Brother, Can You Spare $700 Billion?

The U.S. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is advocating speedy passage of his proposal to bail out the country’s financial markets with what is essentially a blank check in the hands of the U.S. Treasury. Both major presidential candidates support the basic idea of the plan, though are calling for more regulations and a more detailed structure of the plan.

I can certainly find better ways to spend $700 billion (28 billion White Castle Crave Cases, for example). Considering we have veterans in need of health care, active duty military personnel in need of supplies and better pay, open borders that need protecting, roads and bridges that need repair, schools that are falling apart and subways that can’t run on time, bailing out careless investment bankers does not sound like it should be a top priority. Sadly, it’s a stop-gap measure meant to reassure the world’s financial markets and avoid a greater economic catastrophe

While the goal is to avoid a larger financial meltdown, the plan is essentially wrong. Our tax dollars are going to be used to bail out large banks and other investors who made bad investments. The plan will have the government buy these assets and then hire some of these same investors to help them sell it to some of these same investors, who will have the opportunity to salvage profit from their own bad investments, with our tax dollars.

The entire text of the proposal is fewer than 900 words (849 by my computer’s count). The document looks the product of a high school or college student who wakes up with a hangover and realizes they have a term paper due in 45 minutes. It has a two year time frame and the promise that the Treasury Secretary will report to Congress occasionally, but lacks any of the regulatory detail that the circumstances require. Members of Congress are going to have to be able to look their increasingly broke constituents in the face and tell them why he or she voted to bail out Wall Street millionaires while the homes of middle and working class voters are being foreclosed on.

To a certain extent, I can understand the lack of detail, since the object is to get the thing passed as quickly as possible before the financial markets get any worse and then let Congress haggle over the specifics. The roller coaster ride the markets have taken—shooting up when the proposal was made but then dropping as opposition formed and quick passage was not assured—lend credence to the government’s fears that failure to pass the measure would lead to more catastrophic bank failures and maybe worse.

However, passing a $700 billion spending package with a document that wouldn’t have passed muster in freshman economics class is not the way to go.

Then there’s this gem:

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

So Secretary Paulson, who is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, and his successor, will have two years to go on a buying and selling frenzy and not have to answer to any court of law regardless of what he does? That’s a blank check with carte blanche, and that’s absurd.

Built By Ruth, Destroyed By Greed

Right now, the last game is being played at Yankee Stadium. This historic ballpark is going to be torn down so that the Yankees can play at a new stadium currently under construction next door in the Bronx. It is a sad day for every Yankee fan and every New Yorker. Our tax dollars are helping tear down a perfectly good and historically priceless landmark so the richest sports franchise in the country (if not the world) can move into a new stadium that will resemble a shopping mall.

My first game at Yankee Stadium was a regular season game against the Oakland A’s. I was in grade school and my family lived in Yonkers. Against my wishes, my family left the game early, after the 7^th inning, but the Yankees were ahead and won the game.

My second game at Yankee Stadium was on Phil Rizzuto Day, when the retired shortstop retired from broadcasting. Mickey Mantle came out of the dugout in his old uniform. The stadium went crazy. Former Yankee Tom Seaver, who was pitching for the rival Chicago White Sox at that game, celebrated his 300^th win against the Yankees. I watched Billy Martin kick dirt on an umpire. It was fantastic. Again though, I was forced to leave the game early by a parent who wanted to beat traffic. This is partly the reason I will never leave a game early, ever.

My fondest Yankee game memory is from October of 2001, when the Yankees won their divisional playoff series against Oakland. It was after September 11, and there was a great feeling of unity and patriotism in the city after September 11. I had managed to get great seats on the first row of the upper deck, and witnessed Derek Jeter make a diving backward catch into the stands. The crowd screamed “RUDY!” whenever Mayor Giuliani’s face appeared on the big screen.

I am a Yankee fan for two reasons: I am originally from The Bronx, and growing up in Yonkers in the late 70s, the New York Yankees were great heroes whose baseball cards were treasured. I remained a Yankees fan through the bad times and good, and made attending Yankee games a must when I moved back to New York.

Yankee Stadium is the House that Ruth Built. In fact, it was built with a shorter right field than was common at the time to accommodate Ruth’s hitting style. Babe Ruth hit the first home run in Yankee Stadium when it opened in 1923.

The new stadium is being built to do nothing but rake in profits and rake fans over the coals. There will be about 2,000 fewer seats and three times the number of luxury boxes. The park land that the Yankees organization said would be replaced by now has not materialized, and the number of prospective new jobs that the stadium will produce has been downgraded substantially. In face, the Yankees may have willfully defrauded the city to get tax breaks.

The cheapest seat available for tonight’s game, via links from the Yankees’ official web site, was $239 + fees for a bleacher seat. No thanks.

Another Anniversary

New York is a solemn place on September 11^th, or at least it should be. Like the rest of America, the events of September 11^th are pushed farther toward the back of our minds. This year I don’t believe has been any different.

I was on a trip to California when the attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred. One year later, I was working with a traveling poster sale and wasn’t able to attend the memorial at Ground Zero. I’ve made it a point to head down there every September 11^th since.

I left work with roughly 15 minutes to spare, and the walk to Ground Zero is between five and 10 minutes. My goal was to walk up Church Street and stand across the street from Ground Zero, but Church Street was blocked off, and I had to head farther West to Greenwich Street. Walking up Greenwich Street, I came across a small group of bikers. They were members of different fire fighter motorcycle clubs, with motorcycle vests with names such as Fire Riders emblazoned on them.

I came upon another blockade on Greenwich Street but there was a path opened back to Church Street. I found a place to stand on Church Street next to an entrance way for victims’ families, but the police told everyone they couldn’t stand there. The police were having their special “community affairs” officers— who are basically regular cops with light blue shirts and caps—hustle people along.

I walked up to Broadway and stopped at the intersection of Broadway and Cedar Street, where people had gathered. I found myself a spot against the wall and out of the way. A man with a crudely drawn sign that read ‘Hussein Obama is a terrorist!’ stood on the corner. His sign had other slogans on it, but it was hard to read.

Another police officer in a light blue shirt cleared people away from the center of the sidewalk. This was the second year in a row that the police made it difficult for people to attend the memorial service at the World Trade Center site. Access to the areas right up to Ground Zero was good until last year. In 2006, on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, conspiracy theorists swarmed the area. The police clamped down the following year, though under the premise that construction at the World Trade Center sight made it necessary to use more of the surrounding area for victims’ relatives to gather and to stage the event. That may be partly true, but no doubt the police were out to make it tougher on conspiracy theorist protester and on civilians attending the memorial service. There was no visible presence of conspiracy theorists from where I was. I’m sure they were still there somewhere, but it was difficult to get around and see things and they may have been concentrated elsewhere.

Across the Street, in Liberty Plaza, a group of police officers from London, Toronto, and other places gathered with their flags and banners. It was hard to hear what was going on at Ground Zero, but these police officers dipped their flags during the first moment of silence.

Mennonites from Massachusetts were at the corner handing out CDs of Gospel music and a booklet titled ‘Love Your Enemies’. The young Mennonite women were dressed traditionally, like Amish women, with long dresses and white head coverings (a white head covering means they are married, I believe, a black head covering means they are single; though I don’t think that knowledge will do me much good either way). A young Mennonite man handed out booklets and CDs while the women mostly handed out CDs. On the curb, a large Department of Environmental Protection HazMat trailer truck was parked. A DEP worker took one of the man’s ‘Love Your Enemies’ booklets and cracked that, “I have a lot of enemies.”

Though it was hard to hear what was going on, the bell for the second moment of silence rang clearly. Amid the bustle of the city, there fell a brief and imperfect pause. I couldn’t help but grit my teeth at the chatty Italian tourist, the cop moving the metal barricade (again), or the doofus scrambling to take a photo.

Shortly after the readings began again after the second silence, I headed back to work. Throughout the rest of the city, business as usual churned along. Beyond the barricades surrounding Ground Zero, the sight of American flags at half staff was the only indication of today’s significance. Most had no time to honor the dead of September 11, 2001. I didn’t sacrifice more than a few minutes of my time standing on a street corner.

We are not behaving like a nation at war. We are behaving like a nation waiting for others to go to war for us, and those nations don’t survive.

Palin Comparison

This year’s presidential election became much more interesting with John McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Sarah Palin is not the right wing monster the left makes her out to be, nor is she the stalwart reformer that the Republicans would like to think she is. She is an ambitious politician who has embraced the mantle of the religious right when it has been convenient (God wants that gas pipeline built, halleluiah), but has been willing to buck her party’s establishment and the religious right when it worked for her as well. She has good political instincts and is an effective public speaker, but she’s no less of an opportunist. She’s nicer to look at than Joe Biden.

The media’s immediate skepticism of her candidacy and the avalanche of tabloid media coverage of her daughter’s pregnancy only made her a more sympathetic figure in the eyes of the Republican Party faithful. The New York Times ran an article about Palin (since removed from its web site) openly questioning whether she would be able to balance her demanding family life with her duties as vice president.

McCain’s real coup with this selection is not just picking someone who both shored up the conservative Republican base and made a grab for independent women and fringe Hillary Clinton supporters, but in picking someone who has now become the most interesting candidate in this race. Obama held that mantle for the past year and a half with the help of an adoring media. Everyone knows who he is and most have had a chance to form an opinion about him. The person that the people I work with were talking about the most over the last two weeks (the “water cooler” discussions that don’t happen near the water cooler) was Sarah Palin. With this one pick, McCain made his campaign exciting and newsworthy, garnering valuable publicity and capturing attention away from the Obama camp. That’s smart politics.

I cannot vote for the candidates of either major political party. Both tickets support policies that are unconscionable if not outright treasonous, in my view, and I plan on writing in Ron Paul. However, the more I learn about Sarah Palin, the more I want to move to Alaska. Caribou burgers, snow machine races, gun-toting women and vast wilderness—Alaska just might be for me.

Hot Weather In Cold Spring

Yesterday was Labor Day, the day set aside to lament the passing of the summer season and gird our loins to be kicked by working life for the rest of the year. This Labor Day, I decided to take an inexpensive ($7.75 each way on Metro North) trip to Cold Spring, New York, an hour’s train ride north of New York City to meet spend time with some family.

I met my mother, her husband and a friend of theirs at Foundry Dock Park, which sits across a parking lot from the Cold Spring Metro North train station. After lunch at a restaurant near the Hudson River, we began walking the West Point Foundry Preserve. This consisted of mostly un-preserved remains of buildings that once housed foundry works that were essential to the Union winning the Civil War. A historic marker informed us that President Abraham Lincoln visited the works during the War Between The States and witnessed a demonstration of one of the cannons that was made there. There are still reported to be unexploded munitions on the other side of the Hudson River.

Most of what was the foundry is now brick rubble that has been overgrown by woods. One building, an office building built in 1865, still remains mostly intact, though it is fenced off. The façade of another building sits nearby. Piles of bricks, low-lying brick and rock walls made for cumbersome hiking. Despite the difficult terrain and decrepit state of the remains, it was good to see evidence of things from the past. Visiting the surviving relics of things that happened long ago will give you both a greater appreciation for history and the fleeting nature of life. People working at the foundry during the Civil War probably never envisioned well-fed local tourists would be stumbling through rubble in the woods on the very spot where they worked smelting iron for the war effort.

After seeing the historic site and taking in some excellent views of the Hudson River, I walked on Main Street to see the shops and what else the town might have to offer. The first shop that caught my attention was a shoe store. Outside, all the men’s footwear on display were various forms of sandals. I walked inside to see if they had any footwear that a real man would wear. I did see some nice hiking boots, but at $190 they were priced for the rich and retarded shopper. Continuing up the street, there were many antique shops, each with its own character. The best one I saw had old 45 records stacked inside and inexpensive furniture in display outside. In the back corner, a female mannequin leaned against the wall in a vintage army uniform and a disheveled young man in long hair and large glasses discussed comic books and collectibles.

I patronized the Cold Spring Bake Shoppe and got some ice cream. I should normally stay away from such sweets, but I thought it was OK to indulge on the last day of the summer season. Some motorcycle convention or ride must have been happening, because people on motorcycles roared up Main Street at regular intervals. One man rode a colorful motorized tricycle and sported a long grey beard. Both real motorcycles and rice burners were represented.

But my brief stay in Cold Spring left me with the impression that it is a nice town that is being ruined by people with too much money moving in. While my mother went to buy a milkshake for my stepfather, a snide man with family in tow parked his white escalade in a ‘No Parking’ zone and sauntered away like it was no big deal. I got the impression from most of the people there that they had no interest in being a part of the good working-class American life that Cold Spring was built upon; they were just there to go shopping. While the people behind the counters in the places I visited were friendly, most of the patrons were out of towners (like me) who had too much money for their own good (not like me).

While I enjoy rustic environments and escaping the city for a while, Cold Spring is being transformed into a faux rustic town. It may be a Perrier Paradise for well-off city folk, but they are removing more charms then they are preserving.

When it was time for me to go, I headed back to the train station with other city people. I saw a man who looked like independent film director Jim Jarmusch waiting on the platform also. I’m a fan of his films, but I did not approach or attempt to photograph him for confirmation. If it was not him, then all I would achieve would be to photograph some guy who looks like Jim Jarmusch and embarrass myself as an incompetent celebrity stalker. If it was him, then I would be responsible for letting the world would know that Jarmusch is a pussy who goes antiquing in Cold Spring, and I love the cinema too much to do that. So it shall remain a mystery.