Morning After Open Thread

For your venting pleasure, consider this your post-Election Day open thread. No big surprises in the congressional results, but at least two glimmers of hope are standing out this morning.

 Elizabeth Warren beat Scott Brown. The big question is how long she will last as an "independent voice of the people" in the Senate. My prediction: she will come out swinging, ease some of Bernie Sanders's lone voice lonesomeness, deliver many a rousing speech and write many an indignant letter railing against Wall Street. Then one day, sooner rather than later, her new bffs President Obama and Harry Reid will invite her to lunch. And, I fear, she'll gradually start toning down the rhetoric. She will discover the reality that congress critters have to spend an inordinate amount of time fund-raising and meeting lobbyists.

I hate to sound cynical, and I hope that I am wrong. But elected office and corporate dollars and peer pressure do have a funny way of corrupting people. Moreover,Warren has already gone to the dark side when it comes to wholeheartedly supporting the Homeland Security State, championing the permanence of Obamacare as opposed to eventual Medicare for All, even sabre-rattling for war in Iran. Can it be much longer until the submission is complete, and she crumbles completely to the financial forces that foot the bill for all these wonderful things?

Oh. and Florida Rep. Alan Grayson will be coming back to town after a two-year hiatus. You may remember him as the champion of the public option in the health reform debate, way back when. So I guess we can at least look forward to a few more moments of biting sarcasm on the House floor.

I shut off the TV last night when, despite the frantic, overblown, red-white-and-blue nail-biting theatrics on CNN, it became obvious that the president would easily be coasting to a second term. The suspense had been contrived and empty all along. But after two years and more than two billion dollars, I guess it's understandable that the pundit class just couldn't bear to see the lucrative, nasty and small-minded horsey race end.

I'll post more later, unless the coming Nor'easter knocks us off the grid for the second time in two weeks. Many locales in my immediate region are still powerless from the first storm. Just yesterday, an elderly couple in a nearby town were discovered dead in their heatless home, reportedly from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a gas-powered generator. 

Votapalooza

Yawn. So I filled out my mail-in ballot over the weekend, tongue held firmly in cheek. Were it not for the storm, I would have done the deed earlier. There was one local law on the ballot I wasn't familiar with, and I wanted to do some research on it first. It turns out I now have the choice of either allowing my county legislature to draw redistricting maps, or allowing an unelected board of people I don't know to draw redistricting maps. So I chose the former, lesser of two evils. From the dregs of the backwaters to the heights of the presidency, ain't it always the way?

I deliberately do not endorse any candidates on this blog because I don't want to add to the phony political mania. Plus, I realize that making a Hobson's choice in a battleground state must be nearly as stressful as living in a hurricane state. But let me tell you how I voted anyway. Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala of the Green Party, for prez and vp, as you may have guessed.

  I voted against my Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand. Although her general voting record is relatively "liberal", she also happens to be the Number 1 senatorial recipient of Wall Street money. Grounds for immediate dismissal right there.

As a direct result of those bribes, she was silent while the NYPD pepper-sprayed, tased, illegally detained, billyclubbed, jackbooted, trashed the camps of, or otherwise inconvenienced Occupy Wall Street protesters last year. She was silent during the SOPA and PIPA protests (Hollywood and Silicon Valley Money) too.  And most loathesomely of all, she sided with President Obama and voted with 85 of her cohorts for the National Defense Authorization Act, allowing for the detention without trial of American citizens. As Gail Collins pointed out in a recent column, Gillibrand reportedly does have a Republican challenger, whose name nobody seems to know. So-- I checked off the Green Party candidate once again. Her name is Colia Clarke, a former assistant to Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers; she is one of only six Greens on the ballot in Senate races nationwide.

I did vote for the unknown Democratic contender for retiring Rep. Maurice Hinchey's  seat, a guy by the name of Julian Schreibman, on the alternate Working Families Party line. Julian is a former CIA agent, so I held my nose with fingers crossed, just to keep the sole close contender, from the Tea Party, at bay. See? I can be a pragmatist too, at times. Plus, there are no third party candidates running in my district.

 I voted for New York State Senator Blank, because the long-time GOP incumbent, John Bonacic, is again running unopposed. Four years ago, Senator Blank actually beat him. Even so, no living human being could come up with the money or the chutzpah to challenge J.B. this cycle.

Finally, I cast my ballot for incumbent Democratic Assemblyman Kevin Cahill. This guy has actually personally helped me out on a couple of matters. So when they tell you to put all your energy into local politics, believe it. Bottom-up change is pretty much all we have to cling to anymore.

If you're feeling that what little is left of the Left is crumpling up into a pitiful ball, urging us to hold our noses and vote for Barry, you are not alone. Such erstwhile stalwarts as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Daniel Ellsberg are among the recent sellouts, or semi-sellouts. But don't despair. Not everyone has fallen abjectly into the Nose-Holders for Obama League.

Chris Hedges calls it The S&M Election, and he is all too painfully correct. Echoing the famous George Orwell essay, Such, Such Were the Joys, he compares this horrid presidential campaign to his own torture at the hands of boarding school bullies. A choice excerpt:

Obama tells us that we better lick his boots or we will face the brute down the hall, Mitt Romney. After all, we wouldn’t want the bad people to get their hands on these newly minted mechanisms of repression. We will, if we do not behave, end up with a more advanced security and surveillance state, the completion of the XL Keystone pipeline, unchecked pillage from Wall Street, environmental catastrophe and even worse health care. Yet we know on some level that once the election is over, Obama will, if he is re-elected, again betray us. This is part of the game. We dutifully assume our position. We cry out in holy terror. We promise to obey. And we are mocked as we watch promises crumble into dust.
 

He truly gets it. Personally, I don't think I've ever been subject to so much animosity from the tribalists of the Pseudo-left for even mildly criticizing Dear Leader in the comments threads of the New York Times. Thank God for Chris Hedges. He soothes even as he inflames the victims of attempted gaslighting by hordes of well-meaning Obamabot concern trolls.

Speaking of the 'bot attacks, Matt Stoller got a real earful when he painstakingly laid out the The Progressive Case Against Barack Obama for Salon. He blows away the choking kool-aid propaganda powder that would have us believe the president is a proto-feminist, or that the much-vaunted Supreme Court nominations are a reason to give him another term, or that the so-called pragmatic progressives (translation: right wing enablers) have a leg to stand on:

As a candidate, Obama promised a whole slew of civil liberties protections, lying the whole time. Obama has successfully organized the left part of the Democratic Party into a force that had rhetorically opposed war and civil liberties violations, but now cheerleads a weakened America too frightened to put Osama bin Laden on trial. We must fight this thuggish political culture Bush popularized, and Obama solidified in place.

(snip)

At some point soon, we will face yet another moment where the elites say, “Do what we want or there will be a meltdown.” Do we have enough people on our side willing to collectively say “do what we want or there will be a global meldown”? This election is a good mechanism to train people in the willingness to say that and mean it. That is, the reason to advocate for a third-party candidate is to build the civic muscles willing to say no to the establishment in a crisis moment we all know is coming. Right now, the liberal establishment is teaching its people that letting malevolent political elites do what they want is not only the right path, it is the only path. Anything other than that is dubbed an affront to common decency. Just telling the truth is considered beyond rude.
 

Read the whole thing, as well as this follow-up addressing the torrent of criticism. Stoller is a profile in journalistic courage.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, CounterPunch can always be counted on to deliver many a dead-aim left hook/knockout punch. The blackly humorous Good Voter Larry  by Riley Waggaman provides a grim Election Eve chuckle. Seeing how MoveOn has been more than usually annoying lately, I especially enjoyed the parody of the MoveOn member who gets mistakenly arrested while handing out Obama propaganda. MoveOn has been inundating me with emails informing me if I don't send them money right now, and if Romney is elected, I will be unable to live with myself for the rest of my brutish life. Real subtle persuasion tactics.

Toledo voter Michael Leonardi talks about going to the polls in a decimated area of Swing State Ohio,"land of the serfs and wage slaves". And while I wrote a couple of posts ago about the epidemic addiction to the Obamaopiate class of designer drugs, Randy Shields informs us that Obama can also be smoked. "For American capitalism, that Obama is some good shit," he writes. "Using Obama makes some people prone to wild mood swings and abrupt changes in personality."

And sometimes, short, sweet and succinct just says it best. The hilarious Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy has an excellent rejoinder to Obama voters who think they will able to hold Barry's feet to the progressive fire once he is safely re-esconced as the Temporary Emperor (temp emp.) --

If Obama wins, and you didn't push for a Democratic primary challenge or a left third-party vote or a non-vote... when you post your smarmy "now the real work begins" thing on Wednesday, I respectfully suggest that the real work for you is to go fuck yourself.

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.