Damocles, Deflected

 I know you've been worried about all the rich people who were forced to evacuate their luxury condos when the crane on an even more luxurious skyscraper in their neighborhood was ripped loose last week by Superstorm Sandy. But this morning, a palpable sense of relief is wafting through the plutosphere. The bothersome hunk of twisted metal dangling over many an entitled head has finally been tamed. The Sword of Damocles has been resheathed, to threaten again some other day. (Maybe in as little as two days, when another nor'easter is forecast to whip on through.)

The financially secure in this Park Avenue-area community are once again mentally and physically secure. One well-heeled woman was actually quoted as saying that her long national nightmare was over, as she hastened back into the Briarcliff building on W. 57th Street. (the cheapest condos there start at $1 million.) The pain of the crane is gone with the rain.

Meanwhile, as many as 40,000 less well-off people have been rendered homeless by the storm, and are expected to remain that way for quite some time. Now that Mayor Bloomberg has gotten personally involved in fixing the crane and opening the New York Stock Exchange, he is finally admitting that housing is quite the dilemma in a city where it was at a premium to begin with. Even before Sandy hit, though, Bloomberg was being his proactive self, hatching a plan to construct shoebox-sized housing units as part of his ongoing public-private partnership real estate racket. This is defined as public money being funneled into projects that ultimately end up enriching developers.

The Bloomberg micro-units are micro-managed with young affluent one-percenters in mind -- meaning that poor families will face even more of a squeeze when it comes to locating affordable living spaces, according to public housing advocates.

Want to add insult to injury? It turns out that the developer of One57 (a/k/a the Billionaire Crane Building) qualifies for a special tax break in return for "sponsoring" construction of affordable housing elsewhere in the city. The savings will be passed right on to the wealthy purchasers, while the developer, Extell, collects the usual high rents from the poor, laughing all the way to the bank.

Under the plan, the buyer of One57’s $90 million, 13,554-square-foot penthouse on the 75th and 76th floors would pay just $20,000 a year in taxes, instead of the estimated $230,000 without the break.

Even more injuriously insulting is the loophole by which Extell doesn't even have to actually build the affordable housing itself. Corporate-friendly law allows it to wheel and deal on the open voucher-type market with building contractors. One deal that would have used the tax abatements to construct a low-income housing project in the Bronx fell through last year, so the developer is still shopping it around. And now, with the sudden windfall of a housing shortage resulting from Sandy, I imagine that even more mighty hordes of barbarians will be clamoring at the gates for a piece of the disaster capitalism pie.

Critics at the Pratt Center for Community Development point out that the $755 million in revenue losses caused by the tax abatements could have saved the jobs of every laid-off teacher and firefighter in the city -- not to mention the $100 million in cuts to the library system.

I can just hear one huge oligarchic sigh of relief, one giant mutual back-slap in the hallowed halls of the corporatocracy, as the Sandy clean-up continues. In the immortal words of that other craven mayor, Chicago's Rahm Emanuel, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

One57: The High Price of Tax Breaks for Billionaires

Power to the Powerless

Much to the chagrin of the candidates and their spinmeisters, climate change and income disparity have reared their ugly heads to become defacto issues in the waning days of Eternal Presidential Campaign 2012. Superstorm Sandy has wedged out the wedge issues. Big Bird has flown the coop.

Even corporate media giants like CNN are noticing the inequality. Side-by-side images of desperately hungry people in Brooklyn sifting through garbage in search for food, and VIPs bemoaning the closing of the Dumpling Bar at JP Morgan Chase would never have been possible without the cooperation of Superstorm Sandy.

Poverty was once the word that could not be spoken, especially during political campaigns. Not any more. The shame of the richest nation in the world is hung out for all the world to see. New York City boasts the most glaring income inequality in the entire country. Its arrogant mayor is our 10th richest plutocrat, with a net worth of $25 billion. But more than a fifth of his subjects (you can't really call them constituents) fall below the national poverty line.

It's easy for Michael Bloomberg to brag about the resilience of his fair city in the face of the storm, because he doesn't have to look at the people who are bearing the real brunt. He triumphantly presided over the reopening of the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. He thumbed his nose at Sandy by insisting that the annual Marathon will be run this Sunday.* But thanks to the magic of TV, the rest of America now bears witness to  the grinding existence of ordinary New Yorkers who must run the equivalent of a city marathon every single day just to earn a subsistence wage. According to the Pratt Center for Community Development,

We found great disparities in transportation access between higher-income, professional workers and low-wage manual and service workers. High housing costs mean that most low-wage workers live in areas outside the city's subway-rich core. Those workers also must travel to work sites dispersed widely around the city and region. This leaves the lowest-paid workers with the longest commutes to work, and limits the geographic range of job opportunities for residents of high-unemployment communities.

Three-quarters of a million New Yorkers travel more than one hour each way to work, and two-thirds of them earn less than $35,000 a year. By contrast, just 6 percent of these extreme commuters earn more than $75,000 a year. Black New Yorkers have the longest commute times, 25 percent longer than white commuters; Hispanic commuters have rides 12 percent longer.

Meanwhile, Wall Street plutocrats are telling harrowing tales of their own. One investment banker had to find his way to his wine cellar in the dark to scarf down a $1000-dollar bottle of wine before it went bad when the temperature controls failed. The CEO of Morgan Stanley had to hoof it three miles from his corporate suite to his domestic suite. Local news coverage of the storm was interrupted with a breathless announcement from Lexus to luxury car owners whose rides were damaged by flooding. A concierge service will pick you up and take you wherever you want to go while you're waiting for a replacement vehicle.

Jason Sheftell, who covers the luxury real estate beat for the Daily News, is totally blaming utility giant Con Ed -- not the hurricane -- for disrupting the lifestyle to which he is accustomed. His piece epitomizes the high-end whining of the entitled:

Con Edison has temporarily rendered a large portion of the greatest city on planet Earth irrelevant. They are treating us like we’re some kind of small town in Connecticut. In the sticks, power is an afterthought after 10 p.m. New York is the city that never sleeps.... Power is our lifeblood. It is our backbone. Without it, we are nothing. One day, acceptable. Two days, fine. Five days, in downtown New York, an egregious error where someone, somebody, some power company, must be accountable. No more excuses.

It is to the credit of some would-be Marathoners that they are forgoing the Bloomberg staged event and volunteering on hard-hit Staten Island instead. Despite the televised orgy of mutual back slapping and self-congratulations by swarms of political candidates, the government response is not all that it's been cracked up to be. People are stranded, people are hungry, people are cold, and people are getting mighty pissed off. Brooklynites waited in line for hours for National Guard handouts of water and MREs (meals ready to eat) The indy newspaper Gothamist has coined a new phrase for the forgotten people and where they live: The Powerless Zone. The lack of electricity is obvious; the lack of political power, not so much.

But  guess what? Occupy Wall Street, that social movement that the PTBs had either written off or co-opted into President Obama's re-election bid, is making a comeback. They're setting up aid camps in the Powerless Zones, even creating their own electricity with those exercise bike generators used in the Zuccotti Park encampment. Information on how to help can be found here.

Mayor Shrillionaire wouldn't dare send his paramilitary police army to bust heads at the new humanitarian Occupy encampments. Or would he?

* Update 5:30 p.m. Sanity prevailed, and the race has been cancelled.

Going to Extremes

The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy is a multidimensional study in contrasts and similarities.

The battered seaside estates of the obscenely wealthy and the flooded inner city housing projects of the neglected poor vie for our split screen attention.

Polished Mercedes Benzes and battered Ford pickups are equally vulnerable, it turns out, to falling trees and bricks and metal signs.

A Democratic Laurel and a Republican Hardy are equity actors in post-disaster consolation theatre. Even though Halloween was cancelled in New Jersey, Thanksgiving came early. They spoke their lines with barely a prompt, in what some critics are calling a blatant plagiarization of that disaster hit from yesteryear, "Heckuva Job Brownie."

Chris Christie: "And I cannot thank the President enough for his personal concern and compassion for our state and for the people of our state. And I heard it on the phone conversations with him, and I was able to witness it today personally."

Barack Obama: "At the top of my list, I have to say that Governor Christie throughout this process has been responsive; he has been aggressive in making sure that the state got out in front of this incredible storm. And I think the people of New Jersey recognize that he has put his heart and soul into making sure that the people of New Jersey bounce back even stronger than before. So I just want to thank him for his extraordinary leadership and partnership."

While the presidential wannabes of 2012 and 2016 respectively were careful to avoid Bush-like photo-ops of themselves peering at the New Jersey devastation from aboard their cushy helicopter, Mitt Romney was more ham-handed. His production company made the mistake of buying up all the diapers and infant formula and canned goods from a local Walmart SuperCenter to ship directly to the scene of the storm. If there is one thing the Red Cross always stresses during national disaster appeals, it's "Don't send STUFF. We don't have the time to sort and distribute it. Send MONEY."

If there is one thing Mitt Romney stresses during a national campaign, it's "Don't send money. We don't have the time to give some of it to the national treasury and distribute it for the common good." In Romney World, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, especially if the dog is tied to the roof of your car. (Sorry, Gail Collins.)

For me, the iconic image of Frankenstorm is the partially collapsed crane dangling dangerously over Manhattan. It is attached, sort of, to what has become the symbol of obscene wealth in this country -- a residential luxury skyscraper with units so expensive that only billionaires can afford to live in them. It is a pinnacle of the plutocracy, a monolith of greed. The crane is like a perverse Sword of Damocles misdirected at those hapless victims far, far below. Should it fall, it will plummet to earth like a bunker-busting bomb, tearing open the concrete, exploding gas and water mains, sending projectiles of concrete and steel to slash and impale any of the hapless lesser people lingering below.

It is just what happens when the top one percent of the population owns more than 40% of all the wealth. When wealth is disproportionately distributed toward the extreme top, the whole structure becomes unstable. Just as the lethal crane clinging precariously to the luxury high-rise threatens to destroy both the structure and what lies beneath, economic inequality leads to inevitable collapse of the whole society.

Frankenstorm is just one more freak of nature, one more indication of what happens in a society where regulations are few, where capitalism is unfettered, where the rich get rescued, and the poor just drown.

Back Online

We just got our internet/phone/cable restored in New Paltz after a two-day disruption, so I am still catching up on all the devastation outside my own little slice of real estate. Just a brief glance at TV and online news makes it apparent that the destruction wrought by Sandy is far worse than most people could have imagined.

Thanks to everyone who has written to me with messages of concern. We fared much better during this storm than we did with Hurricane Irene last year, when floods literally washed away whole towns. The latest damage to the Hudson Valley, where I live, was mainly due to high winds. There was little rainfall, comparatively speaking.

This is going to be a long recovery for untold millions of people in a huge, huge chunk of this country.

Good Night & Good Luck

The officials in the rolled-up sleeves are now going on TV to inform us that we may be off the grid for ten days or more. I suspect that this dire prediction is meant to make us idiotically grateful when they heroically restore our power in a mere week. We won't blame them like we did after Hurricane Irene. That debacle, you may recall, led to the resignation of more than one grossly overpaid utility CEO.

I have a friend who works for one of the utilities. Last year, he told me, they were too cheap to bring in extra crews. This go-round, they've got so many people in their control rooms that they forgot to get them enough chairs. They actually had utility trucks out aimlessly cruising the neighborhoods this afternoon, when the winds began howling at 5mph. It was Electric Company Theatre taking its cue from Homeland Security Theatre.

The only good thing I have to say about Hurricane Sandy is that he has one exquisite sense of direction. His priorities are straight. He is expected to directly unleash his wrath upon the sewer known as Wall Street. He will vomit saltwater all over Goldman Sachs and its fascist network of NYPD/Homeland Security fusion center spy cameras. The soakers shall become the soaked. The polluted financial swamp will become swamped with polluted river water. After the Stock Exchange bravely declared it would remain open and greedy throughout the storm, how it must have pained Mayor Forbes Shrillionaire Bloomberg to announce the evacuation of the entire Financial District and Club Cipriani Wall Street, home of the $25 hamburger. And what about those high-frequency computer trading vaults across the river in New Jersey? The Crawling Eye of the Storm is headed their way too. This is beginning to be almost bearable.

As far as this blog goes, I'll be back when I'm back. Unfortunately, I can't keep the comments open*, because lately I've been inundated with Spambots selling Uggs and Viagra. I did get spam from an actual person once. He picqued my interest by saying that he and his partner only discuss my subversive posts and those of Glenn Greenwald with their windows closed, for fear the government is eavesdropping on them. He included a link to his own blog. Turned out to be a commercial site for tinfoil hat software to prevent the National Security Agency from spying on malcontents. Oy vey.

For everybody in the path of Sandy, stay safe and dry and warm. Fill your bathtub with water so you can flush. If you forgot to buy designer water and batteries for your radio, you are probably out of luck. There are so many panic-stricken drivers out on the roads, looking for that last roll of toilet paper, that tonight's accident rate will probably exceed that of tomorrow and Tuesday.

* You can still write comments, but they may sit in limbo for awhile until they can be approved. As of 10:30 Monday I am still around to approve them -- we still have power, though for how long is the question. Winds are just starting to pick up here, about 20 mph w/higher gusts.

The Adventures of Sandy the Storm

As a storm of apocalyptic proportions barreled toward a population center with millions of bodies, with damage already forecast to be in the billions, President Obama today addressed the nation on..... Personal Finance! Forget about stocking up on bread and batteries. Drop everything and check your credit score, right this very minute!

I get it that climate change denialism is an unwritten plank in both rotten sides of the Uniparty, but this is too much. Although President Obama disingenuously expressed mild surprise that the looming catastrophe of man-made global warming just wasn't brought up in any of the debates, it apparently never occurred to him to actually act presidential and proactively bring it up himself before audiences totalling well over 100 million.

Instead, he went on MTV to let MTV fans know that's he cool enough to occasionally ponder global warming.

“We are not moving as fast as we need to, and this is an issue that future generations, MTV viewers, are going to have to be dealing with, even more than the older generation is,” he admitted, obviously putting the onus on the crumbling, irresponsible Geezer Generation.

As "Frankenstorm" threatens to hasten the demise of a huge chunk of the also-crumbling infrastructure here on terra firma, it turns out that even though we landed a rover on Mars, we haven't been maintaining the aging satellite system designed to keep track of the megastorms of the future. A combination of bureaucratic inefficiency and deficit hawkery has spelled a gap of at least a few years in which the tracking of storms will be grossly impeded. Starting as early as next year, we may be reverting back to the time when hurricanes took coastal areas by complete surprise, resulting in thousands of deaths.

This is what austerity does. It endangers lives in the name of saving a few bucks. But even that rationale is a lie. Austerity is the excuse given so that the rich can get richer and the poor can get screwed. The mega rich apparently have not yet learned that megastorms can destroy their seaside estates, yachts and manicured lawns just as effectively as they flatten mobile homes in trailer parks. And the two candidates of the mega-rich, says The New York Times,"have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

None of the debate moderators brought up climate change because the oil and gas industry is a major sponsor of TV news shows. We've all seen those incessant "I'm Beavis, and I'm an energy voter" pro-fracking and drilling commercials sponsored by the industry. This propaganda attempts to convince us that what is good for their bottom line is good for the average Joe. We are not told that Big Energy is not in the profit-sharing business, that increased drilling does not ease the pain at the pump. Prices are set by international cartels. What's extracted in this country doesn't necessarily stay in this country. The much-touted jobs are temporary and dangerous, the damage to the earth and our health is incalculable.

The talking heads are not about to bite the oil-soaked hand that feeds them. The corporate-run Commission on Presidential Debates is itself owned and operated by lobbyists and CEOs, for whom climate change is the inconvenient truth that must not be told. Regulations attempting to ameliorate the effects of climate change eat into corporate bottom lines. Politicians daring to introduce climate change legislation will find the corporate wealth funding their billion-dollar campaigns drying up faster than a fracked community's water supply.

Maybe if we can overturn Citizens United and get the money out of politics, our voices will become louder than their dollar signs.

Oh, and speaking of dollar signs, don't forget to log on the internet and check your credit score so you can run up more debt and enrich the bloated banks and buy a ton of junk that you don't need and can't afford. It's the new economic patriotism.

I believe that the free market is one of the greatest forces for progress in human history, and that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not the government.-- Barack Obama, pre-Sandy presidential manifesto.
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A Mighty Wind

Hand-Wringing in Liberal Land

How's this for leverage: nervous liberals are operating under the theory that they can wait until Obama is safely re-esconced in the West Wing before convincing him to protect the New Deal. According to The Hill, a coalition of so-called progressives will be launching a campaign "immediately after Election Day to pressure Obama and Senate Democrats not to endorse any deal that cuts Medicare and/or Social Security benefits."

They are so fearful of their Leader co-mingling them with the maligned purists of the "professional left" that most of them won't even reveal their own identities. They are loath to betray their incipient betrayer. They have apparently forgotten that gay rights groups helped Obama "evolve" on marriage equality when they threatened to withhold support and money. Ditto for immigration reform activists, who demonstrated their own discontent with his lackluster support and "made him" order temporary amnesty for Dream Act candidates -- again, by threatening, not cajoling.

Independent Vermont Senator and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, famous for his marathon anti-plutocracy filibuster and frequent indignant letters to the White House, is apparently the spokesman for the cravenly pragmatic crew of anonymous malcontents. He has urged passionately, and he has urged often that President Obama be held to account, that he should promise to protect the safety net as a condition to his re-election.

But at no time has Sanders gone so far as to suggest that we actually withhold our vote for this Democratic president, and vote Green or Socialist instead. Despite all his populist rhetoric, Sanders is still giving his tacit endorsement for another Obama term.

After running themselves ragged door-belling, phone-banking, contributing their meager dollars, and mindlessly cheerleading the incumbent, the groups will begin to apply their pinky-finger pressure on Nov. 8, two days after Election Day. (They need 48 hours to gather steam for the Big Offensive. They will take two bold baby steps forward on the road to recovery in the wake of their mass exodus from collective sanity during Horserace 2012.)

The AFL-CIO, which showed up at the Democratic National Convention for the purposes of improving their own unfair thuggish image, rather than making demands on their candidates, will also join in the attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube. One bold agitator even dared give his name ahead of time:

There’s going to be a major effort by lots of groups to make sure the people we vote for don’t sell us down the river,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future.

“People, groups, organizations and networks are working very hard to get Obama and the Democrats elected, and yet we are worried that it is possible that we could be betrayed almost immediately,” he said.

Ya think, Roger? Why, it was only yesterday that Obama salivated, for the umpteenth time, over the prospect of ripping open that can of Simpson-Bowles Catfood to shove it down our throats. After thinking he could importune an Iowa newspaper into endorsing him on the basis of an off-the-record interview -- and the paper subsequently calling him out on his ridiculous secrecy -- this is what Obama said:

It will probably be messy. It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs.

And we can easily meet -- “easily” is the wrong word -- we can credibly meet the target that the Bowles-Simpson Commission established of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, and even more in the out-years, and we can stabilize our deficit-to-GDP ratio in a way that is really going to be a good foundation for long-term growth. Now, once we get that done, that takes a huge piece of business off the table.

Obama is obviously still operating under the debunked notion that austerity helps grow the economy in the middle of an economic recession. If he reads Paul Krugman, it is obviously not sinking in. Then again, Paul Krugman is so focused on how bad a President Romney would be that he is essentially giving the incumbent a free pass. Presumably, he will return to form once the election is over.

And I don't know if Roger and Bernie and the rest of the gang have noticed.... but have you ever picked up on the fact that President Obama always promises to negotiate with the Republicans, yet never expresses the slightest interest in talking to the so-called Progressive Caucus of his own party? These doe-like Congress critters, led by Raul Grijalva of Arizona, have put together a "People's Budget" that puts people back to work, imposes a living wage, slashes the deficit, scraps the cap on Social Security FICA contributions and all kinds of good stuff.

It sounds great, but that's about it. You don't hear Grijalva and the other progressives forming a schism and walking away from the Blue Dog prez, do you? These people are what we can kindly call "useful idiots". They form the pretend-left flank of the spineless Democratic Party, which exists solely to provide a cosmetic balance to the right wing extremism of the Ayn Rand Cult. We feel better listening to them liberally and impotently rant and rave on MSNBC, and then the right-center President and his Senate lackeys swoop in to split the difference and pretend that they tried. They really, really tried. But you know... gridlock and stuff.

So-called pragmatic progressives are fond of maligning their backwoods, mouth-breathing kin for voting against their own interests when they elect Teapublican crazoids. And if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and still expecting different results, then perhaps immediate self-commitment in a fancy liberal rest home is in order. The differential diagnostic grounds for admission: cognitive dissonance disorder consistent with battered spouse syndrome, complicated by addiction to a designer drug of the Obamopiate class.