Noticing New York

Traditional Christmas Eve Revisit of a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville, the Real Life Incarnation of the Abhorred Pottersville

2011-12-24T01:46:00.018-05:00

It’s Christmas Eve, which means that it is time again to acknowledge and revisit the story of the creation of Brooklyn’s Ratnerville. It is, if you will, the real-life materialization of the bad alternative future the heavenly angel allowed the Jimmy Stewart character to see in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That film proposed that it wasn’t going to be good for the townspeople of Bedford Falls if a one single man, Mr. Potter, with a self-interested eye only on profits, was allowed to own and control the entire town. Now in Brooklyn, because Mayor Bloomberg together with state officials at the Empire State Development agency, believe in the proposition that it is good for a single self-interested Bruce Ratner to own a 50+ acre mega-monopolistic swath of Brooklyn we are seeing materialize in reality a version of that alternative reality: Instead of the movie’s “Pottersville” we have “Ratnerville” that does, indeed, embody the sort of abhorrent conditions of life looked askance at in the film.

In real life, it is the reverse of the film: The alternative reality that can only be imagined with the aid of an interceding angel is the better life that could have been brought about if what the community asked for had been pursued. That better path would have involved implementing a variation of the UNITY Plan and awarding development of multiple parcels to different competing developers based on bids.

Returning to this story is now an annual tradition for us. Here are previous Noticing New York posts on the subject from Christmas Eves past:

• Thursday, December 24, 2009
A Christmas Eve Story of Alternative Realities: The Fight Not To Go To Pottersville (Or Ratnerville)

• Friday, December 24, 2010
Revisiting a Classic Seasonal Tale: Ratnerville

What shall we add to update the story this year? What hard lumps of coal wound up in people’s stockings as 2011 gifts from Mr. Ratner? Please indulge me if the list, compiled in haste (preferring that more holiday-compatible thoughts might preoccupy us), is less than complete. We all do know, however, of a certain omniscient Mr. Oder who keeps a thorough long list of the year’s not-nice naughties. Here though are a few events worth adding this year to additionally ornament this holiday story:

• Those who were promised constructions jobs by Mr. Ratner and BUILD (effectively Ratner's subsidiary) and never received them (although they actually labored without pay in a scam) felt it appropriate to sue both the developer and BUILD: Tuesday, November 15, 2011, Lawsuit Against Forest City Ratner And The Fallacy Of Relying On A White-owned Monopoly To Create Construction Work For The Minority Community
• It looked as if because Ratner’s arena was behind schedule and/or that the schedule for construction was never reasonable to begin with, Ratner made a decision that the surrounding neighbors should suffer 24/7 work, work throughout the night and on weekends. Wednesday, September 21, 2011, Construction of the Ratner/Prokhorov (“Barclays”) Arena Is Behind Schedule. Either That, OR a 24/7 Construction Schedule Was ALWAYS Intended. That's what it looked like and it turned out that this was probably true. What the neighbors have been subjected to includes bright land-of-the-midnight-sun lights and extreme noise situations at all hours. (Photo from Atlantic Yards Watch below.)

• When the Jimmy Stewart character staggers through the snowy streets of Pottersville in “It’s a Wonderful Life” he is assaulted by the unfriendly throb of neon lights advertising the thicket of bars that have usurped what was previously a hospitable domestic scene. Noisy real life sports bars are coming to brownstone Brooklyn: Thursday, May 19, 2011, Beyond Prime 6 and the sports bar/gastropub, a 35,000 square foot entertainment center planned for Pacific at Flatbush.

• Not content that his mega-monoply is already sufficiently sprawling Ratner was busy grabbing the last vestiges of sidewalk, leaving an almost impassibly narrow sidewalk beside his arena. Wednesday, October 5, 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg In the Regalia of Queen Elizabeth I? Noticing New York’s Testimony at the DOT Hearing on Atlantic Yards Bollard Plan

• The unions and public were subjected to a scary surprise even if it is only a not-nice bluff- The rest of the mega-project might be built using unattractive, untested modular units, cutting the union’s coveted payday down to . . . What?: Friday, March 18, 2011, A Ratner Bluff on the Not-So-Fab Prefab Modulars? A Second Opinion and Friday, March 18, 2011, The Real Question to Ask About the Ratner Bait-and-Switch Approach on Atlantic Yards.

• Jay-z’s image has been Ho Ho Ho Hyping around everywhere. (Is he personally Oh-noing in secret?) Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Longing For Correcting Images to Jay-Z’s Hip-Hop Hype and Ratner’s Atlantic Yards “Strategy of Distraction”

• Ratner was proving in as many respects as possible that he presides over an unregulated and unregulatable mega-project. Friday, September 30, 2011, Could the Atlantic Yards Monopoly Be Even Less Regulated Than It Is? Why A Mega-Monopoly Continuation Isn’t Workable. Ratnerville? some of those down in the dumps are calling it Ratner Heights.

• Ratner put the community at risk by not securing his construction site before an impending hurricane- And, for perspective, compare the hefty subsidies Ratner is getting with the cost of cleaning up after that storm: Thursday, September 1, 2011, Cuomo, Asking For Help From the Feds, Announces NYS’s Toll From Irene Will Be Less Than the Public Cost of Ratner’s Atlantic Yards Mega-Monopoly.
• Ratner was conniving to pull the Brooklyn Academy of Music into his web to produce circuses in the arena that nobody wanted to call "circuses": Friday, July 1, 2011, Cultural Circus? Mr. Ratner’s Attempt to Rechristen His Arena A “Cultural Center”.

• Another gift under the Christmas tree of government function that the Ratner-Grinch helped himself to was to have a private consultant reporting to him redesign the traffic pattern for nearly the entire Borough of Brooklyn: Thursday, June 16, 2011, Sovereign Immunity, Reconfiguration of Brooklyn’s Traffic And The Peculiar Verisimilitude of Government Functions When Forest City Ratner Takes Over.

• Mr. Ratner’s troops were still distracting the public with the misguided notion that, like the magical tents in Harry Potter, the innards of his tiny arena can hold an ice skating rink large enough to host a professional hockey team, the Islanders: Thursday, April 21, 2011, Question Revisited: How Craftily Close Did Forest City Ratner Skate On Thin Ice of Securities Law Violation With Non-Promise of a Hockey Arena?

• In dark city tunnels around the time of Halloween pictures of Mr. Ratner’s arena were saying boo at you from the walls: Sunday, November 6, 2011, Rogues Gallery: The AIANY (“American Institute of Architects New York”) Subway Corridor Posters Under the IFC Center Showing “Urbanized”.

• Things were kept interesting with investigations in Mr. Ratner's neighborhood as we heard about the new situation with Senator Kruger: Friday, March 11, 2011, Lightning Keeps Striking: It Couldn’t Happen To Some More Deserving People . . Over and Over, Again- Ratner, Illegal Bribes and Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

• This was the year that we heard about how Jay-Z’s Wife, Beyoncé was amongst a small set of top entertainers to be paid large sums of money to perform for the family of now-deposed Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi (Qaddafi) on New Year’s Eve 2009 in St. Barts in the Caribbean: Wednesday, March 9, 2011, An Insert Preview - Music Superstar Ethics: How Completely You Can Sell “You can say what you say, but you are what you are.” Jay-Zzzzus!

All in all the Ratnerville story has been well ornamented by this year's events. What more can the new year bring? Almost anything. After all, who would have thought 2011 could have brought us all this?

John Liu And the Mayoral Race: We Are Confronted by A Misfortune. Can Misfortune Be Turned Aside?

2011-12-20T18:54:00.012-05:00

Who ever really knows what to expect from a politician? Almost all politicians come equipped with an extremely likeable side, a side to charm you if you just relax and enjoy it. Most often though, when we think of politicians we think of the side that brings infuriating disappointment: They convince us that they can be counted upon to do one thing and then do something quite the contrary.

If no one ever really knows what to expect, who’s to say what we could really expect were New York City Comptroller John Liu to become the next mayor of New York?

The New York Times has recently run two articles counting John Liu out of the race for mayor. One was an assessment of the entire field of candidates running for mayor written by Kate Taylor* and the other was an article that tells us a federal investigation into Liu’s fund-raising practices is continuing with an effort to hunt up more witnesses. (See: To Find the Perfect New York Mayor, Only 2 Years Left, by Kate Taylor, December 11, 2011, and More Liu Donors Said to Be Examined in Fund-Raising Inquiry, by William K. Rashbaum and David W. Chen, December 15, 2011.)

(* The Times seems to be building up Ms. Taylor’s profile with all manner of assignments, some of them rather fluffy and others, like this one, more consequential although her ability to put PR in perspective to discern an accurate big picture is not in evidence.)

The Times articles essentially evaluate as nails in the coffin of Liu’s mayoral race the federal investigation into Liu’s fund-raising. The investigation is the result of an apparently successful FBI sting operation. How bad is it?: The article about who is in the potential field of candidates for mayor doesn’t even include Liu’s picture amongst the panel depicting the panoply of contenders (see above).

If the sting operation succeeds in knocking Liu out of the race it will be unfortunate from the standpoint of Noticing New York's family of concerns in one respect: As the collection of alternative candidates considered in the December 11th Times article emphasizes, no one else likely to run is likely to pose the same threat to the Bloombergian real estate industry-dominated status quo as John Liu. The threat Liu presents to that established order calling the shots in this city is best judged by his record. As a member of the City Council Liu stood out as part of a small minority willing to reject the dictates of Bloomberg’s Quinn (serving as Speaker of the City Council): He voted in a principled manner on projects such as the irredeemably tainted Walentas Dock Street project. As City Comptroller he continued to take on Bloomberg when almost nobody else did.

It is difficult to say for sure what exactly a Liu-as-mayor future would hold because politicians don’t come with guarantees but the other candidates who don’t have Liu’s record aren’t even offering politicians' promises to change the business-as-usual prominence that real estate money gets in this city. If those candidates were, it would contradict their records.

None of this is to endorse the kind of improper fund-raising the FBI sting operation caught the Liu campaign in. It was improper. The Liu campaign was caught taking larger-than-permitted campaign contributions from one individual and then fictitiously ascribing those contributions to multiple other individuals so as to ostensibly come within the per donor contribution limits. If you want to know what I suspect about the way the FBI sting was structured (which is to say it's not what I actually can claim to know), my guess is that the FBI had information leading it to believe that the Liu campaign might already have been engaging in some sort of similar “bundling” practice so that they expected that the campaign would go along when an FBI agent posing as a political donor proposed to structure his contribution in this way. The FBI may now be looking for other witnesses, hoping to show that the result of the sting operation was reflective of a pattern.

Campaigns ought not to engage in such tactics to raise money. As far as we know, during the last mayoral campaign Tony Avella, similarly a foe of the real estate industry’s domination of the local politics, ran a clean fund-raising campaign. He also raised virtually no money when he ran for the Democratic Party nomination, which is why we wound up with Bill Thompson as the Democratic candidate for mayor.

Any candidate running against the real estate powers-that-be in this city is facing an uphill battle in terms of fund-raising. That's because of the outsized value of political favors that are routinely handed out to the big fish in the real estate industry here.* Consequently, a huge amount of money pours in to those who will play this game and not upset this applecart. It's true that wealthy real estate industry executives are similarly subject to limits on the campaign contributions they make but they can get around those limits by having their highly paid employees also contribute to candidates. This can be accomplished, for instance, by having an appreciable portion of bonuses to a number of employees flow right through to a campaign in one nice big bundle. It’s a monied industry so it all adds up very fast.

(* It is worth noting that self-interested political donations from large industries are typically driven by what in economic terms is described as "rent seeking" which means that those making the donations are interested in government handouts for which the donating entities will give the public the least possible in return.)

Does this bundling sound a lot like the prohibited conduct the Liu campaign got stung for? Yes, it does. It is similar and if a real estate boss flowed bonuses to his employees with an overt enforceable directive that all or some of those funds be forwarded as campaign contributions to an identified candidate it would be tantamount to the same thing. Not only that, it would also be illegal. Illegal, yes, but it would be harder to prove and harder to catch in a sting operation. Besides, even if they are not the directing bosses, those who are highly paid in the real estate industry don’t have to be made subject to a directive to understand why it is in their interest to make contributions to those certain candidates likely to bestow benefit upon their companies.

Real estate executives can also send bundles of contributions that exceed the limits to which they are subject as individuals by having family members make campaign contributions. Or they can send funds to a national or central campaign rather than to the campaigns of the particular candidate for whom they have reached their personal donation limit. Handled the right way they will still get credit for future real estate-oriented political favors.

The Times article on the potential field of mayoral candidates in the same sentence that dismissed Liu as politically crippled mentioned that mayoral “hopeful” Anthony D. Weiner was sidelined by scandal. Weiner with his famous tweeted underwear photos (and more important his deceitful denials on the subject) clearly brought himself down, but it also clear that Weiner was targeted when he was brought down, not because he was running for mayor, but because it was valuable for the national Republicans to bring the congressman down. On national issues like healthcare and tax and budget issues Weiner had a spine and a sharp intellect and a sharp tongue. Noticing New York was never likely to have supported Weiner for mayor: Mattering less than the idiosyncrasy of his sex life (though his stupid and dishonest disavowal was very bad) would have been that Weiner did not oppose Atlantic Yards (a critical touchstone for all NYC politicians) and was against bike lanes.

Perhaps the Times article did not need to mention (as it didn't) that also viewed as politically sidelined is another mayoral “hopeful” of the past: Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. One of the things assisting this safely sidelining of Mr. Markowtiz was the Times own front page story this October about Markowitz's questionable practices when it comes to campaigning and fund-raising; he runs four charities that operate like political campaigns and real estate developers like Forest City Ratner (the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly supported by Markowitz) pay into them. See: From Brooklyn Office, Mixing Clout and Charity, by Liz Robbins and Alison Leigh Cowan, October 24, 2011.

That October article mentioned that Markowitz “is considering running for mayor in 2013.” Why did the article run when it did? Norman Order in Atlantic Yards Report noted that the Times incorrectly asserted that:

Mr. Markowitz’s role in fund-raising for his nonprofit groups has gone virtually unquestioned.

According to Mr. Oder's correction in his first article on the subject:

No, it hasn't. It has gone virtually unquestioned by the Times. The New York Daily News (9/15/08), the Brooklyn Paper (9/18/08), and the New York Post (10/10/08) were all on this topic three years ago, albeit not in such a thorough manner.

Noticing New York also provided such coverage: Monday, October 20, 2008, “Charity?” We Begin to Groan. That article also noted how City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was caught around the time of her first campaign for mayor using fake charities to route money for political purposes. (Just a few years later she’s now considered a front-runner in the 2013 race.) More important, however, the article described interrelationships between Markowitz’s charities and Bloomberg-controlled charities (Markowitz’s charities get money from the Bloomberg ones) and similarities between what Markowitz does with his charities and Bloomberg does with his.

In a follow-up Atlantic Yards Report article about the Times front page Markowitz story Norman Oder observed, referring back to Noticing New York coverage:

Yes, the Times article focused on real estate firms and businesses that had reason to seek Markowitz's favor.

However, it omitted, curiously, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who's known for an even more elaborate and sophisticated charity strategy, as Noticing New York's Michael D. D. White has extensively analyzed.

Mr. Oder also offers his thinking that the timing of the Times Markowtiz article can perhaps be explained as an effort to sideline Markowtiz as a mayoral candidate:

Perhaps this article had been in long gestation.

Or maybe it was goosed by supporters of a political rival aiming to ensure that Markowitz, hardly an aggressive campaigner for 2013, stays out of the mayoral race.

Any effort to sideline Markowitz would not be motivated by the fact that Markowtiz doesn’t support the real estate industry. He is certainly an indefatigable supporter of Atlantic Yards in the face of any and all inconvenient facts. The reason to sideline the hyperactive, hyper-promotional Mr. Markowitz is that he is a lose cannon who can't be taken seriously: He's so perpetually a promoter that like Spinal Tap's fabled volume amplifier dials the only way he can surmount his own din is by assigning volumes equivalent to "eleven" and beyond to a scale that tops out at ten.

The Times article about Markowitz engages in a frequent Times stylistic device: It walks right up to the line of proclaiming that something wrong in local politics is illegal and then doesn’t cross it.

Though the Times clearly used the New York City Conflict of Interest Board as a resource to write the Markowitz article it did not in that article communicate the rule that it is illegal for a political official to require a donation to a charity in connection with that individuals’ exercise of a discretionary act by them as a public official. In other words it is illegal to bribe a public official and you can’t get around that rule by taking a bribe in the form of a donation to a charity you identify. The Times article doesn’t communicate that rule but it implies that it is there and that Markowitz has not broken it only in “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” terms.

The article quotes one Markowitz statement that “there was no quid pro quo here” and includes his denials “that there was any connection between donations and his role as borough president” by virtue of which conceptual separations (to the extent they can validly exist) allow Councilwoman Letitia James to say of the Atlantic Yards mega-project (which she opposes) “He [Markowtiz] is taking advantage of a loophole in the law.” (According to the Times article: “Forest City is one of the biggest contributors to Mr. Markowitz’s charities, having given approximately $1.7 million.”) The Times reports that Markowitz, discounting connections, “brushed aside questions about whether donors might feel compelled to give because of his political influence.”

At the same time the Times reports (not speaking specifically about Atlantic Yards) that donors “recalled that he [Markowitz] was relentless, seemingly unable to take no for an answer” and that one donor said “He took my arm and twisted it off — yeah, he more than asked me, he kept coming at me, until finally I said yes.” The intermixes all of this this with accounts of situations where it certainly looks as if well-timed donations went along with Markowitz taking positions favorable to the real estate industry donors, including a Markowitz change in stance on Wal-Mart after a bundle of $150,000 donations from Wal-Mart executives.

You may not believe Markowitz when he is quoted in the Times article as saying, “I am not pitching them to give me money, and me in turn give them anything,” but so long as you can’t prove it wrong you might not have a provable violation of the law however close it may be. Is anyone thinking of an FBI sting operation for this purpose? Maybe not even a sting operation; maybe just a few wiretaps or subpoenaed e-mails instead?

The problem is that deciding to go after Markowitz on this one would raise the Bloomberg question. The Times article flings aside the Bloomberg question somewhat casually, literally with a parenthetical: “Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a billionaire, has his own charity that does extensive work in the city, but it is largely self-financed.” “Largely,” maybe (if you don't look at who Bloomberg sells his terminals to) but charitable donations to Bloomberg’s East River art project, Waterfalls, came in from real estate developers with whom the city was doing business, including, again, Atlantic Yard’s Forest City Ratner. And that is just the beginning of the problematic ways in which Bloomberg’s charities are politically used.

Returning to the topic with which we began, the weakening of John Liu as a candidate for mayor as a result of the FBI sting targeting his improper fund-raising techniques: It’s unfortunate that John Liu’s campaign staff didn’t stick to proper procedures to raise money. It’s unfortunate that when the FBI ran a sting operation the Liu campaign got caught doing the wrong thing. It’s unfortunate that the result is that the candidate who was perhaps most likely to usher in change and counter the influence of the real estate industry may have been weakened as a result of the successful sting operation. It’s unfortunate that challenging the real estate industry and raising money to run against candidates financed by the real estate industry is such an uphill, lopsided battle. It’s also unfortunate that a great deal of what is making that battle so uphill and so lopsided involves practices by which the real estate industry contributes huge sums to politicians. It’s unfortunate that these real estate industry practices are permitted without challenge.
(Above, Liu at a local Brooklyn fund-raiser.)

If Liu’s campaign has, as it appears, been weakened, it’s unfortunate because I have limited personal resources to donate to politicians who I think may effectively oppose the real estate industry and I am one of the ones who chose to make a donation to the Liu campaign. (My resources were limited enough so that I was not able to donate up to the full amount of the permissible limit.) If Liu’s campaign is weakened by this FBI sting then it is clear that the limited resources I donated with this cause in mind may go less far as a result. That means my voice is weakened. Although donations to Liu’s campaign may now not go as far as before I am still thinking that I may donate more money to Liu’s campaign in the future. What are my alternatives?

Who ever really knows what to expect from a politician? I am not 100% certain about what to expect from John Liu if he surmounts his present adversity to becomes mayor but it is possible that the real estate industry thought they had a fairly good idea of what to expect from Liu and did not want to see him mayor. Admittedly, that’s a bit of a conspiracy theory about why Liu might have been investigated but it goes along with the question as to why other politicians haven’t been investigated.

Tough Luck: Heads the Developer Wins, Tails the Public Loses. . Unprincipled Upzoning for Rudin Luxury Apartments at Former St. Vincent’s Site

2011-12-13T09:25:00.006-05:00

Below is Noticing New York's testimony furnished yesterday to the City Planning Commission in connection with Rudin Management Company's proposed special upzoning of a portion of the Greenwich Village Historic district so that the company may construct a larger luxury residential condominium tower than otherwise permitted. The testimony concerning the request that involves a history of events that very significantly includes the bankruptcy and ultimate demise of the St. Vincent's Hospital is self-explanatory.

* * * *

December 12, 2011

Amanda Burden
Chair, New York City Planning Commission
22 Reade Street
New York, NY 10007
via e-mail to aburden@planning.nyc.gov

Re: ULURP application for Rudin Management Company’s proposed rezoning of the former St. Vincent’s hospital campus
Dear Ms. Burden:

I am writing with respect to the above referenced proposal before the Commission to allow Rudin Management Company to privately benefit by side-stepping zoning that requires a lower of residential development for its above referenced site and applying to itself instead a special upzoning intended exclusively for the development of hospital buildings because of the public purpose they serve.

This comment is being offered in the name of Noticing New York, dedicated to the insistence on good economic development policies in New York and the proposition that developing New York and appreciating New York must go hand in hand. I offer this testimony as an attorney experienced in real estate, as an urban planner and as former senior government official who worked for more than a quarter of century in the areas of public finance and development for the state’s finance authorities.

For my testimony before the commission I am restating my testimony before the September 15th Community Board 2 hearing, below.

I am also attaching and including as part of my testimony to you the article I wrote about that hearing and my testimony, together with a follow-up article I wrote concerning public hearings for big New York real estate projects:

• Wednesday, November 2, 2011, Big Politically-Connected Real Estate Projects: Ignoring The Public Majority With Futile “Participatory Democracy” Hearing Process.

• Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Public Hearings For Big Real Estate Projects: Refining Your Sense of the Absurd.

I invite you, in order to appreciate the bigger picture, not only to read these articles but also to visit it where it is posted on the web so as to make full use of all the amplifying interior links it makes available. One thing the articles make clear is how completely and rightly opposed to the Rudin proposal the community is although it is acknowledged that there is very little likelihood that the Commission will be listening to the salient points that we or the community make. - - Nevertheless, I invite you to prove me wrong by turning down the Rudin proposal.

This testimony I am furnishing will also appear on the web with links.

I am also expanding my testimony to compare and contrast the testimony furnished in connection with this matter by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (consistent with Noticing New York’s) and the testimony furnished by the Municipal Art Society of New York (inadequate as will be discussed). That comparison and contrast follows the restatement of Noticing New York’s Community Board hearing testimony below.

Noticing New York’s September 15th Community Board 2 Hearing Testimony

• Why do we even need to be here to consider this question?

• The Rudin/St. Vincent’s real estate deal was a very complicated shell game designed to cash in using the hospital’s 501 (c) (3) status in order to upzone (and essentially sell off) a portion of historic Greenwich Village for the benefit of a private real estate developer. That was a bad thing and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted other 501(c)(3)s to follow suit notwithstanding that there were some who favored this as a way to subsidize the hospital at the expense of the integrity of the zoning code and landmark preservation law.

• The shell game failed when St. Vincent’s failed. One lesson that can be taken away from that failure is that with all the complicated rigamarole and professional energy being put into that subterfuge the eye had been taken off the ball- - In basic terms, the hospital for whom all this bending of the rules was being done was not being properly managed.

• The moral is to stick to basics, to keep your eye on doing right what needs to be done. In this case, it’s a question of proper and consistent enforcement and administration of the zoning code. You can’t get pulled off course by shenanigans.

• If Greenwich Village needs to be upzoned then thought needs to be given to doing that in a thoughtful way throughout the community as a whole.

• You can’t hand out a special up-zoning as a consolation prize when a developer fails to pull off what was a fairly nefarious deal to begin with.

I believe that the testimony furnished by Andrew Berman as Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation accords significantly with Noticing New York’s criticism of this proposal because it focuses on the “particularly profound” issue of principle that is proposed to be violated if this proposal is approved by your commission. And that is why it quite rightly references the unleashing of the free-for-all, Wild West, open-Pandora’s Box situation we will be in if your commission does not adhere to principle. To quote from the Berman testimony:

Our fundamental, overriding concern with the requested rezoning is that a private developer, seeking to construct luxury housing on the site, is seeking an upzoning, using the current zoning density which was allowed specifically for the construction of a hospital in 1979, as the baseline for the new allowable density. This is wrong, not just for this site, but for the city as a whole. If the increased density granted for the development of public service facilities, such as hospitals, can, in whole or in part, as proposed here, be used by private, for-profit developers in the future, we are opening a deeply troubling Pandora’s Box with profound potential consequences for the entire city. If the City Planning Commission approves such a change, it is in fact putting in place a tremendous incentive to allow greater density of development for public service facilities which can later be exploited by private developers when the facility no longer exists, is forced out, or is bought out.

That issue of principle is really the whole of it: Private developer Rudin should not have conferred upon it private benefit from the extra density which was granted to St. Vincent's in order to meet a public purpose that will now not be met and with which the Rudin development has absolutely NO connection. If there is one respect in which Noticing New York’s testimony perhaps diverges from GVSP’s testimony above it is to be absolutely clear that the bamboozling shell game that was played initially was wrong and unprincipled and would have remained so even had St. Vincent’s Hospital not gone bankrupt in the course of the confused misdirection of focus.

That issue of principle zeroed in upon by the testimony that the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation provided is not only the essential whole of it, it is also the hole in the doughnut of the testimony provided by the Municipal Art Society: Somehow MAS manages to provide testimony that dances around and so doing leaves at its core a void of unaddressed principle. In so doing, it consigns itself to irrelevance by suggesting that everything now is about playing a standard developer’s game of negotiating collateral prettifications when principles are violated to seize the public realm and override basics such as zoning. By engaging in those negotiations everything becomes a matter of mere degree and all track is ultimately lost of what is fair and balanced. In retrospect when all is said and done and some ersatz “compromise” is achieved, who will remember how much MAS “won” of what it “fought” for. All that will be remembered is that MAS simply participated in trotting out a familiar list of things that politically-connected developers like to negotiate about as distracting eyewash when they ride roughshod over rules and protections: affordable housing, a little bit of park space, reduced parking.

This is not to say that the huge amount of parking Rudin is proposing to introduce into Greenwich Village via this single project isn’t ludicrous: It would certainly destroy the neighborhood to introduce it as the norm. Affordable housing and park space are also nice but they shouldn’t be introduced into conversations like this as distractions that disguise the importance of what is going on.

In its testimony MAS invokes its past: “Throughout all of our work, MAS has long history of engagement in Greenwich Village.” But without guts to take on the flouting of principle, is MAS really the same MAS it was in the past?

Here is a clue: Elsewhere in its testimony MAS mentions an earlier fight, partly won and (not acknowledged) partly lost, praising, I think inappropriately, the work of its current Chairman, architect David Childs, brought in to complete both the Time Warner Center and the Freedom Tower:

In 1987, we lead the fight to scale back a proposal for a massive tower on the site of the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle, thus leading to the creation of one of New York’s most iconic buildings, the Time Warner Center.

The commission may conceive that pragmatism is the thing that is providing the counterweight to principle as it considers this matter. That is not the case. Pragmatism isn’t what is rearing its head here; what we are witnessing is crony capitalism.

After the 2008 financial crisis people were frequently observing that we no longer have functioning capitalism in this society and that we no longer have a level playing field. What we have now instead is crony capitalism. In this regard people noted that with the government bailout of the banks after the risks undertaken by the banks soured, what we got was a privatization of profit with a socialization of risk. The proposed Rudin plan is essentially a version of this page from the crony capitalism game book.

A Rudin masterminded shell game was being played. It was very complicated and not truly defensible. But to recap, the idea was that St. Vincent’s Hospital’s 501 (c) (3) status would be used in order to upzone (and essentially sell off) a portion of historic Greenwich Village for the benefit of a private real estate developer. As inappropriate, unprincipled and unfair as it was, everything was predicated upon a new St. Vincent’s Hospital being created and that hospital being subsidized via an infusion of some of the cash value of selling off a portion of the Greenwich Village Historic District. That plan had certain inherent risks, one of them being the risk that materialized. . . that the hospital would fail. Obviously, our argument is also that the Rudin plan may have contributed to that failure even without that being its intention.

When the risks of the Rudin plan materialized the plan should have ended. Instead, the proposal now before the commission is to rescue Rudin from the materialization of risk inherent in a plan of Rudin’s own design. The private sector will be protected and rescued by the government sector. At the same time there will be no public benefit from a hospital; there will be no government sector rescue of the public in this regard.

The only reason to protect Rudin by salvaging this deal now that the original shell game has collapsed (with no hospital being provided) is that Mr. Rudin is a member of the politically-connected 1% Club. That is the way that crony capitalism works, as will be demonstrated by the commission if it approves this proposal.

Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

Testimony at Department of Environmental Conservation’s 11/30 Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): The LONG and the SHORT of It

2011-12-06T14:31:00.007-05:00

(Above, evening hearing attendees in the 900 seat auditorium)

I presented Noticing New York and National Notice testimony last Wednesday when the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation held a day’s worth of afternoon and evening hearings in Manhattan concerning Governor Cuomo's proposal to start allowing High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing, aka “Fracking,” in New York for the first time by lifting the current moratorium under which it is effectively banned. The next day I posted my testimony about introduction to the state of that new, still largely untested technology here at Noticing New York while promising that I would update the post to include an account of those hearings (with pictures) together with substantial amplification of the points in the testimony presented (which testimony appears again below). As of yesterday those updates were available, see: Thursday, December 1, 2011, Wednesday’s Department of Environmental Conservation Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): Noticing New York’s Testimony Plus. .

(People lined up after me Wednesday morning to get into DEC's first hearing, the afternoon hearing on introducing the new technology of fracking to New York state.)

If you want to read an account of the hearing (almost everyone spoke against fracking) that is more thorough than you will find elsewhere, along with a comprehensive discussion of just how important the concerns are that the state is facing, click on the above link to read that updated article. But if you are interested in just the tantalizing pith of things you can confine yourself to reading the testimony I provided below. In one sense this is the “short” of it.

(Above, DEC hearing officials, DEC’s Deputy Counsel Russo and hearing officer on far right, ready to give a limited number of speakers three minutes apiece.)

The testimony is organized to highlight in just three minutes (the total time permitted speakers testifying) the breadth of devastation the state faces if this poisoning technology is introduced to the state. (If video of my testimony becomes available I will update this post to link to it.) But, as reading the much longer article I have made available will make clear, three minutes is hardly adequate to consider all the dire facts in full. Therefore the other article is, in one sense, the “long” of it.

In another sense the “long” and “short” of it is this . . . If permitted, the facking industry with its predicted financial collapse will likely be in and then out of the state in a very short period of time, during which it will do an unbelievable amount of environmental damage, that being the “short” of it. But the incredible destruction besetting New York State as a result, including the destruction of the state’s increasingly more precious drinking water and water richness, will last for thousands of years, and that’s the “long” of it.

Happy reading, whichever of these articles you have time for.

Testimony of Noticing New York and National Notice

Here is our own testimony supplied at the afternoon hearing.

November 30, 2011

New York State
Department of Environmental Conservation
625 Broadway
Albany, New York 12233-6510

Re: November 30, 2011- Hearing Regarding High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing SGEIS

Dear Department of Environmental Conservation:

This comment is being offered in the name of Noticing New York, and National Notice, independent entities dedicated to insistence on good economic development policies in New York and the nation as a whole.

I offer this testimony as an attorney experienced in real estate, as an urban planner and as former senior government official who worked for more than a quarter of century in the areas of public finance and development for the state’s finance authorities.

1. With the introduction of fracking New York State is about to suffer a colossal hit and run at the hands of the fossil fuel industry.

2. Most hit and runs are accidents. Not this one. This one comes at us premeditated and well financed.

3. When I was in government my departing boss left me in charge of the legal department for my agencies with a critical piece of advice: “Just because someone tells you that you have to make a decision immediately, don’t think you have to: You’ll be better off waiting.” Indeed, I knew from experience negotiating hundreds of deals: When someone is trying to rush you to make a decision the rush is going to be to their benefit and your detriment.

4. There are reasons the fracking companies want to do their dirty work fast:
a. They want to get in before people realize how extraordinarily damaging fracking will be to the environment, (most of that damage is very long term and too much of it, like leaking wells, won’t show up immediately: 5% of new wells leak but 50% leak eventually), and

b. They are aware that fracking, even though it was just invented, is about to be an obsolete technology. I refer you to economist Paul Krugman’s recent [November 6, 2011] “Here Comes the Sun” column for two propositions:
∙ That if the fracking industry were forced to internalize its huge external detriments and cost to the public it is probably not economic now, and
∙ Solar cell technology is advancing so fast that even without that internalization fracking will soon be uneconomic anyway.
5. Virtually no corner of the state will be unaffected by fracking’s external costs:
a. Decades of water pollution, poisoning:
∙ essential underground drinking water acquirers, and
∙ drinking water in rivers and streams- water treatment facilities will be wrecked.
b. Massive quantities of water usurpation
c. Radiation poisoning in the form of released radium and radon (lasting for thousands of years).
d. Earthquakes and instability of the land.
e. Significant poisonous air pollution.
f. Release of carcinogens.
g. Greenhouse gas pollution releasing climate change-causing carbon that was safely sequestered for 400 million years.
6. There is a sales pitch about economic benefits but fracking is a resource extraction economy that builds up no long-term benefit compensating for the damage it will leave in its wake or the businesses it will drive out.

7. Some might say the fracking companies want to get started before the science on this brand new technology is in. I’d suggest they want to get started before the science that’s already in gets out.

8. Fracking is too destructive to be permitted at all but it certainly should not be permitted without significant protections not now in place or proposed, including:
a. Prohibitions on confidentiality covenants that prohibit the true facts from getting out, and
b. Lessor remorse covenants that allow landowners to terminate lessees upon the unveiling of any misrepresentations of science or facts by the industries.

Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

PS: Attached are two of the articles I have written about the proposal to allow high-volume hydraulic fracturing, both of which are available on the web:

∙ Monday, November 21, 2011, Fracking Double Whammy: New York Loses Two Aces In The Hole When Confronting Climate Change (i.e.Weather Weirding/Global Warming)

∙ Friday, July 29, 2011, Conundrum: If Gov. Andrew Cuomo Traded The Moratorium on Hydrofracking To Get Gay Marriage Would That Be Good Or a Bad Thing?

(Hazmat suited protester. The first thing many saw approaching the hearing location)

Wednesday’s Department of Environmental Conservation Hearings on High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (“Fracking”): Noticing New York’s Testimony Plus. .

2011-12-01T17:39:00.014-05:00

(People lined up after me Wednesday morning to get into DEC's first hearing, the afternoon hearing on introducing the new technology of fracking to New York state.)

I attended last Wednesday’s New York State Department of Environmental Conservation hearings at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center at 199 Chambers Street (adjacent to the Borough of Manhattan Community College). I also provided my Noticing New York and National Notice testimony.

I can give you a full report covering all of what was an extended day. I would have had to plan a lot better if I had just wanted to get there, testify and leave as quickly as possible. Arriving at 11:30, I was not unable to register early enough to succeed in testifying during the afternoon hearing which started at 1:00 and concluded slightly late at about 4:15. Not realizing quickly that I had to re-register to speak at the evening hearing (beginning 6:00 PM) I didn’t wind up actually delivering my testimony until about 9:00 PM and that was close to the bitter end of things as the second hearing was scheduled to conclude at 9:00 PM.

(Hazmat suited protester. The first thing many saw approaching the hearing location)

More Than 100 Speakers Testifying; More 100 Speakers Testifying Against

(Early crowd- front part- waiting to get in to the evening hearing)

The opposition to fracking was so great that the hearing was almost more like a rally against high-volume hydraulic fracturing than a hearing about whether and how it should be introduced into New York State. (Hereafter, we will refer to this recently invented technology as “fracking” for simplicity’s sake and in order to make this comprehensive article a fraction shorter. More than a hundred speakers testified at the two hearings while I was there and of all the speakers, including a number of elected representative, more than a hundred spoke against fracking, virtually all of them advocating an outright ban.

4 ½ Speakers In Favor of Fracking

Of all the speakers who testified while I was there only 4 ½ spoke in favor of fracking. I will give those 4 ½ individuals their due first:

• One was a round man in a grey suit who could have been a time travel visitor from the 1950's who said he worked for an electric company.

• Another was a Christmas tree farm owner from the Syracuse area who said that he believed the oil and gas companies were already commendably being good neighbors and providing jobs in the area with their current activities. I couldn’t help wondering why, if that was so, it was envisioned as necessary for the companies to expand into fracking, which is so qualitatively different that it bears no relation to any existing activity.

• A rumpled man who said he was a scientist and who, as we shall discuss later, advocated, as per a standard fracking industry theme, that facking should be used to produce gas as a “transitional fuel.”

• A nerdy reader suggesting that he was the only one who had actually read through details of the very thick documents concerning prospective environmental impacts and the possible regulation of them. “Nerdy” is not meant to be derogatory in this context. You have to be “nerdy,” like us, to spend time reading these kinds of documents. You are also unlikely to read what is in them or try to find your way through to what they actually mean unless you are driven by a certain passion. I found myself wondering because I could not perceive what passion had driven this gentleman to undertake all this reading or to alight on certain passages in all this dense and turgid prose which for certain technical reasons he thought were helpful to the fracking industry. Immediately after speaking he sat down with two other people in the audience, seemingly supportive friends or family. Shortly after that they all got up and left together.

You may wonder why I say there was a “half” speaker favoring fracking. My “half” person was the following:

• There was a young gentleman full of energy who explained that he was the owner of a technology company. He spoke in favor of allowing fracking with the proviso that the technology of his company be used and required by Department of Environmental (DEC) regulation to address certain risks. He explained that using his company’s brand new technology, which he described as “elegant,” was the only way that radioactive poisons could be kept underground when fracking occurred.

All of the people speaking in favor of fracking together with this last mentioned technology company owner encountered angry booing when they spoke resulting in the hearing officer halting the 3-minute clock to allow them to resume speaking when quiet resumed. In the case of the technology owner’s testimony, the booing may have been quite counterproductive because what he was spending his time describing, the need to keep some released and scary sounding radioactive substances from ever coming to the surface, made him sound more like he was supporting the case against fracking than speaking in favor of it. Whether the booing (which certainly lacked decorum by conventional measures) was productive or not requires some balancing: Certainly, it reflects justified anger. It also caused delays and shortened the amount of time to give others a chance to speak out with strong rational and very informed arguments against fracking.

Rather Like an Anti-Fracking Rally, Really

As the entire very crowded event seemed more like a rally against fracking than anything else I felt less deprived when I was informed by a brown uniformed DEC enforcement officer that I was not being allowed to attend the opponent-sponsored press conference preceding the hearing as I had planned (and arrived early) to attend. At the press conference a number of people spoke, including representatives of environmental groups, elected officials, documentary film maker Josh Fox ("Gasland") and actors Mark Ruffalo and Deborah Winger. Fox and Ruffalo also testified at the hearing.

(Ruffalo testifying below)

Free Speech Curbed

“We are net letting anyone else go to the press conference,” said the DEC officer in his brown police-style uniform.

“So you are saying that the First Amendment isn’t going to apply here?” I asked.

“Right,” said the officer.

This business of authorities in charge doing more and more about telling us who can speak where, when and how effectively and also who can listen is something I have been writing a lot about recently. (And the theme gets picked up again in amplifications appearing near the end of this article.)

I did not make an issue about the officer turning me away. I slightly hoped that going into the auditorium immediately might ensure I could speak sooner (it didn’t). I could have made the point that I was press. I did not. Technically, I believe that writing for Noting New York and National Notice I qualify as press although I am not what is refereed to as “credentialed press.” Although New York Times media journalist David Carr says that he would only let his credentialing “press pass” be pried out of his cold dead hands I have never wanted to apply for these “credentials.” They are issued miserly and discriminatoryly by NYC government and are not a true qualifier for who is press. I probably would not have needed “credentials” to persuade the officer to let me cover the press conference but I also have a certain philosophy about seeing things from the standpoint of the general public without exerting special privilege.

The Need For Good Coverage By The Press

One problem with this philosophy: It means that for a lot of reporting we are too much at the mercy of the “credentialed press” when understanding current events. As will be made clear from some of the amplifying material I am providing following the print version of my testimony that appears, the credentialed press cannot always be relied upon to do a good job, including the New York Times. Thankfully, with respect to its coverage of the threat of fracking the New York Times has been doing a lot of remarkably good journalism.

Here is New York Times coverage of Wednesday’s hearing: November 30, 2011,
Chants, Boos and Celebrities at a Hearing on Fracking, By Mireya Navarro

Here is WYNC coverage: WNYC News, City Says Fracking May Compromise Water Supply
Wednesday, November 30, 2011, By Ilya Marritz. Click below to listen to WNYC’s audio broadcast covering the hearing.

In WNYC’s broadcast you can hear Alex Greenleaf singing his testimonial comment which may be a pretty good way of holding yourself to the 3 minute time limit that was given for testimony.

Another speaker who did something similar when he testified (and also timed things well to come in under the thee-minute limit) chose to `amplify’ his voice with more than the microphone provided: As he spoke, audience members all around the auditorium who had copies of his statement arose to speak it out in unison, reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street’s “mike checks.” I heard reports that Occupy Wall Street’s mike check was used by Josh Fox at the press conference I (and many others) were not allowed to attend.

Hundreds Seeking to Speak: A Filled Auditorium

(Evening hearing. Front rows reserved for DEC and elected officials. Below, views from two other vantages.)
By my count, approximately 60 speakers spoke at the afternoon hearing without getting to the end of list I know not how long. It was announced at the beginning of the evening hearing that 125 members of the public had signed up to speak and they were allowing additional others to do so. The auditorium was pretty well packed throughout the hearings, particularly in the evening when nearly every seat of the auditorium (a reported 900 seats) was filled. When I spoke, close to 9:00 PM, I was by my count the 48th to give testimony. I know the hearing ran past its scheduled ending time but it was obvious that without running way into night only a minor portion of those wishing to speak were going to be heard.

Electeds Testified

(State Senator Tom Duane testifying above)

The speakers included elected representatives who were given priority. There were more of them at the afternoon session: State Senators Tony Avella, Liz Krueger, Bill Perkins, Tom Duane, State Assembly members Richard Gottfried, Jim Brennan, and Linda Rosenthal and City Council Member James F. Gennaro. State Senator Velmanette Montgomery and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer spoke in the evening. I believe I am leaving out one or more speakers sent to speak on behalf of City Council Members, but you get the point.

I met another elected official, City Council member Steve Levin, as I was in line to go into the evening hearing. I quipped with him that he should read my testimony instead of me as there were so many people waiting to testify and they were giving priority to elected officials. As it was, he departed and as far as I know never did go inside to testify. Upon returning home, I was dismayed to discover that the previous night Levin had made use of his time by being the only elected official to join Bruce Ratner and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz in their Metrotech Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Merely to show up at such an event is to support Ratner’s government-assisted eminent domain abuse-fueled 1% style mega-monopoly in Brooklyn, which accounts for the dearth of politicians appearing there.

Cuomo As Another Elected

(Nearly full size Cuomo image in line waiting to get into the afternoon hearing.)

There was one non-present elected representative to whom everyone in the room was paying a lot of attention, the one who was running the show: Governor Andrew Cuomo. There was a pervasive worry that Cuomo was fixated about issuing permits to frack as soon as he could. About the only way perceived to pull him back from the brink was something else people were talking a lot about: How fracking ought to interfere with his presidential aspirations (and as one woman speaking said, even his aspirations for a second term as governor).

New York’s Leadership

Several speakers brought up the subject of New York’s leadership. Going back to the era of Teddy Roosevelt New York has always been a leader in protecting its environment. The fossil fuel industry’s purpose in targeting New York so strenuously for an overturn of its environmental protections likely has a particularly insidious aspect to it: If the industry can sell despoliation in New York it can by “spreadin’ the news” parlay that into a sales pitch for fracking anywhere else in the country. A sort of “New York, New York” refrain mentality: “If I can frack it there, I'll frack it anywhere, It's up to you, New York, New York.”

The alternative is for New York to continue to the be the kind of environmental leader it has always been by being the first state to ban fracking.

“Report Environmental Crimes”

("Report Environmental Crimes": click to enlarge)

A defining moment of the hearing came when one fellow testifying noted in his testimony that brown police car-style DEC automobiles lined up on the street outside the entrance of the hearing all had a DEC motto stenciled on their sides:“Report environmental crimes.” The gentleman really didn’t need to say anything more. Recognition of the perspicacity of his comment spread throughout the auditorium, putting it in an uproar of laughs, hoots, hollers and gasps of disbelief because all of us there knew in that instant that this was exactly what we were truly there for: In our testimony we were all reporting an environmental crime. In fact, that’s the way I already had my testimony written. I was reporting it as a crime in the making, a “hit and run.”
(Above, "Report Environmental Crimes," Special Phone number: 1-800-TIPPDEC or 1-800-847-7332)

My testimony on the subject follows (which I also handed in in writing with attachments linked to in this article). Moving briskly I delivered it within the three-minute deadline. Following that testimony below I am continuing this article with substantial written amplification of most of my testimony’s points and in the course of doing so I provide more coverage of the hearing by referring to points covered by others.

If and when I become aware of any available video of my testimony on the web I will link to it and perhaps insert it in this post. I tried to deliver it with an impact that would give Ruffalo a run for his money.

Deadline for Submitting Written Testimony Extended to January 12, 2012

One last thing I should note before getting on to my testimony: The big news announced at the beginning of the hearing is that the deadline for submitting written testimony was extended (as of last week) from December 12th to January 12th. Everyone should consider taking the opportunity to submit testimony.

(Map of Marcellus Shale from Geology.com. Click on this or any other image in this post to enlarge.)

Testimony of Noticing New York and National Notice

Here then is our own testimony supplied at the afternoon hearing.

November 30, 2011

New York State
Department of Environmental Conservation
625 Broadway
Albany, New York 12233-6510

Re: November 30, 2011- Hearing Regarding High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing SGEIS

Dear Department of Environmental Conservation:

This comment is being offered in the name of Noticing New York, and National Notice, independent entities dedicated to insistence on good economic development policies in New York and the nation as a whole.

I offer this testimony as an attorney experienced in real estate, as an urban planner and as former senior government official who worked for more than a quarter of century in the areas of public finance and development for the state’s finance authorities.

1. With the introduction of fracking New York State is about to suffer a colossal hit and run at the hands of the fossil fuel industry.

2. Most hit and runs are accidents. Not this one. This one comes at us premeditated and well financed.

3. When I was in government my departing boss left me in charge of the legal department for my agencies with a critical piece of advice: “Just because someone tells you that you have to make a decision immediately, don’t think you have to: You’ll be better off waiting.” Indeed, I knew from experience negotiating hundreds of deals: When someone is trying to rush you to make a decision the rush is going to be to their benefit and your detriment.

4. There are reasons the fracking companies want to do their dirty work fast:
a. They want to get in before people realize how extraordinarily damaging fracking will be to the environment, (most of that damage is very long term and too much of it, like leaking wells, won’t show up immediately: 5% of new wells leak but 50% leak eventually), and

b. They are aware that fracking, even though it was just invented, is about to be an obsolete technology. I refer you to economist Paul Krugman’s recent [November 6, 2011] “Here Comes the Sun” column for two propositions:
∙ That if the fracking industry were forced to internalize its huge external detriments and cost to the public it is probably not economic now, and
∙ Solar cell technology is advancing so fast that even without that internalization fracking will soon be uneconomic anyway.
5. Virtually no corner of the state will be unaffected by fracking’s external costs:
a. Decades of water pollution, poisoning:
∙ essential underground drinking water acquirers, and
∙ drinking water in rivers and streams- water treatment facilities will be wrecked.
b. Massive quantities of water usurpation
c. Radiation poisoning in the form of released radium and radon (lasting for thousands of years).
d. Earthquakes and instability of the land.
e. Significant poisonous air pollution.
f. Release of carcinogens.
g. Greenhouse gas pollution releasing climate change-causing carbon that was safely sequestered for 400 million years.
6. There is a sales pitch about economic benefits but fracking is a resource extraction economy that builds up no long-term benefit compensating for the damage it will leave in its wake or the businesses it will drive out.

7. Some might say the fracking companies want to get started before the science on this brand new technology is in. I’d suggest they want to get started before the science that’s already in gets out.

8. Fracking is too destructive to be permitted at all but it certainly should not be permitted without significant protections not now in place or proposed, including:
a. Prohibitions on confidentiality covenants that prohibit the true facts from getting out, and
b. Lessor remorse covenants that allow landowners to terminate lessees upon the unveiling of any misrepresentations of science or facts by the industries.

Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White

PS: Attached are two of the articles I have written about the proposal to allow high-volume hydraulic fracturing, both of which are available on the web:

∙ Monday, November 21, 2011, Fracking Double Whammy: New York Loses Two Aces In The Hole When Confronting Climate Change (i.e.Weather Weirding/Global Warming)

∙ Friday, July 29, 2011, Conundrum: If Gov. Andrew Cuomo Traded The Moratorium on Hydrofracking To Get Gay Marriage Would That Be Good Or a Bad Thing?

Hit and Run As the Appropriate Metaphor For What Is About To Befall New York at the Hands of the Fossil Fuel Industry

Numerous times during the hearing speakers said that “we can’t play Russian Roulette with the future of New York.” Although that metaphor about playing with risk seems to have gained significant traction I don’t think it is as good a description of what is waiting in the wings as an intentional hit and run by the fossil fuel industry. That is because with Russian Roulette there is an implicit 5 to 1 chance that the risk being played with, although significant (death), might not materialize. With fracking it is altogether certain that New York State will be damaged significantly in numerous ways. Consequently, everyone will be affected if only as a taxpayer but probably also by one form or another of the extensive pollution. The prospect of deaths also factors into the equation. The risk of any particular set of damages occurring to any one family or community may have an unpredictable Russian Roulette quality but overall significant damage to the state is guaranteed. That’s why it needs be spoken of as an intentional “hit” by the industry. The reason it is also a “run” is that the industry is providing no meaningful insurance or guarantees that in the aftermath the ensuing devastation can or will be cleaned up or otherwise attended to.
(Above, a map of of major NYS drainage basins from the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation.)

Evidence of the Rush

Something that many of those testifying complained about itself stands as evidence that Governor Cuomo is attempting to rush the approval of fracking in fthe state: Why, the question was asked repeatedly, are the regulations, the environmental impact statement and the plan to start permitting all being presented for consideration simultaneously, rather than step-by-step, one at a time? This combined approach means, for instance, that regulations won't get considered in the context of the public knowing what environmental mitigation will and will not go into effect as a consequence of the environmental review. And it looks like Cuomo wants to start issuing permits as soon as possible no matter what.

(Hearing officer DEC’s Deputy Counsel Russo on right, stenographer on left)

This rushing is also evidence that Cuomo is treating hyrdofracking as a political deal he has made and therefore also a “done deal” that he plans to force through no matter what. A “done deal” scenario means that there is very little that those holding the hearing are willing to seriously listen to, especially since the overriding message of those testifying was that fracking should simply be banned, something Cuomo doesn't want on the table. Therefore, the concerns of one person testifying about whether any of the speakers could legitimately expect to be listened to were on target. My memory is that this was the same person who noted that at various points during the hearing the DEC’s Deputy Counsel Russo had accused attendees of being childish in their jeering and who then observed that any childishness occurring was on the other side and at a much grander level if Russo and the state were holding the hearing merely for show.

With respect to the rush, a number of speakers made the point that if extraction of gas from the Marcellus Shale is actually a good idea, it is one that can wait. The shale has been down in the ground for 400 million years and it will certainly still be there after taking the the time to carefully consider the wisdom of extracting its gas.

With Internalization of Costs Fracking Is Already Uneconomic

That industries should pay for the harm they cause, internalize those costs, is a basic economic rule. Paul Krugman puts it very well in his “Here Comes the Sun” column:

Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to “internalize” those costs — that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. . . . But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation’s infrastructure.

Accordingly, Krugman also points out that the special treatment the fossil fuel industry wants in order to exempt fracking from internalizing its costs “makes a mockery of free-market principles.”

Now it may be that when industries affect health, cause death and ruin the environment for the rest of the public they shouldn’t be permitted at all. There is, however, an argument you can make in economic circles that if you can place a price on these things then you should permit an industry that succeeds in internalizing such costs to do business. Still, when you do put a price on all of the harm that fracking will do, including the very long-term damage of global warming, permanently polluting drinking water, earthquakes and thousands of years of radium poisoning it is extremely doubtful that fracking can pay for itself now. That being said, the industry is looking to be excluded from internalizing virtually all of its eternal costs.

Fracking Is About To Be Made Obsolete By Newer Technologies Like Solar Cell Power

As I said, during the entire time I was at the hearings (1:00 PM to 9:00 PM with minimal breaks) I heard more than 100 speakers and only 4 ½ spoke in favor of the fracking technology. One of the 4 ½ speaking in favor one was a rumpled looking man towing a suitcase who said he was a scientist and he advocated that fracking be allowed using a standard fracking industry argument that gas from fracking should be conceptualized as a “transitional fuel.” In other words, the industry concedes the point: Fracking is not here to stay. Ergo, we are only arguing about exactly how long fracking is expected to be around before everyone picks up and abandons it. The transition that will leave fracking in the dust is coming fast.

Here is another place quoting from Paul Krugman’s article will be worthwhile. Krugman referred to “Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months” and noted that there is an accelerating downward trend in the price of solar installations:

In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

You know those huge flat screen televison sets that were being sold for $200 apiece as part of Black Friday specials? Remember just a few years back when equivalent sets were being sold in premium electronics stores for $40,000.00 apiece? That’s the exponential effect of Moores law. What’s not getting any cheaper, however, is the price tag you can put on clean, safe water and the environment. The technology already exists to produce solar cells nearly ten times as efficient as current ones. All that’s needed now is to reduce the cost of that technology. Do you really think that will take very long?

Virtually No Corner of the State will Be Unaffected by Fracking’s External Costs

For more amplification about how fracking’s pollution an effects will extend to every corner of the state (and beyond) read my comprehensive earlier article: Friday, July 29, 2011, Conundrum: If Gov. Andrew Cuomo Traded The Moratorium on Hydrofracking To Get Gay Marriage Would That Be Good Or a Bad Thing?

(A mapping of DOH radon danger data)

Things I heard discussed at the hearing that I did not discuss in that article are:

• How the use of gas from the Marcellus Shale in New York City kitchens (because the gas isn’t the same as gas we currently use from other locations like Texas) will result in accumulation of radon which, it was suggested, would translate into additional lung cancer deaths in the city in the thousands.

• That the proposed regulations would not actually keep fracking even a very small (and unsafe) distance– just feet really– from New York City’s drinking water because apparently the regulations about distance from the drinking water system pertain to the distance a fracking well must be at the surface of the ground, not the required distance from the drinking water underground. Since fracking wells are drilled down and then horizontally, this means that wells could be drilled directly under New York’s water supply and water supply tunnels. The earthquakes or seismic activity caused by fracking could cause fracture of the tunnels and leakage of gas into the system. Thus there was also speculation on the part of testifying government officials that New York City’s water would be could become contaminated in a variety of ways, including with methane and that the methane could cause explosions within the water system.

(Image from geology.com Fractures from explosions can radiate for as much as 1500 to 1800 feet. 16 wells may spread of from one drilling pad location.)

Jobs- It’s An Industry Sales Pitch: Hallmarks of Hyperbolic Hype and Hooey

It can be expected that the fracking industry would be delivering a sales pitch that fracking will be good for the economy and that it will create jobs irrespective of whether that is true. It’s not true: As we will get to in a minute, fracking will be very bad for the economy and will destroy jobs. It’s no surprise either that when people are desperate some of them are going to buy the standard `creation-of-jobs' hype whenever that hooey is served up by any half-decent PR firm. Some of the press is also going to buy in, engaging in press-release journalism. What’s surprising (and one of they ways we know that PR firms are out there working hard) is that within days of each other we heard two “jobs are us” uncritical puff pieces presented on public radio.

One was on NPR’s morning edition: Gas Drilling Boom Brings New Life To Steel Industry
by Jeff Brady, October 13, 2011. It couldn’t have sounded more industry-scripted if it had tried: “rust belt” “brought back to life,” etc. Then it gets into the standard impressive sounding economic jargon stuff, the “ripple effects” those effects apparently being evidenced by a new drilling pipe manufacturing factory in Youngstown, Pennsylvania that ripples further to a steel industry executive testifying that the hotel industry must be doing well because he “had difficulty finding a hotel room in the small town of Williamsport last winter.” The Pennsylvania's Department of Labor and Industry (reporting to a Republican governor supportive of fracking) chimed in with some boosterish background figures and interpretation respecting gas industry hiring. No other side to the story was presented. The closest to it was the suggestion near the end of the story (only intimating a darker side to those listening very carefully) that the additional jobs created extended to Sierra Club’s hiring of a gas industry monitoring activist who in turn is hoping that the increased drilling activity will lead to the hiring of more government regulators to “look over the shoulders of drillers.”

The other story was on APR’s MarketPlace: North Dakota, land of jobs, by Stacey Vanek-Smith
Marketplace, Tuesday, October 18, 2011. That broadcast also hits on the `it’s hard to find a hotel room/motel room’ angle. Same PR firm? And it also gives examples of the economic “ripple effect,” this time for North Dakota: Walmart is hiring, and McDonalds is offering hiring bonuses, truck drivers are employed. Like the preceding story this one also engaged in a wowie contrasting of conjured images: a `world without jobs’ vs. ‘a world with jobs.”

Unlike the preceding story this one could not find any example of another factory or business (like the drilling pipe factory) that was created as a direct consequence of fracking activity but it managed to do something far more slick: A voice clip of Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple aying that jobs are great in his state introduces a statement that the tax base is so good that property tax exemptions and a good tax environment “helped attract” a job-creating Caterpillar manufacturing plant to Fargo. Zounds!: Fracking is subsidizing the creation of Caterpillar manufacturing jobs by financing tax abatements? I’d like to see the math on that . . . It probably doesn’t exist. . .

. . . But the story didn’t actually specifically say that. It just sounded like it. And what pays for what in terms of economic development involves a lot of fungibility (one day you might hear one thing is paying for something, another day that something else is) and fuzzy math. Fuzzy math tends to crop up especially when politicians are selling their pet projects. Furthermore, if one industry, like fracking, were paying to subsidize another totally unrelated business (because there was nothing else it could actually directly and naturally economically stimulate) that would probably not be good economics. (The Caterpillar plant was manufacturing mining equipment.) Nevertheless, I thought I would do some checking to find out what reporting there had been on the Caterpillar manufacturing plant story before it was included in this recent puff piece.

One thing I found out was that the Caterpillar manufacturing plant was not a new Caterpillar plant being attracted to Fargo as the APR article made it sound, it was an existing Caterpillar plant that Caterpillar was choosing to expand. Caterpillar was getting support from the state and the city of West Fargo, and a local economic development corporation including property tax exemptions. An article with interview of the mayor telling why West Fargo’s government was providing benefits for Caterpillar in the form of low corporate and property taxes explained that “The people in the city have been struggling with the lack of employment” as “several people from West Fargo had lost their jobs in 2009 due to recession,” quoting the mayor that they would be providing “facilities for the company for assisting their people for providing jobs.” So how a story is told depends on who is telling it, when and why.

Yet another version of the story is that Caterpillar was expanding because of “global ties” and the “current worldwide boom in mining” and because according to the facility manager for Caterpillar's West Fargo operations, “The West Fargo community is really a very good place to do business,” where “there is a well-educated, highly trained work force and the quality of life is good. The metro area is growing and we have an excellent education system.”

Certainly, as fracking is going on in North Dakota there is some identifiable number of jobs that exist there in connection with it and it may further be reasonable (but not a forgone conclusion as we will discuss) to conclude that with fracking's recent advent it has increased the current number of jobs in the state but is fracking the best explanation for why North Dakota currently has a low level of unemployment?

A January 2008 New Year’s Day article in the New York Times, Oil in North Dakota Brings Job Boom and Burdens, (by Monica Davey) reported how an increase in the number of drilling rigs in the state at that time, from 52 in December 2006 to 250 in October 2007, had increased employment. One of type of job focused on in the article was that of “landmen,” the people who show up early on to review land records as part of the effort to buy up drilling rights for the oil companies. Because of the availability of figures in the article like the number of drilling rigs and the number of new workers that the oil industry says it “expects to need” in the next two years (12,000) and the number of legal agreements that were recorded in a single month permitting drilling on the land of local farmers (1,200) it the industry clearly had some sort of input into the article but the article wasn’t 100% friendly to the industry. The reporter went out to discuss things with others in the community. According to the article “roads and water systems are being used at levels unseen here” and the industry needs “more electricity for its new gas plants, more fresh water for all this drilling.”

The article also noted that many in the community, based on experience, were suspicious of the apparent boom turning into an eventual bust:

Some here also wonder how long the oil boom will last. In places like Williston, a city of more than 12,000 about 70 miles west of Stanley, people have been through such a boom before and suffered through the bust that followed.

When oil showed promise in the early 1980s, some thought Williston’s population would grow to 40,000. City officials took on more than $20 million in debt to build streets and sewers for subdivisions that never arrived after the price of oil collapsed in the mid-1980s.

No one has forgotten.

The article which speaks about an oil boom doesn’t make entirely clear as do later articles about the North Dakota activity, that it is about the new technology of fracking, including fracking for gas, but it apparently is. Fracking can be used to produce oil and/or gas, depending on what is underground. The article explains that the oil was found “more than 50 years ago, but no one figured out how to tap into it successfully until recently” and that it is being extracted now because of rising oil prices and “thanks in part to new extraction technology.” Gas was clearly being produced in addition to the oil as the article tells us “Much of the natural gas that has also been found in the drilling here is being burned off” while workers build new natural gas plants in the region.

Twenty months after the Times article there was a "24/7 Wall Street" article (August 2009) specifically about North Dakota’s low unemployment rate and the reasons for it instead of being about the oil and gas industry. This article, providing another perspective, nearly fails to mention the gas industry at all bringing it up in a list (after geothermal) of what the Nabors company makes: “drilling equipment for geothermal, gas, and oil exploration and production.” Ahead of this mention the article discusses as reasons for the state’s high level of employment in the following order:

• the growing health care industry (“A large number of the biggest employers in North Dakota are health care companies. MeritCare in Fargo is the largest with a total of 6,400 workers. Ten of the twelve largest employers in the state are hospital groups, clinics, hospitals, or benefits firms.” )
• Bobcat, which makes small loaders, excavators, and industrial vehicles used at construction sites.
• LM Glasfiber, which makes wind power infrastructure components.
• Infrastructure investment paid for by the stimulus package.
• The high tech disk company Imation.

So both wind power and geothermal were mentioned as employers before the gas industry. The article sums up the way it sees the big picture of employment in North Dakota, population 640,000 people:

North Dakota may be a job utopia of sorts. Health care and government work support a great deal of the state’s population. Everyone works, no one makes much. For those who can live through the winters, the air and water are clean.

(See: Unemployment USA: Moving America To North Dakota, by Douglas A. McIntyre, August 6, 2009)

To be fair, since this article was written in August of 2009 and fracking is a recent 2006/2007 technology fracking may, since that time, have had a chance to become a bigger part of North Dokota’s employment picture but, by the same token, the article’s concluding mention of how the “the air and water are clean” may be less appropriate then when it was written.

We have digressed covering other reporting to make clear that with respect a number of things the APR MarketPlace North Dakota fracking=jobs story could have been a very different one presenting different facts and explanations, why unemployment might be low in North Dakota, whether a fracking boom actually augments a state economy in a stable contributory way, why and how the expansion of a Caterpillar manufacturing plant occurred (not the creation of a new plant), whether any other real jobs of value outside the industry were truly being stimulated as they existed alongside fracking, etc.

If the hype of the MarketPlace story was not otherwise absolutely explicit there is one thing that should make it so: It included as news a clip a Halliburton executive (Jim Brown) going on Jim Cramer's CNBC “Mad Money” show begging workers to come to North Dakota and promising extremely high-paying jobs while Cramer follows up by tantalizingly emphasizing (as if it were a late night infomercial) “Wait a second, you're talking about an unskilled job!” Why does this make me think of the self-serving job advertisement fliers handed out to the Okies in the “Grapes of Wrath”? We all know Dick Cheney's Halliburton. And Cramer was, after all, the fellow who was famously skewered by Jon Stewart going about as far as Stewart ever has on his “Daily Show” for being the willing host and home for uncritical hype and shilling for businesses clearly destined to do damage to his listeners (video available).

Featured near the end of the MarketPlace story is the fact that there are jobs at North Dakota McDonald’s. The oddness of this anticlimactic information is accounted for by its use as a cute device to suggest that North Dakota’s fracking-based formula for low unemployment can be “franchised in other states” (are you listening, New York?). How would that best be done? Governor Dalrymple comes on again in another clip to convey a favorite Republican message, that an important part of that franchising formula (besides not taxing companies) is “a friendly regulatory climate.”

Excuse me: Is the idea to promote unregulated or lightly regulated fracking? The industry certainly got their message in here, didn't they?

Why Fracking Won’t Be Good For the New York Economy: Why Fracking Will be BAD For the New York Economy

You can’t expect that reporters, even reporters for APR’s MarketPlace, are going to be economists but you can expect that they would at least be fact checkers. But let’s now get into the economics.

(Above, DEC hearing officials ready to give a limited number of speakers three minutes apiece.)

Fracking transforms a region into a resource extraction economy. A resource extraction economy is one variation of what Jane Jacobs in her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” (1984) calls a “supply economy.” Regions that depend on “supply economies” she calls “supply regions.” A resource extraction economy is likely the lowest rung of desirability in terms of such economies, being the least worthwhile in that after the resources are extracted, the region can no longer supply them as opposed to a farming region that doesn’t deplete its soil and can sustainably keep producing its product era after era. Fracking also depletes local natural resources in in the damage that it does to the environment. Even if a full extraction of the natural resource never occurs a supply economy can suffer an equivalent terminal ending when demand for its product fails.

It may take a moment’s thought to fully appreciate this but its Jacob's analysis that in a major sense supply economies don’t really represent true development at all. Jacobs compares the economies found in supply regions to those of the third world. The problem is that supply economies are not built upon connections and they don’t build up the intricate nearby and interior connections and industry that allow a community to advance. In fact, not being built on connections and interrelationships, the minimal connections of a supply economy that do exist to the rest of world and outside economies may be exceedingly tenuous: The outside economies supplied may be across an ocean or the connections may be little more than depositing gas or oil in a pipeline that then traverses a continent and perhaps afterwards an ocean.

For one illustration to understand the drawbacks of supply economies it is an interesting exercise to think back to the United States Civil War. Thinking back to consider why the North won the war you might recall reasons having to with the North’s superior industrial might, its supremacy when it came to ships and their manufacture, as well as the railroads that had newly emerged in importance and the North's thriving industrialized cities that supported a much bigger population that could be tapped for soldiers. You might conclude from this that the North had a bigger superior economy that in the end enabled it to prevail even though the South was fighting on its own turf to defend its own soil. But one should not be too quick to conclude that the North was necessarily the richer half of the country with the bigger economy. It depends how you measure these things. It is possible to argue this both ways.

By some conventional measures the South was, at the start of the Civil War, the wealthier half of the country, notwithstanding that the slave-based nature of its cotton-growing economy was deserving of opprobrium in and of itself. If ranked as an independent nation, its per capita income, excluding slaves, would have ranked it as the fourth richest country of the world in 1860, the year preceding the outbreak of war. Furthermore, as Jacobs points out elsewhere in her book, the South would have been even wealthier before the war if Northern industry had not been protected by tariffs on goods imported from abroad. (Those tariffs were also an important part of government income.) The South would have preferred to get greater value when selling their cotton by being able to buy, without tariffs, lower cost manufactured goods imported from Europe.

Jacobs likens the South's pre-Civil War economy of to the supply region economy paradigm she offers by describing the economic history of Uruguay (at the beginning of her chapter on “Supply Regions”) which “beginning in 1911 . . . . was able to start building what became probably the world’s most generous and fully rounded welfare state.” Uruguay prospered “as an unusually rich supply region for several generations” making “a big success of animal husbandry” supplying “meat, wool and leather to distant markets.” It did little else but “lacked for nothing because whatever Uruguay did not produce, it could afford to import.” However, things went economically awry for Uruguay as soon as its markets overseas dwindled and disappeared.

Jacobs describes how Uruguay managed to compound its problems by thereafter not developing an organically connected economy before it was too late. Ultimately, as the U.S. State Department puts it: “In 1973, amid increasing economic and political turmoil, the armed forces closed the Congress and established a civilian-military regime, characterized by repression and widespread human rights abuses.” (You may remember Costa-Gavras’ 1973 film “State of Siege”.)

What happened to Uruguay has parallels in what happened to the American South. Suffice it to say that after the war the market for the South’s cotton largely disappeared, and with it the South’s wealth, like Uruguay’s, evanesced. One can argue to an extent about how precisely this happened. For instance one reason European countries may have started buying their cotton elsewhere was because were unable to buy cotton from the South throughout the way because of the Northern blockade. It is also true that the South also suffered significant destruction at the hands of the North during the war.

But afterwards and as Jacobs says (page 82) “until the 1930s” the South was “the most backward part of the country” with an antiquated farm economy that couldn’t support its residents resulting eventually in the clearance of a vast population from the area. Jacobs notes that in Georgia:

. . . there had been about 1.5 million farmers and farm workers in 1930. Fifty years later there were only about 2225,000 and more than 300,000 farms had been consolidated into fewer than 70,000 in 1930.

Jacobs quotes a famous passage (page 36) about a Pickens County funeral that was part of an 1889 speech made by Southerner Henry Grady to a gathering of industrialists and bankers in Boston when Grady was seeking economic development aid for the South from the North. Grady was an essayist and editor of the leading newspaper in Atlanta. Pickens County was about eighty miles north of Atlanta.

The grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone came from Vermont. It was in a pine wilderness but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. An iron mountain over-shadowed it but the coffin nails and the screws and the shovel came from Pittsburgh. With hard wood and metal abounding, the corpse was hauled on a wagon from South Bend, Indiana. A hickory grove grew near by, but the pick and shovel handles came from New York. The cotton shirt on the dead man came from Cincinnati, the coat and breeches from Chicago, the shoes from Boston; the folded hands were encased in white gloves from New York, and round the poor neck, that had borne all its living days the bondage of lost opportunity, was twisted a cheap cravet from Philadelphia. That country, so rich in undeveloped resources, furnished nothing for the funeral except the corpse and the hole in the ground and would probably have imported both of those if it could have done so. And as the poor fellow was lowered to his rest, on coffin bands from Lowell, he carried nothing into the next world as a reminder of his home in this, save the halted blood in his veins, the chilled marrow in his bones, and the echo of the dull clods that fell on his coffin lid.

The point of the above is not that all these nearby available resources should have been extracted; the point is that, had they been extracted, the South was without the wherewithal, the intricately interrelated businesses, that would have enabled it to process and make use of those resources. In the past its economy had simply focused on shipping cotton to distant ports. (Grady was pleading for Northern aid. Jacobs explains how for years the cities of the North, in fact, then did actually subsidize the South.)

Jacobs says on page 63:

Rich or poor, supply regions are inherently over-specialized and widely unbalanced economies, hence unresilient and fragile, helpless when they lose their fragments of distant markets. The disasters that befell Uruguay are the nightmares that trouble the rulers of currently rich oil supply regions, and with good reason.

Translated that means an economy that is fragile and helpless as soon as fracking is abandoned.

Later, Jacobs, explaining what makes “supply economies not efficient,” speaks about their detriments and why they are so often poor or needy of subsidies (p. 71). A supply economy is an economy that “contains few different sorts of niches for peoples’ differing skills interests and imaginations” and “can fill few of the needs of its own people and producers.” On page 143 she bluntly uses the adjective “dead-end” to sum up the problem nature of a supply economy an adjective she uses again (p. 146) to describe how with a supply economy focus the cities of the South, “Charlston, Savannah, Richmond, St. Augustine and Williamsburg” failed to develop and mature confining “themselves for the most part to simple two-way, dead-end trade . .”

Fracking is not an economic activity that is built up on existing connections in the area. It is not, for instance, attracted to the area because it is compatible with or aided by the existing network of roads. In fact, in rural New York it will stress the inadequacy of those local roads and the fracking industry has no interest in paying for and will not pay the additional cost the taxpayers will have to bear as the industry begins to burden those roads. Rather than being based on connections to the existing local economy, fracking is the reverse: It is the lack of connection that the frackers have with the local businesses that allows them to make plans so economically hostile to the existing interconnected local business that currently do exist, businesses like winemaking, tourism and farming.

Fracking's Collision With an Alternative Vision of New York . . . Whose Was It? . .

It is ironic that with his promotion of fracking in New York Andrew Cuomo should be undertaking to undo one of his most major initiatives on New York's behalf when he was Secretary of HUD, the $131 million in federal assistance he was announcing in 1996 and 1997 as the “Erie Canal Corridor Initiative.” It involved additional investment of about $102 million by the private sector and $57.3 million in other public funds. Quoted in his own agency’s press release Cuomo said at the time:

"We expect the Canal Corridor Initiative will pump about $290 million into communities along the canal, and transform the canal system into a mighty engine for economic growth and job creation in New York," . . ."We will make this initiative succeed as a comprehensive, end-to-end revitalization project that will benefit all New York."

"We will create a new Canal Corridor revitalized with new marinas, parks, trails, restaurants, retail stores, businesses, restored historic sites, and other recreational and commercial facilities"

The purpose of the initiative was to build tourism and an attractive future and recreation “recreationway” for boaters and hikers like the canals of England and France, a “magnet for American and foreign travelers and for economic development benefiting the canal's municipalities”:

"The announcements we've made this week in New York will give powerful momentum to the campaign to transform this great canal system from an abandoned commercial waterway into a premier tourist attraction," . . . "We want to make sure that best days of the Erie Canal are not in its past, but in its future."

According to the Times coverage:

The effort to revive the canal survived because the bordering towns and cities want some comprehensive plan that would draw travelers and boaters to take pleasure trips on the canal, which winds through the pleasant scenery of western New York, the Finger Lakes, the Mohawk Valley and up to the Adirondacks.

Comparing the project to other revitalization efforts such as San Antonio’s Riverwalk and Washington State’s Puget Sound Cuomo suggested that advantage could be taken of the fact New York State’s “Erie Canal has nicer geography and a richer history.”

The canal initiative makes a lot of sense in the Jane Jacobean way that it is built upon and integrates with existing infrastructure and history and supports already existing population centers in New York. Senator Moynihan, one of its promoters, focused on the history:

''You go down the canal and every 10 miles there's an event in the history of the Industrial Revolution,'' Senator Moynihan said. ''This is where cannons began. This is where typewriters began.''

And in the HUD press release Moynihan makes these remarks in connection with population centers:

"The contributions of New York's canals once brought prosperity to the towns along their banks. In 1987, we secured the first federal funds for restoration of the Erie Canal. Today's awards will continue this noble enterprise by giving cities and towns along our canals important seed money to support their own redevelopment efforts."

Fracking is not compatible with these visions of improving economic prosperity previously promoted by Cuomo. Can New York expect to take advantage of its superiority as a water-rich state or its bucolic vistas when fracking makes the state synonymous with water, air and radiation poisoning? What accentuates the tragedy of other economic opportunities and businesses being driven out by fracking is that fracking is such a short-term dead end. The American South with King Cotton and Uruguay with its animal husbandry each had multiple good decades before the lack of development associated with their supply region economies came home to roost, for Uruguay it was only four. But fracking will be here just long enough to do its long-term damage and then it will be gone, its companies vamoosing or going bankrupt, leaving behind unpaid bills.

(Crowd waiting for the afternoon hearing to begin.)

This doubling down on fossil fuels to provide energy accompanied by the creation of exponentially greater pollution should be a warning sign in itself. I previously wrote about another observation of Jane Jacobs, also concerning dead ends, this time focusing on pollution. In her “Economy of Cities” Jacobs observes (p. 117) that the most ruthless depredations of the environment occur “where people exploit too narrow a range of resources too heavily and too monotonously for too long,” without repair or developing alternatives. And this, she asserts is symptomatic of “stagnating and stagnant economies.” In other words, it represents dead-end folly.

Says Jacobs, looking back over the entire history of mankind for her evidence (p. 118):

. . serious stagnation becomes appallingly destructive to the environment. Common sequels in the past have been deforestation, complete destruction of wild life, loss of soil fertility and lowering of water tables.

Regulation of Fracking: Does It makes Sense?

Does regulation of fracking make sense? It seemed that the consensus of the more than 100 people speaking against fracking was fairly universal: The speakers were not in favor of fracking, period- It should be banned outright- The harm of fracking cannot be mitigated by regulation. A number of speakers went out of their way to be very clear that fracking cannot be effectively or economically regulated. How would the state be able to afford the army of state employees working for the Department of Conservation and the Department of Health and even the Department of Transportation that it would take? How would you, for instance, stop illegal nighttime dumping of the vast quantities of poisoned wastes?

Even so, I concluded my own testimony by quickly suggesting two regulations even while saying “fracking is too destructive to be permitted at all.” Why? Two reasons: First, to start conceiving of certain regulations not now in place that would have to be in place is instructive about the gravity of the problems being faced, and second, certain regulations that would be altogether appropriate to insists upon would, if put in place, simply kill the industry.

Banning Confidentially Covenants

I suggested banning confidentiality covenants. This goes to a broader matter of public policy. Too often the public and public officials do not have the information available to make appropriate decisions because confidentiality covenants have put that information beyond reach. I am not just talking about fracking. This also applies to the use of confidentiality covenants restricting the free speech of those who sign them in connection with many other things:

• Those being evicted by mountaintop removal coal mining
• Those finally agreeing to accept settlements when being chased off their properties by eminent domain abuse as in the case of Ratner’s Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly or Columbia University’s takeover of West Harlem.
• Those like damaged fishermen accepting settlements or interim clean-up work after being damaged by the huge BP Gulf Coast oil spill and scientists looking for chances to study its effects.
• Those agreeing to accept settlements after being harmed by corporations’ negligence and bad conduct (torts), sometimes intentional, (who may then go on to ridicule and misrepresent situations), as is delineated in the documentary “Hot Coffee.”
• It is likely appropriate to add to this list the perpetuation of existing confidentiality arrangements via collusive legal settlements that stymie insight into the causes of the nation's 2008 financial crisis.

The effect of these silencing agreements also contributes to an overall shift in control occurring generally in a variety of different ways affecting who can speak and how freely and effectively about important issues in this country: Control of effective speech is more and more in a variety of ways becoming the possession of corporations and the most monied class. (See: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?)

These silencing agreements should be prohibited as against public policy across the board so that there can be a more informed public debate. I have said that the industry doesn’t want the facts of fracking to get out to the public and this is one way the industry prevents facts from getting out and perseveres in misrepresentations. When T. Boone Pickens went on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show in April to promote greater government subsidization of fracking (in which Pickens invests) he folksily bantered to Brian Lehrer about how a lack of public complaint meant that there aren’t negative environmental effects from the poisonous chemical used. Lehrer asked:

There have been two fairly damning studies about the potential effects of hydro-fracking . . . one about methane which will get to in a minute and one about the chemicals used in the process. A Congressional report from Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee found that over 650 of the products used in the hydrofacking process are carcinogens or are controlled by the Clean Air Act, benzene, was amoung those carcinogens and other studies have found that the levels of benzene used in hydrofacking are extremely high, nearly a hundred times in diesel.

Lehrer had to circle back to get Pickens to finally answer the question after Pickens engaged in initial coy roundabout evasions that included misinformation to the effect that the currently proposed fracking is supposedly not a new, significantly different process from anything we have seen before. Pickens finally responded citing the lack of public complaint that has been heard (at about 10:10 in the conversation):

. . . I don’t think. . . I dunno. . Jess . . . You’ll get through the conversation: If you’ve had 800,000 wells fracked and nobody’s complained about it, I don’t think it’s doing what some people say its doing.

Pickens was dissembling in multiple respects: 1.) He persisted in trying to represent that the currently proposed high-volume hydraulic fracturing is not a newly invented technology (dating back to 2006/2007) that’s qualitatively different from what has been done before (and therefore was he was significantly inflating his figures for how many wells have been fracked and how far back in time they were), 2.) He said that nobody has complained (which Brian Lehrer challenged him on because obviously people have complained), and 3.) He implied to anyone uninformed in the audience that the world does not include a large number of people who can’t complain because they have signed confidentiality covenants.

It is time to call the industry’s bluff by changing the law. Because it is a matter of public policy these “omerta” agreements can even be voided retroactively. That's what should be done.

Legislating Lessor Remorse Covenants

I suggested that “lessor remorse covenants” be required that allow landowners to terminate leases upon the unveiling of any misrepresentations of science or facts by the industries. This only seems fair. It also seems as if you might expect it to be the law already. I would go so far as not to require an affirmative fraud or misrepresentation by the particular lessee with respect to a particular lease: The better rule would be to allow contracts to be voidable when the industry as a whole is making misrepresentations or holding back information unless the lessee has affirmatively equipped the lessor of the information the industry is holding back from the public. Leases voidable on such a basis would make fracking leases much less attractive to the industry.

I did not suggest in my testimony, but it should be readily apparent from a new New York Times article, that leases would also need to be regulated for public protection by preventing uninformed landowners from making the stupid mistakes the fracking industry now regularly hopes they will make when signing leases. See: Drilling Down- Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases, By Ian Urbina and Jo Craven McGinty, December 1, 2011.

Says that article:

. . . many landowners and lawyers say that gas companies are intentionally vague in their contracts and use high-pressure sales tactics on landowners.

The article also makes the point that the law requires the fracking companies to tell their investors more about the environmental risks being undertaken than they are required to tell (or probably do tell) the leasing landowners about those environmental risks notwithstanding that it is the owners whose lives (as opposed to just money) will be most directly affected by those risks. Those risks, by the way, are risks that may also make a landowner liable to their neighbors for monetary damages. The article also details how things like the loss of drinking water which it describes in several situations can wipe of the theoretical benefits the landowner was contemplating when they signed a lease.

A valuable addition to the article was: A Layman’s Guide to Lease Terms, December 1, 2011. That itemizes many of the clauses that can be included in leases that will screw landowners. One of them is the “Assignment Clause”:

Allows a company to sell or transfer a lease to another company. Some landowners have complained that their leases have been sold to companies that are financially unstable or have poor environmental records.

So if you were wondering just what the hit and runs in New York may look like, expect to see clauses like these invoked to leave a landscape blanketed by bankrupt fracking companies that won’t be picking up the bill for the damage fracking will have done across the state . . . damage both immediate and damage that can last last for thousands of years.

(Waiting to get into the evening hearing.)

(This post, which started with just a posting of my testimony was updated December 6, 2011.)

New Installment Re Proclamation of Bloomberg as First Amendment Champion: Times Editorial Struggles With Bloombergian Press Suppression

2011-11-29T15:30:00.006-05:00

If you were following the National Notice stories about the incongruity of recent characterizations by the New York Times and Bloomberg biographer Joyce Purnick of Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a backer of free speech, incongruous given their historical coverage of the man, there is a new installment now available in that series. The new story also has the Occupy Wall Street at its core. It chronicles how the Times editorial page had to struggle with reconciling its odd new characterization of Mr. Bloomberg with the editorial it needed to write criticizing the way Bloomberg’s police department suppressed the press during its eviction of the OWS protesters from Zucotti Park.

The New story is: Monday, November 29, 2011 Times Editorial Page Quandary: After He’s Dubbed Free Speech Champion Bloomberg’s Police Suppress Press During Occupy Wall Street Eviction.

Prior articles in this series are:

• Sunday, November 20, 2011, Question of Truth For The Times: The Meme of Bloomberg as Champion of the First Amendment & Free Speech, Firmly Planted Before OWS Eviction.)

• Tuesday, November 22, 2011, Orwellian Purnick Purge: Bloomberg Biographer Rewrites Billionaire Mayor’s Record On First Amendment Free Speech Rights.)

The following Noticing New York articles pick up on the theme and relate it to Noticing New York concerns like Atlantic Yards and a long line of earlier stories about what the Times has been getting wrong:

• Wednesday, November 23, 2011, National Notice Article on Orwellian Reversal As Bloomberg Biographer Proclaims OWS-Evicting Billionaire Mayor "Firm Supporter of the First Amendment"

• Sunday, November 20, 2011, How Could The Times Get Yet Another Story (In Addition to Atlantic Yards) So Wrong: OWS Evicting Bloomberg as Defender of Free Speech

There is yet one more to add to that Noticing New York list:

• Friday, November 25, 2011, What Oscar Snub of “Page One: Inside the New York Times” Might Tell Us About A Misplaced Losing-the-Battle (and War) NY Times Bet

What Oscar Snub of “Page One: Inside the New York Times” Might Tell Us About A Misplaced Losing-the-Battle (and War) NY Times Bet

2011-11-25T15:26:00.013-05:00

How many New York Times reader review rating stars has “Battle For Brooklyn,” the Michael Galinsky/Suki Hawley documentary about Atlantic Yards earned? Answer: It’s was rated 5 out of a possible 5 with 14 unanimously positive written reader reviews on the New York Times movies page. That’s good to know and commit to memory because going to the Times reader review page you were likely to see it rated at only 1 or 1.5, the inaccurate underrating being due to a an uncorrected computer glitch snafu.

This mistaken underrating was not the first case of the Times, for whatever reason, giving this Oscar-caliber film less than its due.

I use the term “Oscar-caliber” advisedly because “Battle For Brooklyn” is on the short list of films up for the for Best Feature Documentary.

In fact, “Battle For Brooklyn” and “Bill Cunningham New York,” both films reviewed by Noticing New York appear, respectively, as Number One and Two on the short list list of 15 films winnowed down from the 124 films that originally qualified in the category. (For the Noticing New York Reviews see: Friday, June 17, 2011, I Went To See “Battle For Brooklyn” This Weekend and You Should Too Because . . . . and Saturday, April 30, 2011, A List of Reasons Lovers of New York Should See “Bill Cunningham New York,” A Documentary About Photographing New York Fashion.)

Appearing as Numbers Number One and Two on the list is not meant to speak to the actual likelihood of those films winning the Oscar (although who knows): The films wind up being listed as One and Two because they are listed alphabetically. But it is an interesting coincidence that of 15 films on the list these top two are the two films reviewed by Noticing New York this year.

(Last year, three films that made the short list of 15 documentaries were written about here: “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer,”“Gasland,” and “Inside Job.” “Gasland”and
“Inside Job” were then nominated and “Inside Job” won.)

It may be an interesting non-coincidence that another film written about here, a film specifically about the New York Times, was snubbed for this year’s short list: “Page One: Inside the New York Times.” The inclusion on the list of the two other films written about here matched up against the exclusion of “Page One” may say something telling about a misplaced bet the New York Times has been making about what news that paper covers and how it covers it. Styling itself as a national newspaper the Times is apparently making a bet that it needn't treat coverage of significant local New York news with the same kind of journalistic professionalism. (The Noticing New York review is here: Sunday, June 26, 2011, “Page One: Inside the New York Times” Reviewed; Plus The “New York Times Effect” on New York’s Biggest Real Estate Development Swindle.)

Reviews for the Oscar short-listed “Battle For Brooklyn” and the now snubbed “Page One” appeared in the Times on the same day and on the same page. (See: the photo of the print edition’s page above.) The review of “Page One” was above the fold, filling about half the page. The review for “Battle of Brooklyn” was below the fold taking up minimal column space but was accompanied by a large rendition of a Tracy Collins photograph (see below- I can catch myself in the background) elevating the stature of the coverage. This subordinating treatment of “Battle of Brooklyn” in retrospect now looks like another clear underestimation of the film. The review for “Page One”(subcontracted out to Michael Kinsley for conflict-of-interest reason) wasn’t even that flattering, the reviewer misguidedly gave the misimpression that the film was a total mess.

Those who read the Noticing New York review of “Page One” may remember that “Page One” was recommended by Noticing New York as a very good film and well worth seeing, but that I complained about what had been left out and therefore recommended seeing it conjunction with “Battle For Brooklyn” to fill in what was omitted. Specifically, I pointed out that the film did little to address the absence of coverage of local news countrywide and specifically how that deficiency is a big story in New York City itself. The Times is not stepping in to fill a vacuum. Even worse, as exemplified in the “Battle For Brooklyn,” the local news narrative concerning Atlantic Yards as led by the theoretically dependable and unimpeachable Times has resulted in an economic and political fiasco.

One could analyze the problem with “Page One” as being twofold: First, there are the omissions and inadequate work on the part of the Times itself; second, these omissions and failings were not pointed out by “Page One.”

What a strange quirk of fate then that one of the other films edging out “Page One,” “Bill Cunningham New York,” should be another film which is also about the Times since its subject is the well-known Times reporter who covers both high society and street fashion. What's more, “Bill Cunningham New York,” like “Battle For Brooklyn,” also covers the subject of local news coverage more prominently than “Page One.” In my Noticing New York review of the Bill Cunningham movie I came up with a list a ten reasons why Noticing New York readers should want to see the Cunningham movie. With the principal focus of Noticing New York being development and urban design in New York, together with associated politics, I was able to supply a list of ten reasons for readers to see the film. I commented that the film will give them a prism through which to see the city and to think about quite a variety of related subjects; for instance, how much Cunningham sounds like Jane Jacobs: “I let the street speak to me, and in order for the street to speak to you, you’ve got to stay out there and see what it is.”

You see, (and this is something Jane Jacobs might say too) everything is related.

In writing often about New York Times coverage, most recently how the Time screwed up coverage of Bloomberg’s eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park, I have been making the point that you cannot cover the news selectively. Local coverage is related to national coverage. You cannot selectively cast a blind eye to the misconduct associated with Atlantic Yards as the New York City’s biggest boondoggle. If you try to elide the evils of Atlantic Yards in your pages it will leave holes in the paper-of-record stories about everything else. One of the really big stories about Occupy Wall Street (and even the Tea Party) is the rampant crony capitalism the nation is dealing with. If you are not reporting the real story of Atlantic Yards and the crucial involvement of mayor (who wants to be a national candidate and voice) you are not going to be first, foremost or reliable in reporting about key aspects of the national dialogue.

Something about “Battle For Brooklyn”and “Bill Cunningham New York” was speaking to those selecting films for the Oscar short list in a way that “Page One” addressing the grand theme of the Times as a national paper and institution did not. All three documentaries “Battle For Brooklyn” “Cunningham” and “Page One” involve unfolding of events that could not have been predicted when they were begun. I tend to think that even though “Page One” involves a lot of gripping material it was an easier film to make than “Battle For Brooklyn.” The paper provided access and eloquent talking heads for a year: It is hard to think that with all the national and international stories the Times covers the result was not going to be fascinating. “Battle For Brooklyn,” was undertaken with less certainty about what might result. It was filmed over the course of eight years and in figuring out how to introduce appropriate balance in its perspective faced challenges of access given the heavy duty politics and PR manipulation that has always been so large a part of the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment’s story.

One reason “Page One” can be regarded as a lesser film in the overall contest as films head toward Oscarland is that it does not evade the trap, which must have been apparent from the beginning, of producing a self-laudatory result full of praise for the Times. If it had taken on and absorbed some of the local news coverage issues presented by “Battle for Brooklyn” (or perhaps even “Bill Cunningham”) it might have become a truly great film. Let’s see if New York gets featured amongst the Oscar winners this year. Let’s see if “Bill Cunningham New York” wins for best documentary or perhaps the David against the 1% Goliath/Occupy Wall Street themed “Battle For Brooklyn.”

In that regard we are only talking the documentary film world reporting on the real world. But the Oscar race is a clue to a bigger real world story. That bigger story is about how the New York Times could become a significantly greater paper by setting aside its misplaced bet that it can get away with sidestepping proper coverage of important local news stories like Atlantic Yards or Columbia University’s the similarly problematic use of eminent domain to take over West Harlem or. . . the list of stories goes on. It is a long one because everything is connected.

National Notice Article on Orwellian Reversal As Bloomberg Biographer Proclaims OWS-Evicting Billionaire Mayor "Firm Supporter of the First Amendment"

2011-11-23T18:27:00.000-05:00

Readers of Noticing New York and followers of multitudinous Atlantic Yards shenanigans will be well acquainted with how thoroughly Orwellian local New York politics can be as any semblance of fixed reality is readily allowed to go “down the memory hole.” As Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Reports (whose “down the memory hole” phrase we quote here) has ample and regular opportunity to note, much of what vanishes down that hole goes flushed out of our consciousness via articles written by an abetting media.

It’s “Orwellian” when those in power say that things are the way they want the public to perceive them with no respect for history or the way things really are. We’ve seen “Orwellian” in eras past and likely we will see it again to disguise the non-completion of Atlantic Yards. It was “Orwellian” back in 1986 when it was proudly announced to the NYC public that the Jacob Javits Conference Center had been completed relatively on budget ($487 million vs. $375 million) and on schedule (only two years late) ignoring the fact that the completed center was only half as large as what was planned when construction was begun. But now it seems as if we are living with “Orwellian” as we have never before.

There is a new National Notice article up for your delectation of things Orwellian. It involves the reversal Bloomberg biographer, Joyce Purnick, made when she declared just weeks ago on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show that New York City’s billionaire mayor is “a firm supporter of the First Amendment” when in her 2009 biography of Mr. Bloomberg she describes him as anything but. Ms. Purnick’s new point of view arrived coincidentally with the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to depict Bloomberg as a civil libertarian as he orchestrated eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park. (All the details are al available here: Tuesday, November 22, 2011, Orwellian Purnick Purge: Bloomberg Biographer Rewrites Billionaire Mayor’s Record On First Amendment Free Speech Rights.)

Noticing New York readers may recall that we once considered Ms. Purnick’s Bloomberg biography “Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics” in the context of how it expunged from his portrait depiction of “significantly errant Bloombergian megadevelopment” and particularly Atlantic Yards, notwithstanding Ms. Purnick’s having been thoroughly briefed on that megadevelopment’s outrages. See: Saturday, October 3, 2009, What Purnick Has Purged: The Bloomberg Bio Mysteriously Missing Atlantic Yards.

The National Notice article is a follow-up to an earlier National Notice article about how, in much the same way, the New York Times started running stories proclaiming that Bloomberg was a champion of the First Amendment and free speech in connection with its coverage of his eviction of the OWS protesters even though the Times history of coverage on Bloomberg in this regard is very much to the contrary. (See: Sunday, November 20, 2011, Question of Truth For The Times: The Meme of Bloomberg as Champion of the First Amendment & Free Speech, Firmly Planted Before OWS Eviction.) It definitely seems as if Ms. Purnick was trying to fall in line with this flattering revisionism offered by the Times rather than stand by her own reporting in the previously published biography.

There is always a concern that biographies written by biographers getting special access to their subjects will be too adulatory. The prior Noticing New York article included observations that Ms. Purnick’s book was mostly admiring of Bloomberg. Usually however the problem envisioned with respect to such bias is that the biographer will be too deferential to its subject when the biography comes out, not that the biographer, due to an ongoing deference to the subject of their book, will subsequently act as if the book they wrote no longer says what it said when they wrote it.

Think what it would be like if biographers treated the facts of the biographies they’ve written as malleable to the ebb and flow of political fashion. In 2007 when a march was on to rehabilitate the image of Robert Moses and three separate museums mounted exhibits asking visitors to rethink Moses (and thus also their view of mega-projects) do you think Robert Caro was approached to to revise his Pulitzer Prize-wining Moses biography, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”? No, those looking to burnish Mose’s image went elsewhere. Caro wrote his warts and all portrait of Robert Moses as he thought was honest in the first instance. He was certainly not about to realign it to some new PR campaign.

Ms. Purnick, alas, is no Robert Caro.

Fracking Double Whammy: New York Loses Two Aces In The Hole When Confronting Climate Change (i.e.Weather Weirding/Global Warming)

2011-11-21T12:08:00.006-05:00

The changes brought by climate change, of which there will be many, including drought, escalating temperatures and rising sea levels, will have immense effects around the planet. Last week the New York Times ran a story about a new 600-page report, published Wednesday, about the effects that climate change will have in New York State. The report was commissioned by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a public-benefit corporation, and reflects years of work “by scientists at state academic institutions, including Columbia and Cornell Universities and the City University of New York.” (See: From Shore to Forest, Projecting Effects of Climate Change, by Leslie Kaufman, November 16, 2011.)

According to the Times, there is lots of bad news: tress will die, invasive species will alter forests, orchards will go defunct, dairy cows will suffer heat stress and beach communities would be inundated by a sea level rise as much as 55 inches and “effects of climate change would fall disproportionately on the poor and the disabled.”

Any good news in the report? Yes, there is. According to the Times New York has an ace in the hole that could give it a special advantage over other states when confronting the devastating effects of what people also refer to as “weather weirding” and in the past more frequently called “global warming”:

Art DeGaetano, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell, said that its findings need not be interpreted as totally devastating. . . . “. . there will be opportunities as well. We expect, for example, that New York State will remain water-rich and we may be able to capitalize when other parts of the country are having severe drought.”

There is a problem with that analysis: The prospect that New York can capitalize on its status as a “water-rich” state vanishes if, as is likely to happen, New York’s water resources are contaminated by hydraulic fracturing. No kidding, New York is a state with a wonderful supply of water, water everywhere but as Noticing New York has previously covered the entire state faces pollution from fracking that the Andrew Cuomo administration is proposing to introduce. Say goodbye to the value those water resources would have. (See: Friday, July 29, 2011
Conundrum: If Gov. Andrew Cuomo Traded The Moratorium on Hydrofracking To Get Gay Marriage Would That Be Good Or a Bad Thing?)

There is another ace in the hole New York has been keeping in reserve that, according to the Times, New York stands also to lose when the higher sea levels associated with climate change arrive:

. . . New York City’s backup drinking water supply may well be contaminated as a result of seawater making its way farther up the Hudson River.

So if you were hoping that the city could resort to its backup water supply if there is a fracking contamination problem with its main supply; Fuhgeddaboudit!

Is that fair? After all, where does global warming/climate change come from anyway? By pumping carbon dioxide and gases like methane into the air by burning fossil fuels. Fracking, although a brand new, recently invented “technology” will exacerbate the situation and greatly accelerate the arrival of change. (There is also the “game over” (for the planet) plan to exploit Canada’s tar sands by building the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

That means that fracking will first significantly contribute to global warming and weather weirding and then it will, adding devastation to devastation, destroy our New York State aces in the hole available to deal with it. Holy cats!

How Could The Times Get Yet Another Story (In Addition to Atlantic Yards) So Wrong: OWS Evicting Bloomberg as Defender of Free Speech

2011-11-20T11:06:00.006-05:00

You are almost certainly going to want to read my new National Notice article about how the New York Times misguidedly covered Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park, implanting in its stories the deceptive meme that Bloomberg is a champion of First Amendment free speech rights: Sunday, November 20, 2011, Question of Truth For The Times: The Meme of Bloomberg as Champion of the First Amendment & Free Speech, Firmly Planted Before OWS Eviction.

How could the Times have gone so wrong in its coverage of yet another major news story?

Noticing New York has frequently covered and criticized the grossly inadequate, misleading and biased coverage that the New York Times has provided with respect to the Forest City Ratner Atlantic Yards megadevelopment and associated issues such as the abuse of eminent domain that is also occurring elsewhere, like Columbia University’s takeover of West Harlem. Here are some links to that coverage:

• Sunday, June 26, 2011
“Page One: Inside the New York Times” Reviewed; Plus The “New York Times Effect” on New York’s Biggest Real Estate Development Swindle

• Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Whither the New York Times? Noticing New York Comment Respecting a Manhattan Institute Sponsored Debate

• Sunday, August 21, 2011
Heritage of "Journalistic Enterprise and Courage" Duly Noted: The Modern Day New York Times Meets and Likes Its Boss Tweeds

• Wednesday, September 7, 2011
The New York Times Takes an Editorial Position on the Subject of Encouraging Competition and It’s Inconsistent With Its Position on Atlantic Yards

Heretofore the Noticing New York thesis about such atrocious coverage by the Times was that it was all the more insidious and dangerous because the paper of record is, in otherwise confidence-inspiring ways, head and shoulders over other newspapers in New York City, even all the rest of country. The Times dereliction with respect to the Atlantic Yards family of issues seemed to be a willful and conscious choice related to a deal the Times knowingly made with the devil when it attempted to buttress itself financially (while garnering some attention-grabbing cultural surface glitz) by partnering with real estate developer and subsidy-collector-specialist Forest City Ratner to use (abuse?) eminent domain to build a New Times Square headquarters building.

The problem is, as pointed out in prior Noticing New York articles, you cannot selectively cast a blind eye to the misconduct associated with the city’s biggest boondoggle because everything is connected. You cannot expect to elide the evils of Atlantic Yards in your pages because it leaves holes in your paper-of-record stories about everything else. Do you want to report about the Brooklyn Borough President's shady capitalization on conflicts of interest involving charities created for that purpose? There’s a gaping hole in this tale you tell unless Atlantic Yards gets featured front and center.

Whatever the Times may have conceptualized about ghettoizing its coverage of Atlantic Yards into some sort of safely segregated backwater, where real news could be ignored and PR advertorial-style fluff could innocuously occupy space on its sports and other pages, it hasn’t panned out. Bruce Ratner’s penchant for perpetually and outrageously pushing boundaries of public offense has worked to ensure that the Atlantic Yards stories never stop rotating through news cycle while raising all sorts issues, issues embarrassing for the Times to report on and embarrassing for it to ignore.

You can’t report the news selectively. Everything is connected. In fact, the biggest story the Times is failing to cover well when it doesn’t cover the all Atlantic Yards issues is the story of crony capitalism. That has national implications. Without a crystal clear and firm handle on cony capitalism the Times can’t adequately cover New York City’s mayor, Bloomberg, a man who has national political aspirations. And without a crystal clear and firm handle on cony capitalism how good is your reporting on Occupy Wall Street going to be?

The inadequacy of Times coverage of both Occupy Wall Street and Mayor Bloomberg brings us back to the aforementioned new National Notice article about how the Times was styling Mr. Bloomberg as a defender of free speech while it covered his eviction of Occupy Wall Street. How could the Times have gotten yet another story so wrong? To learn about how wrong they got it, read National Notice.

Whistleblowing and EDC: Culture and the Questionable Spirit In Which the State Agency Most Responsible For Atlantic Yards Wields Omnipotent Powers

2011-11-16T16:05:00.009-05:00

Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno was recently fired (as was university president Graham Spanier) for his inadequate whistleblowing in connection the sexual abuse scandal involving minors. In a National Notice article I contrasted Paterno’s firing for insufficient whistleblowing with what lawyer and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald is saying happens to whistleblowers in government which is essentially the opposite. Greenwald is saying that government whistleblowers, at least federal government whistleblowers within the Obama administration, are being punished for effective whistleblowing. (See: Friday, November 11, 2011, Damned If You . . . WHAT? Deep Doo Doo (or Don’t Don’t) Questions For Whistleblowers: Does All It Hinge On Private vs Public Sector Employment?)

(Picture of fired Penn State football coach Joe Paterno above from Wikipedia.)

Is this a difference between the private sector and government?: Is it that in the private sector you are damned if you don’t blow the whistle effectively while in government you are punished if you do? Possibly. And possibly the explanation is found in another thesis that Greenwald argues and has set forth at length in his new book, “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful”: That there is now a club, a political and financial class, that is above the law, essentially the 1% Club. By virtue of that thesis the elimination of effective whistleblowing within government simply follows from the fact that for all practical purposes there is now an identity of interest between government and the 1% Club. Greenwald referred to Simon Johnson’s Atlantic Magazine article “The Quiet Coup.”

Whistleblowing and New York Agencies: Presenting ESD

When I wrote the National Notice article referred to above I could not help thinking back to the earlier Noticing New York article about whistleblowing I wrote about effective and ineffective whistleblowing in New York government agencies, particularly state authorities. One of my focuses was the Empire State Development Corporation (aka The New York State Urban Development Corporation) which, with a new name shift, is now calling itself by the further abbreviated moniker “Empire State Development.” (See: Wednesday, February 3, 2010, Two Things About the Pataki Administration and a Hope About What Is Secretly Going on Behind the Scenes Respecting Atlantic Yards.)

One of the things I wrote about ESDC at the time was that:

. . the Empire State Development Corporation, the state agency theoretically most responsible for Atlantic Yards, does not have a whistleblower protection policy even though it was legally required to have adopted one by the Public Authorities Accountability Act of 2005, the provisions of which were signed into law on January 13, 2006.

And ESDC's noncompliance was being lapped by a new change in law because:

More whistleblower requirements that ESDC is supposed to follow are coming effective March 1, 2010 with the amendments to the Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009.

Crime Scene Return

I figured I would return to the scene of ESDC’s crime of noncompliance with the law to find out whether the state agency was finally getting around to complying. ESDC is belatedly coming into compliance with the law but it can easily be said that it does not look as though there is enthusiasm for a spirit of encouraging whistleblowing at ESD or at its coadministered sister agency, the Job Development Authority.

Fully on notice about its noncompliance given my February 3, 2010 Noticing New York article, ESDC finally adopted the whistleblower policy it was legally required to on April 26, 2010 (i.e. also missing the March 1, 2010 deadline of the second law).

It was on the agenda for April 26, 2010 for administrative action as Agenda item #4. According to the minutes, when one of the board members asked, they were told that this was the first time the agency had such a policy but there is no mention recorded in the minutes or in the memo presenting the policy to the directors that the agency had been improperly without such a policy for many years.

JDA, ESD’s coadministered sister agency that was involved in issuing the (rather questionable) bonds for the Atlantic Yards Prokhorov/Ratner “Barclays” arena did not act to adopt the required whistleblower policy until more than a year after ESD, June 28, 2011. (Interesting to note: In terms of government operating in a fancifully pure world, there is apparently, as of yet, absolutely no reference on the entire ESD site to “Prokhorov.”)

Inert Policies: No Periodic Reporting

The responses I received after inquiries to the ESD press office inform me that the policies, since their adoption, have been essentially inert.

The ESDC whistleblower policy requires that periodic reports be given to the board of directors and that those reports be no less frequent than annually. Specifically:

Periodically, but not less than once annually, the Audit Committee, in consultation with the Senior Vice President-Legal and General Counsel, shall provide a written summary to the ESDC Board(s) for the period setting forth the status of pending matters reported pursuant to this Policy Statement, including all claims of whistleblower retaliation.

That would mean that the first such report to the ESD directors would necessarily have been required by April 2011, at least. There was no such report furnished to the directors.

The ESD press office offered the interpretation that no report has been required because, to date, no “claims have been received for whistleblower retaliation.” This is not an impossible interpretation for a way in which the policy could, under its terms, be administered at ESD and JDA. Yes, the required reports could be interpreted as nonrequired in such a situation, but it is not the way to administer the policy if you want to create a consciousness that the whistleblower policy is important. Is it too lawyerly on my part to point out that the more conservative dot-the-“i”s and-cross-the-“t”s way to do this would be to provide the required regular periodic reports reminding the directors of the policy and affirming in those reports the negative, that no matters are pending.

Minimalist Policy Covering Only Retaliation

As it is, as written, very little is required to be reported under the ESDC whistleblower policy because the ESD policy constitutes only the very minimum required by the law it is finally complying with. The policy in all respects focuses exclusively only on prohibiting retaliation against whistleblowers and does not in any other respect encourage, require or provide structure for whistleblowing or employees to report information concerning acts of wrongdoing, misconduct, malfeasance, or other inappropriate behavior that they discover, know about, or otherwise obtain information about. If it did, the periodic reports would have more to cover.

At this point, were it to be assumed that ESD is now in compliance with both the law and its policy, the absence of required reports under the policy can be interpreted only to mean that no employees have complained of retaliation for their whistleblowing. It does not mean that no employees have blown the whistle about internal ESD misconduct. It does not even mean that employees who have blown the whistle are not being retaliated against, only that if they are being retaliated against they have not yet complained about it (if they even know they are being retaliate against).

No Duty to Report Internal Misconduct: Misconduct Not Proscribed

It is instructive to compare the whistleblower policy of the state housing and finance authorities that was included in my earlier Noticing New York article about whistleblowing.

Those agencies have an express policy of not condoning the misconduct itself:

It is the policy of the Affiliated Agencies . . . . that illegal or unethical activity, including but not limited to corruption, fraud, criminal activity, abuse and conflict of interest, by the Members, Officers or employees of the Agency or any person having business dealings with the Agency, will not be permitted, tolerated or condoned.

The ESD/JDA policy expresses no such equivalent. The policy for these other state agencies call for the reporting of internal misconduct:

Employees discovering or otherwise obtaining information concerning acts of wrongdoing, misconduct, malfeasance, or other inappropriate behavior by an employee or Member with respect to investments, travel, the acquisition of real property and the disposition of real and personal property and the procurement of goods and services shall promptly report such activity directly to: [then follows a list of reporting options.]

The ESD/JDA policy has no such requirement for its employees to report internal misconduct. (A sleepy ESD board director would probably not have noticed this by reading the description in the memo presenting the policy for adoption.) Does the policy therefore permit (even hope for) such nonreporting, the kind of government model Glenn Greenwald was apparently talking about vs. the kind of proactive spirit everyone, in retrospect, now feels should have been exhibited by Joe Paterno?

Spirit of Whistleblower Access and Assistance As Possible Alternative

What kind of spirit should an agency be showing with respect to whistleblowing? The Public Authorities Reform Act of 2009 (“PARA”) has provisions about the establishment of a “Whistleblower Access and Assistance Program” and that law also was supposed to involve the State Attorney General in commenting upon the Whistleblower polices of individual authorities like ESD and JDA. That bespeaks a spirit that favors encouraging and assisting whistleblowers but as technically written the program is to be implemented at a statewide level: a public authority such as ESD is not legally required to partake in that spirit. If it wants, an authority like ESD can apparently do the very minimum ESD has done.

And it appears that the ESD policy, as minimally compliant as it now may be, is sinking out of everyone’s consciousness given the absence of things like regular reports to ESD directors that could remind those directors that there are standards extant and applicable to the reporting of misconduct.

Reporting Agency Misconduct Externally

Are there any ESD employees mulling over reporting internal misconduct? Or are there even employees who have reported misconduct at ESD/JDA internally and are now noticing that their reports are not being followed up on? There is one piece of good news for them in the ESD whistleblower policy: It appears that the ESD policy protects ESD employee whistleblowers who report misconduct externally “insofar as the actions taken by the employee are legal” and/or the employee is disclosing the information “to a governmental body.”

Could the policy have been even clearer in saying that such external reporting is an option open to employees witnessing internal misconduct? Probably. The policy of the other state agencies says:

Where appropriate, employees may also, in addition, report such activity to outside local, state and federal governmental authority having jurisdiction over the illegal or unethical activity.

Should ESD employees consider reporting misconduct at ESD externally? For a possible answer we can come full circle to the Paterno and Penn State scandal.

The Culture of Cover-Up vs. Natural Moral Values

(Chris Matthews on Real Time above.)

Chris Matthews on last week’s Real Time With Bill Maher had some harsh words for those who think that just reporting misconduct internally is sufficient and harsh words for those who allow themselves, when it comes to their whistleblowing decisions, to get inculcated with the values of the organization where they work rather than the natural values with which they grew up. His remarks came about 42 minutes into the program:

You know what I think? I said this at college graduations— I believe in it so much! When you grow up as a kid and you join an organization, whether it’s the U.S. Congress or Penn State College, as you call it, you’ve got to have your values before you walk in the door, you’ve got to know what’s wrong and what’s right because they ain’t gonna teach you there. All they teach you there is how to win football games, how to cover your butt. You’ve got to have those values. That guy, McQueary [assistant coach Mike McQueary]— he said he was a young guy— he’s twenty-eight years old: OK?— He’s the guy they we’re all talking about, the guy, the guy they put on PAID LEAVE today. Paid leave! Give him a break? This guy should have known the minute he saw what you just described. The minute he saw it he should have gone to the cops; he shouldn’t have said, `talk to Dad about it.’ Because his first instinct was, `My God! This is horrible!: I can’t believe I am seeing it!’ Then he allows himself to be propagandized into the system— `Oh, well we really don’t want to tell anybody outside of the system.’ And he begins to ask the system to teach him the value system: AND THEY TAUGHT HIM IT: Cover it up! You never ask a system to teach you values because the values of the system is always cover-up.

His first impulse was right: `I can’t believe what I saw!’

Can Anyone Believe What We Saw With ESD’s Handling of Atlantic Yards?

Is the misconduct at Penn State so much worse as to defy comparison with the misconduct people envision occurred as state officials shilled for Forest City Ratner, bending procedures and protocol and bending the letter and spirit of laws, so as to favor a rigged deal for developer/subsidy-collector Forest City Ratner over the interests of the public? The acts alleged to have occurred at Penn State involving sexual abuse of very young minors are truly terrible. The abuse of minors is all the more terrible specifically because minors are understood not to be in a position to protect themselves. But when it comes to what people suffered at the hands of state officials were community members in a position to protect themselves?

The ESD officials wielded virtually omnipotent powers as they abused eminent domain, together with ESD’s other vast abilities to supersede conventional legalities for Bruce Ratner. In what kind of culture were all these powers wielded? I agree with and think that Tom Ziller (at SBNation.com) has accurately described the Prokhorov/Ratner basketball arena as “simply Vaseline for a real estate project [and, I add `accompanying land grab'] in Brooklyn that will make his company billions more than an NBA team could ever be worth.”

Lawsuit Against Forest City Ratner And The Fallacy Of Relying On A White-owned Monopoly To Create Construction Work For The Minority Community

2011-11-15T20:49:00.011-05:00

(Above, Maurice Griffin, one of the plaintiffs at the press conference today about the new lawsuit against Forest City Ratner and BUILD brought by former Atlantic Yards supporters.)

I attended today’s press conference at City Council Member Tish James’ office that was held to call attention to the lawsuit* filed today against Forest City Ratner and BUILD in connection with the nonmaterialization of promised Atlantic Yards jobs. BUILD is one of the AstroTurf community organization, which operates essentially as an arm of and supported by the Forest City Ratner organization to provide 1.) the illusion of community support for the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment and 2.) to a certain limited degree, some actual community support for the mega-project which, according to the lawsuit, it does partly by bamboozling. BUILD’s primary function is to sell the idea that Forest City Ratner’s construction of Atlantic Yards will create jobs for minority community members in Brooklyn.

(* See: Tuesday, November 15, 2011, Seven (of 36) trainees who went through job training program for Atlantic Yards construction jobs sue Forest City, BUILD, others, claiming promises were a sham, Tuesday, November 15, 2011, The missing Independent Compliance Monitor for the Atlantic Yards CBA: it should have reported on the construction job training initiative, now subject of a lawsuit, and Tuesday, November 15, 2011, Given the lawsuit against BUILD and FCR, will the New York Times revisit the 2005 "modern blueprint" claim? )

The lawsuit, brought by seven construction workers (out of a group of 36 trainees) who are members of the minority community and who formerly supported Ratner’s Atlantic Yards, alleges that the workers were snookered by Forest City Ratner and BUILD. Some of the charges are quite serious, including that they were convinced to do construction work without pay (“a sham training program”) apparently as part of the scheme to dupe them and extend their belief that they would eventually be getting promised jobs.

I am going to let others report more deeply on the lawsuit and press conference as I know, for instance, that Norman Order of Atlantic Yards Report will and when he does I will link to it at the bottom of this article.

I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of the lawsuit, the question of what Forest City Ratner really ought to owe everyone. The plaintiffs are represented by South Brooklyn Legal Services and one of the attorneys I spoke to today commented that it was sort of absurd that Forest City Ratner had to be sued for not delivering what was essentially the jobs “sweetener” promised for getting control over all the acreage associated with Atlantic Yards. I think that actually trivializes the debt that Forest City Ratner is walking out on.

It is astounding to think that with the resources of its huge mega-monopoly Forest City Ratner is stiffing people for even these few jobs. The 22 acres of Atlantic Yards are contiguous to other Ratner-owned acreage, making for 30 contiguous Ratner-owned acres at the site, with 50+ Ratner-owned acres in the area. That’s an awful lot of mega-monopoly tying up resources in the community accompanied by an unwillingness to hand out jobs.

More important, it should not be overlooked that the creation of the Ratner mega-monopoly precluded and destroyed other jobs. Therefore, I don’t think it is a case of Ratner just owing the community or individuals the few jobs that were the promised sweetener in connection with all the Ratner takings; what Ratner owes the community ought to be commensurate with all the jobs destroyed or precluded by the mega-monopoly.

The Ratner/BUILD combination was promising jobs for minority construction workers. Is turning a mega-monopoly over to Forest City Ratner really a way to create those construction jobs? Or is it the reverse? Jane Jacobs devoted analysis in her book “The Economy of Cities” to what exactly creates jobs for minority construction workers and firms. Her analysis was that the agglomeration of inherently smaller construction projects into much larger ones was a subtle form of discrimination that actually serves to remove work from the minority community, almost, some might believe as if that were the intention.

Her description on page 226 of her book sounds very much like a description of the development of Atlantic Yards except that it is describing a much smaller agglomeration. The language, in one long paragraph from 1969, might sound a little dated by the standards of what today’s political correctness prescribes, but it makes sense. (I inserted “develop their businesses” below in substitution for a descriptive term that those unfamiliar with definitions used with the book would not know.):

. . . if whites in the Unites States really were to ignore what blacks do, if they really were unaware of what goes on in black communities in American cities, blacks would, in fact, actually have a chance to [develop their businesses]. But black people in their ghettos are regulated absolutely by whites. A black neurosurgeon, Dr. Thomas Matthew (about whom I shall have more to say shortly), replied when he was asked by a white government official how city agencies might help Negro self-help projects, “Get out of my way, and let us try something.” Among well-meaning whites, the latest fad is to give tax exemptions to white corporations to build new housing for blacks and grants of millions to white-owned public utilities and other large corporations to train blacks. This is much like foreign aid to a colony that is not allowed to develop its own work. Along the same lines, a few years ago New York City and the Federal government undertook, with fanfare, to rehabilitate a group of thirty-seven buildings in Harlem. Black-owned construction firms were theoretically free to bid for the work, but there was a booby trap. All thirty-seven buildings were put into one “package.” Therefore, only firms able to get bonding (required by city and Federal regulations) for so large a job could bid for it, and the only firms that could get the bonding were firms that were already doing big jobs, which meant that they were white contracting firms. Of course the works went to a large, white-owned company. If the contracts had been awarded for each building individually— an eminently practical procedure and customary in cases where buildings are being rehabilitated privately in white areas— black contractors could have competed for the jobs. An association of black construction and contracting organizations in New York, struggling to establish a foothold for their work, had begged the city to put the buildings out to bid separately, to no avail. The association, again to no avail, then asked the House of Representatives to investigate this situation and find out why the city was freezing them out of work they were capable of undertaking.

In other words, Jane Jacobs concluded that if you want to create construction work for minority individuals and firms it is not a good idea to agglomerate available construction work and hand it over to monopolies where only white-owned development firms like the Ratner firm are going to be allowed in charge. In the most current popular vernacular we might also regard this, putting aside race entirely, as handing everything over to the 1% Club and expecting some crumbs back.

When I attended the press conference I had just come from the confrontation over the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park so this was on my mind. After the press conference I spoke to one of the plaintiffs about putting everything “in control of the 1% Club and then expecting something back.” First he said that he didn’t care if a job was coming from a member of the 1% Club, he just wanted a job. Then he said that his thoughts on the 1% were really somewhat different. “How can the economy function,” he said, “if the 1% have all the money?”

The question is can you view yourself as truly having a seat at the table when all you are being offered is crumbs? And it’s especially irksome and unfair when the crumbs you are being offered are from a man to whom there was no reason to give control of your table in the first place.

PS: (Added 11/16/2011) As promised, here is the link to comprehensive coverage of the press conference in Atlantic Yards Report (videos included) that links to other local coverage: Wednesday, November 16, 2011, “I was robbed,” claims plaintiff in lawsuit against BUILD and FCR; defendants deny promising jobs and union cards, setting up contest over credibility; claims over unpaid wages in "sham" training program may be easier to prove.

See also ARYs:

Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Brutally weird: Times covers lawsuit against BUILD/FCR amid longer article about promotional event for the Nets

and

Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Documents from the lawsuit against BUILD & FCR: the press release and the legal complaint

Breaking News: 1:00 AM Bloomberg Moves In To Evict Occupy Wall Street Protesters

2011-11-15T10:52:00.001-05:00

(Above, a picture of Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, at Occupy Wall Street, explained here.)

Noticing New York and National Notice usually don’t cover breaking news. A breaking news focus doesn’t readily permit the kind of considered contextual articles that seem to be the most valuable addition that can be made to the prevalent media chatter. This article will make this exception to cover important breaking news.

Bloomberg reportedly had the New York Police Department move in at 1:00 AM last night (without warning) to remove the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park. According to one of the protesters who was there, interviewed on the BBC, the police moved in with knives to cut up and shred the property at the encampment. Reportedly about 70 protesters were arrested. (Another report said 200.) On the BBC you can hear protesters chanting to the police: “Who do you serve: Who do you protect?” and “Shame on you.” You can also hear, “Don’t push me.”

The dispersed protesters are now reassembling at a number of other nearby city sites. There were reports that Bloomberg closed down subway stations to divert the public away from the area.

Bloomberg seems to have chosen his time to evict the protesters so as to fold it in into reports of attempted evictions occurring elsewhere in the country. So it will be less noticed? So, with the help of a short public memory, it will hopefully disappear after a quick run through the 24- hour news cycle?

Bloomberg held a press conference this morning to explain his actions. Most notable in the press conference from standpoint of what Noticing New York and National Notice have previously reported were the following:

• Bloomberg cited health and safety reasons (not suppression of the protesters speech) as the principal reason for removing the protesters. In doing so he gave what I believe were inaccurate (and to my mind manufactured) descriptions of the conditions in Zucotti Park. The many times I have been to Zucotti Park while the protesters were there I never found or felt it was unsafe. I never found that it was difficult to enter or use the park except for the impediments in doing so that came from police barricades and sometimes from shoulder to shoulder police. I did not note that the many elderly choosing to be in the park seemed to feel any concern about their safety. A paralyzed protester in an expensive wheelchair and on a breathing apparatus also did not seem in the least perturbed about his safety. Why did Bloomberg feel it necessary to stress multiple mischaracterizations in this regard during his press conference? Why bother to say things like “there were reports of. . [insert inflammatory thing that didn’t happen] . . . but the police could find no evidence of this”?

• Bloomberg also said several times that the protesters had to be removed because they were violating Brookfield’s property rights. That’s something already written about by Noticing New York and National Notice. Brookfield is the theoretical owner of Zucotti Park. Zucotti Park is the kind of quasi-public space we now see replacing and substituting what used clearly to be public space. So Bloomberg is making the case that Brookfield’s ownership private rights were an operative factor justifying constriction of the protesters’ rights to free speech and free assembly. The argument that free speech violates property rights is increasingly easy as the skewing of wealth in this country to the 1% conjoins with a rapid and continuing privatization of what was previously public.

• Bloomberg was very clear that going forward he (together with Brookfield) intends to be in control of exactly how he wants the protesters to exercise their free speech rights in Zucotti Park. He said this will extend to the police searching people entering Zucotti Park, randomly or as the police see fit.

• Bloomberg said that he did not believe that the protesters were exercising their free speech rights. At the same time Bloomberg has been working to have the press report repeatedly that he is a strong believer in “free speech.” Again, one theme of Bloomberg’s press conference was that he is willing to tell the protesters how they may and should express themselves.

• At one point during the press conference Bloomberg mocked the strength of Occupy Wall Streeters’ ideas and their inability to get their ideas out in other ways. Some of their ideas are that a 1% Club, of which Bloomberg (who became the city’s wealthiest man while mayor) is conspicuously a member, exercise too much control in this country. That most certainly extends to control over who gets to say what and where and with what kind of amplification by the media and with what kind of assistance by paid advertising.

• In the press conference Bloomberg said that throughout the crisis he had been in constant contact with Brookfield Properties. This was despite the fact that earlier in the coverage of Occupy Wall Street the Bloomberg’s administration had prevailed upon the New York Times to report that Bloomberg’s staff was under “strict orders from Mr. Bloomberg” not to “lobby the owner of the park, Brookfield Office Properties.” I did not hear anyone at that press conference ask Mr. Bloomberg about the fact that his live-in girlfriend companion, Diana Taylor, is on the board of Brookfield.

Informative background with respect to much of the above is available in an earlier and thorough Noticing New York article written about Bloomberg’s intention to evict the protesters back on October 13th: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?

(Above, another picture of Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, at Occupy Wall Street, explained here.)

Here’s Reminder: Map For Saturday’s Occupy Brooklyn 2:30 PM March To Evict “Corporate Greed” (And Maybe Ratner's “Crony Capitalism”)

2011-11-11T12:23:00.011-05:00

(Above, map of route for Occupy Brooklyn's 2:30 March tomorrow, Saturday the 12th, to “evict corporate greed.” )

Maybe you already know about Occupy Brooklyn’s planned march tomorrow at 2:30 to “evict corporate greed.” If you do, then the map of the proposed march tomorrow should serve as a reminder for that event and also for the teach-ins that begin at 10:00 AM at the Korean War Veterans Plaza at Cadman Plaza which is near Brooklyn Borough Hall, at Cadman Plaza West/East between Tillary and Johnson. If you didn’t know about it before, this is your opportunity to put it in your calendar.

The map of the proposed march should be a reminder of something else: The vastness of Forest City Ratner’s government-assisted mega-monopoly on some of the most valuable and densely zoned real estate in Brooklyn. It is interesting to note how much of the march, which will be 2.5 miles of walking in all, will involve going either over the property of Forest City Ratner or will be tightly flanked by Forest City Ratner’s property. The marchers would have to walk even longer distances if they were going to travel along all of the property over which government is in the process of giving Forest City Ratner mega-monopoly control. In all it's 50+ acres. See the map below of the mega-monopoly to evaluate the close overlap. See also the second map that follows below to see how the mega-monopoly sits astride a confluence of Brooklyn’s key subway lines and most important subway stations.

Presumably, the route was set in large part because this this is all real estate that is considered central, conspicuously visible and important to the populace of Brooklyn.

While the theme of this march may be to “evict corporate greed” and while there are those marching who will likely have major gripes with capitalism itself, this astounding Forest City Ratner mega-monopoly (which absolutely should be “evicted”) is not the inevitable result of “corporate greed” nor the result of what should be considered normal healthy capitalism. The Forest City Ratner mega-monopoly could only have come about with the complicity of government. It is the result of what is referred to as crony capitalism, something that, in principle, the Wall Street Journal editorially rails against which in this respect aligns the Wall Street Journal (but perhaps not the Atlantic Yards-supporting New York Times) with the Occupy movements.

Crony capitalism is draining to the economy in general and subtracts from the economic well-being of the 99%. I’ve been making the point, with articles under both the Noticing new York and National Notice banners, that opposition to crony capitalism, the teaming up of big corporations with big government, is something that should be a shared cause of both the right and left, both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement, including uniting them in opposition to the government assisted Ratner Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly. (See: Monday, October 24, 2011, On NPR, Echo of Coinciding Principles Noticed: What the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Ought To Agree On and Tuesday, October 25, 2011, Opposition To Crony Capitalism As Uniting Cause: Resource-Grabbing Mega-Monopolies (Like Atlantic Yards) As Catalyst For Great Recessions/Depressions.

In his Atlantic Yards Report today Norman Oder made the same point that, “Atlantic Yards isn't an example of `anti-capitalist outrage.’ It's an example of `anti-crony-capitalist outrage.’” (See: Friday, November 11, 2011, Is Atlantic Yards (site of OWS protest) an example of "anti-capitalist outrage"? Maybe against crony capitalism.)

Also today, Mr. Oder made the point, writing about a similarly themed march yesterday outside J.P. Morgan Chase building in Ratner’s at MetroTech, that though the illusion of job creation is dangled before the public when the special subsidies and benefits get handed out to create these Ratner monopoly campuses, those jobs are likely not to materialize. (See: Friday, November 11, 2011, A protest at MetroTech and questions about subsidies.)

Yep, there’s no question about that, per Noticing New York articles on the subject: Saturday, March 26, 2011, The American Jobs Creation Act, Job Creation That Wasn’t: What Happens When Government Doesn’t Manage Its Programs.

The march through Brooklyn is an important form of free speech, one that is likely all the more important where other forms of participatory democracy to influence politicians seem increasing futile. You may want to exercise this right before it vanishes or is circumscribed entirely beyond recognition. For an extended discourse on how this right of free speech and public assembly is put into jeopardy by privatization of traditional public space, including for instance, the Ratner absorption of streets, avenues, sidewalks, parks and plazas that were previously publicly owned space, see: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?

I hope that same article will also give amusing insight into why I created images, like the one below, of Bonnie and Clyde, Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, hanging out with the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
For links to more Noticing New York and National Notice articles about themes related to Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement and to view some marvelous photographic portraits of Occupy Wall Street protesters, see: Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Faces of Occupy Wall Street: A Wonderful Site For Wonderful Sights.

So there is the march, which is surely worth showing up for and then the teach-ins. Will those teach-ins also be worth showing up for? Probably. Again, they begin at 10:00 AM. I understand that Common Cause New York will be teaming up with Occupy Brooklyn to lead a teach-in “concerning some of our core issues like money in politics and corporate personhood” that will begin at 1:30pm at Brooklyn Borough Hall at Korean War Veterans Plaza, Cadman Plaza W. between Tillary St. & Johnson St. (Nearby trains: 2,3,4,5,R to Borough Hall, A,F to Jay Street). There is also a Facebook event page on this.

See you there.

Public Hearings For Big Real Estate Projects: Refining Your Sense of the Absurd

2011-11-08T08:31:00.003-05:00

What’s the difference between “surreal” and “Kafkaesque”?

This is the kind of distinction you will find yourself making if you want to become a connoisseur of the flavors that public hearing futility comes in.

I just wrote about public hearings held where it is a forgone conclusion that those testifying are going to be ignored by those holding the hearing. And I wrote about a famous incident where, at one hearing, Jane Jacobs was arrested for protesting such absurdity. (See: Wednesday, November 2, 2011, Big Politically-Connected Real Estate Projects: Ignoring The Public Majority With Futile “Participatory Democracy” Hearing Process.)

Jane Jacobs suggested the intent of the hearing she was attending might have been considered simply as a steam valve by those holding it to help abate public indignation and wrath. And that gets into something else discussed, whether when attending such a hearing you should address yourself to those holding the hearing who won’t listen to you or, to make yourself feel better, to an audience of other members of the public who feel as you do. That assumes you are let into the hearing at all.

To describe the hearing when she was arrested, Jacobs invoked `surreal’ and `eerie.’

But `surreal’ and `eerie’ just won’t do as adjectives to describe some hearing where the machinations to ignore the public are ratcheted up steps further. After I wrote about the hearings that a club of politically connected “plutocrats” have complacent faith they can ignore I started thinking about a brilliant animation of a real hearing transcript done this summer by Norman Oder that appeared on his Atlantic Yards Report site. It appears below:

To appreciate it fully you should go to the post where it first appeared that also includes 13 links to prior articles about how absurd the hearing was. One of those posts makes a reference to “Theatre of the Absurd” writer Samuel Beckett, so you will have to chose between your authors in evaluating the situation: Kafka or Beckett? (See: Tuesday, August 23, 2011, Five years ago... there was a big public hearing--some retrospectives, and a new video.)

Basically, as Mr. Oder describes and his animation vivifies for you, over five years ago on an 88-degree August day thousands of Brooklynites tried to attend the first hearing on the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement. As the hearing officer says, it was to be the only hearing but many of those wanting to testify were denied admittance to Klitgord Auditorium due to its lack of capacity. There was then the odd spectacle (chose your additional adjective) of people being called to testify by the hearing officer who were not being admitted into the building.

Webster’s defines Kafkaesque as “suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; especially : having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Kafka’s world is one where everything seems bureaucratically engineered to thwart those in the stories standing in for the Kafka persona. There isn’t anyone in particular to blame or to whom to attribute the futility that is felt but the tantalizing inexorability of the hopelessness becomes in his books and stories almost a personality unto itself.

If in the Kafka books there were individuals who to whom the engineered futility could be attributed then the adjective that would apply wouldn’t be `Kafkaesque,’ it would be `Machiavellian’ or it would be some sort of conspiratorial political thriller. . . Is there an adjective for this genre? Maybe we need one.

Maybe we need one because here is something else I was thinking about in connection with the absurdity of all the legal bells and whistles that surround these hearings and also the way that the courts have jettisoned eminent domain protection from the state and federal constitutions for the sake of the plutocratic class: There is a theory, a rather frightening one, that there is now a club, a political and financial class, that is above the law. I heard this theory propounded by Glenn Greenwald, the author of “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful” on a Leonard Lopate show segment yesterday.

Mr. Greenwald theorizes that we have been on a downward slope since the pardon of Richard Nixon and that there is now a elite club that expects to behave with impunity. He was utterly too convincing in the case he made. I hope it’s not true.

Here is a link and WNYC summary of the segment and you may click below to listen to it:

Glenn Greenwald on Our Justice System
Monday, November 07, 2011

Glenn Greenwald argues that, over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been replaced with a two-tiered system of justice—the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world. With Liberty and Justice for Some reveals the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud.

Yeah, maybe we are in a world where we need some new adjectives if the background to the stories being written will be such a world as Mr. Greenwald describes. Suggestions anyone?

Rogues Gallery: The AIANY (“American Institute of Architects New York”) Subway Corridor Posters Under the IFC Center Showing “Urbanized”

2011-11-06T18:34:00.027-05:00

(Above, an example of how AIANY's postered Greenwich Village subway hall promoting subsidized projects SHOULD look, not how it actually does. Click to enlarge.)

On our way to catch and write about “Urbanized,” the new Gary Hustwit documentary about urban design* we discovered, heading up from the A Train, that the subway corridor directly under the IFC Center theater hosting the film is lined with AIANY (“American Institute of Architects New York”) posters featuring different architectural projects. Some of those images are of Hall of Shame subsidy grabbers, and for sure at least the pictures of the of the net-public-loss Atlantic Yards Prokhorov/Ratner (“Barclays”) basketball arena are destined to be disgruntling.

(* Noticing New York’s review of Urbanized” is here: Saturday, November 5, 2011, Now Appearing In Gary Hustwit’s New Documentary “Urbanized”: Amanda Burden, New York’s High Line and Community Protest)

Prokhorov/Ratner (“Barclays”) Basketball Arena

CitiField Baseball Stadium

A second heavily subsidized expensive new sports venue, the Mets new CitiField baseball stadium was also amongst the images. Now seems like a good opportunity to recall something Noticing New York paid attention to in the summer of 2009: Prompted by the federal bailout (with Citibank among those getting substantial rescue funds) and the public’s hostility to the way that stadium had been financed with excessive public subsidies, suggestions were being made all over the place that CitiField should be renamed. (See: December 4, 2008, Citi Field by Any Other Name, by George Vecsey, December 5, 2008, Citi Field by Any Other Name, Part II, by Andrew Das, December 5, 2008, Answers From Brian Lehrer of WNYC, Part 3, by The New York Times, The Brian Lehrer Show, December 05, 2008, Bailout Stadium, Friday, December 05, 2008, and Mon Nov 24, 2008, So what should we, the American taxpayers, rename Citi Field? By 'Duk.)

The huge preponderance of suggestions (138 from Brian Lehrer listeners alone) for the renaming of the stadium reflect the public’s anger: “Debits Field,” “Field of Nightmares,” “Field of Schemes,” “Bailout Ballpark.” “The Field That Ruthless Built (reserved for the Yankees new stadium)” “Shea-m (Shame) Stadium,” our own “Shady Stadium” suggestion, or taking a cue from Bill Maher “SITTY Field with the H.”

Bank of America Tower

Also present amongst the images was the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. Though that building, currently the second tallest in New York City, may have things to recommend it, Bank of America is in the headlines right now due to consumer outrage over its decision (now retracted) to charge its customers ludicrous fees to use their debit cards, and the size of the tower bearing the bank’s name (bringing increasing density to Bryant Park) was facilitated by assistance the government gave the developer in wielding the threat of abusive eminent domain.

Positioned Pitches

(Above, from the promotional site for "Urbanized")

How did the AIANY gallery wind up being displayed in that underground Greenwich Village subway corridor? Does AIANY regularly display such posters at that location? Did AIANY envision that “Urbanized” would be showing above in the IFC Center and that they could catch the exact audience they’d like to reach? That seems a bit far fetched (even if we can find Hustwit on AIANY's calendar and actually, in NYC, October is “Archtober” in which AIANY has an annual New Work exhibition). More likely, the posters were there at the same location for the same reason that the film was. Greenwich Village is a place where you can find people interested in the arts, including architecture; maybe not business or corporate types but individuals susceptible to the seduction of well-crafted images. Maybe people you want to reach because they are an on-the-edge demographic you don't think you already have assuredly on board with your message. And if you want to reach out effectively to those people it's good to offer your wares around hub subway stations where flows of such people converge.

The subway images promoting the Prokhorov/Ratner arena and these other government assisted, government subsidized projects is also part of something else that has been a Noticing New York preoccupation recently: The pummeling we are getting everywhere we go reflecting a severe imbalance in the public dialogue delivered via paid speech. Big picture, the skewing of wealth in this country is working in conjunction with the increasing privatization of the traditional avenues and elements of public speech (including but not limited to public spaces and streets in which to speak). That means that we are forever being subjected to ubiquitous, insistent cues and reinforcements of (for example) the way Forest City Ratner wants things perceived. (See: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?)

Corrections Please

(More on the calculations with respect to the above is available here.)

And because the images on these subway corridor walls are of government-assisted, publicly- subsidized projects this is essentially a self-pummeling since the images are ultimately paid for by the public itself (and those who have been the victims of eminent domain), notwithstanding that it was skewed wealth that initially tilted those subsidies into the developers' pockets. Cyclically, if the message does get through, then no one amongst us is supposed to object the next time one of these developers persuades politicians to tilt more subsidies into their pockets.

Given that correction is desperately needed to the not-so-subliminal subterranean subjugation I thought I would do in this article what have been doing in others, provide examples of the images we should instead be seen on subway posters and on billboards blasting their message to the public around the city.

To see more in this vein go to:

• Monday, May 2, 2011, “Welcome To Brooklyn” Where the Game Is Frivolous Spending On Boondoggle Basketball Arenas- Getting the Image Right

• Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Longing For Correcting Images to Jay-Z’s Hip-Hop Hype and Ratner’s Atlantic Yards “Strategy of Distraction”

• Sunday, October 30, 2011, Unhappy Halloween: Recalling Last Year’s Tricky “Treats”: The Ghastly Ghosts Lurking In PR Messages From Atlantic Yards To Zucotti Park

Now Appearing In Gary Hustwit’s New Documentary “Urbanized”: Amanda Burden, New York’s High Line and Community Protest

2011-11-05T13:18:00.004-04:00

(Above, NY city planning chief in “Urbanized” a film in which she defends the Brooklyn's public against harm from a project right next to Atlantic Yards.)

Saturday morning we ventured out in the snowflakes of the October Northeaster to the IFC Center in the Village and saw “Urbanized,” Gary Hustwit’s new documentary about city planning. Boy, does the film sure let New York City Planning Commission Chair Amanda Burden get away with a lot! But we won’t.

Cramming Urban Design Into 82 Minutes

First some words about the film in general. I haven’t seen Mr. Hustwit’s much acclaimed first film, “Helvetica.” I’d very much like to. The notion of it appeals to the obsessive side of my personality. How do you make an entire film about a single typeface ? Obviously, you go into the subject much more deeply than anyone would expect you to.

As a film, “Urbanized” has the opposite problem: How do you cover the entire topic of city planning and what shapes cities either for good or for ill in a mere 82 minutes? The film then is sort of a sampler of things that can be learned about urban planning or design, covering a representative variety of ideas and concerns. You may learn from it no matter who you are, but if you know a bit about the thinking of how cities shape themselves you will probably keep noting how so much more than could have been covered. A.O. Scott’s New York Times review says essentially this, calling it a “remarkably concise film — which could easily have sprawled to 15 hours on public television.”

Another Times article discussing the making of the film the day before it came out said that Mr. Hustwit crowd-sourced the making of the film in several respects, tapping “his Twitter followers for suggestions” and quotes Hustwit about the film’s conciseness as follows:

“I had all these Google news alerts set up for, like, ‘city zoning controversies,’ and I got like a hundred a day,” . . . . . “There’s too much to talk about, and after a while, it started to drive me crazy.”

(See: Up Close: Making His Own Mark, Once Again, by David Colman, October 26, 2011.)

(Trailer for “Urbanized,” above. The film's site notes that it features the voice, among others, of Ms. Burden who also appears in the footage.)

Respect For Bicycles In Bogotá

The film covers more than a dozen issues in segmented vignettes. There is joyful sparkle to Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia (above) as we tour around with him as he shows how the city has reclaimed its roads and sidewalks to give priority to buses and bicycles over cars. His philosophy:

A city needs to show as much respect for a person riding a $30 bicycle as it does for someone driving a $30,000 car.

(And, the point is made people are taking up considerably less room in a bus or on a bike.) Are you listening, Senator Schumer?

Self-Building Communities, Chile: Communities Tossed Into the Cold NYC

New minimalist housing projects in Santiago, Chile get the film’s attention as an example of stretching tight resources by zeroing in on exactly what residents need and want most when they move in and then capitalizing on the residents’ own will, energy and sweat equity to add improvements thereafter to the infrastructure and boiled-down basics. There is innate constructive energy in any community waiting to be tapped. A knowledgeable viewer can make the connection that this approach of capitalizing on a community’s own energy is the converse of what goes on with Bloomberg’s eminent domain abuse mega-projects like Columbia’s takeover of West Harlem, and Atlantic Yards, where the government steps in (or, in truth, assists a private entity to do so) and obliterates what a community has successfully built up over time.

Brasília’s Vastly Separated Sculptural Buildings

(Above, from the trailer.)

The film isn’t visibly grinding any axes and is neutral in most of its presentations, letting those who believe certain things about urban design, including some professionals and academics, say what they will. That means that occasional statements that sound like balderdash or superficial tripe don’t get labeled as such by the film maker. The closest the film comes to calling expressed views into question is a segment with counterpointing viewpoints about Brasília, built from scratch in the 1950s and ’60s when Brazil's capital was transferred from the coast to the Mideastern interior. The city's huge sculpturesque buildings embody the very different thinking of the time about what constituted good urban design. It looks like a Robert Moses’ World’s Fair writ large. And large is a big part of the obvious problem with it. Almost all viewers of the film are going to agree with the counterpointing assessment, driven home by appropriate accompanying footage, that its distances are far too vast to be friendly to human habitation.

Ready consensus on this point is not to say that New Yorkers don’t have to be wary of old ideas of Robert Moses’ ilk being brought back. The developer’s proposed design for the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly has a lot in common with the design of Moses’ old developments. That's not necessarily because anyone believes it is good design but because the proposed superblocking maximizes the various hidden subsidies the developer packed into that design.

High Line Hijinks

(Above from the trailer, the High Line with Gehry's "dirty iceberg"- our term- governmentally subsidized IAC building in background.)

New York comes up directly in the film a couple of times and the film even ends with a shot of the city. It is New York’s High Line that is featured with the most particular prominence getting justly deserved praise and being spoken of as inspiration for other cities in terms of adaptive reuse of post-industrial relics. No opposing views about the value of the High Line are presented within the film. These days who could find someone to express them?

The film therefore does New York City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden an enormous favor when it uses the end of High Line segment to introduce her, in no uncertain terms, as its staunch proponent. Says Ms. Burden as we meet her:

We were just passionate about saving the High Line. Zoning was just one piece of it. I only played a role in the zoning, and, being obsessive, I think I spent . . I said if I didn’t think about the High Line every single day it was going to come down. That was my mind set.

Lest we might think that the “zoning” Ms. Burden speaks of is either insignificant or dry stuff, we have the moment before been told (just after a reiteration of the community value of the High Line), “Underneath the design, a lot of what we see here today is a result of the care and attention that went into the zoning.” We are not told what that “zoning” was; it remains abstract, but it sounds pretty good irrespective. If you have come to the theater knowing what the “zoning” was, then you know.

Community Instigated High Line

One thing that is great about the High Line, which the film makes pretty clear, is that its preservation was not an example of top-down planning: The idea for the High Line came from community. As the story is told, and it’s in large part very true, the idea for it came from two men, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, after attending a community hearing and then the enthusiasm for that good idea grew when David and Hammond became its activist proponents. Preservation of the High Line was also not an example of the developer-driven, reactive planning so often practiced by Ms. Burden’s New York City Planning Department where developers tell the city what they want to do, what would be good for them, and then, as the planning department aids them, everyone has to fall in line even if it overrides community plans already in place (e.g. the 197-a plans superseded by the the West Side Columbia neighborhood takeover the huge East Side Solow project).

Development Community and the High Line

The film doesn’t tell you that the development community and property owners actually opposed the High Line. It does tell you that the High Line initially lacked supporters but the film’s one mentioned example is an unidentified someone attending the community hearing where David and Hammond met. Even very late in the game developer Douglas Durst, in some ways a more progressive developer supportive of the Municipal Art Society, was calling for demolition of at least the last third of the High Line that wraps around the proposed Hudson Yards project. At the time Mr. Durst had hopes he would win the competition to develop Hudson Yards and he viewed preservation of the High Line as an unnecessary expense rather than an asset.

But how often in New York do major initiatives like the High Line happen without development community support? That’s where Ms. Burden’s abstractly referred to “zoning” comes in. It would have been much more informative if, in the film,“upzoning” had been the word used. The way that the development community was swung over to support preservation of High Line was that the High Line initiative was used to spearhead an upzoning of the Chelsea neighborhood around the High Line together with the creation of zoning bonuses related to improvements of the High Line and transferable development rights. More density. That’s something the development community almost invariably favors.

Notably, when Mr. Durst was advocating demolition of the last third of the High Line he was almost certainly expecting that the permitted density of the Hudson Yards development would be established independently of whether the High Line was preserved.

Park Improves Community Value

Other than density the development and property-owning community favors something else: improved real estate values. The Times article about Mr. Hustwit that came out the day before the film tells us that Hustwit and his girlfriend live in an apartment “just a block away from the elevated park.” and that the personal downside of the High Line for Mr. Hustwit is that “it has really increased the price of rental space over here.” In other words, just as good parks and amenities should be expected to, the advent of the High Line has improved neighboring property values and increased rents even as the building boom prompted by it has been adding to the square footage available in the neighborhood. Almost any New Yorker aware of the High Line or anyone else who has visited it will be cognizant of the many buildings speedily being erected up around it.

Whether or not the greater density of the upzoning overseen by Ms. Burden should have been exacted as the price for preserving the High Line, it can be convincingly argued that upzoning was a good one for the neighborhood and city and was very appropriate. In addition, because it is helping to pay for the High Line the High Line’s development has thereby been hastened.

Do You Know What City Planning Is?: An Unmentioned Atlantic Yards

Having been so grandly introduced as a proponent of the High Line, the film immediately cuts to a scene of Ms. Burden meeting with representatives of a developer with a project in Brooklyn. Overlaid we hear her voice instructively supplying this city planning primer:

The Department of City Planning is responsible for shaping its neighborhoods, its waterfront, its industrial lands and its business districts, really shaping the form of the city, and where it is going to grow, where it’s going to develop.

Then we see Ms. Burden, in action. As an example of her work she is conspicuously defending the public from overdevelopment. Looking at the plans before her she critically says:

This is a double problem because not only have you lost holding the street wall here, you now have a building that’s very out of scale with the Brooklyn Academy of Music . . . historic building.

“Out of scale with the Brooklyn Academy of Music”? This is almost too clever by half: Clearly visible in the plans Ms. Burden is looking at on the movie screen, and right next to the Brooklyn Academy of Music is the skyline profile of the much more iconic Williamsburg Savings Bank. But the Williamsburg Savings Bank building is not mentioned. Was it just the editing or was Ms. Burden taking intentional care crafting her words?

The scale-establishing reference of the Williamsburg Savings Bank building has been central to very heated discussions about how inappropriately huge and out-of-scale and improperly dense the pending Forest City Ratner mega-monopoly is. Ms. Burden has been a defender of Atlantic Yards and was instrumental in getting its approval through, and yet here she is in this film shown criticizing the scale of another project right next to Atlantic Yards. The film doesn’t explain this but if you go into the film knowing enough it is anger inspiring.

(Above right, the Williamsburg Savings Bank as seen from below. Below, the Williamsburg Savings Bank as seen from behind a proposed Atlantic Yards tower.)

Burden again addresses the audience directly:

We can’t actually design architecture, we can’t design the storefront but at least we can set up these basic parameters that give you the best possibility that this will be a great street.

Not mentioned is that, in the case of the Atlantic Yards mega-project which she helped enable, all these “basic parameters” of zoning that had been set were overridden so the developer could do whatever he wanted to maximize his own best possibilities over those of the community, including his choice to eliminate and absorb into his private ownership formerly public streets, sidewalks and avenues.

(Proposed Atlantic Yards above from the Environmental Simulation Center’s Atlantic Yards plug-in for the Google Earth program and below from the Municipal Art Society’s “Atlantic Yards or Atlantic Lots” slide show.)
Planning Chief Burden And Jane Jacobs Introduced

Working quickly, the film moves on to burnish Ms. Burden’s reputation in yet one more respect. Having introduced her as a key High Line proponent and savior, it then allowed her to authoritatively provide the film’s central primer on the value of zoning, next showing her as a defender against buildings of improper scale in Brooklyn (next to the Williamsburg Savings Bank). The film proceeds to let Ms. Burden introduce the historic struggle between the planning ideas of the Robert Moses’ ilk and those things Jane Jacobs espoused.

A.O. Scott in his Times review of the film says, “there is a distinct bias in favor of Jacobs-influenced new urbanism and against other approaches to city planning.” If it is true, and I think it is, this puts Ms. Burden in a place of enormous honor. It would be a place of enormous honor even if the film were not, itself, so pro-Jane Jacobs in its thinking. And getting this honor also has key implications in some other respects we shall visit momentarily.

Bloomberg Development Mantra: “We Will Grow”

When Ms. Burden begins speaking about the Robert Moses/Jane Jacobs dichotomy (and hinting that it perhaps can somehow even be fused) she dutifully invokes the Bloomberg administration’s mantra about the city needing to grow to quickly accommodate an additional one million people. She is, after all, a Bloomberg administration official.

The city will likely one day grow by the administration’s one million figure but despite the administration’s continued promulgation of inaccurate population graphs, the Bloomberg notion that this was all going to occur in a mere two decades (or less), bringing the city to a population of 9.1 or 9.2 million by 2030 is clearly off base. In fact, the city is apparently currently growing at so slow a rate that the city won’t actually grow to 9.4 million until almost 70 years from now. As Noticing New York has pointed out previously, the reason all this is important is that these projections for enormous population growth have been used as a backdrop to help justify the Bloomberg-style mega-development that begins with tearing things down while not having terrific success at replacing what gets demolished.
(The image above is from Bloomberg’s PlaNYC website.- The graph shown is not up-to-date. If corrected the second green triangle approximately over 2010 should be down more or less level with the blue square over the year 2000, because the city hasn’t actually grown much under Bloomberg.)

For more on this see: Saturday, April 23, 2011, A Post-Earth Day Post: Bloomberg, His PlaNYC 2030, His Environmental Creds (Credentials and Credibility) and Population Projections and Wednesday, April 20, 2011, Fighting His Third Term Curse Bloomberg Now Uses His Own Money To Promote Mega-Projects That Aren’t Happening.

So it is important that Burden begins talking about the tensions between Jane Jacobs’ and Robert Moses’ tenets by invoking the Bloombergian need to grow by one million mantra. Although she does not say by when such growth should be expected it is implicit that it should be in the time period being planned for by her:

Our plans have really redrawn the entire blueprint of the city because we have to grow by over a million people. And our plans therefore have been as ambitious as those of Robert Moses, but we really judge ourselves by Jane Jacobs standards. Robert Moses was the “Master Builder.” He planned, looking at the city from above, and his highway building destroyed entire neighborhoods. He cut off our entire island of Manhattan from the waterfront by building highways down the edges. His impact was profound and his insensitivity, was legendary, to the texture of the city. His downfall came at the same time as the rise of Jane Jacobs.

That’s the intro that Burden gets to deliver. It is left to others to briefly tell us who Jane Jacobs was and why she was so great, including telling us that without Ms. Jacobs most of Greenwich Village would have been knocked down.

Lurking Champions For Moses

There is a reason who is making what seemingly authoritative statements now about what we should believe respecting the calibration of credence for Robert Moses versus Jane Jacobs viewpoints is so important. Once it appeared that the views of Moses were safely dead, particularly after Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-wining book, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” Notwithstanding, during Ms. Burden’s tenure presiding at the City Planning Department a concerted effort was mounted to rehabilitate both Robert Moses and the sort of faith he had in big projects. As Adam Sternbergh observed in his Spring 2007 New York Magazine article about the High Line’s preservation:

As it happens, the High Line arrives at the exact moment when the legacy of Robert Moses—the imperious former New York City parks commissioner who had his own visions for the city—is being rehabilitated, or at least exhumed. Three separate museums this year mounted exhibits asking visitors to revisit his grandly imagined, and subsequently vilified, plans to remake New York into an expressway-laden megaplex, efficiently absorbing the daily swarms of auto-bound commuters.

(See: The High Line: It Brings Good Things to Life: The abandoned railroad that made a park ... that made a neighborhood ... that made a brand, by Adam Sternbergh,
Apr 29, 2007.)

Mr. Sternbergh ventures that the Jane Jacobs defeat of Robert Moses meant that “her theories on lively neighborhoods . . .have been entrenched as conventional wisdom ever since.” Those theories should have stayed unassailably entrenched but with Bloomberg’s penchant for megadevelopments (with Ms. Burden providing cover) the Jacobs theories have both been under attack and ignored.

There are some notable antidotes to the Moses rehabilitation effort. In 2007 while still being led by Kent Barwick, the Municipal Art Society opened its “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York” exhibit and held many related seminar evenings. In 2010 Roberta Brandes Gratz a longtime friend, colleague and disciple of Jane Jacobs produced her excellent “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.” In his blurb for her book historian and author Mike Wallace (author of "Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, The History of New York City") says:

The spirit of Robert Moses has climbed from its crypt and again stalks the city. Roberta Gratz— channeling her friend Jane Jacobs— is determined to re-inter him, not with a stake or silver bullet, but with a rigorous accounting of the true historical costs of Moses-style development, and the under appreciated benefits of citizen-led, bottom-up regeneration. Its paean to urban complexity, coupled with its practical policy prescriptions makes the feisty “Battle for Gotham” a compelling inspired read.

Moses Or Jacobs? Whose Side Is Burden Really On?

There is no question that Commissioner Burden knows her stuff. She can and does flaunt her Jane Jacobs credentials. Ms. Burden considers herself a disciple of William H. (“Holly’) Whyte as she once worked at his Project for Public Spaces. Mr. Whyte, renowned in his own right, is famous as Jane Jacobs’ mentor.

The question is whether in the Moses vs. Jacobs debates Ms. Burden is treacherously flying under a false flag, declaring herself to be observant of “Jane Jacobs standards” and eschewing Moses’ “legendary . . . insensitivity . . . to the texture of the city,” while actually working very hard to ensure approval of the destructive mega-projects that the Bloomberg administration wants approved, such as: Atlantic Yards, Columbia University’s take over of West Harlem, the removal of the Willets Point neighborhood via eminent domain abuse, the shrinkage and virtual elimination the historic areas of Coney Island through a zoning plan where the calculated pretext of preposterous postulations prevails over common sense. Even on small one-building deals like the Walentas Dock Street project Ms. Burden has signed on to duplicity and poor planning when the Bloombergian fix was in.

And Ms. Burden has been accused of insensitivity, perhaps the most famous instance of this being that Ms. Burden is reported to have decided that the controversial rezoning of Harlem’s 125th Street was necessary because she and a friend couldn’t find a good restaurant in the neighborhood after a Roberta Flack concert.

The most thorough Noticing New York analysis of Ms. Burden’s involvement in facilitating Atlantic Yards goes into the anomaly of how Ms. Burden, as the city’s planning chief, could have been concerned about the issue of ill-advised superblocking with the relatively very small and necessary aggregation of blocks to create Teardrop Park in Battery Park City when she then, in contrast, let pass without objection the much larger and unnecessary superblock aggregations involved in giving Forest City Ratner its Atlantic Yards mega-monoply. (See: Monday, September 22, 2008, Should a Teardrop be Shed- Considering the Burden?)

(See the images of Teardrop Park overlaid on the Atlantic Yards footprint below.)
Another question is whether Burden’s City Planning Department and Commission side-stepped looking at Atlantic Yards as it should be looked at. Often presented as a 22-acre, 16 towers plus arena mega-project that managed to evade the technical jurisdiction of Ms. Burden’s minions, the building of Atlantic Yards actually involves 30 contiguous acres of Ratner ownership with 19 new towers plus arena, over which Ms. Burden could arguably have asserted jurisdiction. Those 30 acres are only a subset of Ratner’s larger 50+ acre government assisted superblocking mega-monopoly on prime Brooklyn real estate. (See: Wednesday, January 27, 2010, Did New York City Planning Officials Sidestep Looking at the Bigger Atlantic Yards Picture? Below, the Ratner 50+ government assisted acres)

Because she is aware of what she is doing Ms. Burden may sometimes experience a level of discomfort. Ms. Burden normally appears extraordinarily poised and in command but another Noticing New York article about an April 2009 New York Journalism Institute symposium noted the following about her Coney Island presentation:

Ms. Burden seemed to be very nervous during her presentation and we noticed that she left immediately after finishing her remarks so that she was not available to engage with either the evening’s panelists or the audience afterward.

(See: Tuesday, May 12, 2009, The City to the Public: “We’ve Got Your Coney Island: If You Want It Back, Better Do Exactly As We Say. . ” Ms. Burden at that symposium, below.)

In all likelihood Ms. Burden understands all or most of the implications of forcing through these grand scale top-down projects, including that decimation will follow in their wake, initially and for some time afterward. Who knows what she tells herself in her own defense? Perhaps she believes that if she were not doing these deeds it would be somebody else appointed to the planning commission in her place. Perhaps she believes that with her knowledge and good instincts she stands as a buffer against what could be worse. Perhaps she believes that she needs to do what she needs to do when she needs to do it in order to survive to fight another day on other issues of importance.

Perhaps Ms. Burden tells herself some variation of any combination of the above. Perhaps she does and she is wrong. Perhaps honest, open opposition opposition would be the best contribution to society she could make. Ms. Burden doesn’t need the money but she does seem to relish the position she holds.

Not Covered by “Urbanized”: The Negative Influence of Politically Wired Deals On City Design

“Urbanized” never tackles the city-shaping aspects of politically wired deals. That is perhaps the main recurring topic of Noticing New York’s articles. “Urbanized” deals pleasantly with the aftermath post-Katrina malaise of New Orleans by following a local artist who bedecks abandoned buildings with scores of stickers begging to be filled in that read: “I Wish This Was ____. ” It doesn’t ask the question whether much of the rebuilding of New Orleans is being steered by a local elite interested in downsizing and evicting poor blacks from their neighborhoods.

The film shows us the hope of local vegetable gardens tended by local residents on city-owned land in a depressed Detroit neighborhood but it doesn’t mention Jane Jacobs’ analysis that Detroit's company-town monoculture was destined to lead to such depression. It doesn’t mention the events underlying the infamous Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit case which ultimately prompted the Michigan Supreme Court to (in 2004) reverse itself and interpret more expansively what constitutes eminent domain abuse. (See: Wednesday, January 21, 2009, Caroline Kennedy, in Our Defense Against Eminent Domain?: The Way it Might be.)

As late as 1981 Detroit was till directing all its subsidy eggs to the motor industry basket. The Poletown case involved the City of Detroit’s judicially sanctioned “quick-removal” eviction of an entire neighborhood, a neighborhood of thirty-five hundred, “mostly elderly, mostly Polish first-generation Americans” who had lived in Poletown for three-quarters of a century, in order to, at the behest of General Motors, turn over the neighborhood’s land for the construction of a new 70-acre automobile manufacturing plant. After pouring in untold additional subsidy General Motors ultimately abandoned what had been built. It was after years of GM's not paying property taxes on the same basis as all other Detroit property owners, including those who had been dispossessed by eminent domain. And then there was the GM bankruptcy.

Public Protest In “Urbanized”

(Above, from the clip promoting fundraising for for the completion of "Urbanized.")

Public protest and outrage over imposed public planning is addressed in “Urbanized.” It is addressed in a segment of the film just before its conclusion that lasts about ten minutes, covering the “S21” or “Stuttgart 21 project” transportation project in Stuttgart, Germany. That involved the building of a new train station to facilitate or enable European bullet trains traveling between Paris, Vienna and Budapest to be routed through Stuttgart. Among other things, the film shows community ire being raised by the destruction of a treasured community park and the felling of huge 200-year-old trees.

The Brasília segment and this one are the only two segments in the film presented counterpointed fashion. Respecting s21, The audience is taken back and forth between the community protesters expressing their views and a representative from the rail company explaining why the project is necessary. Despite a superfluity of German subtitles insufficient information is given to know who might actually be right. The conversation in the men's room right afterwards was between two gents who were utterly at a loss to figure out what options were there to be sorted out.

If you are like me and have participated in activist protests here in New York you will certainly feel sympathy for the German protesters but it was impossible to know from the information presented who was right. Maybe that is the was intentional on Hustwit's part. There are some hints though. We are told that when all was said and done the public's opinions on the project swung from somewhat mixed to nearly universally opposed, resulting in the ouster of local politicians when election time came. Protesters complain that though there was formally a public process it moved forward in fits and starts with dormant periods where the project seemed virtually dead so that it was hard for the public to respond or appropriately engage. We are tantalizingly told that this proposed replacement of an old train station with a new train station somehow also involves the construction of a luxury housing complex in addition to the destruction of the park.

I invite anyone who understands the issues of this particular development better than I do to leave a comment on this post.

What’s To Complain About In NYC vs. Germany

Notwithstanding what I didn’t understand about S21 what I came into the documentary knowing from urban design seminars I’ve attended is this: In Germany, in contradistinction to Bloomberg’s Atlantic Yards, big public design projects are typically designed by government officials, not developers; they are divided up into multiple parcels to be executed by multiple developers and then the parcels are bid out competitively to select the developer for each subdivided site. Most of these principles should also have been followed with respect to other big Bloombergian projects like Hudson Yards as well. The other distinction between S21 and Atlantic Yards that I would note is that S21 is purportedly principally a transportation infrastructure project (not withstanding that tantalizingly quick mention of the luxury housing) but Atlantic Yards just feeds private property (taken from other private owners by eminent domain) to a private developer to further a vast privately owned mega-monopoly. There are a lot of arguments for the public to sacrifice for the former. There are no arguments at all for the latter.

Seeing “Urbanized” Together With a Deep Gap-Filling Movie

I recommend seeing “Urbanized” or, if you miss it, planning to rent the DVD. But you should go knowing that unless you already know enough going into the theater there is much that could elude you about what you will see. If you want one film that, in my opinion, would fill in the most serious gaps in “Urbanized,” see the still regularly playing “Battle For Brooklyn” about fighting off Atlantic Yards. That film, which goes into depth on the subject of good city planning versus rigged deals also necessarily leaves out a few things in order to keep its narrative concise (the misconduct of ACORN in selling out the Brooklyn’s communities had to be left on the cutting room floor) but it contains an impressive amount of what was left out of “Urbanized.” I don’t recall, however, that it had anything to say about New York’s city planning chief, Amanda Burden.

Noticing New York discussions of “Battle For Brooklyn” are available here: Friday, June 17, 2011
I Went To See “Battle For Brooklyn” This Weekend and You Should Too Because . . . .; and here; Sunday, June 26, 2011, “Page One: Inside the New York Times” Reviewed; Plus The “New York Times Effect” on New York’s Biggest Real Estate Development Swindle; and here Thursday, June 30, 2011, “Battle For Brooklyn” Deleted Scene: Bertha Lewis’s Non-Response To Low-Income Tenants Kicked Out Of Affordable Housing At The Atlantic Yards Site.

Here is the trailer (better seen in full screen by going to this link):

PS: If you hurry out to catch “Urbanized” you are like to discover, as we did on our trip, that the subway corridor directly under the IFC Center theater is lined with AIANY (“American Institute of Architects New York”) posters of architectural projects which feature, among the images presented, pictures of the of the Atlantic Yards Prokhorov/Ratner (“Barclays”) basketball arena.

Big Politically-Connected Real Estate Projects: Ignoring The Public Majority With Futile “Participatory Democracy” Hearing Process

2011-11-02T08:48:00.020-04:00

(Above, Daniel J. Kaplan, senior partner with the architectural firm of FX Fowle presenting the Rudin/St. Vincent's project at the September 15th Community Board 2 hearing.)

When I heard Bill Maher on his Real Time show a week ago offer his thesis about the futility of the forms of participatory democracy into which we are routinely channeled by those with the political upper hand I couldn’t help but think of the public hearing process in New York City with respect to big real estate projects. . . I am not thinking about all real estate projects, but the “done deals,” the “wired deals” involving those you know are the politically connected heavyweights.

Maher On the Wish of Plutocrats: Channel The Opposition To Do It THEIR Way So They Will Lose, Outgunned By the Plutocrats’ “Lobbyists and Suits.”

(Bill Maher, above, commenting on futility of plutocratically-preferred process.)

Maher was speaking about the complacent assurance of plutocrats that they’ve cornered the political market and therefore can expect to have the Occupy Wall Street 99% boxed in, just so long as the opposition movement can be channeled into the regular and routine forms of civic contest. Then plutocrats know that the 99% “will lose” if they can be channeled into the normal ways of doing political battle, says Maher, because “the other side [the plutocratic side] has all the lobbyists and all the suits.” Or, as Rachel Maddow observed in the same conversation, when the 99% does it the way the plutocrats would like, an out-gunned 99% can be ignored.

That’s why, says Maher, the plutocrats are intent on having the opposition do it THEIR way. (See: Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Bill Maher: Right Wing, Wanting It THEIR Way, Yearns To Get Occupy Wall Street On THEIR Unlevel Playing Field of Lobbyists and Suits.)

Maher didn’t say the “plutocrats”; he said the “right wing” but he was clearly talking about those who want the Occupy Wall Street 99 percenters not to have any power. The reason I substituted “plutocrats” instead of “wealthy” in my paraphrase is that, just because you are one of the wealthy doesn’t mean that you believe that wealth should rule; it’s the “plutocrats” who promote that belief.

Chris Hedges on OWS Charlie Rose Show: Try Voting Against Goldman Sachs and You Will Be Ignored

What Maher was saying sounds like what Chris Hedges said discussing Occupy Wall Street on an edition (October 24) of Charlie Rose where he and Amy Goodman were guests. Hedges, it should be noted, contributed his “No excuses left. It’s now or never” essay to the first issue of the Occupy Wall Street Journal, an unofficial house organ of the protest.

(Click above to watch the video of the Charlie Rose program discussion.)

On the Rose program Hedges described a world where it “doesn’t matter what the citizens think,” where what Goldman Sachs wants, Goldman Sachs gets because: “There is no way to vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs.” Hedges was saying that “There is no way to vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs” by way of specific example speaking about the 100-to-1 phone calls in opposition to the Wall Street bailout but his remark can also be taken as a central metaphor. He didn’t mean, I don’t think, that you actually can’t “vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs”: We still have a system where people certainly can vote. What he almost certainly meant was that if you “vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs” your vote will simply be ignored because, as Bill Maher might analyze it, your vote doesn’t count in a system where “the other side has all the lobbyists and all the suits.”

Atlantic Yards Not the Best Example

Atlantic Yards is probably the fist mega-politically-connected-project that comes to mind when thinking about big New York real estate projects where the public’s wishes will be ignored but it is not the best example of what I am talking about. In the case of Atlantic Yards the public processes of participatory democracy, public comment and review were changed, substantially eliminated and strangled via the intervention of the state’s Empire State Development corporation to override local zoning and public review procedures such as the city’s ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedures) process. Note that the state ESDC (now, in a continuing PR shift of names calling itself just “ESD”) never comes in uninvited by the locality's chief executive officer. That means that Mayor Bloomberg bears substantial responsibility for the ESDC override too.

While Atlantic Yards is not the best example of the public being channeled into conventional participatory processes so they can then be ignored, it is a good example of the tinkering around the edges that occurs as things are engineered when the powers-that-be want a preordained result. Had those in power not had some appreciation of how massively objectionable to the public the Forest City Ratner project was likely to be they might not have decided to override standard public review process to deliver the deal to Ratner.

Example Set By Columbia’s Takeover of West Harlem

The Columbia University takeover of West Harlem, so similar in so many ways to the Atlantic Yards aggregation of monopolistically owned acres, is a better example of how the routines of participatory democracy can be followed while those in the political driver's seat feel safe that the public, to the extent that it could not be manipulated, can be ignored.

It isn’t quite that the public is entirely ignored. Measures are taken (I referred to the `tinkering around the edges’) to tailor presentations and produce a project aura as acceptable to the public as can be managed. That is so there will not be an unnecessary expenditure of political capital, but the bottom line is that, whatever precautionary analgesics are administered in the process, when push comes to shove the intent is to ignore the public and shove the deal through.

Other examples of tailoring projects for the interests of the real estate industry abound: the Coney Island rezoning, the Willets Point eminent domain abuse, the DUMBO Walentas Dock Street project, the faltering of the vision to overhaul Penn Station as the proposed new Moynihan Station, and the list goes on.

Current Example: Rudin/St. Vincent’s Hospital Project

Notwithstanding the magnitude of the Atlantic Yards and Colombia West Harlem takeover insults, the project that was most on my mind recently in terms of ignoring the community in order to shove through a connected deal is the Rudin/St. Vincent’s (formerly Hospital) project.

I attended the Thursday, September 15th Manhattan Community Board 2 public hearing on the St. Vincent's/Rudin Rezoning Plan, at the LGBT Community Center at 208 West 13th Street. What was remarkable about the hearing was that the proposal being considered at that hearing remained on the table at all. The Rudin Management real estate corporation was seeking a substantial upzoning of a portion of Greenwich Village, the former St. Vincent’s campus east of 7th Avenue so as to build a larger residential development than the Greenwich Village zoning permits.

To review the history, the way this preferential upzoning, an example of spot zoning, even got on the table all had to do the community previously being told to expect an improved St. Vincent’s Hospital in return for the sacrifice of accepting it. It’s complicated but, essentially, the old St. Vincent’s Hospital was participating in a manipulation to leverage its nonprofit or 501(c)(3) status into the creation of extra real estate rights (density and zoning override) for the benefit of a private real estate developer looking to build a very large project on some of the city’s most valuable real estate.

I would say that the deal was all about the real estate benefit for the private developer, not about tending to, sustaining, or managing the community asset of the hospital.

What happened? Before the convoluted real estate deal that was in the works for the Rudin organization could be completed St. Vincent’s Hospital was suddenly declared bankrupt.

One might think that with the bankruptcy of the hospital the elaborately complicated deal being careful shepherded through many city agencies, (the Landmarks Commission, the City Planning Commission, the City Council, and as herein mentioned, Community Board 2) would evanesce. To the chagrin of the community all that disappeared was the one element of the deal that was at all attractive to any of its community, the notion that in exchange for the community’s sufferance of a big new luxury real estate development it would get a hospital providing quality health care.

Public Opposition, And Nothing But, At Rudin/St. Vincent’s Hearing

The strangeness of this state of affairs was compounded by the additional strangeness or surrealism of the hearing. It was announced at the outset of the hearing that 24 people had signed up to speak against the project. Slightly more actually wound up speaking against it although not everyone signed up to speak against it was actually there to speak when called (including attorney Al Butzel) and one person at the end of the evening passed on her opportunity. Most spoke with great passion. Nobody spoke in favor of the proposed special upzoning for the Rudins. In fact, at the hearing’s conclusion, when checking if there were any additional people in the room wishing to testify it was perfunctorily asked whether there was anyone who wanted to make a statement in favor of the Rudin proposal. “Do you think anyone would dare to?” the community board member presiding asked after a pause, and the audience twittered at the patent absurdity of the question.

Notwithstanding this universal and passionate opposition to the project there was a thoroughgoing expectation amongst virtually all that the upzoning was going to be granted anyway. This was not only the expectation of the frustrated members of the community speaking to the board, it was also the expectation of some of the politically savvy board members seemingly in the know. (They confided this to me.)

Despite this expectation of approval some of the community board members put the real estate professionals representing the developer on the spot with some excellent questions for which they did not have good answers. Those questions essentially boiled down to different variations of why?: Why was there any reason at all to give the special benefit of a different and inappropriate zoning for a luxury residential project providing no community benefit, the land for which, bought out of the bankruptcy, was probably obtained at a discount with full understanding of the traditional zoning that has always applied?

The two real estate professionals there to represent the developer were Melanie Meyers, a partner practicing in the area of land use with the law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP and Daniel J. Kaplan, senior partner with the architectural firm of FX Fowle.

( Melanie Meyers at the hearing above.)

The frustration of the public in attendance was so high that the entire hearing and board meeting almost broke down a number of times.

It’s true that not all those speaking against the approval focused on why specifically an upzoning was bad. Many instead were justifiably riled by the lack of focus to restore a community hospital. When speakers veered to this subject they were reminded by board members that the hearing was about the upzoning not about the hospital but the missing hospital was the unexorcizable ghost in the room. To be fair though, wasn’t the concept of having hospital inextricably entwined in the all details of the devilishly complex deal that had been originally proposed?

Still, maybe the board members were absolutely correct: The upzoning and the provision a hospital should be kept separate, and had that admonition been heeded all along this presumptiously proposed override of Greenwich Village’s zoning, ignoring the community’s clear consensus, would never have gotten a foothold. And there’s another thing: If these things had been kept separate perhaps the community would still have a hospital. This was raised in Noticing New York’s testimony provided at the hearing which we will get to in a moment.

Up Against the Wall Street Journal Spin?

In case it might have been unclear what the public gathered at the meeting that day were up against or who could be expected to listen to whom, that very same day an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal to which many of those giving testimony referred: September, 2011 St. Vincent's Site Moves On: Rudin Family Obtains Financing for New Complex on Former Hospital's Property. That article, very supportive of the project, was about how the Rudin project had “obtained $525 million in construction financing” observing complimentarily that the “project's success at obtaining financing is unusual in today's market.”

Without any mention that the community view might be that the demise of the bargained for hospital ought to be a game-changer the article is heavily structured around several ornamenting quotes from William Rudin, chief executive of Rudin Management, about how the Rudin family is inclined to “resist efforts” to cut back the project size or make other changes, like including affordable housing. Together the quotes and the article imply that the Rudins have reached the end of a protracted process that was all about giving in to the community. Mr.Rudin’s quotes: “It's been an interesting saga, to say the least” . . . “We think that we have responded in a very positive way to all the concerns that have been expressed to us before,” (before the hospital was subtracted out?) . . . “We believe that this project should move forward as proposed.”

One of the community members testifying said he could tell that the article had been written by the PR firm SKD Knickerbocker. Funny. SKD Knickerbocker has also been involved promoting Atlantic Yards. There’s more available on that and their activities in general.

To Whom Do You Address Your Remarks At A Hearing Where Those In Authority Will Ignore You?

By the time I got up to deliver my Noticing New York testimony a procedural question had clearly been raised several times by the cries of the crowd in attendance. To whom would I address my remarks, the community board member or to the crowd directly? Several of the previous speakers had already been chided by the attending audience for not speaking directly to them. It is an interesting conundrum: Speak to those you feel are destined to ignore you or speak instead to those willing to take your words to heart but don’t have the power to do anything about it. . . and you will be preaching to the choir. The attending crowd had not been granted the formal power that the community board members had to vote and pass along its recommendation to the City Planning Commission and the City Council. Nor did the crowd have the power not to be ignored, but then that is power that the community board didn’t have either.

Community boards are comprised of board members accountable to local politicians.* Buy the local politician to whom a board member is accountable, buy the borough president, and you have almost bought the board member. I say “almost” because there can be a difference but consider the meaningfulness of it: Community boards, responding to their communities voted against the Yankee Stadium project and against the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment. They were responding to their communities but then afterwards they suffered vengeful purges of their members, respectively, by Bronx Borough President, Adolfo Carrión Jr. and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

(* Community boards consist of up to 50 unsalaried members selected and appointed by the Borough Presidents for two year terms with half of the appointees nominated by council members representing the district. Additionally, city council members whose council districts cover part of a community district are non-voting, ex-officio board members.)

So if you were a Community Board member confronting a wired deal what would you do?: Vote conscientiously to represent the community’s interest or give it up and live, instead, to fight another day? Would your spine be stiffened, would your decision be any different thinking of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zucotti Park?

As for the local politicians, the public present at the community board meeting the night of that hearing was getting an interesting message which they were swift to remark upon, taking their own roll call to enforce the point: The local politicians usually so quick to present themselves at meetings where important issues came up were all AWOL that night. Though several speakers made remarks pleading that their representatives not succumb to the lobbying of real estate interests the elected representatives were not there to hear them. It was noted that Laura Morrison, chief of staff for State Senator Tom Duane was there and the city council representative, Christine Quinn, president of the council had representatives who were booed with an especially raucous loudness, much louder than any that signified disfavor or other politicians not in attendance. Quinn and Duane had both delivered statements in favor of the original Rudin/St. Vincent’s proposal, critically instrumental in getting that ball rolling.

In other words, oughtn't those politician now be taking corrective action for their own past deeds?

Jane Jacobs: Arrested For Her Demonstration In Protest When Those At a Hearing Were Destined To Be Ignored

To whom to address one remarks at a public hearing such as this figures prominently in a famous story about how activist and urbanist Jane Jacobs was arrested when she protested because it was clear that a hearing respecting one of the iterations of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway was going to be merely pro forma, or worse, and that those testifying were destined to be ignored. There are multiple versions of this story. The one that I initially knew was that Jane Jacobs, because she knew those testifying at the hearing were being ignored and not listened to, intentionally unspooled the tape the stenographer was making of the hearing.

This version appears in the book, “Shaping the City: New York and the Municipal Art Society” (1995) by Gregory F. Gilmartin wherein the author also notes the incident of Jacobs’ arrest was the reason the Municipal Art Society refused to give Jacobs an award for her life’s work (although it now honors others with the award of Rockefeller Foundation “Jane Jacobs Medals”) (p.392):

In a celebrated incident Jacobs appeared at a public hearing and unwound the stenographer’s tape: without a record of the proceedings, the city was forced to schedule another hearing. . . .

. . . . Jacobs act was prompted by desperation and she had concluded that since the city had no intention of actually listening to the opposition, guerrilla tactics were fully justified.

That version is elegant in the simplicity with which it makes the point that when you’re engaged in a process the purpose of which is to ignore you, it is appropriate to step outside the box and call into question the process itself, perhaps even with some well-targeted civil disobedience. I think, however, I will accept as much more authoritative the more nuanced version I read in Roberta Brandes Gratz’s excellent “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs” (2010) where, in an appendix to the book, the details respecting Jane Jacobs’ arrest is described at length in Jacobs’ own words transcribed from tapes of conversation she had with Ms. Brandes Gratz.

In Ms. Jacobs' words (although this is edited way down to convey only the essential gist from the full account in the Brandes Gratz book):

A very curious thing was occurring. I was used to hearings at the Board of Estimate where the microphone for the speaker faces the people holding the hearing, the ones going to make the decision. The speaker’s back was always to the audience. At this hearing, however, the microphone was directed the other way. . . . The speaker’s back was to the officials. This was symbolic. The hearing was being held with the idea that it was necessary for people to let off steam, not that would have anything that would be instructive or informative for the hearing officers whose minds were plainly made up. . .

* * * *

So I decided that at least I would send them back to Albany with the message that we really didn’t like this, and since talk would never be that kind of a message, since they didn’t hear anything, I planned to walk across the stage and let them know that I was not content to remain down there talking to my fellow citizens, that I wanted to give them an immediate message. And I said, anybody who wants to come with me, come along . . .

* * * *

. . . And pretty nearly all the audience got up and began to follow me as I walked across the stage. That’s all I was going to do, walk across the and down the other steps. And this threw them into the most incredible tizzy. [Ms. Brandes Gratz notes that Jacobs laughed “with obvious enjoyment of the memory.”] . . . You never saw people so frightened. . . .

* * * *

As I came up on the stage with I guess pretty nearly all the audience coming along too, everything was quiet, absolutely quiet, except the chairman, a state engineer, kept yelling, “Officer, arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!”

* * * *

[Then with Jacobs sitting down and the chairman blocking the traffic on stage. . ] The woman with the stenotype had jumped up in alarm— nobody was even making an ugly face— and her tape was all running out, and she grabbed her stenotype So people began picking up this tape that was all around now and sort of tossed it around. That was all that was happening, and this eerie silence and sort of leisurely kind of confetti, it was surrealistic, because nobody was tearing it up or doing anything violent, just wafting this paper and the engineer was yelling, “Arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!”

The Jacobs account goes on with ensuing details about her arrest (She says to the policeman, “They’ve got their minds made up; they’re just trying to do us in,” to which he understandingly responds “Aren’t they though.”). There is great confusion about what to charge Ms. Jacobs with but at her arraignment the prosecuting authorities try hard for and fail to get “what they wanted most”: “They wanted the judge to order that I could not address any meeting or take part in activities until my trial.” Her lawyer successfully argued that Jacobs could not be “enjoined from exercising my normal, peaceful civil rights.”

Ms. Jacobs’ account does not say the record of the hearing was destroyed. Instead she says that the authorities wanted to deceptively fib that there had been damage to the stenotype machine, but they were problematically faced with the need to minimize “what was destroyed of the record”:

They couldn’t make a big thing out of that because it would not have been a valid hearing. And actually, very little of that paper was gone, obviously, because they still had a big transcript.

(Ms. Brandes Gratz’s book states that the above description of Jacobs’ arrest is supposed to be put up on the web at: Center for the Living City (centerforthelivingcity.org), though it does not seem to have been posted there yet.

Speaking When You Will Be Ignored: The Validity of Process

It is hard to think what is appropriate to do at a hearing when it is clear that the hearing is being held with no intent that your testimony will be listened to or even heard. What do you do when those holding a hearing tell you that your remarks will not be transcribed, that those holding the hearing don’t know who the decision makers are, what will be done with your testimony and how it would be used, or how, if the testimony was not transcribed, it could be part of the record. This was what happened to me at a recent hearing on whether Forest City Ratner could add to the size of their 50+ acre mega-monopoly via the seizure of additional street space alongside the Prokhorov/Ratner (Barclays) basketball arena. These are such elemental defects of process that they ought to call into question the very validity of such odd hearings. (See: Wednesday, October 5, 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg In the Regalia of Queen Elizabeth I? Noticing New York’s Testimony at the DOT Hearing on Atlantic Yards Bollard Plan.)

Noticing New York Testimony at the Rudin/St. Vincent’s Community Board Hearing

In presenting my testimony at the community board hearing on the Rudin/St. Vincent’s project I tried to handle the question of whom to speak to and whether I would be be listened to as best I could. Making a reference to “theater in the round” I tried to stand where I would be addressing everyone, both the community board members and the audience. I said, “I'd like to do a 360 here but I also know that the decision makers, those who are going to make a decision for which they are going to have be responsible are the members of the community board.” and so it was to them I principally directed myself.

Here are my testifying remarks:

• Why do we even need to be here to consider this question?

• The Rudin/St. Vincent’s real estate deal was a very complicated shell game designed to cash in using the hospital’s 501 (c) (3) status in order to upzone (and essentially sell off) a portion of historic Greenwich Village for the benefit of a private real estate developer. That was a bad thing and you certainly wouldn’t have wanted other 501(c)(3)s to follow suit notwithstanding that there were some who favored this as a way to subsidize the hospital at the expense of the integrity of the zoning code and landmark preservation law.

• The shell game failed when St. Vincent’s failed. One lesson that can be taken away from that failure is that with all the complicated rigamarole and professional energy being put into that subterfuge the eye had been taken off the ball- - In basic terms, the hospital for whom all this bending of the rules was being done was not being properly managed.

• The moral is to stick to basics, to keep your eye on doing right what needs to be done. In this case, it’s a question of proper and consistent enforcement and administration of the zoning code. You can’t get pulled off course by shenanigans.

• If Greenwich Village needs to be upzoned then thought needs to be given to doing that in a thoughtful way throughout the community as a whole.

• You can’t hand out a special up-zoning as a consolation prize when a developer fails to pull off what was a fairly nefarious deal to begin with.

On Being Ignored: Noticing New York’s Recommendation

It is frustrating to be ignored. That’s why the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations commanding attention at Zucotti Park are so inspiring. But what do you do when you believe you will be ignored. The noticing New York position on this is not to cease participating in available process, not to stop voting. But there is a need for a greater ferocity of outrage and commitment when confronted by such situations, a need to drink in and internalize some of the energy of protest one sees at Occupy Wall Street. That extends to calling into question the very validity of participatory processes when the game is rigged, when the other side ignores the rights of the majority, complacently assuming it will inevitably and easily win because they have all the lobbyists and all the suits.

Do Bill Maher's Most Recent Remarks Present Any Insights About What To Do?

(Above, Maher on Friday night with Ron Christie reacting to his remarks.)

This past Friday night Bill Maher returned to repeat his point once again (as he was talking with Republican author Ron Christie about 40 minutes into the program):

My point I was trying to make last week is that the Republicans don’t want them in the streets, the people, because they would like them to fight the way THEY fight, with lobbyists, where they will lose.

* * * *

When the original Red Coats. . . didn’t like it when George Washington and his troops were fighting behind trees, you know, not fighting in a straight line with red coats where they can be SHOT– It’s the same thing with these people. They’re not fighting FAIR in the way they will LOSE by going to Washington and getting a lobbyist: They’re in the streets! It’s the same way you guys are all saying about Obama, “Oh, he’s out campaigning. He’s not governing!” Yeah, he’s not sitting in Washington giving you guys bills that you’ll crumple up and throw away. He’s taking his case to the people. Is there something wrong if you are not winning with one tactic . . . . Is it so wrong to try the other tactic where you might be able to WIN?

What tactics might actually work? I’m not sure I know. But I do know it is remarkably strange to be sitting around having frustrating conversations about the tactics that will work to win, or even simply avoid being channeled into processes where you are destined to be completely ignored, when you are the majority, you are the 99%.

The 99%? At least in terms of our relative economic standing and, in the case of the Rudin/former St. Vincent’s project hearing, there was nobody at that community board hearing wanting to make a statement supportive of the project, unless you count the two`suits’ in the employ of the developer.

Guess what?: On October 20th Community Board 2 voted against the Rudin/St. Vincent’s project. That’s not what was predicted. (See: Rudin's St. Vincent's plans get rejected by community board, October 21, 2011, The Real Deal.) Now it remains to be seen if the City Council and the City Planning Commission will ignore the community board as was the situation with Yankee Stadium and Atlantic Yards.

Unhappy Halloween: Recalling Last Year’s Tricky “Treats”: The Ghastly Ghosts Lurking In PR Messages From Atlantic Yards To Zucotti Park

2011-10-30T18:47:00.021-04:00

(Above: A new monster in the pantheon for Halloween?)

Halloween is upon us. So it seemed like the right occasion to recall the gruesome details of the scarifying PR packages the New York Times and CNG's Brooklyn Paper dumped on the doorsteps of Brooklyn residents one year ago for Halloween weekend.

Deliver Us From Ghosties and Ghoulies and Long-leggedy Beasties . . .

It was the first Halloween weekend after the publicly-protested groundbreaking of the Bruce Ratner/Mikhail Prokhorov (Barclays) basketball arena spearheading the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly land grab. On their doorsteps Brooklyn residents found two promotional packages for the Ratner/Prokhorov arena: One was a “CNG” (“Community Newspaper Group”) “Brooklyn Tomorrow” magazine with a “Barclays Bounce” cover; the other was the New York Times Sunday Magazine with the Russian Oligarch and basketball team owner, Mikhail Prokhorov, on the cover conspicuously palming two basketballs in his enormous hands.

I guess that makes Mikhail Prokhorov a new sort of Halloween monster!

There is more Noticing New York coverage of the Prokhorov/Ratner haunting we received that Halloween, set out as part of a broader discussion about why we probably ought to be scared out of our wits by how the skewing of wealth in this country, together with increasing privatization of the traditional elements of public speech (including but not limited to public spaces and streets in which to speak), is contributing to severe imbalances in our public dialogue. (See: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?)

As a bonus, when you read that article you’ll learn about the Garrison Keilor/Raymond Chandler impression done by the reporter theoretically covering Mr. Prokhorov as he tells us about how he got up close to some stage-prop models hired to be ogled . . . .

. . . and Things That Go Bump In the Night (Jay-Z?)

The imbalance of the money-fueled PR assault has inspired Noticing New York to respond with some corrective images. (See: Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Longing For Correcting Images to Jay-Z’s Hip-Hop Hype and Ratner’s Atlantic Yards “Strategy of Distraction”.)

I guess you could consider the phantasmagorical imaginings you see here more in that vein.

Mikhail Prokhorov costume, anyone?

Tales Told Around the Campfires In OWS’s Zucotti Park

(Occupy Wall Street protesters above)

Also to add zest to your Halloween celebrations this season, there is another good Noticing New York-worthy spooky story: Did you know that Occupy Wall Street protesters are not just demonstrating in Zucotti Park, they are actually performing an exorcism of the corporate ghosts of yore? That’s according to: The Ghostbusters of Liberty Plaza- chronicling corporate misbehavior (and how to research it), October 6th, 2011 by Phil Mattera in Dirt Diggers Digest brought to us by the folks at Good Jobs New York.

(Above, Bettina Damiani from Good Jobs New York, Greg LeRoy, Executive Director of Good Jobs First, and Elizabeth Bird, also with Good Jobs NY delivering copies of Mr. LeRoy's book "The Great American Jobs Scam" to the Occupy Wall Street library.)

In his apprehension-inspiring little narrative Mr. Mattera describes with almost morbid delight the chilling details of how the ominously named Zucotti Park, once more appropriately named Liberty Plaza, has not always been owned by Brookfield Properties but was instead belonged to a series of prior owners; U.S. Steel, USX, Merrill Lynch, Olympia & York, who, ill-fated all, strangely suffered or succumbed, as if oddly cursed, to various vexing maladies of capitalism. Mr. Mattera’s postmortem of their corporately cadaverous fates is well worth the read.

Zombie Developer, Anyone?
Still need creepy costume ideas? Text that explains the image above can be found at: Tuesday, June 23, 2009, Atlantic Yards, Metaphorically Speaking.

Oh, and looky here! Somebody across the pond seems to have liked this suggestion. The article is from November 2010 and the signs are all about the 1% and the 99%. Seems the Irish got out in front of the Occupy Wall Street folks here in the States.

Longing For Correcting Images to Jay-Z’s Hip-Hop Hype and Ratner’s Atlantic Yards “Strategy of Distraction”

2011-10-26T19:51:00.023-04:00

(Jay-Z on right, above.)

Norman Oder has a couple of new articles out on the subject of Jay-Z and Atlantic Yards, one at his home base Atlantic Yards Report and the other at Salon.com.

See: Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Is Jay-Z just insulated from the Atlantic Yards reality? Or does he understand the hustle, but sometimes feels uncomfortable? , and Tuesday, Oct 25, 2011, Jay-Z’s hip-hop of distraction: The hip-hop superstar hypes a Brooklyn, N.Y., sports arena that failed to deliver on its jobs pledge.

The Salon article is about how Jay-Z is “fronting for two other world-class hustlers: Bruce Ratner, Brooklyn, N.Y’s most powerful developer, and New Jersey (to Brooklyn) Nets majority owner Mikhail Prokhorov, Russia’s second-richest man” becoming the face of the Bruce Ratner/Mikhail Prokhorov (“Barclays”) basketball arena “to distract attention from the hardball politics, sweetheart deals and private profits behind the arena and the rest of the 16-tower project” and as well as unfulfilled and ersatz `promises’ to the community about jobs, housing, design, etc.

Following up in the Atlantic Yards Report article Mr. Oder writes that “one reader suggested that maybe [Jay-Z] the ‘cultural icon’ just doesn't know the facts behind Atlantic Yards.”

Mr. Oder theorizes two possibilities: 1.) Maybe Jay-Z doesn’t understand, 2.) Maybe he does understand, but Mr. Oder then goes on to point out that while Jay-Z certainly knows how to go through the motions of being enthusiastic about the New Jersey Nets basketball team and the Ratner/Prokhorov arena he seems to be “a bit uncomfortable” with what he has gotten involved in if you look at his face in some official publicity photos where he is standing with his “partners.” In theory he should be exuding standard fare PR ebullience, which as a performer one would think he has down pat. Instead, what you see on his face is quite the reverse.

(Left to right in first above: Subsidy collector Bruce Ratner, Borough President Marty Markowitz and Jay-Z, additional figure in second photo is Nets CEO Brett Yormark.)

Mr. Oder comments: “These are official photos, not like the unposed candid shot that Tracy Collins captured.” (below)

(For the Noticing New York take on this: Wednesday, October 19, 2011, Reminder: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Performing at First Acoustics, Gathering Time, plus Kim & Reggie Harris.)

Noticing New York can propose a third theory, one that could be considered a hybrid of the other two and one that can go a long way to explain Jay-Z’s sour puss. Noticing New York sallied forth with this theory once before.

The theory?: Jay-Z signed on to an agreement to promote Atlantic Yards once upon a time when he didn’t understand the facts of the megadevelopment but forgot at that time to include in the agreement he signed what is known in the entertainment industry as a “reverse morality” or “reverse morals” clause, a clause that had it been included in his contract, could by its design have given Jay-Z ample opportunity to walk out on the project given the shameful conduct of his partners to date.

The earlier Noticing New York article on the subject is here: Friday, April 8, 2011, “Reverse Morality” Clauses for Celebrity Endorsers: What Are They? Something Celebrities, Including Jay-Z, Should Try Enforcing.

Also of topical interest given the headlines this month, is an article preceding that one (linked to therein) about the morality of the music business in general that discusses Beyoncé (Jay-Z’s wife) taking home a very large check in exchange for her performance for the Qaddafi Family New Year’s Eve 2009 . (See: Wednesday, March 9, 2011, An Insert Preview - Music Superstar Ethics: How Completely You Can Sell “You can say what you say, but you are what you are.” Jay-Zzzzus!)

The Oder Salon article, as specified in its title, informs us how Jay-Z’s posing as a front man for developer (subsidy collector) Bruce Ratner has been important in helping Ratner’s “strategy of distraction” to work out well. Earlier this week I was writing about such strategies of distraction with respect to which Mr. Oder has also supplied the shorthand “department of diverted attention” to note that sites like Mr. Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report can “repeatedly point out” the “inanities of a fawning press” flowing from the barrage of “paid-for corporate speech” and the “pervasive behind-the-scenes flow of press releases” in which corporations invest.

The NNY article about Occupy Wall Street referenced above, was discussing the big picture of how the skewing of wealth in this country together with increasing privatization of the traditional elements of public speech (including but not limited to public spaces and streets in which to speak) was contributing to severe imbalances in our public dialogue. (See: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?)

In regard to those severe imbalances (and pertinent to Atlantic Yards), I provided the image of Jay-Z used in the subway to promote the New York Times, a newspaper that failed the New York City public by essentially, like Jay-Z, promoting an uncritical image of Atlantic Yards, the mega-project of Ratner, the Times own partner in the building of the New York Times headquarters.

Here is another picture of a dismaying billboard next to the arena that uses Jay-Z to promote the arena to the neighborhood.

In line with what I said in my article about the imbalance of speech in our country, there isn’t a plenitude of Noticing New York cash available to rent that billboard in order to correct the misimpressions being advertised there and vociferously elsewhere in the city. Oh that we had the same mega-bucks to get out and tell the story the way it should be told! It would be such fun to go all out.

But not having the money to rent billboards hasn’t left Noticing New York bereft of ideas. The image below reflects how Noticing New York took things into its own hands in a prior post. Background about the calculations of the loss the arena will bring to the public is available in that post.
(See: Monday, May 2, 2011, “Welcome To Brooklyn” Where the Game Is Frivolous Spending On Boondoggle Basketball Arenas- Getting the Image Right.)

So heck, having had to suffer these other Jay-Z promotional images recently here are some corrective ones. Enjoy. (Click to enlarge.)

Opposition To Crony Capitalism As Uniting Cause: Resource-Grabbing Mega-Monopolies (Like Atlantic Yards) As Catalyst For Great Recessions/Depressions

2011-10-25T12:44:00.010-04:00

(Above, Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde join the Occupy Wall Street protesters, another photo, plus explanation, available here.)

The other day listening to an NPR story about what the Occupy Wall Street protesters and the Tea Party ought to both have in common I heard Harvard professor and activist Lawrence Lessig say:

. . . whether you are upset about the size of government or the size of corporations, one thing everybody should be upset about is when corporations use their power to corrupt the government, to reinforce their size and their influence. A critical change in the way in which we've seen America become much more unequal was driven by changes in public policy that was driven itself by [that] kind of influence . . .
So whether, again, you like big corporations or you like capitalism, you and the right cannot possibly defend crony capitalism.

Hmm! When “corporations use their power to corrupt the government, to reinforce their size and their influence . . . crony capitalism.”

Does that sound like the Forest City Ratner Atlantic Yards land grab to reinforce Bruce Ratner’s mega-monopoly that now, through government assistance, is proposed to extend to 50+ acres? (See below.)

And does it sound like previous expressions of Noticing New York philosophy?:

Where does Noticing New York stand on the political spectrum? Noticing New York attempts to apply both conservative and liberal tests of what good government should be. They overlap a great deal more than is generally acknowledged. Conservatives may fear big government and liberals may fear big business, but these days the preeminent problem both should unite to oppose is the collusion of big government to give big business the edge

(See: Wednesday, March 23, 2011, Whither the New York Times? Noticing New York Comment Respecting a Manhattan Institute Sponsored Debate.)

It actually sounds like both of these things. I covered Noticing New York's historical thinking about this commonality* and the NPR story (with links to it) in National Notice here: Monday, October 24, 2011, On NPR, Echo of Coinciding Principles Noticed: What the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Ought To Agree On. Not surprisingly, Atlantic Yards cropped up amongst the quotes culled from past NNY articles.

(* coincidentally just mentioned in a Noticing New York article about the NYC real estate industry and the antagonistic relationship between free speech and concentrating wealth)

In that article I also wrote about something related: How the deleterious economic effects of such crony capitalism contribute to economic down slide leading to economic depressions or, of perhaps more specific current interest, the Great Recession we are living through now. In this regard, I looked at some commonality of thinking between two writers with recent books syaing much about the underlying causes for the Great Depression. One is a conservative, Amity Shlaes, writing as a historian; the other is a liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman. The books: Ms. Shlaes’ late 2007 “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression”; Krugman’s 2009 “The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008”, a reworking of a 1999 Krugman book.

So both ends of the political spectrum ought to oppose “crony capitalism” where “corporations use their power to corrupt the government, to reinforce their size and their influence.” They ought to oppose such crony capitalism in part because of agreement respecting how such cronyism results in economic downturn or ruin. That’s what each opposite end of the political spectrum ought to be agreeing upon. . . .

. . . Interestingly, on Bill Maher’s latest Real Time show, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was mentioned yet again as a potential third party presidential candidate. Theoretically, the kind of third party candidate we presume Bloomberg would want to be should be claiming a middle ground between the two parties. Despite this presumable commonality at each end of the political spectrum, Bloomberg who portrays himself as being in the middle, is in favor of and practices crony capitalism. How do we know where Bloomberg stands on crony capitalism? You need look no further than the poster child boondoggle: Atlantic Yards.

(The picture of Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde joining the Occupy Wall Street protesters? An enticement, I hope, for you to read the full National Notice article on this subject.)