As the papers daily remind us, there is an ongoing Republican primary. Romney has slipped up a bit this week and some on the right are even imagining a deadlocked convention. But that seems unlikely to me. Though unloved, Mitt will duke it out and be the candidate. I think other, more popular Republicans – Christie, Daniels – stayed out of the race sensing an inevitable Obama victory. At this point, though, they may be thinking they should have gone for it. Obama looks vulnerable in this economy.

So naturally he’s been happy to see halfway decent job numbers for several months in a row. If that kind of thing continues, he will be tough to unseat. There has just been a small uptick in Obama’s approval ratings, to 46%, which may or may not be a historically significant level.

Meanwhile, the banks have just signed what looks to me like a speeding fine with a bit of community service. For their warehouses full of fraudulent documents, robo-signed by the thousands at ten dollars an hour, the five big boys mentioned will give up a total of about $5 billion in cash. The rest will be in principal writedowns that will cost not the banks, but the big money they got to invest in mortgage backed securities, namely the mutual funds, pensions and IRAs, i.e., us. To top it off, it would seem that those who have been diligent in paying their bills and lucky enough to keep their jobs will get nothing from this deal, while those who have been wrongly foreclosed on will get about one month’s rent. Will America buy Obama’s story on this? What will the Republican line be?

Does anyone think it’s a bad idea that “someone” is assassinating civilian nuclear scientists in Iran? (The Junta knows one person who thinks it’s a very good idea, indeed). I have to agree with Glenn Greenwald that these are clearly acts of terrorism, so we can get into that if you want. (And check out this very interesting angle on both Rudy Giuliani’s and Howard Dean’s active material support for “terrorism”.) I don’t like the increasing media drumbeat I’m seeing about how Iran is a mortal threat. Syria is also a potential target for those with the war itch, as al-Assad is gunning people down. Clearly it’d be better if he left, but that doesn’t mean clandestinely supplying arms through Turkey is a good idea.

All of these things and more will be part of the discussion, and the wine will flow. Meet us in the back room.

In the interest of bringing discussions like this out of email and into the public, let me expand upon my argument and respond to some of Jeremy’s points. For brevity’s sake, I’ll keep it to two points.

Obama continues torture

“I’m under the impression that we have stopped waterboarding and most forms of enhanced interrogation.”

Jeremy’s impression is technically correct; President Obama signed an order on his first day in office to ban waterboarding and other techniques. But forces in the field can still employ prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, and force-feeding, techniques which have been cited as cruel and unusual. Moreover, the rendition program, in which we transfer prisoners to other countries (like Libya) to be tortured, continues uninterrupted. Most troubling is a report that the CIA has a complex in Somalia, where it directly pays guards’ salaries, and to which it brings prisoners from all over the world, god help them.

Beyond the policies themselves, the fact that Obama gave a pass to the enablers and architects of the torture program means that those choices remain open to future administrations. Because he refused to prosecute them as crimes, they have now become policy positions, on which respectable people can disagree. You have a Republican field saying they would bring back waterboarding, but if Obama were honest about how hard and dirty he’s fighting the terrorists he’d win every red vote in the country. Which brings us to our next point.

Drone bombing continues

“I support the drones, mainly because I don’t want US troops on the ground.”

This presumes that we need to attack or invade any country in which a so-called “terrorist” is found. And it blindly ignores the fact that so many civilians, even children, are killed by these sky robots of death. It is a heartless and backward policy, which is bound to result in deadly blowback for America.

“You never come up with anything as an alternative to drone strikes, you only reply with the same tired bumper-sticker ideology of ‘killing a terrorist creates more’. How will you feel when [someone] succeeds in blowing up a truck bomb in Times Square?

Sadly, something terrible like this is very likely to occur as a result of these strikes. The failed Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, very nearly pulled off the trick, and cited American drone attacks in Pakistan as one of his motivations. The drones “don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody,” he said in court.

At a meeting last month, Pashtun tribal elders described the sounds of drones hovering over their villages during the day, and launching Hellfire missiles at night. A teenager who volunteered to gather evidence of civilian deaths was killed by a drone one week later. My “alternative” to drone strikes is the absence of drone strikes. I do not believe in a military solution to the problem of terrorism; I would point out that ten years of war in Afghanistan did not prevent Faisal Shahzad from acting, but 3 years of drone strikes compelled him to act.

These are some of the foreign policy failures of Barack Obama, a president who ran on a platform of restoring America’s reputation in the Muslim world. As Jeremy said, Obama’s election bought us much goodwill in the Middle East. But that has all been squandered by his policy decisions. The evidence shows a clear and steady decline. I would argue that these trends will eventually lead to more, not less, terrorist attacks against the US.

“I am really surprised there isn’t more outrage from Americans over the  Wikileaks releases,” said Joah. He meant the Apache helicopter video in particular. The soldiers in the video technically did follow the rules of engagement, but that’s just the point: war is by definition a suspension of the rules. War brings destruction, no matter how man tries to civilize it. “I believe,” said Trevor, “that video should be required viewing for every war supporter in the country.”

Iain piped in. “Diplomacy has required secrecy for thousands of years. It wasn’t just invented by Hillary Clinton. It goes back to the creation of the nation-state and even earlier. It is practically human nature. It is part of human culture. The really surprising thing was that more countries weren’t pissed off at the United States for allowing this info to leak.”

Is WL anti-statist? Are they anti-American?

“WL is for ‘us’,” said Russ. “It isn’t going to change anything in America.” In other words, these leaked documents are for the intellectual elite to mull over in their comfortable, wine-soaked evening discussions. Most Americans either don’t care or aren’t really aware of them.

“It is completely presumptuous and very arrogant for [Julian Assange] to think he knows better than career diplomats and foreign service personnel what ought and ought not to be classified,” said Pete. When questioned whether this wasn’t placing too much trust in the government, Pete emphasized the distinction between non-elected State Dept employees making careers in diplomacy, and unctuous politicians trying to get elected, blissfully unaware of the real workings of statecraft. “I would never trust an elected politician to make the right decision on any of this stuff,” he clarified. But things that can be revealed by these leaks, including the manner and method of US diplomacy, and the structure of the State Dept, are valuable and should be protected.

What about injured American pride? Isn’t there a sense of violation here, that our dirty American laundry has been hung out for the world to see? I think that is certainly part of the reason for the backlash against Wikileaks.

There must always be a balance between security and transparency. Between centralized power and democracy. Between honesty and lies. My own personal feeling is that, for too long, the balance has been skewed toward too much secrecy, and that a dose of exposure is necessary to right the balance. The media has been pathetic for at least a decade – and likely much longer – at acting as a check on government abuse of power. Wikileaks is upstaging them, and in the process showing them what is possible in investigative journalism based on primary source documents.

Jeremy said that we are entering a new era of transparency. Or perhaps a new era of journalism? Greg Mitchell, a writer at The Nation, has been live-blogging everything Wikileaks for nine weeks. He has also just put out a book, The Age of Wikileaks, which sounds like it’s about exactly this point.

Before the evening’s discussion split into its separate paths, Iain raised a question which I intend to explore in future posts: Can we stack the actions of Wikileaks, and the results of its releases, against the goals and ideals of the organization, and what will that show? It’s still early days, but I myself am looking forward to seeing how that question is answered.

Tuesday, February 1st, 8:30pm
DOC Wine Bar, 83 N. 7th St. in Williamsburg. (Cash bar only)

“The Vanishing City” is a great documentary about real estate in Manhattan over the last 30 years. It covers the changes in zoning laws, pushed by developers and adopted by politicians, which have turned New York into a city of “luxury”. Among other exposures, it casts light on the mayor’s plan to build a convention center in Willets Point, seizing via eminent domain laws the property of businesses employing 15,000 people.

Dec. 15, 8pm. The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South (E. 20th St.) Admission is free.

DeRosa was commenting on the possible irony that we had gathered to watch his film in a so-called “luxury condo” development. Eighty Metropolitan was built on the site of an old mustard factory in Williamsburg, and DeRosa said that he actually thought it was pretty tastefully done. Sure, it has a lap pool, but the building is only six stories, and it kind of resembles a factory in this old industrial neighborhood. Perhaps he was being diplomatic, but I found him sincere. His thoughts also closely resemble my own feelings about the building.

What he and Senko do have a problem with is “the city funding these changes”, and favoring the rich at the expense of the poor and middle-class. They set out to make the film because they noticed their own neighborhood changing, with locally-owned shops going out of business. “It was originally supposed to be a nostalgia piece,” DeRosa said. “But as we got deeper into it, we started learning things that really pissed us off.”

A common refrain from developers is that they are catering to the free market, and supplying a demand. “Well, if that’s true, then what’s city planning for?” asked DeRosa. “Our tax dollars are subsidizing these efforts which may eventually push us all out of our own city.” He was referring to the $500 million in annual tax abatements now granted to certain developers of high-priced residential and commercial property, a result of the shift in the 1970s toward accommodating businesses in the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). Although the film criticizes Bloomberg, his PlaNYC, and his conception of New York itself as a “luxury product,” it says he is only the latest NYC mayor to embrace this development philosophy, which unfairly targets working-class and lower-class neighborhoods for re-zoning.

Cities never stand still, nor should zoning.
—NYC Dept of City Planning

The Equitable Building sparked the first zoning law in NYC

The key to everything is zoning, a concept first introduced to New York City with the rise of the Equitable Building, at 120 Broadway. Built in 1915, the Equitable replaced a 7-story building that burned down in 1912, and the new construction dwarfed the old; at 40 stories, it rose over 500 feet in the air and each floor was built out to the full extent of the foundation, i.e., it had no “setbacks”, and cast a 7-acre shadow across the city.

Much like today, the city fathers viewed such development as progress. John Purroy Mitchel, the “Boy Mayor of New York”, personally laid the cornerstone of the Equitable’s foundation, the first time a mayor had done so for a building erected solely with private financing. In a short speech, he compared the building to the city itself, its owners to public servants. However, he seemed to already anticipate the public reaction to come. He congratulated the builders for “having, what I feel may possible be, the last of these cities within a city – but that is a problem for tomorrow.”

The Equitable set off a public outrage. People worried that such enormous towers would deprive the streets of light and air, making the city a dark and gloomy place. This led to the city’s first zoning ordinance, the Zoning Resolution of 1916, which limited not the height of buildings, but the amount of mass at certain heights – builders had to include setbacks which slimmed the buildings as they rose. These regulations spurred the design of Art Deco buildings like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

The zoning resolution was updated again in 1961, with provisions mandating parking lots and encouraging open spaces. This is the period when the modernist Robert Moses was advocating the leveling of neighborhoods and the construction of highways like the Cross Bronx Expressway. Jane Jacobs famously opposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have connected the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges via an 8-lane elevated highway, displacing in the process some 2,000 families and 8,000 businesses.

Today the organization of the city depends on the involvement of its residents more than ever. As someone states in the film, the traditional process has been that “the board creates a plan, and then the community has to fight the plan.” It’s important to remember that the city will change no matter what. We can do nothing, and allow other forces to shape our city in their own image, or we can speak up and demand that the character of our neighborhoods be preserved in city planning.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
—Jacques Barzun

Is that still true? I don’t think so. I’ve said elsewhere that it’s football you have to understand to get Americans, even if Jeremy might feel otherwise. When George Carlin did his famous number on football vs baseball, he was not only pointing out the differences between a farmer’s pastime and an allegory for war, he was explaining the evolution of America over the last 100 years. We have become a more precise, more aggressive people. We have lost our sense of nuance.

But whether it’s football or baseball that defines us, we can still learn a bit about ourselves through inspection. Our heroes have fallen mightily, so many revealed as juicers that it is no longer a surprise to hear the latest confession. The atmosphere clearly encouraged the use of steroids through a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, and we, the fans, have been largely willing to just give everyone a pass.

The price of a night at the ballgame is now beyond the reach of your average working-class family, and the stadiums themselves – built at great taxpayer expense – have been neatly divided into class-oriented strata. Customers are more apt to buy a season package from their TV provider than season tickets, and this is partly because today’s fan is likely more driven by his fantasy league than by his hometown team. The new dream is to be not Derek Jeter, but George Steinbrenner. As Robert Lipsyte says, the ballplayers themselves have become mere monopoly pieces. “Teddy Roosevelt’s hero, ‘the man who is actually in the arena,’ has been replaced with the Gekko bonus baby who owns the arena.”

Fantasy leagues define our country today. Isn’t the lesson of America that it is better to own than to work?