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."

Oddly Handsome 1441 Broadway

I spent a ridiculous amount of time on photos of this building -- built in 1929 at 41st & Broadway -- and wound up with just these five.

Still, it is an odd and interesting building.


The vertical ribs and color hold all the shifting brick & tile patterns together, and light bouncing off the windows adds life.


Sergeant stripes on tweed, below, suggest a rumpled authority -- like a sport coat worn by professor at a small-town college with a secret past as a drill instructor?

FOX/GOP Blood Party (BP)

An alien ship, Dick Cheney's heart pump, or the BP Gulf platform?
If there was any justice, Dick Cheney would have a BP heart pump, and the GOP would be in exile, wandering the streets with its lies and failures draped across its greasy chest like a vest of dead skunks.  But Obama treated the party with respect, like it cared about anything but its own ass, and we are all going to pay the price.

Republicans remind me of pissed off Russians, who would forgive the worst of Soviet days just to be back on top.  In fact the GOP should bring Putin over here to streamline its operations with his KGB-trained thugs, because it's got the propaganda genius but not the guts to take the movement to the next logical level, where it drops the Tea Party charade and becomes the Blood Party (BP).

Though the fairy tales that fuel the Fascist Princess Palin's "Real American" legions pale compared to the myths that fueled Real Germans in the 1930s, I have no doubt that our pitchfork mobs can come through, given capable leadership!

Obama's job is near impossible, like turning the Titanic at the top of Niagara Falls.  And he's had some real success (the beginnings of health reform and financial reform) to go along with a few huge blunders (letting the GOP off the hook and doing a lot more to save Wall Street than to save jobs).

But his successes are too abstract for our knee-jerk reality, and now the GOP is sitting pretty, its lies and liars living larger than ever, mainly because it's succeeded at destroying the terms of argument with its decades-long assault on science (evolution), logic (leave our economic fate to the filthy rich), and the idea of a factual world that can be shared (right wing fundamentalists of all stripes).  And because Obama and Democrats have given the GOP a thousand lives by not directly confronting it.

And here we are, still surrounded by passionate idiots who've bought Night for Day, who truly believe that Obama is Stalin (who killed, what, 30 million Russians?) because... why was that again?  Because he's sitting on their rightful throne?  Or was it Tea Party "taxation without representation?"  Surely there are enough idiots in DC to represent them!

More on the GOP's Never Ending Lie:

FOX/GOP needs racism, so "...Fox pumps racial rage into the media bloodstream 24/7..." with swiftboat crap like the video remix of Shirley Sherrod.
- There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin', by Frank Rich

"...every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media.  You don’t believe such things can happen?  Think Shirley Sherrod."
- Who Cooked the Planet?, by Paul Krugman

Update: Yes, Obama and Democrats should welcome a GOP filibuster!  This is excellent:
- Curbing your enthusiasm, by Paul Krugman

Striking photo on top courtesy NY Times

Making NYC a Better Place

I push crosswalk buttons along the West Side Highway even when I don't
cross, so drivers can stop and contemplate their role in Global Warming
You might think that, as a blogger, I just run my mouth and leave it at that. But talk is cheap, and I am a man of action!  Here's what I've been doing to make NYC a better place:

Reduce Clutter and Noise.  If I notice a distracted cellphone user peering at my ankles -- using me as a guide through sidewalk traffic so they can update their Facebook page or argue with a Customer Service representative while on the move -- I try to lure them into vehicle traffic to get run over.

Reduce Health Care Costs.  If I succeed in getting them run over, or I come across the scene of an accident, I become a First Responder and ask the victim questions from my Karma Triage Checklist like: Who did you vote for in the past few elections, do you support universal health care, and have you ever been a murderer, a child molester, or a Fox News fan?

If they pass the test, I yell for the paramedics; if they fail, I flash my 99 Cent Store badge and tell the gathering crowd to disperse, then drag the failure to the gutter, cover them with newspaper, and leave their fate to God.

This may seem cruel, but since we have a huge surplus of assholes on earth, why hoard them?

Reduce Effects of Global Warming.  When miserable summer heat forces me out of my oven-like apartment, I find a strip of stores with arctic air conditioning and automatic sliding doors, then walk back & forth in front of them.  This approach not only cools me down, it cools down the city and planet too!

What have YOU done today to make NYC a better place?

The Ugliest Buildings in NYC

Several Top 10 Ugly lists have been plucked from the American Institute of Architects' most recent "Guide to New York."  (By, among others, Curbed and Gallerina.)

Well, I don't have to refer to any stinking guides.  Though I avoid posting straightforward photos of ugly buildings -- why spread suffering? -- I've picked the ugliest from photos here (7 for now*, maybe more after my stomach's settled).

First up, to the left, on 6th Ave. near Vandam.  The building on the left aspires to Class on the first floor, then slumps into an Edge City Budget facade as it rises, and finally erupts in a splashy crown of sheet metal pipes combed over the bleak bald lumps on its head -- designed to suggest labor camp cottages downwind of a Hershey's factory?  From West Side Eyesores.


To the right, the Trump Soho at Varick & Spring.  It takes some doing to make a reflective building this ugly, and it's even worse close up.  The cutouts / lumps that define the building give it the look of an evil robot, and every time I look at them I think of people inside the lumps remarking "Hey!  We're inside one of those lumps!"  From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2.

To the left, the World Financial Center, on the Hudson west of the World Trade Center site.  This is the most flattering shot you can take of the complex.

Its surface looks like brown plastic mailing tape, and the "grand entrance" on the complex's south side should come with a warning that -- like Lot's wife leaving Sodom -- bad things will happen if you take a good look at it.  From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1.

To the right, on 31st St. off 5th Ave.  It's the top of this building that's ugly -- they replaced the original, ornate top with something that looks like a cinder block septic tank with windows, or a prison-issue shaved head.  It's part of a shortsighted, cheapskate trend that's stripped cornices and ornamentation off way too many old NYC buildings.

It's especially cruel since this building was the original home of Life Magazine, and the now-naked top was full of bachelor apartments that served as the magazine's "esthetic maternity ward."

To the left, the orange building on the right, which sits at 34th St. and Park Ave. South, is pretty putrid.  (Meanwhile the green Tyvek, exposed for 3 years now, makes the building it covers on the left look better.)


To the right: Almost any NYU dorm could make an Ugly list, including this one on 14th St. just west of 3rd Ave., where there are more ugly NYU dorms.

Education is big business, and ambitious self-serving colleges devour their host cities; NYU warehouses its students in hulks so thoughtless they practically spit on their surroundings.

To the left, architect Karl Fischer's heinous 20 Bayard, on McCarren Park in Williamsburg.  On the left in the picture, what must have been Karl's inspiration.

The building's empty clock face, its vaguely Transformers shape and puny robot head, the kitchen slicer & dicer entrance... It all adds up to make 20 Bayard The Ugliest Building in NYC if not the world.

Note that I have improved and used this monster a few times: 20 Bayard a la Frank Gehry; 20 Bayard a la Rick James.

* Note that when it comes to Ugly in NYC, this is just the tip of the sh*tberg.  There's an endless supply, but just a few reasons the buildings exist:

- Developers and their architects don't care how their unsightly pile of crap affects others -- they would put up a 5 story used cardboard box if they could get away with it.  This is where crapitecture [Queens Crap] and the Budget Hotel Look comes from, and it likely accounts for 90% of the ugly buildings in NYC.

- They may care a little, but they are inept.  Humble or arrogant, with their student architect cousin or a million dollar "starchitect," the developer is blind to the difference between wearing an ugly shirt once in a while and planting a massive, ugly building that poisons its surroundings for decades.

Wanamaker Store Annex 1

Some photos of the Wanamaker Store Annex, which takes up a full block between Broadway & Lafayette and 8th & 9th Sts., and now has a Kmart at the Lafayette end.

Wikipedia says that James Cagney worked there as a Package Wrapper.


The building's surface material (closeup above left) doesn't seem like anything special, and looks patched and downright phony in places, but it absolutely loves the light.  The same stuff is used on the building at the corner of Park Ave. So. and 17th St. on Union Square, above right, but there's no magic there.

I took the top two photos here on one day, the bottom three on a darker day.



[ Much warmer: Wanamaker Store Annex 2 ]