the citizen-viewer

At 10:44 AM 9/11/01 -0400, Rich wrote:

I saw both towers collapse from my rooftop, the second one just a few minutes ago. Battery Park is all dust and smoke and I could see the cloud spread along the ground and puff up between buildings a mile away. I’m afraid this will change a lot of things. There must have been tens of thousands of people in those buildings. It’s beyond belief. I have to get to work right away. Don’t try to call for now because all the circuits are busy.
love to all of you,
Rich

The second building was hit 18 minutes after the first, but the second collapsed first, maybe 30-40 minutes after it was hit. The first one took more than an hour to collapse. There hasn’t been much information, but I’m afraid that a lot of people didn’t make it out. From my view, hundreds of people must have been killed immediately, and then the fire and smoke filled large parts of the tops of the buildings. Maybe people below that were able to get out, but people above would have had a hard time. The damage was tremendous. When the second one collapsed, the top just fell straight down and crushed the rest of the building at least down to the 30th floor or so. And then there were all the people on the planes, and the other planes like the one that crashed in Pennsylvania and the one that hit the Pentagon. One of the art directors here was on the Boston plane that hit the WTC.

I was on my rooftop because after I heard the second crash, I turned on the radio and they said the towers were hit. So I went up to see it. What an awful thing.

In the current issue of New York magazine, Stephen Rodrick profiles Rudy Giulani, former New York mayor and seemingly the Republican frontrunner for president.

Giuliani is building his image on the reputation he gained in the wake of the the 9/11 attacks spoke to an adoring audience in the hinterlands thusly, writes Rodrick:

The secret is to be prepared for anything, Rudy says. Terrorism can happen in New York or Boston or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, “one of the smallest towns in the United States.”

The punchy good cheer of this small town is replaced with grave attention. Rudy notes that he once spoke to the Shanksville high-school graduating class. “But for the grace of God and the bravery of the people who brought that plane down,” he says, “those kids wouldn’t be with us.”

This is a little strange. The terrorism had nothing to do with Shanksville, and if the brave people who brought that plane down had not done so, those kids in Shanksville wouldn’t have been anywhere near a plane crash.

Anyway, it’s a pretty shaky foundation to build a campaign on. Neither Rodrick’s article nor anything else the citizen-viewer has seen actually spells out what exactly Giuliani did after the attacks that was so admirable. Aside from making a few genuinely moving speeches, he just happened to be mayor at the time.

How heroism has been devalued.

Yes, we are all citizen-viewers. But this is taking it too far.

Ray Kelly’s fascistic tendency is showing through again. Surely not, you say. Not fascism!

The New York City police department, of which he is commissioner, proposes to make it an offense subject to arrest for any group of pedestrians or bicyclists to violate any traffic law, rule or regulation. The arrest would be for parading without a permit.

The way they do this is to redefine the word “parade” to mean pretty much everything:

“any procession or race which consists of a group of two or more pedestrians, vehicles, bicycles or other devices moved by human power, or ridden or herded animals proceeding together upon any public street or roadway in a manner that does not comply with all applicable traffic laws, rules and regulations…” [continued here]

Literally, you and a friend step off the curb while the light is red and the nearest cop could arrest you and put you in jail.

This rule change would make literally millions of people subject to arrest every day — literally guilty, too. But don’t imagine that the police would be working overtime hauling in every suit and tie that jaywalks with his pals on the way to a three-beer lunch at Hooters.

What it is, is an effort to create a situation where the police can exercise selective enforcement of the most pernicious kind.

The last time I lived in a dictatorship, Cambodia that is, they had a similar rule (and still do).

The debate was over the wording. The opposition party types insisted that the law was that they only had to notify the police of their plan for a march or rally of more than X people, and that the police “permit” was merely an acknowledgment by the police that they had received this notice. The police position was that they could deny the permit and thereby illegalize the march or rally.

In other words, are you notifying them, or are you asking them for permission?

In the end, the firehoses and electric batons rule the day. And that is what we will see in New York. The police will have a new tool to turn citizen-viewers into criminals at will, and arrest them as soon as they express an opinion that Ray Kelly and Mike Bloomberg don’t like, and beat them down if they stand up for their rights. If you think I’m exaggerating, well, you weren’t there in 2004, 2003, 2001 and keep going.

One of the big differences, in theory anyway, between the US and places like Cambodia (and Mussolini’s Italy) is the presumption of legality. In other words, in the US any activity is presumed to be legal unless there is a law that specifically forbids it. In Cambodia, the premise that is widely accepted and often stated by authorities is that any activity can be illegal unless they, the authorities, have given prior permission.

Now, the NYPD is doing an end run around the presumption of legality by trying to cast the net of illegality over pretty much everyone. That way, they can pick and choose who to arrest.

Transportation Alternatives and the NYCLU are, as always, fighting the good fight against this creeping fascism.

And if the new rules go into effect, I propose the following: Apply, citizen-viewers, apply for a permit every time you plan to cross the street in a group of two or more. Flood the bastards with applications.

But when you want to make a political statement, just do it. You don’t need a stinking permit, you never did and you never will, so don’t ask for one.

I must admit that when the Jets' West Side Stadium plan bit the dust last year I enjoyed a moment of optimism. Perhaps we were finally figuring out that pro sports teams are nothing more that extortionists when it comes to building new stadiums.

Now New York's City Council has approved a new stadium for the Yankees, in a plan that would reduced parkland in the Bronx while increasing parking. Both developments are bad for the Bronx and for the city. As usual the citizen-viewers will foot a big part of the bill -- $138 million to demolish the current stadium, $70 million toward new parking garages that will contribute to traffic and air pollution. And that's just for starters. There's also a complicated tax and bond scheme that seems to have been designed to hide the rest of the subsidy from prying c-v eyes. All told, it may add up to more than $400 million.

But the Yankees, a private and hugely profitable operation, won't be the only beneficiaries of the taxpayers' unwitting largesse. As I suspected, it also turns out that the new stadium will feature many more luxury skyboxes -- 60 instead of the current 18. These skyboxes are a favorite of politicians, who somehow end up enjoying many games from the comfort of these skyboxes while being wined and dined by their wealthier constituents. Ask Jack Abramoff, the king of the skybox.

I would like to see politicians who support these stadium deals take a simple pledge: that they will never, ever, set foot in one of these skyboxes unless they are paying the whole tab, including the champagne, the caviar and the cigars, out of their own pocket.

Either that, or starting treating these professional sports teams like the private businesses they are, and let them pay for their own facilities. Next up: the Mets.

More at Field of Schemes

Ads for American Apparel just keep getting sleazier.

Do they seem especially sleazy because the chain presents itself as an alternative to exploitation of workers, yet the owner, Dov Charney, often gets his employees to "volunteer" for these cheesecake shots? Because he seems to specialize in infantilizing them, as seen here with the bubble gum? Or is it not the ads themselves, but the underlying hypocrisy of a company that says it's sweatshop free but busts union drives? Where male management is famous for having sex with female staff at every opportunity? Or maybe you don't see them as sleazy.

Background research starts here.

Oh, irony of delightful ironies. New York City police are in an uproar because off-duty cops who were demonstrating on the street for a union contract were videotaped by, get this, the police! Read the delicious New York Times article here.

...officers from a special unit videotaped their faces, evoking for one demonstrator the unblinking eye of George Orwell's "1984."

"That's Big Brother watching you," the demonstrator, Walter Liddy, said in a deposition.

Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer.

According the to police department, they are fighting terrorism and gathering information just in case there's trouble. Just as they've been doing at almost every event where citizen-viewers express any opinion that Mayor Bloomberg doesn't like. I was at the demonstrations during the Republican party convention in 2004, and at others, and these guys are everywhere with their video cameras, taping regular people who are doing nothing illegal.

(And not just taping of course. They also rounded up and arrested hundreds of people who were doing nothing more than standing on the sidewalk carefully following police instructions not to impede traffic on the street. As soon as they formed a compact group, the police surrounded them, arrested them, and clapped them into a filthy bus repair depot on Pier 57 where they were held, some for several days, sleeping on concrete slick with motor oil. On no legal grounds.)

Somehow, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has escaped personal criticism for the police force that he leads and whose thuggish commanders he selects. This is why I will never, ever vote for Bloomberg. He is responsible for the systematic violation of our constitutional rights. Imagine if we had a mayor who would tell the police: "You are responsible not just for keeping order, but for respecting the rights of the citizens to express their political opinions, no matter what they are. And if you don't, you will be disciplined to the fullest extent possible."

By the way, on that same page, you can find a link to a video made by the NYT's Jim Dwyer. Cops are shown infiltrating protests, wearing anti-Bloomberg buttons. One group of cops is even arrested, only to be released soon after to infiltrate more protests. This is how they spend their time and our money--undermining our constitutional rights, building up databases of troublemakers whose political opinions they oppose?

I hope that these police officers who are now suing the police department over the surveillance at their rally spread the word. Violate the rights of any of us, and you violate the rights of all.

New York City is under attack by bedbugs, says the Times. Cute story, but did we citizen-viewers really need the kicker about a 30-year-old hairstylist who went the distance to escape her infested apartment?

Still, for Ms. Scanlan, there has been a silver lining. The night after she discovered the bugs, she went out drinking, intent on avoiding her own bed. That evening she met a man at a bar, and, contrary to her usual instincts, accompanied him to his apartment. An encounter partly born of desperation soon blossomed into something more, she said.

"We've been together ever since," Ms. Scanlan said with a smile. "Thanks to the bedbugs, I've fallen in love."

Contrary to her usual instincts? What was she planning to do, sleep under a table at the bar? First the accompaniment, then the "encounter." I love the gentility with which the Times panders these days.

(Oh, and speaking of, um, pander bears, watch the video here. Our press corps at work.)

For you, just $50 million.

I meant to comment on this a couple of weeks ago. Kristen Lombardi reported in the Village Voice:

Just two months ago, George Bush's administration offered Hillary Clinton a deal. If the New York junior senator quit blocking the president's nominee to head the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, she'd get something in return—a decision on over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill...

The senator got all the necessary assurances. Health and Human Services secretary Michael Leavitt promised in a July 13 letter that the FDA, under his oversight, "will act on this application by September 1." And Senator Michael Enzi, the Republican chair of the committee handling the nomination, on which Clinton sits, pledged to hold a hearing if the promise wasn't kept. And so Clinton, along with her colleague Patty Murray of Washington, got out of the way. Five days later, the Senate confirmed the new FDA commissioner, Lester Crawford.

Then came August 26, when Crawford announced his agency was taking "action" on the morning-after pill, or Plan B. The FDA did not do what Clinton had anticipated -- that is, unveil a ruling on whether to make Plan B available without a prescription. Instead, it indefinitely postponed any ruling.

As Lombardi reports, Clinton was outraged. She and Murray put out a statement that surely shook the administration to its very foundations.

"Based on your promise that FDA would deliver a yes or no answer by September 1, we entered into a good faith agreement and lifted our hold on the President’s nominee to head the agency," they wrote. "It is a breach of faith to have this administration give us their word that a decision would be made, and have that promise violated."

A breach of faith, they say. Is that what you call it when you agree to screw your constituents today, if they promise to screw theirs in a few months -- and then your constituents get screwed both times? What were Clinton and Murray expecting?

First of all, when you get suckered, don't publicize it. Change the subject.

Better yet, have some principles, and stick to them.