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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:28
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Sounds like madness to me.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/s...,975037,00.html
quote:
Mayor Bloomberg thought the truth would be just the ticket... it wasn't
Gary Younge in New York
Wednesday June 11, 2003
The Guardian
In a week when they lost domestic diva Martha Stewart to the Feds, the editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, to a scandal and Senator Hillary Clinton to the talk-show circuit, New Yorkers are no strangers to distinguishing between perception and reality. But when it comes to Mayor Michael Bloomberg they seem to prefer the former to the latter.
The reality is bad enough. First of all there was Jesse Taveras, who was fined for sitting on a milk crate outside a shop in the Bronx. "What did I do?" he asked. The official citation was "unauthorised use of a crate".
Then there was Yoav Kashida, the Israeli tourist fined $50 for taking up two seats on the subway when he fell asleep. Worst of all there was Crystal Rivera, 18 years old and six months pregnant, who was slapped with a $50 fine for sitting on the subway steps and blocking the stairway. These are the high-profile cases. We'll not dwell on the octogenarian fined $50 for feeding pigeons in the park or the shop owner who had to shell out $400 because there were too many words on his shop awning.
You get the message. There seems no end to the recent litany of tickets that New York's finest will issue for the pettiest of infractions: crimes that most New Yorkers did not even know they were able to commit. On its own it would be little more than an annoyance. Overzealous, underemployed cops being heavy-handed in a city where the really bad policemen end up killing innocent people - an everyday tale of ordinary uniformed folk.
But along with the fines comes the allegation that the tickets are less to do with the criminal than the political; that Bloomberg himself has ordered the police to get slap-happy with the fines because New York city hall needs the money to plug its $4bn budget gap.
When you think of how many milk-crate-sitters and pigeon- feeders it would take to even make a dent in the city's huge deficit, the accusation seems preposterous. Bloomberg, a multi-millionaire businessman, could probably find more cash down the back of his sofa than he will collect by harassing - and possibly alienating - potential voters.
The reality (another, different, less convenient reality unlikely to grab headlines) is that it costs more money to issue the tickets, process the infractions and pursue the non-payers than the fines are actually worth, and that the city actually issued far fewer of them this year than it did last. "If we relied on tickets to balance our budget, the city would have gone out of business a long time ago," says Bloomberg's press secretary, Edward Skyler.
The trouble for Bloomberg is not that the accusations of him nickel-and-diming the people who elected him are false; it is that even after he has said they are false, and explained why they must be false, just about everybody wants to believe the accusations anyway.
The press certainly want to believe them. "Ticket Madness", "Another Fine Mess" and "Sitting Bull" (over the milk crate) are just three of the Daily News headlines in the past couple of weeks and may soon be followed by a city-wide campaign.
But Bloomberg's protestations that this is just media hype are confounded by the fact that many policemen say it's true. The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the policemen's union, has taken out ads on the radio and in the press blaming the mayor and asking the public not to take out their frustrations over the ticketing blitz on the policemen because they are only following orders.
"We have to make our daily quota," Taveras claims the cop told him at the time. "Don't blame me, blame Bloomberg."
Which is the point. The budget crisis has left the city in a mess. Everybody is affected, from policemen and firefighters (there were 20 arrests and a near riot a couple of weeks ago when the city went to close down one fire station) to schoolchildren and homeowners, hit with a huge hike in property taxes.
And everybody blames Bloomberg, also referred to as "Mike the Knife" and "Gloomberg" whose best case scenario for rectifying the budget would inflict the biggest number of redundancies on the city in 10 years.
The very thing that made him attractive to many - that as a wealthy individual he was in hock to no special interest groups - now makes him weak. There are no special interest groups to support him. The perception worked to his benefit; the reality, however, is far more bleak. |
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:28
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London - is this true??
anne applebaum, oped in the WaPo
"Do you see any parallels between the security state that George Bush has created in America since 9/11 and the Gulag?" For a moment, the question struck me dumb. It had been put by a BBC radio interviewer, and we were on the air. It seemed impolitic to say, "What a ridiculous question," and I was too surprised to laugh. Finally I mumbled something about not having noticed that great a difference between daily life in George Bush's America and daily life in Bill Clinton's America, and left it at that. What I should have done was point out, tartly, that access to information is still far freer in America than it is in Britain, that immigrants are far better treated in America than in Britain, and that democracy remains a more open affair in America than in Britain. One always thinks of these things too late.
Yet in the days that followed, I did, rather surprisingly, have the opportunity to try out a few more answers. I was in London because a book I wrote about Soviet concentration camps had just been published there. For some, it seemed, the combination of that subject and my nationality offered the perfect opportunity to discuss the viciousness of contemporary American society. Several times I was asked if Guantanamo Bay should be considered a concentration camp. One reviewer, after saying a few neutral words about my book, complained that "the author has missed an opportunity to condemn human rights violations in her own country." Another interviewer asked whether people in America are often arrested for insulting the president on the Internet.
Partly, I suspect that this extraordinary new perception of America as a vile source of human rights abuse and repression comes from London-based Americans, one of whom told me she had moved to Britain to escape George Bush's abuses. Partly, and more legitimately, it comes from ill-judged decisions by the administration, such as the refusal to call the Guantanamo Bay captives "prisoners of war," which happens to be what they are.
Partly, though, it reflects something I first noticed two years ago and am still at a loss to explain fully. This is the animus that George W. Bush personally inspires among what the British, among others, call the "chattering classes," in Europe as elsewhere. Recently, a Pew Research Center poll gave statistical backing to a phenomenon that many have observed anecdotally. Much of the world -- and Europe is no exception -- has a love-hate relationship with America. They consume our mass culture but simultaneously resent the impact of that mass culture on their own. They watch our television programs but are wary of importing them. On a host of issues, ranging from beliefs about the death penalty to preferred brands of sneakers, Europeans and Americans are actually growing closer, and the much-vaunted "values gap" is growing narrower. Yet when asked about it, Europeans often focus on what drives us apart.
Somehow -- and the Pew results support this too -- Bush has come to stand for the hate part of the love-hate relationship, symbolizing the downside of mass culture and the pushy side of our foreign policy, rather than the economic freedom and political openness that many admire. Largely this is because Bush, as a fully paid-up conservative, is at odds with Europe's left-leaning political elites, most of whom hate not only him but also the things with which he is associated, rightly or wrongly, such as a freer rein for the private sector. What they hate, in other words, is his domestic policy, more than his foreign policy.
Hatred of Bush has, in turn, slanted the reporting in the European press. Huge amounts of attention were given to the reports, after the fall of Baghdad, of the looting of the Iraqi state museum, which played into negative stereotypes (anti-culture Americans!). Far less attention has been paid to subsequent discoveries of the museum's treasures, hidden in vaults, safe from looters. Much was made a year or two ago of the administration's apparent lack of interest in Middle East peace (warmongering Americans!). By contrast, there has been relatively little interest in the president's recent trip to the Middle East, which has been widely dismissed as a cynical maneuver.
At the moment, prospects for change are slim. The administration's stunningly inept diplomacy in Europe isn't doing much to improve matters, nor is the low-level arrogance that still drips out of the White House and the Pentagon. One can talk weakly of student exchanges and conferences, but those sorts of things reach limited audiences. Besides, increased communication sometimes makes for increased misunderstanding. Perhaps the best thing to do is invite your foreign friends to visit, switch on Jay Leno and reassure them, in case they don't believe it, that it is still pretty hard to be arrested -- as Stalin's victims once were -- for telling jokes about the nation's leader.
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Bereta_Eder
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always say yes to texas
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11-06-2003 22:59
) are likewise used often to describe 70-something and 90-something people.
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