here, but we do. So those who own the land use it as a lever to profit from the demand, which can never be fully supplied. </div>
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Then again, when I bought my house, it was a lovable dump on a block that my neighbors treated like the poor relations who they allow to live over the garage. There were indeed some characters who were anything but colorful except in the sense of an oil slick. I was often informed with haughty condescension that my block was not even in the historic district, which then and now is just fine with me. </div>
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All the houses are pretty nice now either through sweat equity or just big bucks. Because my block is a little wider than others in the area, it's sunnier and feels more generous in the light that comes with the warmer months. We have great trees and lots of birds even though we are in the geographical center of the wreck I love best, NYC. I am happy for my block in that sense, but I miss the people who were here when I got here. What our snootier, tweedier fellow inhabitants really meant was that we belonged to a designation that has now passed from general use, which is to say, Bodega Flats.</div>
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Well, we did have a lot of bodegas and we still do. Some of them are friendly. Some are pretty sleazy. All are stuffed with this and that, most of which I don't either smoke, eat or have much use for around the house. But they are a part of the neighborhood that I cherish because they remind me of when more 'real' people lived here who got up in the morning and went to work. A lot of them were pretty dirty when they got back to their abode, but that was all in day's work. There were kids then who went to school on a yellow, noisy bus. That doesn't seem to apply to kids now who have to be at their therapists' before dawn.</div>
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Now everyone here is plugged into a cellphone and staring at the tiny screen as they walk down the street, which they don't see at all. They all have tattoos and silly hair and clothes that don't fit or match. Fashion is clearly a trending that has left without me.</div>
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But the up side is that more people feel its okay to say, "hello" as they go by me. Maybe that's because they think I'm old and harmless (heh heh), or maybe I've just been here so long, I am part of the furniture so to speak. Who cares? By a combination of good luck and better friends, I get to live in Brooklyn.</div>
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Steven Turner Hart</div>
cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-25871499297467148502015-02-28T21:23:00.000-08:002015-02-28T21:23:12.600-08:00<h2>
The Return of the Blog</h2>
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by Steven Turner Hart</div>
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A great deal has befallen me since I last posted here that is not worth your time. For fifty years I worked in the theatre and film as well as teaching various subjects related to all that and served in assorted capacities from critic to actor.</div>
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I have recently moved back to New York and find the city much transformed by Bloomberg and Co. who destroyed most of the small production venues in Manhattan in favor of dwellings for the wealthy. There is a lot of theatre now but of the institutional sort that is tried and tested out of town in places like Chicago. The productions here, like those in Paris, are more polished but they are yesterday's news especially on Broadway. </div>
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In fact the only thing older than the shows is the audience, those who have a background that interested them in live theatre, and the money/time to go. They are the last of the unplugged, and thus used to real public discourse rather than vacant tweets in place of ideas.</div>
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Well it is what it is and it may end the theatre as we currently think of it, but that has been said for several thousand years. It pops up again in some new and cheaper form because performance seems to be part of human nature. But what Bloomberg left in his wake has nothing natural about it such as bike lanes on Bergen Street and an island dedicated to rich people. His model I guess was London where no Englishman can now afford to live. Instead, sheiks and Gazprom gangsters occupy Mayfair. I guess the Duke of Bedford still gets the payments that started in 1066, but the rest of the sceptered aisle has a housing shortage as NYC does now. The arts? Who cares? All they ever do is puncture our self-satisfaction. That's not good for our self-esteem.</div>
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Then again, who's going to want to live here when there's nothing to interest them but looking at rich people who are looking at rich people?</div>
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cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-16860363152004841712009-02-19T07:29:00.001-08:002009-02-19T07:29:59.188-08:00THE RATNER BAILOUTIS RATNER’S BAILOUT BE NEXT? HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING AT ALL?<br /> <br />Maybe, and maybe not. <br /> <br />We are about to guarantee the questionable value of paper that banks created loosely based on the value of real mortgages that they bought from local lenders. It was a mathematical house of cards in which the joker was the “derivative”. They thought to secure the value of that paper by slicing and dicing the risk, but the risk was still there. It was just spread all over the world in very small bits. <br /> <br />You and I are not securing the mortgages themselves, only paper that was issued against the anticipated value of that paper – such as derivatives -- on the market. It was financial flim flam. Now imagine Ratner and try to picture him in his current financial situation. Doesn’t he seem a likely fellow to have a cruder version of a bailout in mind? Or Mr. Stein with his hole of uncertain completion? Or the Toll Brothers for that matter, if any or all of these guys don’t get to do what they wanted to do which was speculate on the worth of our community at our risk.<br /> <br />Ratner sought to shovel the lion’s share of the risk onto the public by having them underwrite, as well as directly pay for, most of the Atlantic Yards. He is a natural for a bailout as he may even try to claim the loss of his project will harm the economy of Brooklyn. No doubt he is considering a plea for a bailout for FCRC as his plan sinks into the coming real estate recession. It will be a hard case to make to Governor Paterson, but nothing seems beyond the pale for Bruce Ratner to try.<br /> <br />But we need to think about our role this issue of public versus private finance on a very local and a very grand scale. We are now asked to get the credit markets going again by backing dubious paper that should never have been allowed as an investment product. It was a sham because it was building a diving board of speculation on a flimsy base of another layer of speculation. It is what gamblers do when they sink further into debt. They gamble more and get deeper in debt-- and WE, not Wall Street, are in mega-debt to such warm allies as the People’s Republic of China with this bailout. <br /> <br />Worse still, this sort of speculation defeated the entire concept of the responsible lender taking reasoned risks to support the long-term future of a community like Brooklyn. Who owns your mortgage? Do you have any idea? Do they give a damn about Brooklyn? Do they know where it is? Do they care, or do they only care about the paper they backed based on its projected worth?<br /> <br />Whether Ratner tries this unlikely gambit or not, he will probably find it unconvincing now that the free marketeers of George Pataki are out of Albany. On the other hand, Mayor Bloomberg and the state of New Jersey are seeking bids from private entities to develop off shore wind power. Did we learn NOTHING from the Enron energy fraud debacle? Are we learning nothing from the current banking crisis? Do we learn nothing from the government subsidized windfall profits of the oil industry?<br /> <br />T. Boone Pickens has a good idea about a broad, general energy initiative, but he made his bucks in the OIL business, and he has been up to his neck in that odiferous goo all his life. Mr. Pickens is one of the people who got us here. Here, by the way, is not an oil shortage. That is the small end of the problem. It is an environmental crisis. Mr. Pickins hasn’t owned up to his part in that any more than he has seen fit to recant funding the Swift Boat disgrace in the 2004 election. Do you really want men and women with his sense of honor and the common good deciding the fate of your children on this planet?<br /> <br />What we need is a national power authority that subcontracts, if necessary, research and development to the private sector as well as universities and public research institutions. We do not need people trying to patent the wind. CONED offered to let me pay extra so I could have some of my energy generated by wind last month. They want to own the wind and sell it to me at a rate above fossil fuels? Are these people truly nuts or do they take their cue from Karl Rove?<br /> <br />The private sector has two failings. Its interests are entirely directed inward toward the advancement of the corporation and its shareholders. Nobody needs that in energy, health, education, infrastructure, pensions, or for my money, mortgages which often shape the financial character of the community. Secondly, American private industry is chained to the slavery of the short-term gain. That is fine if you need to crank up the balance sheets for times a year for greedy investors. It does nothing productive whatever for the common good. <br /> <br />Call that socialism if you like, because it is. But remember, any society that has a public road is a socialist society including Texas. All socialism means is that the community realizes that there are certain things that are better handled collectively for the long-term interests of all rather than parsed out to narrow individual short-term gains.<br /> <br />The evidence is sitting there from the Savings and Loan Mess that we are still trying to recoup to Chrysler, to Enron, to third world state of American health care, to the pathetic drooling, stumbling, indolent state of American public education. The majority of the country can barely read, and a substantial portion of the population that claims to be literate cannot analyze what they are reading. Perhaps that is why we are about to give away the store again to the same collection of pin-striped thieves by privatizing energy AGAIN and holding our future hostage to nitwits and bandits in the process.<br /> <br />Bruce Ratner is not likely to get a bail out, nor should the greedy slug that is the American energy industry as oil becomes as obsolete as whale oil once was.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-71986332482232913112008-04-30T11:45:00.000-07:002008-04-30T11:46:32.219-07:00ARE WE NOW A NATION OF KILLERS?Now we are not only a nation of torturers who openly advocate the practice in war, we are again a nation of killers whether we are shocking and awing people en masse, or we are executing them to demonstrate that we are either superior to, or as dehumanized as, those we would eliminate. I am at a loss to understand what this solves or whom this pleases. Prisons have been demonstrated to be excessively costly and pointless as a social corrective. With privatization, they have become lucrative local sources of tax income even when they are obsolete, brutal, or past their usefulness. As a private prison is subject to little or no public scrutiny, we are telling their operators that anything goes as long as they stay in the black.<br /><br />Capital punishment costs more than life imprisonment, and it is profoundly divisive. When we kill someone in this process by mistake, it is, or should be, a heinous blight on the nation. Even as some of our leaders have tried to pull away from the dangers of this practice, the courts, influenced by the Republican right, have recently exacerbated the problem by deciding that the risk of causing suffering in the condemned is in the public interest. Such a decision may possibly cause an inmate to die in agony, but it will most definitely insure that we as a nation slide deeper into our acceptance of torture as an acceptable social device. The inmate will at least have the release of death. We are left with the knowledge of what we have become.<br /><br />As the last eight years have shown us, becoming more brutal will not increase our national or international strength. It just inures us to more of the suffering we create and further reduces us among other cultures around the world. We are no longer trustworthy members of the civilized world. Worse still we have begun to lose important parts of the fabric or our republic.<br /><br />Over the past seven years we have watched the steady erosion of the right of free expression partly as a function of the administration’s threat against habeas corpus. Those who object to the national agenda feel a growing threat to their right this administration’s self-destructive weaknesses and follies. They have cause for alarm because in the absence of the right to a speedy, open trial, people can be effectively disappeared into the federal system. <br /><br />This Administration uses fear as both threat and persuasion because it can think of nothing constructive to replace it. Threats, bribery, propaganda, graft, intimidation, and harassment have become their tools. At the same time, the pursuit of happiness is open to an ever smaller group of people as real wages decline and the economy is devastated by inept and corrupt administration practices.<br /> <br />The United States continues to decline as an economic power in part because there is no longer any incentive for the average person to work hard if his wages decline in value and he/she is working to ship his employment abroad to cheaper labor under abusive conditions. Citizens realize that no matter how hard they work, government policy insures that their buying power will continue to be reduced. The problem is not taxation, but rather a policy that openly discourages organized labor while at the same time encourages the centralization of wealth.<br /><br />That is not to say that either of these political or economic conditions need be as they are. We must be careful that the whoever takes over the White House and thus the Judiciary, does not sneer at the Constitution as an inconvenience to his/her will as does Mr. Bush. Much of our economic woes could be ameliorated with a national push to improve the environment around the world by the use of recycling and new energy sources other than those that are carbon based. As important would be compelling corporate manufacturers to pay to clean up the environmental damage they create including the cost of recycling and/or disposing of packaging as well as their products.<br /><br />The labor of ordinary citizens goes to enrich a select group of corporations and wealthy individuals, who, it is increasingly clear, have no commitment to the fate of our nation. They simply pick up and leave the ruinous conditions and the tyranny they create. They trade in other currencies as the dollar declines in value, and they are provided with unique investment instruments such as hedge funds in which only they are allowed to participate. <br />The current Undersecretary of the Treasury openly endorses this state of affairs. <br /><br />It is no wonder then that we are a nation divided by deep mistrust, cultural animosity, and greed. The pursuit of happiness has been subverted along with our liberty, and now we are the agents of a policy that denies the significance of life itself.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-70993896983910111032008-04-03T06:48:00.001-07:002008-04-03T06:48:54.029-07:00BROOKLYN PLANS ITS GRAND CANALI think it is significant that as major issues concerning development are being decided in Carroll Gardens and Gowanus, Mr. Deblasio has gone on a campaign against plastic plates in schools. Plastic is a genuine hazard, but it has been in use in schools without any proven fatalities for some time. Development is in the process of trying to change the character of the whole area now.<br /><br />Those of us who live near the inlet are rightfully concerned about the Toll Project, which seems just plain nuts as a residence until the waterway can be seriously detoxified. That will not be an easy task as I gather it is full of carcinogenic toxins like heavy metals. Business as usual has every possibility of creating a major, long lasting health hazard, not to mention a profound environmental threat.<br /><br />When you add in that the sewer and storm system is already under visible stress each time it rains, the developer may build safe housing for residents. At the same time the rest of us will start wrestling with substances that are forced into the water table, our basements, and simply into the street. That does not take into account the corrosive effect of such stuff on the footings of buildings that are 160 years old.<br /><br />Building near the Gowanus Inlet can be great, but it needs serious government regulation, oversight, and a concrete program to control the environmental toxicity that is already there. For that to be the case, we need a serious government. That hope is at least a year away in Washington and perhaps nearly that long in Albany.<br /><br />The charade of public oversight in the Atlantic Yards project shows that at present government will sanction and even pay for construction that is potentially devastating without any serious thought to infrastructure, the environment, or human beings. In the case of any plans for the Gowanus Inlet, it always seems that these concerns are afterthoughts. That is not a great idea with a river of toxic waste that is only nominally under control at present.<br /><br />Through all that, many here love the inlet and it does have great potential. The first priority for change around the Inlet should always be the well-being of those who are here. Prudent choices should be made with environmental conditions governing architecture and engineering, not the reverse. <br /><br />Each of the proposals to date privatizes and obscures the inlet from the public to make the waterway an exclusionary property; thus in theory raising its value. That idea is at best comic when you stand near the inlet at low tide as of now. Yachting on the Inlet seems a most unlikely amusement. <br /><br />The warehouses and businesses in the area have no use for the inlet and it could be made into a viable space. Scale, however, and public access should prevail in any determination of what to build there so that the waterway does not continue its long tradition as a reeking, poisonous industrial trench.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-90283442631743155682008-04-01T10:13:00.000-07:002008-04-01T10:15:03.342-07:00THE RATNER LEGACY AT THE BROOKLYN MUSEUMOne serious casualty of the Republican agenda is public art. Nowhere is that more evident than in the fete that is now planned for Bruce Ratner at the Brooklyn Museum. It is impossible for the museum, and should be for us, to ignore the steady decline of public funding for the arts. More importantly as the funds went down, an ever greater level of political coercion has gone up so that a kind of public orthodoxy pressures for ‘family values” in art. This from a party that day after day faces yet another indictment for corruption like the departing Secretary of HUD.<br /><br />When you link that with religiously driven sexual hysteria, the landscape of our culture becomes ever more distorted. That is finally perverted beyond recognition by the subtle infusion of free market propaganda, which is promoted by free marketeers who do not believe in a free market. Nowhere is that more evident than with Bruce Ratner who has regularly sought to use the public treasure for his private gain. He sought and still seeks tax abatements no one else in NYC could hope to get. Now he has apparently bought himself a place as a cultural icon at the Brooklyn Museum. But, you may ask, what else are they to do? They need the money.<br /><br />Yes they do, but there comes a time when an institution abandons the public good to such an extent that its downfall is not necessarily a loss. For more than a generation we have watched the NEA and NEH become the spokesmen for Republican ideas. As such they have moved further and further away from the real experiences of Americans. When you add in that their real buying power is so reduced as to be inconsequential, they have become the equivalent of Soviet puppet ministries of culture. At that point, I have long wondered if it might not be better to let them die. <br /><br />The same may well apply to the Brooklyn Museum. Mr. Ratner has created nothing in Brooklyn that is not antithetical to the aims of art. He understands only blunt rectangles and lumpy distortions of them. His color sense involves fashioning new structures to mimic the grime of the ones they replace. Nothing he has built here – even though ALL of it was on the public cuff – has proven to be profitable as most of his large tenants are city or state agencies. No one else wants these spaces. Worse still, Mr. Ratner has arrogantly sidestepped every single form of public review and community involvement since the Atlantic Yards project was announced in August of 2003. <br /><br />For the Brooklyn Museum to honor him is at best grotesque. It is obvious that Brooklyn needs and deserves a great international museum of fine arts. Does it, however, need a badly run one that, as a public institution, shows no interest in the public good. Every single person who works in the Museum does so at the public expense. Every single calorie of heat that fills the building is the product of public expenditure. Every single exhibit is the result of public investment in the public good. <br /><br />I do not support the idea that the Museum should define its role by public consensus. Their function is to be cultural leaders, not a mirror of Brooklyn’s lowest common denominator. By the same token, however, as a public institution they have an obligation to do more than follow the money. Mr. Ratner’s effect on this borough thus far has been a minor disaster. I would not object if President Bush gave him a medal of freedom, which would be in keeping with the administration’s policy of honoring the inept. I do not see why the Brooklyn Museum should exhibit the same shortsighted enthusiasm for a man who is a tasteless opportunist and a profiteer. <br /><br />I have donated money to the Museum off and on for some time. I fear that is at an end under its current policies. No doubt they will hardly care, but if a large part of Brooklyn turns its back on these policies, a new leadership may show more sense of common purpose.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-48010349285010577302008-03-17T21:52:00.000-07:002008-03-17T22:06:43.032-07:00GREED AS A PUBLIC VIRTUEThe following article by Michael White appeared on the Huffington Post today. It was posted by Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. The tenor of it is reasonable, if severe, on the Bush driven dole to make the wealthy wealthier. That program has been supported by Mayor Bloomberg and manipulated by developers such as Bruce Ratner. Mr. White ably captures the history of what Mr. Ratner did to get where he is and why with the Atlantic Yards. It is worth your time to read just for the sake of clarity.<br /><br />http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-d-d-white/more-money-for-the-very-r_b_91970.html<br /><br />If you happen to be watching the John Adams series on HBO, the contrast is remarkable between the founders of the American Revolution and those currently in charge of the nation and its treasure. Both times set a high priority on property, but the men who met at Philadelphia saw the right to own and use property as a way to enhance the natural freedom of all. The current Bush followers, on the other hand, believe they should enjoy special freedoms which would grant them the special right to seize property.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-37088813098353950542008-03-15T06:43:00.000-07:002008-03-15T06:45:08.507-07:00THE FED INSURES BSYesterday Chase Morgan bailed out Bear Stearns by buying mortgage bonds insured by the Fed after a run of investors on Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is a very aggressive investment bank that has built a huge fortune on tenuous speculation like these very same mortgage bonds. <br /><br />When Toll Brothers try to do something here in Brooklyn, they borrow the money somewhere, which means that they are depending on the same banking system that is currently in genuine and very dangerous crisis. The last run on a bank of this sort was in 1929, and if a domino effect takes control over investors, many of these aggressive far-flung banking operations will be without cash. <br /><br />A bank without cash is a dead entity. It cannot tread water because it has nothing for depositors much less investors. If a bank is holding a massive amount of worthless paper, like mortgage bonds, they are moving toward the coroner’s slab.<br /><br />The important thing here is that Chase bailed out Bear Stearns by buying mortgage paper from them backed by the Fed, so while it may look as though BS got shored up, it is really the case that the financial whizzes in and out of government have perpetuated the same stupid system. <br /><br />Banks should not be investors, and certainly not insurers. They should be conservators of their depositor’s assets. When bankers take a flyer with the public’s money as they did with mortgage paper, the loss is born by their clients who never had a say in the matter. Like many pension funds now, these entities are permitted to gamble with other people’s money. Those people, as in the case of Enron, have to absorb the losses when stupid decisions are made.<br /><br />Banks are the lifeline of developers, builders, contractors and such so even if the price of real estate holds in NYC as it will relative to the rest of the country; we will take some painful temporary losses. If the idiot banking practices of the last 30 years really come home to roost, that may turn into something that is the modern equivalent of the Depression. If that happens, we will all be very unhappy no matter where you have deposited your assets.<br /><br />Sorry to be grim, but this administration is not going to address the need to re-regulate banks and put some sort of controls on the sale of mortgages as speculative investments. So we should get ready for a rough ride, though of all the cities in the US, NYC is the most likely to come out in one piece. Most of the value of real property has some genuine base here because there are fewer places to live than people want. That is not likely to change in the foreseeable future. <br /><br />Of course, if global warming floods us, the value of property will tend to decline rather sharply. What's more you can be sure that no one currently in the White House has any idea what global warming is, nor do they want to be told.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-65024068684681260822008-03-10T11:17:00.001-07:002008-03-10T11:17:54.979-07:00BAILOUT TAXES FOR NYC BANKS?New Yorkers, and Brooklynites in particular should note that the administration is now finally getting ready to take the economic downturn seriously. In a real estate market like Brooklyn, which is relatively strong, that could hold the promise of renewed stability in housing prices. That in my view is where we want to be given that most of the price escalation of the last two or three years was simply built on air given the slipshod government policy on banking regulation. <br /><br />New Yorkers could salvage this situation by instituting a citywide bailout tax on all real estate transactions done on credit. A borough like Brooklyn then would be free from the vagaries of the free marketeers, and the borough’s primary asset, privately owned housing, would be protected. That in turn would slow the downturn in other credit driven segments of the economy at least locally.<br /><br />Bankers should not be speculators, nor should they be insurers. They should focus on the careful retention of asset worth, a lesson Americans thought they had learned from the Great Depression. Since the time of Reagan, however, bankers have been more and more deregulated into businesses for which their institutions are unsuited and inclined to folly. Thus private mortgages were created on unsupportable risks like interest only loans and ungoverned variable rates. <br /><br />Worse still is the sale of mortgages to investment funds. The half-baked notion was that spreading the risk around reduced its volatility. That is exactly like assuming you can insure the value of your chicken ranch by betting on hundreds of horse races. It is the idiocy that always overtakes business, when business becomes so enthusiastic that it forgets about economics. <br /><br />Americans no longer read very much, so they do not like the word regulation and we are not likely to see insurance, investment, and banking divided again any time soon. What do we do about the mess created by their coming together?<br /><br />Can Paul Krugman be wrong? Very rarely in my experience, but in Monday’s editorial in the NY Times, he comes relatively close to it by a sin of omission. He argues that the current housing crisis with all its attendant financial fallout may be arrested by yet another interest cut from the Fed. Given the problems of personal debt, currency devaluation and unemployment, that may help the markets but it will do nothing for the American citizen. He adds though that shoring up the bond market is a good way to cool the economy while keeping capital in play. I would agree but that does not fix the bank problem.<br /><br />He seems right in his analysis but like all the economists of our time, he has no instrument in mind to protect the actual victims of irresponsible banking. They are we, the public who use these institutions under the assumption that somewhere, somehow they are held in check from total instability by something.<br /><br />If we cannot regulate banks, we should institute a bailout tax. Thus any bank or lending institution should be taxed according to the risk of the loans they make. The revenue should go into a fund like the FDIC. The banks create the risk for themselves, but as we are seeing – and saw with the Savings and Loans debacle of the Reagan administration – they cannot absorb their own losses when their judgment is arrogant, stupid, or simply bad. In fact, with the exception of a few closings among the most egregious offenders, the banking industry never pays for its errors at all. We do.<br /><br />Let the corporation that owns the bank assume the lion’s share of the risk they allow banks to create. Given the housing market as it stands now, that would also work well with developers. Any developer getting any sort of government subsidy would have to pay a risk tax so that cost over runs, delays, and tax abatements would be balanced out in the public’s interest by this fund into which the developer pays.<br /><br />Franklin was right that nothing focuses a man’s mind like the knowledge that he will be hanged in a fortnight. It would be a great boon to our community if bankers knew that each time they sold mortgages as a high-risk security to investors, they would have to pay through the nose to do so.<br /><br />Steven Hartcervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-56342490845256945372008-03-06T15:27:00.000-08:002008-03-06T15:29:33.132-08:00BUILDING DESOLATION IN BROOKLYNThe history of New York City is an architectural crapshoot. Sometimes that<br />has worked out to create really strong communities like the urban<br />neighborhoods in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. Sometimes it has produced<br />the splendid isolation of the towers above 2nd and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan<br />where people are units living in units. Then there are the disasters like<br />Penn Station which is simply a no man's land of transitory passage. It is a<br />monument to cheap ugliness and the concept that the industrial look can be<br />somehow tarted up to seem human when it cannot. I would say the same of<br />Lincoln Center, though the style is less like a Dairy Queen and more like an<br />Assyrian royal tomb.<br /><br />Americans sneer at art because they are childish and naïve about esthetics.<br />They refuse to see that what you look at each day forms your view of the<br />world as much as the interaction you have with people. Is the desolation of<br />the Atlantic Yards empty space worse than what has already been erected to<br />replace it? No, because the former has the promise of possibility, whereas<br />the latter is an inescapable blight upon the spirit. The builder, Ratner,<br />will now live in a 19th century townhouse on 62nd St. in Manhattan far from<br />the hideous abuse he has heaped upon Brooklyn. The distance is esthetic,<br />not in feet and miles. He has openly despised 'brownstone Booklyn' only to<br />place himself in exactly that esthetic space.<br /><br />What Americans really don't like about esthetics is that they require a<br />collective sense of compatibility to make good public spaces. Unlike Ratner<br />and his aged architect, who impose their ideas by imperial fiat, effective<br />architecture requires cooperation. First that means a social contract for<br />the common good, a notion that modern free marketeers regard retrograde if<br />no simply a myth, but it is none the less essential to a functioning<br />society. The second is that public spaces, when planned and managed well<br />are worth the public's investment, but they may restrict rugged<br />individualism.<br /><br />Eminent domain is not an inherently bad idea. It is not a tool of slum<br />clearance. It is what makes possible such needed creations as the Brooklyn<br />Bridge. What is bad is when it is used to override the social contract as a<br />tool of imperial enforcement. The Gowanus Expressway was not wrong because<br />of where it is and what it does. It is wrong because it was built with no<br />thought to what it would do to those who must live with it. There is no<br />greater good served by eminent domain if the common good is undermined.<br />The fundamental error of the last 30 years which is the assumption that what is profitable<br />for anyone is a benefit somehow at some point to everyone. It isn't.<br /><br />That is not a lesson easily taught in the city of New York where those with<br />the money have always done what they liked with impunity. However, there<br />was no general literacy through much of that, no real middle class, and<br />certainly no internet. So the times have been a changin' and this list is a<br />reflection of that.<br /><br />The outcome is uncertain. Penn Station may be remodeled and kept as it is.<br />The stupid ideas of today can always be bested by the stupid ideas of<br />tomorrow. Across the street from me there is a new building that is<br />essentially inoffensive but also essentially another study in bland and<br />cheap, tarted up with shoddy materials and a measure of bad taste. The<br />builder used various shades of grey to complement the base color of concrete<br />thus creating the vivid feel of a Stalinist suburb. The apartments are<br />composed of tiny rooms piled up on assorted levels so that you are forever<br />climbing stairs for a towel and then back down to reach the shower. They<br />want the moon for these things and they will fail to get that.<br /><br />Ratner's fall, if it comes, could leave us with a wasteland of fast food<br />joints and big box stores in a hodgepodge. In some ways that might be<br />preferable though because it could be dismantled piece meal just as it would<br />be built. What would serve us all would be structures of modest height that<br />blend with the surrounding brick but that also have some genuine character<br />and design. Brooklyn does not need concrete monoliths or an imported sports<br />team that will go instantly into debt on the public cuff. It sounds pretty<br />easy when you put it that way.<br /><br />The difference lies almost solely and entirely on our willingness to embrace<br />a new social contract where the meaning of prosperity is redefined in two<br />subtle but important ways. First, bigger means nothing as it is not<br />necessarily better in any substantive practical or financial sense. It is<br />just more money thrown around all at once and the real costs are that much<br />further deferred. Second, short term financial gains are enticing but they<br />are anathema to communities and all long term interests like people, who are<br />and will be the consumers of the future.<br /><br />The hysteria that is now growing out of the failure of the banking industry<br />to make prudent choices about mortgages, is excessive. If we have another<br />long and deep recession, sloppy banking will not be the root cause, it will<br />be the result of bad thinking or simply the lack of it, for 30 years in all<br />phases of the economy. That has been facilitated by utterly stupid<br />government policy. The party is over, and what a relief in some ways. The<br />gaudy excesses of the 80s and the 90s can be stripped away. Then we can get<br />together calmly and build something worth keeping.<br /><br />Steve Hartcervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-4709424860406320452008-03-02T06:47:00.000-08:002008-03-02T06:51:53.923-08:00THE IRRELEVANT DEMOCRATThe Brooklyn Papers inform us that Ed Towns and other Democratic superdelegates of that party are going to vote for Hillary Clinton’s nomination despite the fact that the district voted for Obama. We all have our thoughts about the promise and capabilities of the Democratic nominees for president. However there is a profound danger in making the vote of the people irrelevant.<br /><br />Yes, it is a party primary and parties are created to function in their own interest. It is not an election, but our national sense of unity has been shattered over the last seven years. It is also a fool’s errand to think that, “anyone but Bush” will be better. A new president won’t necessarily change things that much because the president will face a wall of opposition from the Republicans in Congress while dealing with the festering wounds created by the Bush Administration. Most obvious is the fact that the economy has been profoundly mismanaged since the Reagan Administration and the bill has now come due. <br /><br />There is a lot of corruption, neglect and incompetence that will have to be faced and rethought. The real symbol of our nation now is the City of New Orleans. That ruined and abused community represents much of what the Republican Party has done to many aspects of our nation here at home and abroad. Patience, reason and prudence will have to return to the national agenda, but none of that will replace our sense of hope. <br /><br />There is one thing missing from the current political agenda and it has been disappearing since the days of Nixon and is nearly absent due to the current President Bush. We have all but lost our trust in each other and in government, and with that, hope that democracy can work. No party, no ideology, no burst of prosperity, nor any short-term fix can repair that damage. <br /><br />Americans have lost hope that their system of government is theirs. They sustain it with the fortunes, their effort and their lives. They participate as voters, and yet, after the election of 2000, it became clear that elections can be shanghaied to accommodate the agendas of a small minority. The Republicans -- bolstered by the marriage of two groups of thugs, the Religious Right and the Neocons -- relished that power. With the White House in hand, that tiny coalition took over Congress and now it is nearly as inert as the latter days of the Politburo. <br /><br />If the Democratic Party is going to adopt the cynical Republican tactics and force the views of their leadership on the electorate, Americans will more and more turn away from government as Europeans do. It will simply be a corrupt obstruction for our citizens – much like organized crime – to live with and get around. Cynicism may be facile and childish, but often it is the only option when those in power encourage it.<br /><br />The problem is not Mrs. Clinton, nor is Mr. Obama the solution. The problem is that we have become a nation of top down politics with no balance to ensure that the will of the people is somehow at least felt in the operations of government. The two party system as it stands now is making voters irrelevant.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-35394024479657909472007-12-15T06:36:00.000-08:002007-12-15T06:38:48.157-08:00IS BIGGER BETTER FOR BROOKLYN?Daniel Doctoroff, the Deputy Mayor for economic development, is leaving Bloomberg’s side, a c-section in the municipal consciousness that may at least give us a breather from grand, industrial strength schemes for social engineering. He has retrospectively repudiated Ratner’s methods for skirting the public approval process for the Atlantic Yards (AY). It seems a nice, if sadly belated, parting gift to the City. Bloomberg, like President Bush, is losing momentum for his “Uberplans.” Soon Brooklyn may also be free of the dubious representation of David Yassky, although the idea of him as City Comptroller is an alarming one given his affinity for fat cat deals including AY. We will soon be back to the Borough President and his one-liners as public policy. So perhaps Brooklyn can catch its political breath and really sort out the AY question.<br /> <br />With all else that is wrong with Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project, perhaps the worst error is one of esthetics. To date Mr. Ratner has managed to give us the Atlantic Center with its slab iteration of Ebbets Field. He admits it is hideous and has gone about fixing that by plastering its slab sides with assorted garish electric signs reminiscent of a gaudy square in Tokyo. The mall that now fronts the Center is drab, lifeless, and worse still, isolated amid a sea of hostile, dangerous traffic.<br /> <br />The look and feel of a place matter just as much in a building as they do in the presentation of food. We eat with our eyes and that is how we respond to our environment. Former Mayor Giuliani may have more flaws than the nation yet realizes, but he was right in thinking that order begets order. By the same token, environmental sensitivity (which is often a matter of scale) begets a more caring reaction from inhabitants and visitors alike. Trash begets trash. Bad food creates a bad palate. Bland, faceless architecture makes for indifference and a feeling of intimidation.<br /> <br />Some human activities, like the growing of food and architecture, only succeed where a single artisan creates the product because he or she can be sensitive to what suits the time and place. We live in Brownstone Brooklyn because these houses have the individuality of the artisan’s hand. They may superficially look uniform, but in fact each house is its own solution to standing in the row of its fellows. An industrial model in architecture aims for cheap uniformity, Mr. Ratner’s forte. <br /> <br />Some things are not suited to the industrial model that is as much a matter of scale as it is the method of production. Bigger and more efficient is not always better. The industrial model is as likely to be noxious as it is cost effective. Industrial food, for example, may be cheap and efficient for the producer, but it may well make you fat and full of strange additives as well as supplying nutrients. The industrial model serves investors who are rarely likely to have to live with the results first-hand.<br /> <br />We have to ask ourselves, as Americans, if bigger is always better. Some things like making cars need large organizations to complete the task efficiently. That, however, is no guarantee of success. Once Detroit was the model for auto making. They could make cars probably, if they did not have to first support the ponderous corporate structure that impedes them. Other things, like food, are not improved when the aim is to flood a mass market with cheap, easily produced, rigidly uniform goods. What you get is lot of unhealthy processed food. On top of that you add the cost of an enormous mega-organization of fat cats like Archer Daniels Midlands. They have to be fed, preened, and nurtured while they genetically manipulate our food intake and mass produce food-based chemicals that make us fat. <br /> <br />We do that to ourselves, you say? Well yes, we do, but then again, like architecture, how much choice do most people have as to what they have to abide? In general, none is given to them. They look down their block as I do on Warren Street. I watched a developer put up a building in my former parking lot that bears no relation to the rest of the structures on the block. The resulting warren of condos has a lumpy quasi- deco-60s-Bauhaus look composed of concrete slab, sections of fake grey brick-face, interrupted by plate-glass, and a myriad of aluminum bits and pieces. Yum. <br /> <br />The façade was designed to be cheap and get around zoning restrictions by employing set backs and building right up to the edge of the pavement. Everyone on the block agrees that it is, “not as bad as it could be, ” which is not much of a ringing endorsement. So goes life in a city where money does the loudest talking. Nonetheless the building’s design – both inside and out – may prove a financial disaster in the new housing market. The price of these dwellings is outrageous under the assumption that if you build it in New York, the suckers will come, or will they? Some trends go bust. Remember Corbusier, ‘architect for the twentieth century’?<br /> <br />John Brunner published his dystopian novel, The Sheep Look Up in 1972. In it the city of New York has been so overbuilt and polluted that the health of the public at all levels has been negatively affected. The rich live in heavily armed and guarded aeries from which they helicopter out to safer climes while the rest of the citizens form a kind of ovine rabble that is only vaguely aware of their own doom. They are the sheep. <br /> <br />Nowadays we don’t submit to this sort of bullying so much as we zone out when it comes to our attention. We plug our iPods into our heads or slap our cell phones to our ears. Codgers turn up their CD players. We troop off like horses with blinders to serve in the corridors of power. We hope that -- by staying numb to the natural world around us, and what we are doing to it -- we will not get hurt. Instead, we have noisy, inane phone conversations in the street. We bellow in public places about what we are eating for lunch even as we gnaw it, but not with the other person at our table. When we do look up, irony abounds.<br /> <br />The City of New York is now engaged in redoing the architecture of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts so that it will remind people that performance involves humans. Lincoln Center was designed in the hayday of the American Empire, 1959, as an, “icon of culture, class and excellence,” or so says Netours.com in a gristly bit of purple prose. Architecturally though, they are right. Lincoln Center was a concrete series of monoliths that only a Mussolini could love. It was a monument designed for those who used the arts to match the magnitude of the place with their own colossal egoism. The human presence of the artist was incidental.<br /> <br />Glass walls will now replace some of the stone and concrete. The public will begin to see that Lincoln Center is not a vault for the property of the few, so much as a home for the living arts that are for all to share even as they walk by the Center. Artists – especially performing artists – are people, not monuments to their backers or cogs in some grand design of industrial uniformity. They need venues of a scale that a human can occupy, fill, and make shine. So do dwellings and businesses.<br /> <br />After careful study, I can find no building that Mr. Ratner has built that invites humans to make themselves present other than as invisible employees or harried consumers. Much of the plan of Atlantic Yards involves building forbidding, walled enclaves as once was true of the north end of the World Trade Center. This was the home of the financial industry’s back office. It was a bastion of self-assigned importance. You could visit for a price, but ordinary citizens were not meant to linger there. What is more, who would have wanted to do so? It was like sitting in the middle of a vertical eight-lane highway. We now propose to replace it with the same sort of erectile mistake in terms of scale. That brings us to post-modern, industrial, high-tech architecture, or, Frank Gehry.<br /> <br />Mr. Gehry’s architectural firm is being sued by no less a technical institute than MIT because their design for a building on their campus does not work. It is not entirely a matter of esthetics though that is a factor. The building leaks and is structurally flawed. That is not the first time Mr. Gehry’s vanity has exceeded his ability and judgment. A building of his in Los Angeles had to be ‘reskinned’ because the original material created so much heat and glare that it was a public hazard. His work is by his own admission extremely complicated and thus his firm has a hard time communicating with engineers and those doing the construction. He regards that as architectural business as usual, but then it is not his firm’s money that goes for the redesign, repair, and refurbishment.<br /> <br />The building at MIT, which Gehry says emulates the behavior of drunken robots, seems to be of modest height and scope so the problems are solvable for a few million dollars. Miss Brooklyn, the drunken centerpiece of the Atlantic Yards, will be a gigantic, misshapen high-rise. So getting the kinks out of her wrinkled exterior -- much less her complex interior -- may be many times as costly. <br /> <br />That is, of course, if she ever emerges from Mr. Ratner’s dubious financial structure. He and Mr. Gehry, however, will not get the bill, nor will FCRC. The people of NYC will get that, and pass a good chunk of it on to the state. Why do I doubt that these gentlemen can build AY right or even very well? Frankly, it’s too big for them to handle, and they have started to admit it.<br /> <br />Having sidestepped the public review process, Mr. Ratner now admits the new Gehry-designed Nets Arena will cause a glut of traffic at Atlantic and Flatbush. Grim news when you consider that the intersection is already impossible to pass through safely by car much less on foot. Way back in 2003, long before there was anything other than an arena in question, that was the initial objection posed by the people of downtown Brooklyn. <br /> <br />That problem was explained away by two mystifying diversions. The first fix was adding a dozen or so buildings that would make it all better in some vague way. Why? Because it would all be bigger (including the outrageous, ungoverned cost) and thus work better for some unexplained reason. The second fix was that the Ratner/Markowitz promised better routed and more frequent subway service to the Atlantic Avenue station. Fans, it was assumed, would prefer the subway at midnight to driving home in their own cars. The MTA has since explained that any such expansion of service is completely impossible.<br /> <br />We need development, housing, jobs and new industry in Brooklyn, but not at an untold cost that may far exceed the benefits. Gehry and Ratner are not the men to do this job. It is too big for them, and they both have a history that shows just that. Ratner lacks taste and Gehry, practical ability. What we need is to make these things work within the character of the Brooklyn we already have. Then the endeavor will benefit the people who already live here as well as create a new economic, social and cultural horizon for the borough. AY, as now planned, will not do that, and it isn’t meant to. It is a revenue stream for a developer and his investors. We are expected to submit to being herded and, at the right time, fleeced. <br /> <br />Given the current state of the economy, there is no reason to go on with Ratner’s Atlantic Yards plan. It is an ugly, dystopic, burdensome, half-baked, astronomically expensive fiasco in the making. We do need development, and it should be on a human scale that has something to do with Brooklyn, a city of light and air compared to Manhattan. The first step should be to get Mr. Ratner and FCRC out of the equation along with their megalomaniac, inept architect. Sometimes you don’t need bigger. Sometimes you just need enough. I think it is increasingly clear that Brooklyn has had enough of these two guys.<br /><br /><br /><br />http://viewsfromthebridge.blogspot.com<br /> <br /><br />-- "If a nation expects to be ignorant and<br />free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will<br />be." Thomas Jeffersoncervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-44198375563056420062007-11-12T09:16:00.000-08:002007-11-12T09:17:25.408-08:00RATNER, ATLANTIC YARDS, AND THE POLITICS OF HOPEThe politics of fear have worked well for Forest City up to a point. Much has been made recently about the politics of fear nationally. Fear of FCRC is based in Ratner’s immensely clever capacity to martial the appearance of a solid financial base. That alone has made the Atlantic Yards Project (AY) seem inevitable to many, especially politicians who do not want to be on the losing side.<br /><br />I don’t mind that Mr. Ratner is a clever developer and politically fast on his feet. This is New York City where you have to be an operator to get things done. What I do mind is that he has no sense of common purpose, much less of the common good. He wants to impose his ideas, and those of Frank Gehry, on the citizens of Brooklyn from above.<br /><br />Ironically, Frank Gehry’s firm of architects is being sued by MIT for construction faults in a new 300 million dollar building. It is not his first dispute and he seems to take the suit in stride as a natural cost of doing business. Of course it is not his house that is leaking and falling apart. As Steve Goodman once said, “It ain’t hard to live with somebody else’s troubles.” <br /><br />Gehry described the MIT building’s design as a group of drunken robots that have come together to celebrate. Miss Brooklyn -- the centerpiece of the AY which Gehry describes as a sort of bride image -- looks as if she leaned far too long on the open bar at her own wedding reception. Mr. Gehry shows a penchant for excess in his designs.<br /><br />Whether AY will prove as excessive as most of us think, remains to be seen. The evidence seems clear that financially, culturally, socially, and practically the complex would create huge and permanently damaging burdens on Brooklyn and the State of New York. AY has been sensibly and forcefully opposed by those who subscribe to that view.<br /><br />The politics of fear try hard to prevent that. They call for sudden ill-considered action or cringing acquiescence. That makes opponents look naïve and shortsighted. If not that, they are described as ‘nimby’ creatures of narrow self-interest. None of the opponents of AY have fallen for that. However, there is one part of the politics of fear we have fallen for in my view. We fight Ratner on his own turf. That is the problem with fear. It sets the rules of the game by being the source of the fear. But shared fear does not have to be that simple. Nor does it need to be that controlling.<br /><br />Jonathan Alter’s biographical history of Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office is called “The Defining Moment.” Mr. Alter is neither a historian, nor even much of a writer, but FDR’s words survive that effortlessly. The centerpiece of the book is FDR’s first inaugural where the words, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” They are the theme of the first paragraph. Quoted in isolation, the sentence sounds sort of silly but FDR surrounded his thought with his clear determination to face the difficult truths of 1932 and the Depression and act accordingly. Only irrational fear, he said, could defeat that.<br /><br />He made clear that Americans had real things to fear and those need to be separated from the ones that are based in hysteria or narrow self-interest. He asserted that reason and honesty would allow the nation to rise from the Depression. <br /><br />Most importantly, FDR conveyed a sense of common purpose between the government and citizens in facing the future. He said so with the added commitment that he intended to speak the truth, no matter how painful, to the people he represented as president. That is the politics of hope. Democracy cannot function without hope. A government that is indifferent to the people’s will destroys hope even as it instills fear.<br /><br />FDR was a politician, and he knew when to shave the truth as well as how to maneuver around his political enemies. He won some fights, and he lost some. He was a clever political operator but no one could deny that throughout his political life, he held the common good of the American people as his uppermost aim. He was not interested in ideology beyond its practical use, and he basically fought the Depression by trying anything and everything as much because it would instill hope as reap a specific reward.<br /><br />Those of us who oppose Ratner’s AY cannot lose sight of the fact that we are struggling for the common good of the people of Brooklyn. The AY as currently planned will seriously undermine that. We should add that the nation faces an uncertain economic future as a whole. We do not oppose Ratner’s AY as reactionaries, or even as preservationists. Who in his right mind would want to preserve a hole in the ground? We are doing this to achieve a balance of order and reason to the process of Brooklyn’s development. <br /><br />Brooklyn is changing and development is not inherently wrong or misguided. However, the needs of the existing community are at least as important as the new one that is being proposed. That may slow things down, but that can often be a good thing. If not, as one can see all over Manhattan, the existing community will simply be destroyed. The replacement is often a social agglomeration of financial self-interest with little coherence and no sense of common good.<br /><br />That is why the aspirations of developers must be tempered along the Gowanus Inlet; the height and design of buildings in Carroll Gardens need to be harmonious with existing structures, and the Atlantic Yards Project needs to be brought under reasonable public control to preserve the common good. That way we can move forward through the politics of hope.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-30213691780224219412007-11-08T12:19:00.000-08:002007-11-08T12:21:26.551-08:00The New World Order UnfoldsThere are two points we must face as the Bush administration slinks toward Bethlehem in an effort to be born again through their legacy. The first is that our senior Senator, Charles Shumer, was not equal to the question, “Do you support torture?” That is because he affirmed the nomination of Mr. Mukasey as Attorney General. Mr. Mukasey is unable to decide what is torture unless the President tells him it is or not. It is a curiously painful choice on his part given the behavior of the last AG under Bush. In other words, the senior Senator from NYS lacks the moral substance to go to war over basic human rights. If NYS is not up to that challenge in this republic, who is?<br /><br />The second is that the President seems very comfortable with suspending constitutions. Pakistan is the latest example. The problem is not so much that he is untroubled by this behavior as that he has no lucid explanation for his own decisions. Why does that matter? If one constitution can be suspended, why not another? That is particularly worth considering when you realize that he rarely, if ever, has any logical explanation for his choices. You should ask yourself which constitution he might be willing to suspend next, and you should not ask yourself, “Why would he do that?” He does not require a justification. He only needs the impulse. <br /><br />As for torture, what constitutes torture? Who knows? Who cares?cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-37296417445923595602007-09-16T05:46:00.000-07:002007-09-16T05:47:26.589-07:00ATLANTIC YARDS AND THE NATIONAL TABThe Atlantic Yards is a financial disaster poised to happen and not just because of FCRC’s frivolous fiscal practices, which have been well documented since the project was announced in 2003. The project has, and will have, no fiscal over-sight. FCRC has been able to embed themselves in Albany to such an extent that even those who are charged with guarding the public treasure are already looking the other way even before the project begins. That is how and why Ratner has leap-frogged his way through the entire public review process and emerged free to do whatever he pleases. It is already clear that the Atlantic Yards will produce a host of secondary problems and costs, like sewerage, that will come directly out of the public treasury and extend far beyond the limits of the project itself. The question is, can we pay for this enormous, uncontrolled and ill-conceived undertaking to build the equivalent of a mid-sized American city in the middle of downtown Brooklyn? There are three points that need to be addressed in looking at the financial future of paying the tab for the Atlantic Yards. <br /><br />The first and most important one is that the dollar hit 1.39 against the Euro this week. They US balance of trade is so far gone into the imports column that with each penny of this increase, it will come painfully out of the hide of American businesses and consumers. That will in turn decrease the purchasing power of every American to buy the goods that we have outsourced in order to reduce labor costs. You will have to pay more for the essential goods and services you must buy. The Atlantic Yards will form a substantial surcharge for every New Yorker on top of the decline of their real wealth and the rise of the cost of living. Thus far there is no indication whatever that the Atlantic Yards will be anything but an additional and onerous burden on taxpayers. It is no longer a question of whether we want to pay for Atlantic Yards. It is now seriously doubtful that we even can and sustain a semblance of our standard of living. That is already clear from the crisis in the real estate industry.<br /><br />The second point is that while the default rate on sub prime and interest only mortgages may be relatively low, it signals a fundamental softness in the economy. The price of anything is dictated finally not by scarcity but by a fundamental desire to buy it and the resources to meet the price point set for it. The NY Times has indicated that one benefit to the housing recession is that Americans will see their houses as homes rather than investment to build equity. That is a quaint way of saying that the bull market is over for the middle class if in fact they ever really had a crack at it. Real income has been stagnant in this country since the 1970s when the GOP went to war with the labor movement and apparently has won. The disparity between wealth and wage earners has climbed exponentially ever since.<br /><br />The third factor is that government and personal debt at all levels of the economy are at an all time high. That debt has the precipitous effect of underscoring the softness in the real estate market. One of the reasons for the mortgage defaults is that ordinary people are up to their ears in other payments they have to make. Something had to give so they didn’t pay the mortgage. There cannot be a housing boom if the market is glutted with foreclosures, and it takes very little of that to cause new home construction to stall. It has done so in many parts of the country. <br /><br />If personal debt is crucial, the national debt is at an all time high of nine trillion dollars and six trillion of that has been added since the election of 2000. Say what you like, but that debt has to be serviced and a huge portion of our taxes is going to doing just that. Since our tax system greatly favors the wealthy, the burden for that cost falls most heavily on the middle class. Therefore, a large portion of your tax bill goes to paying interest to creditor nations, the largest of which is the Chinese who are our chief competitors now given their vast source of cheap labor. We are in that sense borrowing our own money from the wages we shipped abroad.<br /><br />The decline in the dollar and real worth, plus the growth in debt, mean you will have less to pay your bills, and you will get less and less return on your tax dollars. The Atlantic Yards is the sort of cost most small countries would not dream of assuming. Serious people should now see that it is not one New Yorkers can realistically afford either. What is more, no one should be deluded that the present administrations in Foley Square, Albany, or Washington are able to see these factors at work, much less have the perspicacity to fix them. They remain concerned with redistributing wealth upward.<br /><br />This week Paul Krugman pointed out in The Times that the Administration in Washington is running out the clock on Iraq. That applies at all levels of government on a host of issues. The strategy is to hang tough and never admit anything regardless of the facts. We see that mentality at work as the model in many aspects of the economy such as the Atlantic Yards. The leadership we have at all levels knows full well that even the costs of beginning this venture are set to balloon out of control. That is made grossly worse by the fact that FCRC is mired in political cronyism in Albany and with our Senators and Representatives. Why anyone thinks Senator Clinton is fit to be president under the conditions she has helped to create nationally and locally is beyond me. In the matter of the Atlantic Yards, she and Senator Schumer have shown as much economic insight as President Bush, which is to say none.<br /><br />The situation is not, however, in any sense hopeless. Here in NYC we have a stable real estate economy that may take a beating in the months to come, but it is still NYC and its essential value will weather the storm. What is missing is the will to resist the steamroller approach that has driven big money over the public interest for thirty years. Just as we must find and elect candidates who will look for a serious end to the war, we must find and elect those who truly understand that the business of government is not business. We do not want public agencies to be the enemies of business, but corporate interests are often in competition with those of the public. Government performs the essential function of regulating the market to protect the citizenry from its excesses and omissions. <br /><br />We need people in office who understand that while prosperity is good, other concerns like stability and fairness are equally, if not more, important. That means real incomes have to rise for all Americans while at the same time health, education, infrastructure and the like must not be treated as for-profit, short term enterprises. They are too fundamentally important to society for that. Nothing is more likely to destabilize the economy of New York City and State as the Atlantic Yards Project. We are already in an economy that national policy has seriously destabilized. We will be paying for that for some time to come. We simply cannot afford the Atlantic Yards and every New Yorker should make it their business to bring that message home in whatever way they can as quickly and firmly as possible.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-51964878803684852462007-08-11T13:51:00.000-07:002007-08-11T13:56:35.169-07:00THE SHORT AND NASTY DEATH OF OUR ECONOMYThe NEW YORK TIMES reports today that the world’s central banks are pumping 38 billion dollars worth of cash into the international markets to stem the fall off on the New York exchanges. Considering that we are dumping 50 billion dollars a month into a lost war in Iraq, that is less than a drop in an economic black hole. <br /><br />Within two weeks of being installed as president by the Supreme Court, Mr. Bush had pulled the plug on the national debt by his tax policy to fatten the rich while at the same time depressing real wages, as they had been for some thirty years before, by no tax relief to the middle class. Our national debt will exceed NINE TRILLION dollars tomorrow. It will increase at the rate of 1.4 billion a day after that meaning that right now you, and every single other American, owe close to 30,000 dollars for Mr. Bush’s adolescent misjudgment.<br /><br />Every dollar that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney shovel into the abyss of their misadventure in Iraq was borrowed from the Chinese, who are quite right to sneer at the administration’s suggestion that they ought to lower the value of their currency to raise the value of ours. We are the debtor nation. It is yet another fool’s errand upon which the Bush administration has sent itself. If, like the Chinese, you are the world’s lender nation, you do not float your currency to the natural level, you designate what that level is just as we did through out the 50s, 60s, and 70s before we were blinded by debt up to our hairlines.<br /><br />Much of this could have easily been avoided by leaving income taxes as they were in 2000. That could have been bolstered by regulating banks and other lenders so that they had to properly secure credit cards, and other forms of debt that have since sky-rocketed. The opposite was done, and as we have learned – or should have learned – no freemarketeer will ever turn down a short-term gain in favor of the common good. That is natural enough, as freemarket buccaneers do not believe there is a common good other than those practices that line their own pockets.<br /><br />As these credit excesses have become apparent through massive rising interest rates and resulting defaults, mortgage lenders have begun to collapse under the weight of their own blind stupidity. Americans should have known better since they are still paying for Reagan’s buffoonery in deregulating the savings and loans industry. <br /><br />Below prime and interest only lenders are now finding that the pyramid of debt they built is more like a diving board. It has broken. Foreclosures do no one any good, as any student of 1933 will tell you. The same carpet of fake money that rolled out under the Bush Administration to the unwary and unwise, is rolling right back up again. The only justice in it all is that it is taking down the rich too with the shriveling of many hedge funds.<br /><br />The economy may self-correct because it rests now, as it did not prior to 1980 on the wealth of the rest of the world. Where our own business and government leaders have no understanding of the common good, the world may well be able to do so. However the lingering mess of this debacle will be ours, and our children’s and their children’s mess for decades to come.<br /><br />Even if the Constitution can be restored and lawful government re-established, it is the gross infection of this administration’s economic yahooism that will remain with us, bleed our energy, and make our recovery slow and painful. Nothing lasts forever, and perhaps the America of hope that existed after WWII has been slaughtered by incompetence and greed.<br /><br />In the dark of the night, as Mr. Bush sleeps in the bed where Richard Nixon once tossed and sweated, I wonder if the magnitude of his utter failure as a president, a man and as a human being ever penetrates his massively inert and impenetrable ego. He hears the voice of God, he tells us, but does he understand the message. His miserable feckless life has been one long, continuing path of wretched cheats, lies, and failures punctuated by long periods of delusional intoxication. Unlike Gatsby, he is not his own worst enemy. When the history of his presidency fully unfolds, I have come to suspect that he will have been ours.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-57846485562186597942007-07-19T10:44:00.000-07:002007-07-19T10:46:44.288-07:00THE PROBLEM WITH BILL DE BLASIOBill de Blasio, one of our local Brooklyn City Councilmen, is the sort of politician on the Democratic side to whom we owe our present condition. He is neither sinister nor highly effective. He almost won the City Council presidency. He has diligently found his way to the middle of the road by supporting education, sanitation, employment, safety and in the words of his website, “Making Our Neighborhoods the Very Best.” There’s a brave catchphrase for a man who seems to be ginning up a bid for higher office. That’s politics these days, and more power too him, though I hope he gets a new spin-doctor.<br /><br />Mr. de Blasio’s site moves on predictably to asking you to volunteer and hand over some cash. His record shows that apart from the City Council, he did something vague for the Department of Housing and Urban Development about channeling money to the City. As a member of his local school board, he supports smaller classes and “was part of an effort to reinvent John Jay High School.” What the effort was and whether it accomplished anything is not mentioned. He managed Senator Clinton’s campaign in 2000 for the US Senate, so he has made his own dubious contribution to our nation’s current war policy.<br /><br />Recently his name has appeared on any number of local listserv’s as undertaking such major efforts as getting people to bring in their electronic junk as opposed to heaving it in the city landfills. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, who could possibly object? He also staunchly advocates that parks should be safe for small children. He has few opponents there.<br /><br />Mr. de Blasio holds that buildings, in some cases, should not be too tall unless it would be better if they were. In that he stands shoulder to shoulder with David Yassky who has stated that the Ratner Atlantic Yards project should not be built, unless it is “done well.” In that spirit, Mr. de Blasio has gone after Scarano Architects for ‘unprofessional practices’ but he seems perfectly happy with Frank Gehry’s mega-plex dystopia. The latter apparently will create jobs whereas the former will not though he has not as yet provided the reasoning behind that assertion.<br /><br />I have no brief for Scarano Architects. What bothers me is that Mr. de Blasio is a master at finding the political path of least resistance. In the one instance he is mightily worried about zoning codes. In the case of Mr. Ratner, wherever the flood of public treasure flows -- as well as the ensuing overflow to our already overtaxed sewer system -- seems fine with him. <br /><br />We have had nearly seven years of such stuff from the Democratic Party in the face of Republican lawlessness, greed, and unreason at all levels of government. Can we afford to go on with it given the utter failure of the Democratic Party to take any serious action about anything even after winning the last congressional election? You may say, “What the hell does Harry Reid have to do with a local councilman?” Here’s the answer. Both gentlemen reflect the choices we have made as voters in choosing the nice harmless guy next door as opposed to someone with actual principles and ideas as well as the political grit to give them traction. <br /><br />You may say, “What other choice did we have?” Here’s my answer to that. You probably had none from the usual sources. It’s time to seriously consider a third party as we have many times in the history of the United States. It is certainly time to stop throwing political support in the form of good money after bad -- or simply vacant -- leadership. <br /><br />Steve Hartcervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-11815981129393796982007-05-31T10:13:00.000-07:002007-05-31T10:14:43.685-07:00IN THE FOREST OF REASON, FACT, AND CONTRITIONThis is a story about how people tell the truth. The speakers did not deceive anyone so much as they accommodated their world-view. Each employs reason to shape facts so that the person articulating them shows – either tacitly or outright -- both wisdom and contrition for past errors. Only the last one is actually telling the truth as he sees it. That is what matters here.<br /><br />President Bush is reported in today’s NY Times as now interested in AIDS in Africa as well as the war in Darfur. These are welcome revelations to him. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has at last found her voice in offering dissenting opinions on the abortion and the right of employees to sue for equal pay for equal work that the High Court this week denied them. Previously she preferred to preserve the court’s collegiality. Is it too little, too late? Did her silence delay these decisions or grease the way for them to be made?<br /><br />Sam Brownback, Senator from my one-time home state of Kansas, offered an editorial on his opinions of evolution. In it he states that:<br /><br />“The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe whole heartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two.”<br /><br />The wedge between reason and faith is fact. Beyond that it is an intellectual necessity. Reason is a tool of seeing what is there. Faith is an emotional method of making it palatable. Brownback goes on to say that, “Man was not an accident and reflects an image and a likeness unique in the created order.” <br /><br />What that uniqueness might be is almost a total mystery to me, but I would concur that man is not an accident. Humans are a mathematical result of various probabilities. An accident would imply that man was intended to be one thing, but became another. <br /><br />Man as an accident may be a plausible explanation for many cynics regarding human character. However, to Mr. Brownback that idea is ultimately irrational because it would imply that God made a mistake. To Senator Brownback that is an error that defies the notion of God. To me the error begins with the assumption that conscious intention entered into the process of man’s evolution. It is an unnecessary and blurring complication. A result is simply a fact within the larger context on which it is predicated. Multiplication tables don’t work because they were intended to do so. They simply work.<br /><br />Senator Clinton goes on saying she would have done things differently had she known what she knows now about the war in Iraq. She continues to straddle the issue of the war by financing it at every opportunity; a position that as we all knows is arguable. What is not defensible is her failure to outright to repudiate the disinformation, origins, aims, prosecution and results of War in Iraq. Perhaps she does not want to look like a fool or an opportunist or both, which she well might. I get the reasoning. But it does not jive with the facts and shows no sign whatever of contrition.<br /><br />In the June 4 issue of The New Yorker, the author and political leader, Günter Grass, explains in detail his adolescent journey into the Hitler Youth, and his subsequent induction into the SS where he fought a buffoonish, nightmare, losing war against the oncoming Russians for about a week. He never once presents himself as anything but a willing dupe of the Third Reich. <br /><br />He makes no excuses or apologies for his naiveté, ignorance, stupidity, and skittish sense of self-preservation. He makes clear that even as a teenager buried in Hitler propaganda, nothing gets him off the hook for not being more aware, decisive, and active in opposing the German state. He bumbles, stumbles and sneaks away from the onslaught of the Soviet Tanks (the famous T34s) that entered Berlin in the spring of 1945. <br /><br />Grass rationalizes his history. He has to in order to form it into a narrative. We all do. He makes no bones that he kept his war secret for a large part of his life. What separates Grass from Bush, Ginsburg, Clinton, and Brownback is that he does not use reason to arrange the facts to his advantage. He was the dupe of criminals and admits it. He has the good grace to be ashamed of it as well. That is the meaning of contrition.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-2388409228801812752007-05-23T08:27:00.000-07:002007-05-23T08:34:56.708-07:00THE PARTY'S OVERMany of us have spent the last forty years sending money to what was called the Democratic Party. Yesterday, Mr. Reid led his party to its final resting place in the arms of the Republican hegemony which seems to be approaching a monarchy. We are now all of one mind and arrived there at the precise moment that time limits fell from the discussion of funding the president's war of economic acquiaition in Iraq.<br /><br />If you send money to the Democratic Party, you are now supporting the aims (however mysterious) of that war.<br /><br />Steven Hartcervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-1172520038730608852007-02-26T11:53:00.000-08:002007-02-26T12:00:38.743-08:00EARL LOUIS STUMPS ON FOR RATNERMr. Earl Louis seems to feel that the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards Project is open to any sort of instant fix if the right people would ask Bruce Ratner nicely, Mr. Ratner being the lord of all he surveys. According to his column n the <em>NY Daily News</em>,<br /><br />“The model of how to do this was laid out by freshman Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries. After winning election last fall - even before he was sworn in - Jeffries began talking with Ratner and put an entirely new demand on the table: creation of 200 subsidized units that people would own, not rent.<br />Guess what? Ratner agreed. As a result, hundreds more people will own their own homes, in addition to the thousands who will rent apartments at the site.<br />All it took was a bit of nerve, sharp negotiating skills and a willingness to face the reality that change in Brooklyn is at hand.”<br />Whoever Mr. Louis is – given the large number of public roles he claims for himself – he is not much of a student of FCRC, Ratner, or the deal he is praising here. The idea that the housing configuration agreed upon for the Atlantic Yards is a contract, or that even that contract would benefit the area is folly. Ratner is building a hitech-slum which -- by the designer’s own proud admission -- will be the most densely populated space on earth. Take that, Hong Kong and Calcutta! What is more, there is no comprehensive plan in place to deal with the sewage it will add to the already overloaded storm drain system.<br />Mr. Louis and his paper have consistently painted Ratner’s AY Dystopia as good for Brooklyn, good for the people of Brooklyn and Good for the Universe with the same wide, mindless, sloppy brush. They consistently take the position that bigger is better as a matter of form which would suggest that there is no limit to the benefits of development. Never mind that the space is already likely to have trouble finding tenants other than state agencies as is now the case with the Atlantic Terminal. Development should encouraged absolutely and infinitely whatever the cost to the public. Mr. Louis’ column then is nonsense because he has failed utterly to see who will foot the bill for this behemoth, or more likely, he and his paper do not want to do so.<br />Mr. Louis goes on to say that the resistance to the AY Dystopia and the Barclays Dome is a small, fading band of resisters who have not heeded the words of those better and wiser than them. They would be DDDB and the people of Brooklyn who are not gulled into thinking they will ever stop paying for Ratner’s concrete monster. To Mr. Louis they are on a fool’s errand.<br />To be a fool, one must disregard the obvious facts in favor of a fantasy you prefer might happen but never will. In this case, that role is not so clearly assigned. Mr. Louis would like to believe that eminent domain in the instance of the AY Dystopia is the same thing as building Lincoln Center. If so, then Mr. Louis should be prepared for an endless public subsidy that is never likely to properly cover the costs of running Mr. Ratner’s Megamess. That is the case with Lincoln Center and has been for forty-some years. Do we need another white elephant? Especially one that, unlike Lincoln Center, is being designed to be inaccessible to most of the populace.<br />Mr. Louis believes that the housing that will go on sale at AY will be at a price affordable to the average New Yorker, even those who live within miles of the planned structures in Brooklyn. If so, he needs to take a look at the real estate listings for new housing construction in his OWN newspaper. While the rest of the country continues to experience a slump in housing prices, NYC goes right on churning upward with no end in sight. Perhaps Mr. Louis needs to start reading the Business section of the <em>Times</em>.<br />Perhaps Mr. Louis’ worst error is his belief that only a tiny group of hold outs want the Ratner project reigned in and made to operate within the standard regulations for NYC/NYS development. Only a few citizens want it to pay its own way at least in part, and to be less of an unspeakable blight upon the existing community. <br />Mr. Louis must be the last man in NYC to believe that anyone who goes anywhere near downtown Brooklyn thinks that the current glut of immobile traffic needs to be increased at Atlantic and Flatbush. In that belief, he would be entirely and utterly alone.<br />In fact, it would seem to me that one of the few remaining people willing to blindly subscribe to Mr. Ratner’s folly, is Mr. Louis.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-1172264956289680192007-02-23T13:06:00.000-08:002007-02-23T13:09:16.303-08:00BUSH, RATNER, AND THE ECONOMICS OF SECRECYThe Bush Administration has decided not to enact regulation of hedge funds but rather to let them police themselves, according to the front page of today’s “NY Times.” While that may seem a remote issue to many Americans, the fate of their pension funds and investments are effected by the fate of these tools of the financially elite. The hedge involved does not serve the interests of the small investor much less those dependent on the financial markets for their stability. If hedge funds go down, they land on us in the middle and at the bottom. <br /><br />Congress according to Barney Frank is apparently not planning to enact legislation any time soon to protect the public either. When you get your statement from your pension fund, you will not be able to winnow out the influence of hedge funds but it’s there in their heavy market participation. Their secretive nature shields them from the ‘reasonable man’ protections of fiduciary trust. This is not the old boys’ club stuff of the 80's, but a new way of circumscribing a portion of the economy for the prosperous who can afford nominal – and sometimes drastic – risks at the public’s expense. That is perhaps the most damning symptom of Bush economic policy, but it’s hard to detect at street level until things really fall apart.<br /><br />It is in that sense like the problem of global warming. When it’s less serious, it is harder to see the effects so the public does not focus on it. On the other hand, when the damage starts, it’s very hard to correct and takes a very long time. That is precisely what is happening with Mr. Ratner’s ‘dystopia’ in the Atlantic Yards; a dystopia being a kind of anti-utopia where life is rendered inert and impossible. He has been able to create a secretive house of cards around the financing of the project while protecting his interests and those who go along with him. They are the ones he deems worthy of his financial inner sanctum. That includes members of the financial community as well as local politicians and community advocates thus far including local cultural institutions like the BP Library.<br /><br />It is not that the Bush Administration has fostered the creation of FCRC’s dystopia, although the paternalistic way the AY Project has been troweled onto the community no doubt has their approval. They believe in top-down public policy. It is that presidents set the tone of behavior especially in business where politics and enterprise often feel they have one and the same interests because, through lobbying, they often do. Six years of Mr. Bush have been very good for big business and for the wealthy in general in special tax abatements and deregulation. Where oversight could not be eliminated, it has been under-funded out of existence. <br /><br />Bruce Ratner has engineered an amazing example of both a lack of financial oversight and an extraordinary disconnection from the normal processes by which the public wealth, and even that of investors, are protected. I have in front of me a letter from Christine Quinn which essentially states just that and admits defeat in the face of the forces arrayed by Ratner against the City Council. None of the processes and reviews that the City would normally employ have been implemented in this instance. It seems impossible to imagine such a state of affairs if the entire apparatus of financial public oversight had not been dismantled or left to rot on the vine as a matter of national public policy.<br /><br />Quinn does say that the Council is still pushing for a traffic study that will insure some flow of vehicles when the AY is built if it ever is. So, as you can see, the traffic problem is indeed like the problem of global warming. Both situations are bad now, but if left unscrutinized and unchecked, they will both become horrendous and nearly impossible to correct for decades. It hardly helps when local journalists cannot see beyond the moment. They simply point out that Ratner tends to lie from time to time.<br /><br />This whiney approach fails utterly to envision the implications of what all that lying will lead to even as the project is being built, much less when it is completed. It is even worse when major dailies like the Times fail to report more than the marginal details of the situation as local feature stories. Surely a paper that employs an architecture critic can see that building a mid-sized city in the downtown of Brooklyn is going to affect the whole of NYC, and certainly Manhattan. Where is Paul Krugman when we need him? I guess he can’t do everything, and our local papers cannot keep up with the pace of the game.<br /><br />What is more, within the last two days the need for the Freedom Tower has again been questioned as there is already a glut of office space in the area. Why then do we need this massively dense construction in Brooklyn which the designers themselves claim will be one of the most densely populated zones of human activity on earth? Its right across the East River. The builders are already imaging the Freedom Tower as stuffed with government offices. We have that now in the Atlantic Terminal. So we will pay taxes to to cover FCRC’s tax abatement and pay rent to Ratner so that he can erect buildings we do not need.<br /><br />“Wait and see” is not a solution. “Looking away,” is less of one. “Shoot them all and let God work it out,” is not even a clear statement of intention, but that is where we are in terms of the future of Ratner’s AY dystopia. <br /><br />Any student of probability can see that we are setting ourselves up for things to become exponentially and catastrophically worse. What else can investors and the public expect when we create secret, exclusionary investment zones for the rich; and at the same time give mega-developers a free pass to avoid minimal and fiduciary and municipal oversight.<br /><br />Steven Hart<br /><br /><br />Go to my blog, VIEWS FROM THE BRIDGE<a title="http://viewsfromthebridge.blogspot.com/" href="http://viewsfromthebridge.blogspot.com/">http://viewsfromthebridge.blogspot.com</a>cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-1171828961978785002007-02-18T12:00:00.000-08:002007-02-18T12:02:42.000-08:00"Pan's Labyrinth," a ReviewIf Lina Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties" is the best film ever made about Hitlerism, without question Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" is the greatest film ever made on the subject of fascism as a whole.<br /><br />The publicity for this film misrepresents it as a fantasy, which it is, but hardly on the order of "The Secret Garden." Set in 1944 the film takes place during the Spanish Civil War. It addresses the subject in poignant and painful detail on both the fantastic and the extremely graphic levels. It is a great work of art.<br /><br />If like myself, you find the whole oeuvre of western film in the last few years a dreary, and predictable grind of apolitical corporate slop, "Pan's Labyrinth" will remind you why you loved movies in the first place. It is brilliantly acted by the entire large cast with a sort of vocational dedication to mood and character. Though subtitled, even your high school Spanish will be enough to catch the eloquence of the script and its constant irony as it is spoken with a lyrical Castellan lilt. The direction and cinematography range from the unflinchingly spare to the lush beyond description. None of it is just there to fill up the screen with dazzling clap trap, or ponderous, vacant starkness.<br /><br />The true power of the film lies in its passionate indictment of fascism as a parasitic world view that infects and corrupts all things around it. The double curse of mythic nationalism and blind obedience to unreason invade this world in a way so perverse that we are fascinated even as we recoil.<br />No one and nothing in this film is untouched by the filthy taint of it even when they inhabit world's far removed from the Spain in the 1940s. <br /><br />Most of all the film unswervingly shows that once having bitten the apple of fascism, cleansing the system of it is a hard, long, violent and horrid process. That is made worse in all cases by accommodating it. You cannot reason with unreason. You cannot render the criminal justifiable by argument. In the end, a fascist can never turn back from their commitment, and their victims must never forgive or forget. The price of getting it wrong and failing to purge the system of its rot, is too high. At times we cannot all get along because we should not.<br /><br />It took Spain three generations to throw off its fascist domination with the death of Francisco Franco in the 1970s. Only death undid the apparatus that he held in his hand for a lifetime. The film is a brilliant and sharp lesson for those who would turn the other cheek to fascism or simply turn away because they are afraid of its tyrannical face. They will pay that much more in the end for their folly.<br /><br />Beyond that, "Pan's Labyrinth" is a work of incredible sensual beauty in the best sense of what that can mean. Even if you never go to the movies, make an effort to see this one. It is a landmark of our time.<br /><br />Steven Hartcervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-1167420181248504282006-12-29T11:21:00.000-08:002006-12-29T11:23:01.263-08:00BUSH, RATNER, AND THE VISIONS OF FOOLSThis November we saw the beginning of the end of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States. Whether Neo-Conservatism is proto-fascist is well worth considering. That is because Fascism regards the aims and policies of a power as superior to the system of law and order. Far more important is that many people in this country are no longer offended by fascist modes of thinking. They are either venal enough to think they can exploit it, or foolish enough to find it comforting. If it is true that vice tends to catch up with itself, folly does it faster. In some cases we have vice in the name of folly, a pursuit that starts with its own tail in its mouth. Good examples are the War in Iraq and the Atlantic Yards. <br /><br />The sheer, clumsy dishonesty of the Bush II Administration is revealing the grotesque folly of Neo-Conservatism, a fact that has been obvious since the fiscal policies of Ronald Reagan for which we are still paying as a large chunk of the National Debt. Who exactly has been fooled, and who has been the fool is not at all clear as yet. What is certain is that Neo-Conservatism has thrown at least a quarter of the world’s population into bloody, mindless, and pointless chaos. As proof, the Taliban seem plausibly able to retake Afghanistan. We are back where we started except for those who died in the process.<br /><br />Bruce Ratner rides the same breed of horse as the Neo-Conservatives though he would no doubt vehemently deny it. It is not so much that the ends justify the means with Forest City Ratner, as it is an article of faith that some people are imbued by providence with the ability to plan, decide, and seal the fate of those they regard as less able beings. It is not that Bruce Ratner believes he rules public finance by Divine Right. It is that for him, like George Bush, the law is a secular impediment to his role as the conduit for the divine will. The law just gets in his way. <br /><br />To Mr. Ratner, the Atlantic Yards Project is more than the law, the state, the nation, and its people. We mortals here below are not able to grasp that fact, and so when the high trinity of New York State politics gathered in Albany this month, they “sanctified” Mr. Ratner’s mission in spite of the evidence. Apparently they agree that he is gifted with the angelic visionary ability to create for us what we cannot see we ought to do for ourselves. Like the Archangel Michael, Mr. Ratner wrestles with secular law to beat it into cooperating for the higher – though as yet unseen -- good. To him, those of us who see this as a mass mugging of the public treasure simply have feet of clay. We need indoctrination, not honest dispute.<br /><br />The gangsterism that both Bush and Ratner have employed to circumvent the law does more than get them to their own privatized historical destinations. It leaves a wake of misery and destruction that they themselves cannot repair, and so they refuse to see that it is there They both speak in curiously, reductive homilies about, “Nobody likes change,” as though our regrettable genetic inferiority is what prevents us from embracing the Edens they would each set before us. <br /><br />Mr. Ratner and President Bush see themselves as placing toys of endless, shining wonder before naïve, and unwisely timid children. In Ratner’s case, people both above and below him can see that he is bending the truth, if not the law, entirely out of shape on a daily basis. Apparently that no longer bothers them. Let us hope that the courts can see the moted flaws in FCR’s divine vision. Apparently Mr. Bush will be allowed to wait on the judgment of history, which in his case can never be harsh enough.<br /><br />Eden was a place that proved uninhabitable to humans. Both the Bush and Ratner Edens are apocalyptic. They lead to scorched, polluted deserts. One cannot blame them entirely for their flawed vision, given that in both cases, their glaring folly unfolded long before either the current crusade in Iraq or the Atlantic Yards were begun. In both cases, the question is whether we Americans can adjust our thinking in time to pull back from the heinous acts and blatant idiocies that have brought us this far.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-1165422329572522532006-12-06T08:23:00.000-08:002006-12-06T08:25:29.586-08:00FCR AT THE TROUGHIf anyone is still under the delusion that Forest City Ratner is not already well and truly on corporate welfare, I note this item from Crain’s New York Business.com. In the three brief paragraphs that appear at the end of this article, we learn that the Bank of New York is being subsidized to cover 9/11 losses by giving FCR 113.9 million of your public dollars to build the Atlantic Terminal and provide them with office space.<br /><br />More importantly we learn that the newly merged New York Mellon Corporation will have assets of 16.6 trillion dollars and be the largest asset manager in the world. That would hardly seem to make the new banking entity one of New York’s neediest. The 9/11 losses were I guess sustainable.<br /><br />In other words we are subsidizing banks with trillions (trillions!) of dollars in assets with our tax dollars by plumping up FCR so they could build the architecturally dubious Atlantic Terminal. <br /><br />I invite you to think about that because we are about to give FCR billions of dollars from our pockets to create the Atlantic Yards enterprise. One wonders why those with trillions of dollars could not simply lend Bruce the dough instead of weaseling it out of the public in the form of property taxes, income taxes, and sales tax subsidies? <br /><br />If the new Democratic Congress is to be any different than the old Republicans, this is the sort of scraping and grinding from the public coffers that has to stop. To hell with bridges to nowhere, and other piddling earmarks, we need to shut off the conduit of the nation’s wealth set up from our pockets into the corporate world’s “venture capital.” In fact this is the sort of bold entrepreneurial spirit that only Karl Marx could possibly support.<br /><br />The material from the Crain’s Website is below.<br /><br /><br />“Bank of New York was hard hit by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The state and city helped keep bank jobs in the city by issuing $113.9 million in Liberty Bonds to Forest City Ratner Cos., which developed a tower over Brooklyn's Atlantic Terminal. Bank of New York became the anchor tenant, moving about 1,500 jobs there. The bank currently occupies 320,000 square feet in the building, Forest City says. Bank of New York received the grant as part of the same economic development package. The merged company, to be called Bank of New York Mellon Corp. will create the world's leading asset servicer, with $16.6 trillion of assets under custody. It will also rank among the top 10 global asset managers with more than $1.1 trillion of assets under management.”cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33012928.post-1162889755832930032006-11-07T00:51:00.000-08:002006-11-07T00:55:55.846-08:00AS THE TIDE SHIFTSToday we will have an election. We will either favor the rule of law and liberty or endorse again the rule of power and advantage. Those are the choices.<br /><br />No one should imagine that a Democratic victory will guarantee a victory for democracy unless that also involves a new vision from that side of the aisle. Thus far the Democrats, Howard Dean aside, have offered in a crafty whisper to do nothing differently, or better still, to do nothing at all.<br /><br />That will not restore public order. It will not bring foreign and domestic war criminals to trial. It will not restore habeas corpus which is the basis for our Constitution. It will not bring balance and equity back to our tax system. It will not insure the use of eminent domain only when it is essential to the public well-being. It will not guarantee the liberty of half the population to do what they think best with their bodies. It will not take a nation of fat, illiterate children and make them fit or cognizant of their language, history, or culture. It will not insure your right to say what you think no matter who you annoy in doing so.<br /><br />It may well, however, be better than those currently in power. If the Democrats follow the model of Hilary Clinton, we can only depend on the personal loathing between politicians and political factions to retard the rising tide of chaos. We need to speak up for order and liberty in our votes. For twenty-six years we have pursued the opposite through two hazy goals.<br /><br />First, we have sought to centralize authority in the hands of those who are beyond the reach of the fickle and unpredictable populace. We have done that by eliminating public education and replacing it with basic industrial training. We call that, “no child left behind.” That says, “don’t think, just read and follow the directions if you can” to children.<br /><br />Critical thought (PC for skepticism) has been eradicated by an institutional enmity to intellectual distance. Uncritical acceptance has insured an ever-widening division between those with the power to make decisions through their wealth, and those who serve the wealthy at their pleasure.<br /><br />Second, we have sought to lay claim to a wide assortment of dubious successes to which we have no claim in any case. Reagan’s Star Wars did not bring down the Soviet Union. In many ways Stalin’s five-year plans did. He created guaranteed obsolescence through central planning. That was not the fault of socialism which was never really implemented in the USSR. It was the fault of too much power in too few hands. They were not very clean hands at that.<br /><br />But history is not that orderly. One could also say it was Brezhnev’s soporific acceptance of corruption. Perhaps it was the fact that Russian culture has a much longer history of corruption dating from the Boyars than of public order. Perhaps it was that the Soviet establishment could never connect the nature of culture with how people respond to government.<br /><br />Now we Americans (who have no unified culture) are trying to make bits of the Middle East over in our own image through the unscrupulous and often ridiculous efforts of bargain basement imperialism. The trouble is the efforts are no bargain because, like the central planning of Stalin, they were ill-conceived, vainglorious, and executed by fanatics. That is yet another project that is all but over, like Viet Nam, long before it is near to being finished. What is more, it is likely the criminals who perpetrated the war will get away with it. But the US, and even the Iraqi’s, can survive all that.<br /><br />What we have lost is the fundamental understanding that people can reason even when they are not very good at it, and when the problem is hard to grasp. That is what the founders did see. People reason best when they do it slowly, deliberately, and collectively because none of us is very good at it on our own. <br /><br />Societies survive by implementing and upholding laws based on principles of fair play and equity if not equality under the law. The founders’ model, like ours, may have been imperfect, but that was their fundamental idea. It was based on the two basic virtues: honor and courage. Now we aspire to pride and guile. It’s not only the US that has gone that way, but we lead the pack. <br /><br />If you do not vote, you should shut up. That does not mean you have to vote for either major party and their bozos. You can write in candidates. Write in yourself. Vote an independent party so that point of view gets noticed and a place in the discussion. Whatever way you vote, remember this is the first time in several decades that you, the voter, are back in the race. Don’t fall to the sidelines just because you have surrendered to apathy. Apathy is a five-dollar word for lazy, and lazy is for bums.cervo@yahoo.comhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00238770656660697545noreply@blogger.com0