The 9/11 Windfall

Fascinating article in the Village Voice about people who have literally profited over the last decade from 9/11.  What was tragedy and heartbreak for many became filthy lucre for some.

Our former mayor is the most famous example of 9/11 profiteering (he apparently is now worth $52 million -- wow!). But this exploitation of tragedy for profit goes way beyond him and includes companies that have gotten sketchy tax breaks to move to downtown Manhattan, "witnesses" to the attack who has gone on the lecture circuit, and the abuse of government contracts by shady security companies. There's also a myriad of strange "charities" and "non-profits" that have raised money off the attacks in order to "help" the victims, etc. It's been quite a cash cow.


Oh, and did you know that the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero is not a national memorial? No, it's a private, profit-making enterprise. And the people who run it are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year! There's even, I kid you not, 9/11 wine. Yes, you read that right.


The greatest tragedy in our nation's history has become a big business for many. Some people are evening calling it blood money -- but I'm not quite prepared to go that far.


Still, it's a tribute to the unending power of greed. The lust for money is never sated. Even this great tragedy was seen by many as a chance to cash in. These people aren't doing anything illegal (well, as far as we know), they just have no sense of decency and see everything as an opportunity to wheel and deal and make a quick buck. Hey, it's the American way. 

Politics ain't beanbag

There's a special election for Congress in Brooklyn and Queens today. The polls close in less than two hours. It's a very conservative district and it'll probably go Republican tonight. That would be awful for NYC and America but these are crazy times. After all, a Democrat won a special congressional election in upstate New York this past May for a seat that had been Republican for eons. So anything is possible these days. 

These days, what's up is down and what's down is up. Everything's a mess.

The race is between Democrat David Weprin, who has proven to be a lousy candidate, and Republican Bob Turner, your typical Tea Party scumbag. This race basically comes down to this: the district is very old, very conservative, very religious, and very racist. Therefore they hate President Obama. So they think that by voting for this Republican they'll hurt and embarrass the president. Simple as that. 

And, wouldn't ya know, the filthy Republicans are up to their usual dirty tricks. Apparently the Turner campaign is jamming the Weprin campaign's phonez and now the Turner campaign has -- ready for this? -- "served papers" on the Weprin campaign challenging the election results -- and the polls haven't even closed yet! So the narrative the Republicans are trying to set up is this: if we win, great; if we lose, it was voter fraud. Republicans have always been sore losers and now they're sore winners! Scary.

But if the Democrats lose this one, they'll have no one to blame but themselves. They ran a lousy candidate and a lousy campaign. Weprin failed to effectively show what a lying fraud Turner and Weprin made gaffe after gaffe. The good news is that this district is probably not going to exist after next year so, whoever wins, he'll have a short career in congress. And that's the only good thing about this awful, miserable election.

Bloomberg on Curb Your Enthusiasm

Mr NYC Looks Back

If you'd like a to look back at how 9/11 has been remembered or referenced on this blog, please click on this link and you'll find a variety of posts over the years. I hope they shed some light -- and boost our sorely sad spirits on this day.

National Sept. 11 Memorial: A Look Back

The Arrogance of Power

Mayor Bloomberg has managed to avoid most of the ugly, petty scandals that dog so many politicians. His money and popularity, for years, kept him above reproach. But his popularity has plummeted and his share of problems have increased (Cathie Black, the snowstorm, City Time, etc.). Now, for the first time in his decade in power, Bloomberg's has been revealed to be just another politician.

Last month, Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith resigned, allegedly because he wanted to go back into the private sector and because he was ill-suited for the job. He is widely blamed for screwing up the December snowstorm response and he seemed more interested in fancy ideas instead of the nuts and bolts of governing. So when he resigned it was shrugged off by Bloomberg and the press as, "Oh well, it seemed like a good idea at the time but it just didn't work out."

But that wasn't true. 

Turns out, Goldsmith resigned because he was arrested in DC in July for domestic violence. Now that's bad but what made it worse was that Bloomberg covered it up! He lied to the public at the time, said basically, "The guy's resigning because he's unhappy in the job and we don't like him anymore." Bloomberg NEVER revealed the real reason and it dribbled out in the most sleazy manor.

And what's Bloomberg's response now that scandal has been revealed? Total indifference. He basically says "Oh, I didn't want to embarrass the guy so that's why I didn't reveal it. But I liked him and would have kept him in the job anyway." Bloomberg flunked the basic lesson of Political Scandal 101: it's not the crime but the cover-up. Had he just said at the time the real reason why Goldsmith resigned, then there would be no scandal. It would be out he goes and that's the end of it. Shameful.

This shows you who Mike Bloomberg really is at his core. He is supremely arrogant man. And this is the arrogance of power in action: protecting your friends, and yourself by extension, by deceiving everyone else. It's wrong -- and our mayor should be ashamed of himself.    

Au Revoir NY Press

I'm a little late in blogging about this but a week ago today the last issue of the NY Press was published.

I'm sure your shrug of shoulders or your "What's the NY Press?" thought is one of the reasons why it's gone under. The era of free "alternative" weekly newspapers is so very twentieth century. In this media age, such papers are dinosaurs. That asteroid called the Internet came crashing down and eradicated its kind.

Boo-hoo.

Personally I'm not that sad. Actually, I'm kind of happy about it. I know on this blog that I rant about how depressed I am whenever anything in this city closes or disappears -- bits and pieces of old NYC going away -- but this case is an exception. First, the NY Press was not a great, or even a particularly good, newspaper. It was little better than a college newspaper and, compared to some college papers that I've read, even worse. So this is no great loss to the culture. Second,  I sent them an article several months ago, hoping they'd run it, but they never did. It wasn't any worse than most of the stuff they put out so I don't know why they chose never to run it, and I never got an explanation (not that this was any great loss to the culture either). So I'm glad that whoever chose not to run it is probably out of a job. Obviously it'll never run now but I wasn't holding my breath anyway.

However, putting my feelings aside, the NY Press did have a pretty good run (1988-2011). Twenty-three years for any publication to last ain't bad, particularly in an expensive and crazy media environment like NYC (it was around almost as long as The Phantom of the Opera). 

The newspaper began as a New Journalism-contrarian-conservative-mean spirited "alternative" to the  "alternative" Village Voice. No liberal pansies them -- oh no, they were "real Americans" giving it to NYC "straight." Needless to say, their glory years were the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president and they loved, loved, loved savaging the otherwise popular in NYC commander-in-chief. Like all good conservatives, the paper was also totally hypocritical too -- when they weren't screaming about liberals undermining "traditional values," they were publishing graphic articles on sex and running ads for escort agencies. 

Sadly for them, however, the 2000s brought tougher times. The presidency of their much beloved George W Bush turned into a disaster -- it was one thing to attack a president they hated but it was another thing to have to defend a president everyone else hated -- thus exposing the bankruptcy of the conservative ideology they had been peddling all those years (which I'm sure disillusioned their readers). Their best sex writers left. The economy sucked. The founder and owner Russ Smith eventually had to sell the paper and the new owners had no vision, no plan to keep it relevant in the Internet age. Worst of all, the NY Press was one of those papers under constant crises -- writers and editors were constantly coming and going, they had feuds with one another that went public; it got vicious. Then the money ran out.

And the rest is history. 

So au revoir NY Press. You're a victim of circumstance. You're not the first and certainly won't be the last to bear the brunt of these tough times. But I'll admit it -- the only thing that makes me sad about your closure is that you're not taking the New York Post with you. 

The 9/11 Decade

"There's nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." -- Kurt Vonnegut

Ain't that the truth. The proliferation of words, words, words -- to steal from Shakespeare -- eventually drench and make muddy whatever meaning they are meant to convey. 

The banality, senselessness, pure stupidity of great evil acts speak for themselves. 

So is the case with 9/11. In the years since the event that changed the world, billions of words have been written about what it meant then (tragedy, national unity), what it led to (war, divisiveness, neo-McCarthyism, etc.) and what it means now (who knows?). But who knows what any of it means?

That is why I applaud New York Magazine for it's 9/11 Encyclopedia. It takes the tragedy and breaks it down -- person by person, event by event, issue by issue, controversy by controversy -- and gives snippets about each while, at the same time, not bombarding the readers with psychologising. Instead, it's just the facts -- and it lets the readers find the meaning of 9/11 for themselves.

Kurt Vonnegut would be proud.

Classic Mr NYC

Remember Seinfeld?

Of course you do. Even more than a decade after it went off the air, you can still hear New Yorkers quote their favorite lines to one another. Its spirit will never die.

So it was more than appropriate that, back in 2007, one of this blog's first interviews was with Kenny Kramer, the real life man behind the legend.

You can read it here -- and one or two things that the real Kramer reveals will surprise you.  

Hurricane Irene in NYC