New Yorkers: is this true?

[Agathon]

Sounds like madness to me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...975037,00.html

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.

[Japher]

octogenarian

What does that word mean?

As for the article

This is as bad as California censoring it's text books.

[Arrian]

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.

But nobody believes that because they're pissed off, and Bloomberg is a nifty scapegoat.

-Arrian

[Boris Godunov]

The tickets are true, although I agree that it is silly to think Bloomberg ordered it. The cop quoted probably doesn't have a clue as to what he is saying and assumes it was Bloomberg. Someone in the police force may have ordered it, but I doubt it was the mayor.

Oh, and I whole-heartedly agree with the ticket for the old person feeding the pigeons. Pigeons are vermin, nothing but flying rats, and anyone who does anything to help them should be fined, jailed and drawn and quartered!

[DAVOUT]

A human being 80 years old.

[FrustratedPoet]

Japher: It means "an 80-something year old person".

/edit: cross-posted.

[lord of the mark]

Not sure about the rest, but this part is just Guardian agitprop:


"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. "


this a reference to an act of several years ago. "in a city where the really bad policemen end up killing innocent people " implies an ongoing problem - and in fact, IIRC the policemen involved denied deliberately killing anyone - the guy was taking his wallet out, and they thought it was a gun. The guardian reporter isnt even bothered to mention the incident, much less explain whether or not there are different views on it - he simply slips it in as an aside in an article about something else entirely. Typical Guardian.

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Oh, and I whole-heartedly agree with the ticket for the old person feeding the pigeons. Pigeons are vermin, nothing but flying rats, and anyone who does anything to help them should be fined, jailed and drawn and quartered!

I totally agree. Did you see the huge flocks of the things in Trafalgar Square when you were in London? Most of the tourists feed the bloody things! Stupid people!

[Japher]

Man, the author was really seaching for a word there.

[lord of the mark]

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.

[FrustratedPoet]

Japher: Not really, it's a pretty common newspaper term - over here at least. Septagenerian and Nonagenerian (maybe bad spelling there ) are likewise used often to describe 70-something and 90-something people.

[ajbera]

Actually, octogenarian is pretty standard, as are quinquagenarian (50s), sexagenarian (60s), septuagenarian (70s), nonagenarian (90s), centenarian (100s), and supercentenarians (110+).

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
London - is this true??

That the British left-wing press are anti-Bush? Yes.

That people in the UK actually believe that people in America "are often arrested for insulting the president on the Internet"? No - that's daft.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by FrustratedPoet


That the British left-wing press are anti-Bush? Yes.

That people in the UK actually believe that people in America "are often arrested for insulting the president on the Internet"? No - that's daft.

you think Ms. Applebaum, a highly regarded writer, was lying in her column? she said an interviewer had actually asked her that.

[Agathon]

Threadjackers! Ban the lot of them Ming!

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Agathon
Threadjackers! Ban the lot of them Ming!

the Guardian prints an article about how oppressive life in NY allegedly is, and i post an article on anti-americanism among Lefties in the UK - seems like a pretty logical follow-on to me.

[Boris Godunov]

Only on a very superficial level, lotm. I assure you, NY papers have been far more strident about this than anyone else.

Besides, how was the Guardian article anti-american in tone? It was just highlighting the ludicrous police actions. No mention of Bush or rightwingers or anything was made. Your article was indeed irrelevant.

[Arrian]

I was actually surprised, LotM, at how non-offensive the Guardian article was. It wasn't anti-american at all, which was quite refreshing coming from that publication.

And the NYC papers have been rabid about it, because it sells (which the Guardian article points out).

-Arrian

[SlowwHand]

Boris, I read with shock and horror your opinion on poor pigeons.
They just want a little love, and you don't stop there.
Feeders of said-pigeons, drawn and quartered?

You NY people are mean. Low-down rotten mean.

[Boris Godunov]

Fine, we'll ship them to Texas, and you can deal with them. I have a feeling you'll be eager for target practice after a few days.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Only on a very superficial level, lotm. I assure you, NY papers have been far more strident about this than anyone else.

Besides, how was the Guardian article anti-american in tone? It was just highlighting the ludicrous police actions. No mention of Bush or rightwingers or anything was made. Your article was indeed irrelevant.

The aside which implied that killings of civilians by New York cops is routine.

do you want me to quote that again?

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


The aside which implied that killings of civilians by New York cops is routine.

do you want me to quote that again?

Again, that's a criticism of NY cops, not anti-Americanism. Still not relevant. If you don't have anything useful to add, etc.

For the record, more than one innocent person was killed by NY cops. The NYPD abuse of authority is an ongoing problem, of which the deaths were of the highest profile incidents, and that of Amadu Diallo.

Even most NYers acknowledge the NYPD has a problem in this regard. So what's your complaint again?

[SlowwHand]

I know this is off course some, but do you have grackels in NY ?
We have pigeoons, but we have these black grackels.
Crapping to the max black birds.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov

For the record, more than one innocent person was killed by NY cops.

when was the last one - and a deliberate or negligent killing, not a genuine accident - the reporter said "really bad cops".

[Bereta_Eder]

always say yes to texas

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
when was the last one - and a deliberate or negligent killing, not a genuine accident - the reporter said "really bad cops".

That would be May, 2003. Two unprovoked killings that month, and certainly negligent:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/ju...nypd-j04.shtml

I know the source will be criticized, but these two incidents are quite real.

I'll also remind you that Diallo was shot 41 times, and had entry wounds in the soles of his feet.

And then there's the oh-so-wonderful plunger incident...

[lord of the mark]

from the "gotham gazette"


"Alberta Spruill, 57 and African American, died of a heart attack May 16th after Special Operations police, acting on a bad tip that the apartment contained munitions, tossed a stun grenade into her Harlem apartment as she dressed for work, handcuffing her even after finding no guns in the place. The medical examiner's office has ruled the death a homicide, but blame has yet to be assigned. Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have apologized for the incident and acknowledged the obvious, that something was terribly wrong with this raid. Bloomberg's response has been noted to be in stark contrast to that of his predecessor in police misconduct cases. Rudy Giuliani almost always sided with the police, exacerbating racial tensions. "

Blame not yet assigned - new approach from bloomberg.
not the impression one gets from the Guardian.

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
I know this is off course some, but do you have grackels in NY ?
We have pigeoons, but we have these black grackels.
Crapping to the max black birds.

"In other news, the pidgeon, also known as the 'Feathered Rat', was completely eradicated due to the Bolivian Tree Lizards released upon Springfield. Young Bart Simpson will be honored at a Ceremony this afternoon!"

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


That would be May, 2003. Two unprovoked killings that month, and certainly negligent:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/ju...nypd-j04.shtml

I know the source will be criticized, but these two incidents are quite real.

I'll also remind you that Diallo was shot 41 times, and had entry wounds in the soles of his feet.

And then there's the oh-so-wonderful plunger incident...

both of those were years ago, and only one was a killing. The guardian specifically referred to killing.
As you see i found a source on one of the May deaths, and no, its not clear what the fault was there.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Blame not yet assigned - new approach from bloomberg.
not the impression one gets from the Guardian.

Well, whoop-de-do, but that's not the point. If Bloomberg is going to be more responsible about NYPD abuses and negligence, I'm happy, but that doesn't change the Guardian's point about the killings.

And again, nothing there translates to anti-Americanism, nor relates to your own article. It was a rather obvious attempt to change the subject out of some bizarre hypersensitivity. Being a NYer, I think it's a valid editorial and makes an excellent point.

Bloomberg's next outrage is in the works: prohibiting bartenders from buy-backs.