Bloomberg & Occupy Wall St.

A laughable quandary: Demonstrators Test Mayor, a Backer of Wall St. and Free Speech.

The mayor wonders "...why don't you [Occupy Wall Street] get out there and try to do something about the things that you don't like, create the jobs that we are lacking, rather than just yell and scream?"

He's unaware, because of the billions clogging his empathy gland, that not everyone is a member of the divine Job Creator class he belongs to. 

He figures he's engineered the perfect NYC, where anyone with initiative is worth millions, and where the rest of us should be content to Occupy Ourselves with the corporate morphine dripping out of iPhones and advertising as we underbid each other for the honor of running errands for the rich.

The mayor's done everything he can to make the city dependent on and servile to his Wall Street / 1% cohort, which has drowned the power of all speech but its own and turned democracy into a joke by purchasing the political process (see Oligarchy, American Style).

A few years after our banker-inflicted crisis, the world economy is still hostage to hidden dependencies buried in the shadow system built by Wall Street "innovation," with 29 global banks deemed 'too big to fail' and with a distant collapse bound to have side effects here (see Sad Proof of Europe’s Fallout).

But nothing's been done about personal debt, employment, or the next brewing crisis, and we can't do a thing about it through the political process because nowadays, thanks to people like Bloomberg, meaningful citizenship is restricted to the 1%, and its money chokes out any form of life that does not serve it.

Escape from New York Recipes

Coming soon: Creamed Banker Beef on a Shingle,
pictured here under a heat lamp in Hell
Escape from New York

The Tea Party will soon be in power and close down the federal government.  Society will collapse within days, and all the bankers, corporate moguls and media elites will flee New York City, as crackheads take the streets and bloodthirsty mobs chase down stragglers, feed them to homemade guillotines, and use their severed heads to turn the avenues into gruesome bowling alleys.

Without the FAA's air traffic controllers, elites will have to escape by land.  They'll head for their fortified Rockie Mountain compounds in Humvee convoys, guarded by contractors back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Heartland Meth-Head

But they'll never make it, because the U.S. heartland -- full of crazed, toothless, acne ravaged meth-heads suffering withdrawal from Fox News and armed to the teeth -- will lay waste to enough banker beef to make a buffalo skinner weep with nostalgia.

Before the wild dogs and orphans eat it all, get some for yourself and try a few of the following recipes.

Banker Burritos

Chop up assorted body parts -- toes, ear lobes, and pituitary glands are especially flavorful -- and grill them.  Place the fixin's on a large wheat tortilla, smother them in black beans, salsa, and tofu sour cream, then roll up the burrito.  All that flavor makes it hard to believe you're eating the flesh of one of the most vile predators to ever walk the earth.

Banker Tofu Scramble Orange Julius

Use banker brains, which taste just like tofu, for a new twist on the classic scramble.  Banker brains, fine-tuned for high frequency robbery, are extra large and extra gray.

Chop the brains and saute them in garlic, Thunderbird wine, and Worcestershire sauce.  Then pour the mix into a blender, add six organic eggs, a can of orange juice concentrate (minus the can), and a half pint of vanilla ice cream.  Blend on "liquify" until the concoction starts foaming out the lid of the blender.

Then pour a pint from the blender into a Kool-Aid pitcher, add a quart of 199-proof bathtub vodka, and serve!

Serves six, if you can still see well enough to find another quart of vodka.

Corporate Mogul Tomato-Free Gazpacho

Same recipe as just above, but use the moguls' cheeks -- both facial and buttock -- in place of banker brains.  Mogul cheeks, ripened from a lifetime of gluttony and perversion, impart a smoky tang that will make it hard to believe the gazpacho is tomato-free, and leave you wondering "Where the hell is that bacon smell coming from?!"

Media Elite (Fox News Anchor) Fajitas

(Warning!  Be 200% sure the anchor is 100% dead before you handle them!)

Chop off the anchor's fingers and throw away the rest of the body, as it contains poison concentrated enough to kill a small solar system.

Grill the fingers over a gasoline fire.  Then throw them away too.

Serves all of humanity.

Gilded Catwalk NYC

Aristocrats frolic in the window at 51st St. & 7th Ave.
I remember the trolls in the comments at Curbed used to (still do?) claim that you have to either let developers have their way or cede the streets to crackheads.

Unsurprisingly, their hero Mayor Bloomberg comes up with his own false choice of extremes, on whether to allow Wal-Mart to build here: "You should let the marketplace decide," he said.  "Anybody who has tried to manage the marketplace, it has not turned out very well.  I think the Soviet Union is as good an example as you'd ever need of that."

I love it how people who can afford to escape the negative effects of The Market preach its innate wisdom, no matter how money's made or spent, and see moral superiority and a lesson for others in their singular ability to take as much as possible from the world without choking on it.

But Bloomberg's never seen anything special in NYC anyway, and never cared to find the balance point that could preserve what made NYC special: the humility, and the respect for millions of humble lives lived in proximity, that left enough air for people at the bottom to breathe.  Instead he's done everything he can to turn NYC into a gilded catwalk where arrogant aristocrats flaunt their wealth and admire each other.

Searching for the key to maintaining a "healthy" city, I keep coming back to this simple thought: There is nothing noble in poverty, but there is in humility.  And the arrogance of wealth is what's destroying NYC, block by block.

Greenwich Village Then & Now

Dylan & Suze Rotolo on Jones St. in the Village
Nearly 50 years ago, on January 24, 1961, Bob Dylan first arrived in Greenwich Village [Interferenza].  (Also see Touring Bob Dylan's New York, The Telegraph.)

Now the Village draws a different set, with Craigslist job listings like the one to the left for a High Frequency Trading Developer (Greenwich Village).

What more can you say about New Bloomberg City?  NYC is Wall Street's mistress, dependent on its mercenary drones and "innovations" like high frequency trading, all geared toward skimming as much as possible before the casino collapses.

Dylan said "New York was a dream... of the cosmopolitan riches of the mind.  It was a great place for me to learn and to meet others who were on similar journeys"  [Westwood One Radio, 1985; via Interferenza].

There's no room for that kind of nonsense now, when Young Republicans flock to New York dreaming of Bloombergian riches, of going to school and puking "east side, west side, all around the town," before joining the Wall Street fraternity and the shiny lifestyle it buys, eventually settling into suburban luxury in the middle of NYC -- something a Master of the Universe might find deadly boring without the knowledge that this city is always waiting up for him, legs spread, naked in furs, with lines of coke on the coffee table and a music video playing on the wall-sized TV, to the strains of Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (sample; original lyrics):

When you're lost in the rain in Cancun
And it's bonus time too
And your portfolio fails
And your hedge fund don't pull you through
Don't put on any tears
When you're down on Los Hooters Avenue
You had your way with New York City, bro
– you can do it to Mexico too!

NYC Cast as Villain

Barclays Capital burns money thru its lit facade near Times Square
One nasty recurring thought I've had over the years is "Now that NYC is run by and for Wall Street and the global aristocracy, who's going to give a f*ck if the terrorists blow it up?"

The answer is, of course, no one.  As A Favorite Villain in Election Ads: New York City [NYT] reports, politicians -- mainly Democrats -- are running ads that equate the city with Wall Street.

Nine years ago, after 9/11, NYC was a symbol of fortitude under fire.  Now political ads feature NYC tourist sites as the narrator sneers "That's the way they do it... on Wall Street."

I guess that might insult some sensitive New Yorkers, but I wish every Democrat had the spine to demonize Wall Street.  And if some of the demon blood spatters the city, well tough luck -- that's the price of selling your soul.

In the article Mayor Bloomberg defends NYC's financial services industry as a bastion of middle class jobs, pointing out that half its workers make $71,000 or less (neglecting to mention that the average Wall Street salary is $392,000).

Bloomberg made his fortune building a computer network that democratized Wall Street gambling, and helped -- along with all the other financial "innovations" we've seen -- spread its poison throughout the economic system.

Maybe he really believes the average citizen has the desire and ability to become a full time capitalist, placing bets and dreaming up new ways to turn air into gold along with millions of other financial alchemists out there.  But if he does it's because he hasn't got the empathy to imagine people not like himself.

For years we've heard arguments that NYC has always been all about change, money and power -- mainly from hustlers who profit from acceptance of that attitude -- and it's valid to an extent.  We've heard that NYC is just going through the same inevitable changes -- thanks to globalization, the web & cellphones, and corporate concentration -- that have turned everywhere else into the same place, just with different branches of the same conglomerates, and helped create a world increasingly split in two, with connected islands of wealth floating on a sea of increasing misery.

But what's missing from these arguments is any notion of what made NYC special -- at both the sidewalk and mythical levels -- or any desire to shape its future in a meaningful way that does not serve the needs of people who already have too much money.  They use the term "change" to suggest renewal, as they erase humble neighborhoods and replace them with the standard units favored by global aristocracy; they look at NYC the same way a suburban developer looks at barren land.

Somehow it all seems to go together -- all the bank buildings and corporate ads in Times Square, all the shiny new luxury condos and chain stores, the High Line and other gold plated attractions, the suburban bike trails.  All part of a package meant to attract people who used to live in upscale suburbs, that just happens to force out the honest, humble commerce and culture that make urban living worthwhile.

Times Square is the center of the (media/shared) world.  It becomes more intensely hollow all the time, as ads creep from the billboards onto the buildings, and corporations plant their flagship stores.  The village square -- where civic and national victories were celebrated -- now serves to dazzle and congratulate consumers for their good citizenship, for their consumption.  It is a sterilized boardwalk experience, with all the life squeezed out by corporate calculation.

And Bloomberg and his enablers have done their best to sterilize the rest of NYC in the same way, block by luxury block, so the people on top can profit from the life squeezed out, and Wall Street worker drones can live in the antiseptic environment they prefer, with plenty of places nearby to spend their money.  The process leaves zero room for anything unexpected, and pushes out anyone who has not sold their soul in the same way they have.

Their vision of NYC is "urban" in the same way a paper company tree plantation is a "forest."  It's a stainless plastic resort where wealth can recline in comfort, and be pampered with the service it believes it deserves, while it admires itself.

I would hope this round of demonization would shame them into leaving NYC, but these people are shameless.

Update: Want a 20% Raise? Work on Wall Street

New Bloomberg City

Like wide screen TV, but $1000 a month to maintain
I think it's time we quit fooling ourselves, and rename NYC New Bloomberg City, or NBC.

Rinse off the stench of
wealth at ABC Home

The city's transformation is nearly complete, as Bloomberg Preferred Citizens^TM -- bankers, developers, and other people with Wall Street incomes, and the drones who furnish them with the regular and stainless amenities formerly found only in upscale suburbs -- have firmly taken control and, like arrogant weeds, are sucking up all the air that used to allow for the cultural and economic breadth and depth that made this huge village special.

Today's reminder that we live in two worlds: People who spend six figures on aquariums for their $16.9 million apartment as an alternative to a big screen TV.  Watching the bright, swirling trails of captive fish soothes the owner, and lets them imagine they are rinsing the filthiness off their wealth, transforming it to beauty and meaning.

Spend to Transcend ^TM*

I suspect that washing off filth via home furnishings and improvement is what a lot of people with too much money do.

From the window displays at ABC Home (above and right), where Spending is Transcending ^TM, to Jean Nouvel's "Vision" luxury tower in Chelsea, that had the normally egalitarian critic Nicolai Ouroussoff enthusing over interior details, as if the city is enhanced -- not by what anyone can see from the outside and the way a building meets the sidewalk but -- by imagining we were invited into one of those luxury apartments to enjoy the precious details and the way they express the owners' sensitive and complicated relationship to wealth.

And now, as usual, the rest of us are left to watch the Elect, those who gave their souls to Mammon, live the high life in their pretty fish tanks strung like pearls along the High Line, and let the enjoyment trickle down on our imaginations.

[ Previously: A Tale of Two Economies ]

* This ABC Home display, though up during Black History month, always made me think of a home makeover by the Manson Family.

A Tale of Two Economies

Explained below.  Meanwhile, learn to breathe under water...
There's the Wall Street Economy, run by people who still make huge amounts of money skimming the take in the deregulated casino they've built at the core of our economic system.  (Wall Street, where the average salary is $392,000, is hiring!)  Then there's the Jobs Economy, where the rest of us live, where state and local governments are still laying off teachers and closing fire stations.

Welcome to the Recovery, says Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury.  The recession is over because his economy -- the Wall Street Economy -- is doing fine, because "financial engineers" are still building ever faster and more convoluted ways to hide the smoke inside their "financial instruments" and rationalize their huge bonuses.  (Paul Volcker vs. "financial innovation.")

What about the Jobs Economy? "The point is that a large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work."  - Defining Prosperity Down, by Paul Krugman. 

Krugman is worried that people like Geithner have accehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uBmCW9lZ_0pted high unemployment as "structural," as a fact that can't be changed.  And from what Geithner and others are saying, Krugman's fears are justified.

The illustration above is my take* on how income distribution has changed in favor of the filthy rich, aided by the GOP and its accomplices.

On top is the Ideal distribution, with wealth spread across the middle class, and relative few poor and rich.

Then in the middle, the middle-class was gouged out by Open Pit Mining, as manufacturing and capital went global while labor stayed local, and Reagan and the GOP convinced everyone that deregulation and lower taxes for rich people would cause their wealth to overflow and "trickle down" on the rest of us.  (Wealthy Reduce Buying in a Blow to the Recovery.)

Of course trickle-down does not lift all boats; it makes people already too rich richer and drowns everyone else, so we've wound up with the world at the bottom of the illustration, where -- thanks to technology that connects the islands, and helps outsource any work not nailed to the ground -- First-World Islands for the rich stick up out of a sea of increasing misery for the multitudes.

* Graph is built to get the point across, not on actual data, though I'm sure plenty of poor people have been kicked off islands, and a few million middle-class mortgages are "under water."

GOP BP Arson Party

BP Station Spills Green All Over E. Williamsburg
"The images from the last month -- Washington essentially powerless, BP flailing away -- has been deeply disheartening." [ NYT ]

Yes, but at least the FOX GOP Tea Party has finally found a role for government it can endorse: janitor.  From GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal: "We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis."  For the GOP, the role of government (and taxpayer money) is to clean up after the filthy rich and corporations that pollute their way to profit.

Meanwhile, in Currently in Vogue: Ringing the Deficit Alarm, Democratic Rep. Neal says of Republicans complaining about the deficit: "The people who set the fire are now the ones calling the fire department."  It warms my heart to hear a Democrat speak truth like that.  But it saddens me to agree with Frank Rich that Obama is still sadly lacking when it comes to getting his modest program across.

I know it's tough to compete with the lynch mob excitement the GOP sells, but if I was Obama and they tried to turn me into a janitor I'd either curse them out sideways to Sunday or do what former Gov. "Drill Baby Drill" Palin did: Quit!

Sign Over Big Hole Where BP Was at Queens Plaza

Wall Street Flag

NYSE, Last Refuge of Scoundrels
What, you expected Wall Street to hide behind some other flag?

If you haven't been down by the New York Stock Exchange lately [map], it's still an interesting sight, with that giddy tourist-friendly anti-terror edge we just don't get enough of anymore.

There's some serious-looking security infrastructure -- its effect intensified by the narrow streets -- and at least one poor bomb-sniffing dog that looked tired of being on high alert.

There's the sculpted scene from Capitalist Heaven above the flag, left, where an apparently pregnant young woman (center) stands amid the naked rabble of industry while her mom (left) panhandles to keep them fully clothed.

Then there's the funny way that Wall Street's hustlers, free from regulation and responsibility, nearly wrecked the world economy all by themselves, without any help from Al Qaeda.  And the unfunny way they've been treated with kid gloves, while unemployment continues to grow.

Maybe most funny is the fact that -- now that any hustler with an Internet server can run their own stock exchange -- the NYSE is losing volume, and that massive flag may have to stay up permanently to hide the emptiness inside.


[ The Big Squander, Paul Krugman, NYT ]
[ Rivals Pose Threat to New York Stock Exchange, NYT ]

More Morsels

Tara Donovan at Lever House
Rubber stamping all that development was easy, but now Bloomberg's Dept. of Buildings is at a loss over how to test all the untested concrete without turning the buildings into Swiss cheese (before they fall apart all by themselves).  See New York Faces Huge Backlog in Concrete Retests.

"Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates — Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer.  Call it Village People populism."  See Frank Rich's Small Beer, Big Hangover.

And Paul Krugman thinks high-speed trading is a crock, too.  See Rewarding Bad Actors.

How to Stay Alive in the Woods

Post Apocalyptic HQ at the Queens end of the Greenpoint Ave. Bridge
As I wake up to headlines that say the world is careening like an old car with no brakes at the edge of an abyss, I remember that the used survival book I had banked on to save me when it came to this -- Bradford Angier's How to Stay Alive in the Woods -- is probably a load of crap.

Along with practical information that gave me confidence I could not only stay alive but dress stylishly in the post apocalyptic woods, like:

Some aborigines make waterproof garments by opening the dried intestines of large animals and sewing the strips together vertically with sinew.

...were ambiguous passages like this:

The point is: no ordinary problem will stump any of us for very long if we possess sufficient enterprise and ingenuity to have a reasonable chance of surviving at all.

...that robbed me of confidence and made me wonder if the cigars and brandy he was enjoying as he wrote this stuff -- probably with a silver fountain pen, while dressed in a smoking jacket in a wood paneled study -- had dulled his interest in the reader's survival.

So I will have to go with guidance from my backup survival book, Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  You would think a story about a father and son walking south in a gray, post apocalyptic world, dodging fiendish perverts and cannibals as they hone their survival skills, would be boring on top of grim.

But The Road turns out to be suspenseful and deep, and McCarthy -- who can pour on the turgid prose until you feel like a soggy stack of pancakes drowning under a bottomless bottle of thick purple syrup -- in this case manages to pull life and hope from a restricted, monochrome reality in a natural way.

The Road tells me I will have to do some horrible things to survive, like bushwhacking bushwhackers before they bushwhack me, and mating with hill country Jezebels with enough inbred genetic damage to make sure our Jethro spawn are dim witted enough to want to survive a sooty hell on earth.

And it tells me that after this house of cards collapses, with any luck, we will meet again in the grayness of spring, perhaps on the Gulf Coast, where we will find a boat.

It will be years before the smoke clears, but the sail will hold, the wind will know the way, and before long we can start over fresh, free of fiends.  (Except for those stowed in our genes.)

Wall Street Crash is Great News!

The crash may be bad news for Wall Street types and the people who serve them, like chauffeurs, sex workers, artists, etc.

But it's great news for me.  All the Wall Street workers will cancel their luxury condo plans and retreat to the hills of Connecticut, where they will break into the wine cellar and start guzzling investment grade vintage like it's Mad Dog 20/20, then break out their "survival gear" -- bulletproof vests with car alarms attached to the shoulders, chrome shotguns, barrels of pharmaceuticals, and a virtual U.N. of blow up sex dolls -- and wait till their testosterone level has climbed back into the red, then go outside and skeet shoot their investment grade Franklin Mint plate collection.

Once they and their money have left the city, it will be left to the rest of us, the sullen zombies who lurk in the shadows fighting pigeons for scraps.

All the new luxury hotels and condos in the Bowery will turn into fetid flophouses for down & out condo brokers, ranting dementedly about the amenities they used to offer: "Live chinchilla shoe buffer in the lobby!  Squawk!!  Fresh virgin's milk spa on the deck!  Eeep!  Creative Artists Agency screening room just off the lobby, which is not a reproduction, but the actual Palace of the Swiss Guards' Fighting Eunuchs XXV-Corps, purchased from the Vatican in 1942!  Squawk!!"


Meanwhile all the luxury condos going up in Williamsburg will be turned into chicken farms, recycling centers, and solar powered hydroponic farms.

This means people like me, whose hands are untainted by money and not afraid of real work (like typing this post) will finally be able to live like royalty.

I plan to move into Karl Fischer's Ikon, pictured on top, where the bottom floor of the ant farm will be my bowling alley and driving range.  I also plan to move into his NV building, pictured just above.  There's something about its "plastic castle" look that appeals to me; not only does it afford an easily defensible, crenelated roof line, but it's close to the East River, and "tap water" will soon be a memory, like "FDIC insurance" and "government."

How will I pay for food?  That's easy -- pretty soon employers in China, Russia and India will be outsourcing their jobs, and that $3 an hour will make me a king compared to envious neighbors outside my NV castle.  All I have to do is figure out how to stay alive till those jobs show up.

You know, I bet there's a ton of food in the basement of that 20 Bayard condo, above right, where all those well fed Top Chef contestants are holed up...