THE ZONELORD
We predicted long ago that the mayor was using his term of office to curry favor with the capital-concrete lobby in pursuit of a job that paid better. So when we read that Warren Wilhelm de Blasio announced May 16 he’d entered the race for president of the Real Estate Board of New York we felt vindicated. Why else would he have permitted his appointees to eliminate neighborhood zoning protections to transfer every square inch of city land to donor/developers? Why block sunlight from a population already suffering from the epidemic effects of vitamin D deficiency? Why subsidize luxury buildings to obstruct the flow of wind currents from city streets choked with hazardous auto emission particulates if he was not running for president of REBNY?
And then we read further . . .
What’s that? He declared for . . . what? The US presidency?
What for?
It’s gotta be a misprint Read it back.
Which US?
Not REBNY?
CHARISMA
A president should be sure of himself. He should speak coherently, confidently, clearly. Kennedy spoke like he meant it. Reagan managed to recite hour long speeches without looking down at the pages before teleprompters were in vogue. But when he repeated something Nancy said in front of the camera, it appeared he was in the habit of repeating what was fed to him. The first lady pretty much confirmed that blaming his gaff on that “gizmo” in his ear. We all remember Al Gore responding to questions robotically, as if calculating what he was supposed to say rather than what he knew. Compared to Obama—who stumbles badly without a script—Gore looks like a break dancer.
New Yorkers tend to choose from candidates for mayor who berate them. Blame the voters for what your administration does wrong and you get reelected. Ed Koch turned back questions about his policies by criticizing questioners, like a mother making her kids feel guilty. Giuliani could be human in an interview, but he made no bones about the authoritarian persona he chose as his platform. This attracted guilty liberals, which may be redundant.
In comparison, Bill Wilhelm makes automatons Gore, Obama, Reagan seem lifelike. His handlers will do anything to keep him away from a microphone. (The best de Blasio could come up with was calling Trump ‘Don Con’ in his announcement speech? What’d that take you all afternoon?) They’ve successfully hidden whatever passes for his personality. They may have put his soul in a blind trust. A corporation. Which is what Mussolini called his government: corporatismo. Contrasting the former, Il Duce was an orator among orators. He waved his arms and shook his head and the crowds loved it. But his corporation stuck too much in its pockets. Ordinary people suffered. The ‘activists’ didn’t just talk (or text) about it. They got together. Caught him. Hung him by his boots.
THE CORPORATION
Herr de Blasio backed into Gracie Mansion in 2014TK after the two leading candidates quit the race. New York’s concrete-capital lobby has had their way at City Hall ever since. Whether it’s neighborhoods, land mass, mortgages, businesses or individual apartment leases, the law is no bulwark against the conquest of real property during the current land speculation bubble. Only New Yorkers as a whole are in a position to protect their homes from The Corporation.
Bill’s underlings lit an incendiary with a delayed fuse against the city’s businesses and communities when they approved disproportional construction plans in districts long protected from same. His administration offered huge tax abatements for luxury towers and recast development plans on vast tracts of public land.
City Hall called in cement mixers in wholesale attacks against New York’s busiest moderate-income business districts by approving structures designed for affluent tenants. It planted the seeds of thousands of evictions against longstanding businesses—from secondhand stores in The Bronx, to upscale groceries in The Village. It undermined the survival of tens of thousands of families living in relatively affordable apartments from the Belt Parkway in East New York, Brooklyn to the Miller Highway on the Upper West Bank.
Though the rent demands have already shaken up certain neighborhoods, the fuse will burn and detonate an explosion in rents, new home prices and carrying charges—lawful and otherwise. Laws protecting the harassment of residents are not enforced. Those who wish to survive have prepared or are preparing themselves. Every season is open season. When New Yorkers look back on their decision as to whether or not to intercede on their own behalf, they will regret failing to do so.
SHOCK AND AWE
Shortly after Al Gore attained a majority of electoral votes but thought better of assuming the presidency in 2001, some rough equivalent to the real estate board of Iraq began visiting Cheney’s office in the old War Department headquarters, since renamed. Ostensibly to discuss “energy strategy” with his staff, representatives of large, medium and small oil processing, shipping and distribution firms pored over maps of Iraqi oil fields as if choosing silverware patterns from a wedding register.
A conquest of the Middle East was unfolding that would become US military strategy of the next two decades. Iraq would be first killing field on this schedule, providing collaborators in the fossil fuel industry with a hefty commission to boot. Within a couple of years ‘green zones’ around both Manhattan’s Financial District and Baghdad’s government buildings would collapse under the weight of aircraft, detonators, ordnance, and other construction equipment while explanations of such state craft never came close of satisfying public scrutiny.
Bombing Iraq’s capital city of Baghdad brought in a new landlord—one far less effective at curbing fundamentalist movements. Bombing one green zone or other diminishes air quality. The pillar of smoke, incinerated ash and pulverized concrete gestates in New York’s collective respiratory system still today. When asked for comment about air quality immediately after the Twin Towers went down, the EPA, DEC and DEP each had a different answer. The effects will continue to be felt across a generation’s demise
SOCIAL ENGINEERING
His Honors’ support for the transfer of so immense an inventory of public resources—land, air, neighborhoods, families—into the accounts of one or another finance or development house, may come to rate among the great feats of social engineering in modern times.
The prospective effects of blocking
out the sun, capturing airborne waste, and remaking predominantly low-rise neighborhoods of the five boroughs into some sort of show room for stacking concrete, burning fossil fuel and filtering exhaust through human respiratory systems is a calculated risk in a city that has never been in compliance with the Clean Air Act.
The effort may someday be seen to rival Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway Act of 1954 which sprouted suburbs along the off-ramps and conservative voters across the suburbs. Or Obama’s redistribution of trillions from consumer savings to corporate bailout. Perhaps even the European powers’ granting of charters to the British East India Company and the Dutch West Indies Company. Government programs can alter life styles, trade public good for private profit, or conquer lands populated by peaceful populations. Not since the Dutch rented Manhattan Island from the natives has industry held such sway over a population.
We know too little of Slick Wilhelm to imagine him more than a front for his Clinton Administration mentors’ plans for New York. No responsible journalistic outlet nor any known academic entity has chosen to evaluate the administration’s unprecedented handover of public property, etc. on a city-wide level.
However historic preservation attorney Michael Hiller received calls regarding questionable developments on public land on a semi-regular basis during the Bloomberg administration. At a gathering of Upper West Side residents opposing an addition to the America Museum of Natural History atop public park land, he observed that the frequency of such calls went through the roof shortly after de Blasio took office.
A lesson may be learned from the West Side’s effort to reign in the Museum’s planners and financiers, predominantly because the effort has garnered much the same result as each of the neighborhoods that spoke out against their particular rezoning and new development fears: they lost.
Whereas residents did go through the motions of inviting together casual opponents to the museum’s, frankly, distasteful use of scant public land in the area, they could at no time expect to prevail. Neither did they organize local opposition, nor assemble representatives of other neighborhoods suffering the same threat they were complaining of. Of course, mass behavior patterns are strongly affected by popular media. One does not watch network sitcoms featuring sexy neighborhood organizers attending civic events or joining forces with crosstown hotties employing whacky socio-economic repartee. We’re more likely see Archie Bunker— the racist with a heart of gold, or Tony Soprano—Father of the Year with the ice pick, etc.
THE 42 PERCENT
A political faction called ‘Occupy’ took up shop in a small quadrant of New York’s financial district a few years ago. They remained there for a short time before they were forcibly removed by the anti-terror squad. They were surveilled mercilessly as they chanted, made speeches and carried signs. But they made their point. And they popularized the concept that 99 percent of Americans are forced to sacrifice their material and natural birth rights for the benefit of a tiny percentage of privileged corporations and individuals. Whether Occupy’s implicit raising of consciousness eventually brings about some shift in the above equation remains to be seen.
However a more palpable statistic was generated by the New York City Rent Guidelines Board a few years ago which provides far more striking insight into why American residents face such lousy odds today, following public participation/citizen responsibility’s high water mark in the sixties and seventies.
The RGB pointed out that landlords in New York City no longer enjoyed moderate profits from conducting their businesses, but average returns of 42 percent, dividends comparable to those associated with operating a cartel, a monopoly or a racket. Meanwhile, the rate of evictions of New York families from their homes has risen from four per day to one hundred and four per day since 2016.
Snatching the floorboards out from under Mama, Papa and Goldie Locks is not as lucrative as burrowing into the Earth and stacking concrete and glass over the hole like a giant middle finger to humanity. However there are far more leases to trade and speculate upon to go around to the many small brokers, lawyers and managers who rely on a war-like atmosphere to bring in inflated profits. A US General famously declared that War is a Racket. Here in the parish of St. Tammany, so is land speculation when life and limb are under duress. Today that war is against New York’s greatest resource, its people, such as are contained in its neighborhoods.
MAN OF THE YEAR: THE CORPORATE PERSON
Tammany Hall institutionalized the bribery of judges, commissioners, police chiefs, etc. before corporate efficiency measures—characterized by author Jack Newfield as “permanent government”—were instituted. Though a cursory glance at campaign donations still helps visualize how City Hall edicts are influenced, the Tammany mantle continues to shroud the corporations which manipulate the people who pull the strings.
Despite its absence of human characteristics—most notably, a conscience— The Corporation has been transubstantiated into a “legal person” under US law. As such the 2003 film, “The Corporation” (Bakan, Crooks, Achbar, Abbott) establishes clearly that if comprised of flesh and blood these ‘legal persons’ would be deemed psychopaths. The film’s featured commentator, Noam Chomsky, added context when he said, “the corporation is the tool of your oppression.” With corporate logos comprising a large portion of America’s role models, it’s a hard calculus to ingest.
History has a separate file for when a country and a corporation become indistinguishable. Mussolini defined his fascist system of governance as “corporatism.” The schoolbooks call it dictatorship. A business. Without conscience, a bank or law firm may sponsor a block party, but it never needs to feel good about itself. There may be puppeteers at the end of the strings, but they are governed by a corporate charter.
The chronic inhalation of corporate media may dull the recognition of shared characteristics of Mussolini’s March to Rome and our quadrennial electoral twostep. Like any of a number prehistoric fish, however, both of these activities have seen success in pursuing their prey.
Civilization itself has cursed us with what the founding fathers finally found in the underpinnings of Jefferson’s flowery attempt to blur the line between the corporation and the conscience by substituting “life, liberty and property” with “life, liberty and happiness.” Civilization is all very nice, but its discontents contrast the concentration of land ownership with the survival of a species that we may be indulging excessively.
Peter Minuit famously gathered Lenape elders who were visiting the island and asked them to accept 24 guilders. In exchange, Minuit would retain the rocky outcropping at the tip of Manhattan. They drove a hard bargain, but Minuit, a harder one. He carried a gun.
At the time, an acre of land was valued far less than a beaver pelt. Now the Earth’s under concrete, the beavers are gone, and the rent has come due. But what New Yorkers inherited from the Dutch, they no longer own.
