Did you ever wonder where your tax dollars were being spent after you purchased some McNuggets
Those monies are being used to pay bonuses to AIG execs
Welfare isn’t just for the really poor. It’s actually for the really wealthy.
Wealth + laissez faire economics = welfare for the uber-rich.
Here’s a supreme article about the declining fortunes of one of the families of real estate barons here in New York City.
The TISHMAN-SPEYER corporation purchased the Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village from Metropolitan Life back in 2006. When the value of real estate tumbled because of the bubble being broken, their fortune took a direct punch in the mouth. It’s just deserts for them too. New York City is controlled by a tiny group of families that own the majority of the land we use.
One of the first “so called” improvements the TISHMAN-SPEYER developers started to do after their purchase was to plant trees all over the open lawn spaces. The longtime tenants and residents hated this change because it removed the sight lines from the interior courtyard that had existed previously. Didn’t we just have a discussion regarding the benefits of design when considering high rise developments?
The open lawn area at Stuy Town is perfect for picnics during the summer and other outdoor activities all year around. The reason that Stuy Town works as a high rise development modeled after Le CORBUSIER’s master architectural plans is because of the core values of the residents. Even during the KOCH Administration, New York City’s lowest period for economics and morality, the Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village remained a haven for its residents.
It wasn’t because Black folks weren’t allowed in either. It remained safe because poor people weren’t allowed in. Poor people are devalued and disenfranchised and this causes them to devalue the things they come into contact with. Poor people are disproportionately accosted by the police. This makes poor people angry and volatile. Poor people were barred from entering this community because of all the ways that they are marginalized and mistreated and the residents of Stuy Town didn’t want to live that way either.
Peep the aerial photo of Stuy Town. The buildings layout forms an almost castle like barricade from the rest of the city. The ills of the East Village didn’t penetrate Stuy Town.
It remains to be seen if the TISHMAN SPEYER family will be able to continue to manage this crucial property in Manhattan. The developers have been converting many of the buildings into dormitories because the kids that go to New York University generally have parents that can foot the bill for their children’s living expenses. You all know how kids treat dormitory rooms right? These buildings could look like shit within the decade. The economic downturn could force the developers to admit tenants into the housing complex that have serious economic challenges. Like Section 8 users. That is when Stuyvesant Town becomes Co-Op City.
Co-Op City is the world’s largest cooperative residential housing development. Co-Op City is 4x the size of Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village(see voided area in image below). Co-Op City fell the fuck off when they were forced to accept poor tenants into the development. The poor tenants mixed with those who had middle-class aspirations and they made the two groups unidentifiable. Now everyone that lives in Co-Op City is considered working class (read: poor). The economy is about to make all of working class. When that happens there won’t be any residential development that will be safe.
One of the most hardbody scenes in the Dark Knight movie is when the Joker presides over a pile of burning cash. Something like a few million or a billion. The amount was astronomical, but what made the scene all the more perverse was the realization that dawned on you that the Joker never even gave a fuck about the money. It was never about the money to him at all, but the thrill of watching everyone else squirm, yell and scream because the cash was all that ever mattered to them.
I feel like I am witnessing that scene all over again except the Joker is now replaced by a faceless giant called the banking industry which takes money from the government, the insurers and from me, all simultaneously. While still keeping a straight face and telling me that it is out of money. The banks aren’t out of money. I am out of money. I am the one who needs the government bailout. I’m buying a loaf of moldy raisin bread for a quarter out of the back of some African lady’s minivan. I’m buying warm coldcuts from some Puerto Rican guy on a skateboard.
Meanwhile, the banks are playing everybody for chumps because we are. And its our own fault too. We are the ones that preferred the convenience of plastic to paper. With all of this convenience comes a price.
That bill hasn’t arrived yet.
Has a politrickster ever had a more appropriate name as ADOLFO CARRION? The former Bronx Borough President and newly minted White House czar for urban policy hasn’t even had a chance to make his cabinet seat warm before we all find out that he is as crooked as anyone would be in the nation’s poorest urban area.
DP.com friends WWIB have been posting links to the Daily News and Village Voice investigative reports on CARRION’s cozy relationship with property developers and even architects that were granted contracts on capital construction projects in the Bronx. I’d hate to think how much other stuff is dangling around from CARRION’s time as BX BeeP. This is why the Bronx has remained disenfranchised, underserved and poor.
It’s too easy for funds to go missing when large sums are being moved around. The Bronx has required so much remedial development to bridge the gap from decades of negligence and irresponsibility. CARRION is just the tip of the iceberg for this boro’s woes. His conflict of interest with a municipal architect is such chump change. There were billions of dollars being circulated through the Bronx as it became the final frontier for NYC’s gentrification.
Although CARRION escaped the Bronx just as the construction bubble was bursting he has found himself in a hornet’s nest down in the D.C. Beltway. If you remember BERNARD KERIK then you know that the microscopic laser ain’t no joke when it is trained on you. BERNARD KERIK went from flying high as a Ground Zero Hero to just being a grounded zero. OBAAMA might have to pull another Latino from somewhere else to sit in this cabinet seat. I wonder if ProperTalks knows of any responsible Mexicans on the westside?
Did I ever tell you folks the story about our ‘Bodega’ video shaping public policy citywide? After getting wind of our video a certain billionaire mayor and teh ghey councilwoman put the Healthy Bodega Initiative on the frontburner so to speak. Chea!
If you think you are having a problem holding your breakfast down then maybe you can imagine what kind of problem these dudes might be having.
Mexico is on some serious beheading shit. I thought it was only the arabs and the Indonesians who went in all crazy for the head chopping. The French had that whole guillotine movement a couple of hundred years ago but that was ceremonial. These fools in Mexico is dead ass serious.
I still plan on going to Cancun this summer though.
Did you know that there was so much money in moving drugs through Mexico? I need to ask my buddy from Tony’s Kansas City what the deal is with this. I would have thought that bringing drugs into America from South America was far more cost effective on airplanes and large shipping container vessels. How else do you flood an entire nation with narcotics unless you bring in kilotons of the shit. Maybe Mexico has the refineries and the processing plants? That cocoa leaf and poppy seed have to be processed somewhere don’t they?
In my mind, Del Monte or Kraftfoods has the factories that refine raw organic materials into narcotics for the American market. Who else has the facilities built to undertake this shit? Whenever I see an enterprise that generates a million billion trillion dollars I understand that white isn’t going to just let that operation lumber along. There is a global recession going down and if the drug trade wasn’t regulated previously (grow up people) it certainly is now. I don’t mean legislative regulation either. I mean that Warren G type regulation with guns, rocket launchers, tanks and planes type shit.
But on the real, the Mexicans need to stop fucking around with all this beheading shit. Just kill a motherfucker and keep it moving. Leave something for the wild dingoes in Mexico City.