DARPA, the Pentagon research agency, wants to build a railway on the moon. Here on earth in the United States, however, our rail infrastructure is execrable.
DMZ America Podcast #140: Super Tuesday Leaves Two, Euthanasia Comes to Illinois, Troops in Subways
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Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.
The first segment of this week’s offering covers some major developments in the 2024 presidential campaign. The US Supreme Court followed Ted’s lead, choosing democracy over the Constitution, ruling 9-0 to invalidate the 14th Amendment cases attempting to remove Trump from the ballot. Super Tuesday saw broad sweeps by Biden and Trump, Nikki Haley’s withdrawal and progressive discontent over Biden’s support of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Scott and Ted preview the State of the Union Address and detail what Biden would have to do there—it involves violating the laws of physics—to drive a stake through concerns about his mental acuity. Oh, and it’s definitely Biden versus Trump this fall.
The second segment takes a hard turn into Illinois’ move toward legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. Scott expresses concerns about whether God would approve and whether there might be a potential for abuse. Ted gets personal about a friend and colleague who recently decided to end her life after suffering from depression.
Finally, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has ordered state police and the National Guard to New York City’s beleaguered subway system to restore law and order…and search your bags.
Watch the Video version: here.
Mr. President, Please Kill the Homeless Woman Who Lives Outside My Apartment
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Dear Mr. President,
Won’t you please kill the homeless woman who lives on a bench on the median strip of the street near my apartment building?
She doesn’t bother me. As far as I know, she doesn’t bother anyone else either. The woman who lives in the middle of the street is nice. I like her. Last week, as I was waiting for the traffic signal to change, she beckoned softly from under her pile of soiled blankets, asking for change, and I gave her a ten-dollar bill. I’m not usually that nice. She’s that sympathetic.
I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by this probably-fiftysomething-year-old woman has deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.”
It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder and it is not a question of when or how she’ll die—the answers are (a) this winter and (b) hypothermia—but whether the usual circle of votive candles and $5 bouquets of flowers will be placed by her bench or on the southwest corner of the intersection near the other one.
They say that dying of cold isn’t that bad. That you feel warm, cozy, disoriented.
I don’t believe them. Whatever the physical sensations, dying from cold a hundred feet from a couple hundred housing units so overheated that many New Yorkers keep their windows open all year long has got to be one hell of a lonesome suck of depressing. The nice woman who lives in the median deserves better than drawing her final breath while staring at the glow of a laptop screen through a frosted window pane the opposite side of which, under different circumstances, she would live inside.
So, Mr. President, won’t you please kill this lady? You’d be doing her a favor.
I know this isn’t your fault, sir. In a different world, you could allocate the tens of thousands of dollars needed to provide my outside neighbor with emergency shelter, transitional housing, permanent rehousing, substance abuse and/or mental health treatment. In reality, that money is tied up. The government’s budget is stretched thin. You have a massive deficit to think about.
Plus you have big expenses. For example, you’re asking Congress for $106 billion “in funding for Israel, Ukraine, countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and operations on the southern U.S. border.” These are, obviously, all very important needs. Before she succumbed to schizophrenia, the woman who is going to die in my New York neighborhood wouldn’t dream of suggesting that her desire to live indoors ought to come ahead of countering China in the Indo-Pacific.
I understand. If she hadn’t gone crazy, she’d understand too. Defense is one pot. A big pot. Anti-poverty is another pot. A very small pot. Like the tiniest pot in the smallest dollhouse ever. Everyone knows—you can’t “just” move money from one pot to another pot. That’s not something we even want to think about.
All that military spending got me thinking, though. Although Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan clearly need fighter jets and tanks and drones and ships and cyber weapons and missiles and bombs and light arms and bullets in order to kill as many Russian and Palestinian and Chinese people as possible, will they really miss…one?
Euthanizing a homeless New Yorker wouldn’t require anything as fancy as one of the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems we’re sending to Ukraine. This lady isn’t worth $1.5 million. Not to mention, one ATACM would take out a whole block or two—including my place!
I’m thinking something more modest, along the lines of the Switchblade 300 “suicide” drone, another gizmo we’re providing to Ukraine. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. President, the AeroVironment Switchblade is an expandable loitering munition so small it can fit in a backpack. You launch it from a tube. Then it flies to and crashes into its target, where its explosive warhead detonates. Like the homeless, it’s expendable. And it’s only $6,000!
Come on, Mr. President: We both know the Ukrainians and the Israelis and Taiwanese don’t need all the weapons we’re sending them. The Ukrainians don’t; they’re selling the extras we send them on the black market and the dark web. I only need one. One!
I know—“operations on the southern U.S. border” address an existential threat to America. What if an illegal terrorist migrant were to sneak past the border wall and make his way to New York and then were to kill the homeless woman on my street who would otherwise die of exposure this winter? Of course, that would be OK.
Still. It’s not like you can’t let $6,000 “accidently” fall out of your budget for “operations on the southern U.S. border.” Send that drone. Please blow up the old lady.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Related: Biden Sends Billions Overseas As Americans Starve (Short Video)
Bring Back New York’s Transit Police
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Visitors to Bath, England learn that the town’s namesake first-century spa deteriorated following the collapse of Roman authority in the fifth century. Unmaintained, the reservoir silted up and blocked the drainage system, burying the facility and surrounding buildings under yards of mud.
Trained by the Romans, the local English initially knew how to keep the baths running after their imperial masters returned to Italy. Habits changed; the English didn’t bathe as often as the Romans. Time passed and knowledge faded. Eventually, even if the locals had developed a hankering for a hot-water dunk, no one was left who would have been able to get the system working again. Basically, the English forgot what they knew.
The latest headline-making violent incident in New York City’s declining subway system, the choking death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old unhoused schizophrenic, at the hands of 24-year-old ex-Marine Daniel Penny, has me and other older New Yorkers pining for the New York City Transit Police.
Like the denizens of Bath, New York forgot the Transit Police.
From 1953 to 1995, the nation’s largest mass-transit system had its own police department, separate from the NYPD. By 1994, the force employed 4,500 uniformed and civilian members, making it the sixth-largest of any department in the United States. The 1974 version of “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” showcases the skills of the Transit Police, who were trained how to shut off third-rail power, conduct rescues of passengers trapped between stations and pursue suspects into tunnels, abandoned stations and subterranean emergency exits.
We don’t know exactly what went down before Penny subjected Neely to the 15-minute chokehold that ended his life. As a New Yorker who has ridden the subway for more than 40 years, however, I can attest to the fact that New Yorkers can’t get assistance of any kind when things go sideways on the subway.
You’re trapped in a narrow metal box a hundred feet below the street. Doors to the next cars are locked on most lines, including the one Neely and Penny were riding. There’s no call box in a New York subway car. Cellphones don’t work between stations. There’s no surveillance camera.
And no cops.
Never any cops.
’Twas not always so. The last time the subways were this dangerous and skeevy was in the 1980s: now there are more schizophrenic homeless people, back then there were more muggings. In the aggregate, the effect was the same: disquieting and anxiety-producing. But the Transit Police mitigated riders’ fears.
One or two transit policemen patrolled every train. They were a familiar sight, twirling their nightsticks as they gamboled from one car to the next. I’ll never forget the time a naked man sat next to me; a transit cop nearly walked past us before doing a double-take. “Yo,” the officer said, tapping Mr. Nude on his bare knee with his baton. “Forget something?”
The Transit Police deployed a sizeable number of undercover officers. One night I sat across from a young pregnant woman with a baby in a stroller. The crackle of a police radio emanated from somewhere beneath her clothes. Out came her badge and gun, she ditched her fake baby bump and stroller (the baby was a doll too) and off she went in search of glory and public safety. I’m not big on cops, but how could I fail to be impressed?
Citing redundancies and inefficiencies—the NYPD and Transit Police used different radio systems—then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani abolished the Transit Police and folded them into the NYPD. (His real motivation was consolidating his political power.) A new NYPD Transit Bureau was supposed to replace them; in real life, the police presence vanished from the subway system.
We need more details, but at this writing I agree with the district attorney’s decision to charge Penny with second-degree manslaughter. Neely didn’t touch anyone, including Penny. All Penny had to do was wait a minute, maybe three minutes, for the doors to open at the next station, and leave Neely to his rants. Restraining/choking him for 15 minutes cannot be justified.
At the same time, tragedies are inevitable in a situation where commuters are left unprotected, abandoned to their own judgement on subway cars that more often than not serve as rolling homeless shelters and lunatic asylums for the thousands of people our political class has determined do not deserve care. Neely was a victim. So, too, are the New Yorkers who deserve a safe, reliable trip from A to B for their $2.75 fare.
In an effort to make people feel safe, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has subway conductors announcing at each stop: “If you have any questions, concerns, reports, the NYPD is located at this station.” What a joke. Subway trouble is quick trouble—and it usually occurs on the train, not the station, as seen in the Neely-Penny confrontation. Stations, moreover, are big places, at least two full city blocks long with multiple entrances. Finding a cop is like hunting for a needle in a haystack.
There will always be crime and other problems in an urban subway system. But New York could go a long way toward making riders feel safer by bringing back the old Transit Police, with their officers patrolling each and every train, 24-7. Penny, for example, might not have maintained his chokehold of Neely had he known that his F train would pull into Broadway-Lafayette station and be boarded by a cop a minute later.
We have to unforget.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Death to the Greedheads of Premiumization!
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The Five Boro Bike Tour is a glorious treat for big Apple bicyclists accustomed to dodging car doors, taxis and potholes in search of skimpy unprotected bike lanes blocked by double-parked delivery trucks. Once a year, the humble urban biker is elevated to king of the road.
You set out early one morning from the Financial District for an all-day exploration of some of the city’s most fascinating nooks and crannies. You navigate wide avenues l free of motor vehicles and make your way around Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. You and your fellow cyclists enjoy free reign of some of the biggest bridges and highways, culminating with the final, challenging climb across the Verrazano bridge over New York Harbor to Staten Island. I did it more than 20 years ago and still remember shouting with joy as we coasted under the giant green reflector signs over the FDR Drive, nary a car in sight.
I was planning to do it again this May. Then I found out about the fee.
“Standard registration for adults and youths costs $129, plus processing fees, $27 of which is a tax-deductible charitable donation to Bike New York to fund our free bike education programs,” according to the Tour’s website. (Not that free.) When I did the tour two decades ago the cost was nominal, about $30. Now they’re charging $256 for two people—for a paper tag with a number on it and bottled water along the way? That’s the same as two nights in a decent hotel room, two Amtrak tickets from New York to Washington, two very nice restaurant meals, eight really good books.
$256? That ought to cover a bicycle rickshaw and someone else doing the pedaling.
What really sent me into a blind rage, however, was the tour’s Dickensian caste system: For $400 plus $84 in “processing fees,” or $968 for two people—President Biden’s “junk fees” bill comes to mind–New York’s toniest cyclists can buy “VIP” tickets. VIP status buys you “guaranteed placement in the first start wave,” a “timed climb” across the Verrazano, breakfast and lunch, and some swag. The famished peasants who can only afford $156 cool their heels as they watch the VIPers chow down and speed off in front of them.
There will be a Revolution. It will be violent. As always, the rich will go to their deaths wearing that idiotic wide-eyed “I’m totally surprised” expression. Us? Why are you so angry? What did we do?
May these overprivileged bastards tumble over their handlebars, smash their designer helmets and empty brains on the pavement, and tote their custom, limited-edition Tour-branded Manhattan Portage bags on their tumbrels to the fires of Hell.
The bike tour’s sponsors and organizers appear to have succumbed to what The New York Times reports is a new trend of “premiumization” in the corporate world. “Businesses have long segmented customers, trying to push richer ones into pricier and more profitable purchases: Think of the spacious premium seats on a plane versus the cramped economy-class alternatives. But the trend picked up during the pandemic, and the lurch toward luxury is now spanning a wider array of products and services,” according to the Times.
Consumers may fall for it, but most of us despise premiumization. A 2016 study of “air rage” found that economy passengers were 3.84 times more likely to have an air-rage outburst on planes with first-class sections, and even more likely if they had to board through first class on their way to coach.
One of the best things about biking is that it’s a proletarian pursuit. You can buy an excellent bike new for $300—even less used on eBay. Bikes are inexpensive to maintain. You can wear shorts and a T-shirt. And it’s free transportation! The tour’s gentrification of something as liberating as bicycling is a galling corruption of a small-d democratic space.
Nowadays no product or service is so humble as to be immune from attempts to subject it to hateful first-class/coach class stratification. The Times notes that Krispy Kreme plans to sell “premium specialty doughnuts” during the holidays. What are you going to ask your child to eat, our new expensive doughnuts or our old regular crappy ones? After building consumer loyalty with generic weed, legalized cannabis companies’ next step is to upsell by offering higher CBD and THC content. “WD-40, the firm that makes the lubricant of the same name, has found that customers will pay more for products with enhancements, like a can with a ‘smart straw’ to spray the lubricant in two different ways—in either a precision stream or more of a mist.”
Let the peasants lubricate imprecisely.
Premiumization has failed in amusement parks. After annoyed visitors stopped attending, Disney was forced to roll back obnoxious fees for parking at its parks and reduced the number of “premium days”—i.e., high-demand days to visit, because people find those days convenient—for which it charged extra. “In the nine months through September, attendance at [Six Flags] parks fell by 25% from the year before, spending per guest rose 22% and, in the end, profits fell by nearly 10%.”
AMC Theaters has taken heat for its plan to shunt poorer moviegoers into slum seats with poor sightlines. “The movie theater is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all and this new initiative by @AMCTheatres would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income,” tweeted the actor Elijah Wood.
In a capitalist economy, of course, democracy is an illusion. Prior to AMC’s move the best seat in the house went to whoever lined up first. Many people can’t afford to go to the movies at all. As for the bourgeois who all paid the same price to get in, some could get popcorn and Skittles while others went without. They drove different cars to get there. They went home to residences ranging from penthouses to housing projects. But Americans still value the fiction that everyone is middle class.
Money talks, fairness walks. Premiumization will vanish if and when Americans decide to Just Say No to price-gouging, upselling and stratified consumer castes. As for me, I’ll save a few hundred bucks and conduct my own personal bike tour around NYC for free, at my own convenience—with no up-charge for dodging car doors and potholes.
Until the Revolution, anyway.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
What’s I’d Do as NYC Mayor
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New Yorkers go to the polls June 22nd to choose their next mayor. They’re primaries, but whoever wins the Democratic nomination will almost certainly move into Gracie Mansion.
Media coverage has focused on the fading fortunes of former presidential candidate and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the dearth of progressives in a wide field and the new, confusing ranked-choice voting scheme. (I have a lot of doubts about ranked-choice voting, which I will enumerate in this space at another time.)
A New Yorker by choice most of my life and, unlike Yang, a guy who moved back to the city during the COVID-19 pandemic while others were running for the exurbs, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the next mayor should prioritize and what I would do if I were in charge of the city. Most of my readers don’t live in New York. But most do live in urban areas. Many who live in rural regions work and shop in cities. So New York’s problems are your problems too.
Even more than in other cities, New York’s mayor is not a king. He has, for example, no jurisdiction or control over the five boroughs’ sprawling mass-transit system, which falls under the aegis of the governor. Public schools were only transferred to mayoral control 20 years ago; they were still locked down by order of Governor Andrew Cuomo in response to the pandemic. To get elected you’ll need allies in one of the city’s three loci of power: the police, real estate or Wall Street. If you win, it’s a bully pulpit job.
To lead NYC you have to have charisma, the gift of gab and a strong work ethic—unlike Bill de Blasio. And new solutions for old problems.
Here’s what I’d do:
Homelessness, a perennial problem and perhaps the most glaring failure of capitalism, has exploded over the last year. 80,000 New Yorkers are homeless—1% of the population. It’s shameful. Even if you don’t care about human misery, homelessness affects everyone else. Mentally-ill homeless people contribute to street crime and drive down property values. Let’s get our brothers and sisters off the streets.
While our fellow citizens are sleeping on filthy, freezing cold or blazing hot sidewalks, tens of thousands of apartments and single-family homes sit empty for no good reason. There are between 2000 and 4000 “zombie homes,” mostly single-family houses abandoned by their owners. 27,000 apartment units are being warehoused by landlords holding out for rents that are even higher than the city’s stratospheric current rates. These properties should be seized under eminent domain—don’t worry, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such transfers are constitutional—and transferred to the control of a new city agency dedicated to housing, treating, rehabilitating and training homeless people with the eventual goal of returning as many of them as possible to the workplace. Among the side benefits would be the fact that you need a mailing address in order to apply for government benefits and jobs, which would defray the cost of my rehab programs.
With a paltry 17% occupancy rate for New York commercial office space, it’s a safe bet that millions of square feet of empty office space will be vacant well after everyone has forgotten about COVID. Space that remains empty more than 12 months after the end of coronavirus safety rules should be seized and converted when possible—residential space has to have running water and windows—to housing for the homeless and the poor. Interior former commercial spaces should be allotted to artists and musicians by lottery.
Half of New York apartments are subject to rent stabilization. Rent stabilization should be replaced by rent control so that increases can never exceed the federal inflation rate, and should apply to all rental units.
Let’s add commercial rent control as well. Late-stage gentrification led to the weird phenomenon of “luxury blight” in places like Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and lower Fifth Avenue, where landlords holding out for insanely high-rent increases have been warehousing empty storefronts for years. Lower rents with limits on future increases allow entrepreneurs to take chances, experiment and make neighborhoods and cities interesting and quirky. In New York as in other cities, state legislators will need to approve commercial rent control tied to inflation.
New York has one of the nation’s most racially and economically segregated public school systems. The potential of students of color is hobbled by buildings that look and feel like prisons, outdated books and equipment and burned-out teachers—all due to insufficient funding. Upper-class “nice” white parents finance “their” schools themselves though they and their kids drive themselves crazy hiring fixers to game a byzantine school-application system that begins with pre-K; many couples flee for the suburbs after kids arrive. 52% of white parents fork a median of $44,000 a year for private secondary school, more than many colleges.
Warren Buffett said the easiest way to fix public schools would be to “make private schools illegal and assign every child to a public school by lottery.” He’s right. Ban private schools; assign children to schools by lottery and watch equity reign as it has in countries like Finland and Cuba. Both nations did it decades ago; their students radically outperform students in neighboring countries. The best way to incentivize the city’s wealthiest citizens to support higher taxes for public education is to force them to have skin—their own children—in the game.
I’m out of space, so here’s one final idea: deescalate the NYPD. New York is not a war zone, being a police officer isn’t that dangerous—your life is far more in harm’s way if you’re a roofer, farmer or logger—and citizens have the right to be served by cops who neither act nor look like members of a hostile occupation army.
New York cops should take a cue from one of the 19 countries where the police do not carry guns and rarely use deadly force even against violent suspects, or Japan, where cops carry sidearms but rarely use them. “The first instinct is not to reach for a gun—what most Japanese police will do is to get huge futons and essentially roll up the person who is being violent or drunk into a little burrito and carry them back to the station and calm them down. The response to violence is never violence—it is to de-escalate,” BBC journalist Anthony Berteaux reported in 2017. I’d start with training cops in the technique of “policing by consent”—obtaining compliance from the public by earning respect rather than instilling fear—and, if that fails, I’d take away their guns as well as their bulletproof vests.
Some may ask, since you have so many ideas, Mr. Smarty-pants, why not run yourself? You need millions of dollars to run for mayor and I don’t know how to get it.
Maybe someone will fix that problem.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
In Praise of Bad Weather
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There is joy in the air. That joy is misplaced.
For that joy might kill us.
I set down these words on the 9th of March in Manhattan. Historically, the average temperature on this day of the year is 40°. If the weather forecast for today, March 9, 2021, is correct, and at this writing it looks like it will be, the temperature will hit 61°.
“Today is going to be a beautiful day,” the radio said this morning.
Everyone is happy. People are making plans to eat outside, go running, walking, whatever, everyone in New York who can break away from work or other obligations is determined to enjoy today’s “good weather.”
I feel it too. I have a meeting after I finish writing this. The sun will feel sweet on my face. More people will be smiling; even if I have to surmise that from the twinkle in their eyes above a mask, their pleasure in this good weather will be infectious.
We have got to stop thinking about warm, sunny, hotter-than-usual weather as positive. Weather isn’t climate. But hotter-than-usual weather multiplied out, repeated as it has been for years, reflects the existential threat of climate change. Hotter-than-usual weather repeated over time is killing coral and plants, extinguishing species of animals. It will ultimately kill us, and if not us, our children, and if not them, our grandchildren. I have not yet met my grandchild, but I don’t want my grandchild, or yours, to die before he or she has his or her own grandchildren.
We’ve been greeting “beautiful days,” i.e. hotter-than-usual days, by pulling on tank tops, grabbing picnic baskets and heading to the park. This is understandable. This is insane.
Celebrating a hotter-than-usual day makes as much sense as a Frenchman jumping for joy at the sight of invading German troops. Sparkling blue, cloudless skies are harbingers of doom. The soft scent of your own sweat under a gentle sun in mid-winter is a death sentence handed down by a judge whose rulings cannot be appealed. When you hear that it’s going to be 61° in Manhattan in March, you should be scared to death.
There are, if you pay attention, signs that everything is wrong. Trees whose first buds appeared in late April now pop out in February, fresh leaves frozen off as the weather turns cold again, though not as cold nor for as long as it should. Asthmatics, those human canaries, suffer from “spring” allergies all “winter” long. There are so few birds.
The proper response to one too many hotter-than-usual days in mid-winter — for that matter, it is also an appropriate way to greet a series of hotter-than-usual days in summer — is fear. We are on the way out. We are killing ourselves. This is seriously messed up.
Anger follows fear. We should hate the ecocidal maniacs who are too greedy and stupid to see that their relentless quest for short-term corporate profits is murdering us. We should despise the politicians who sell us out to these psychos. We should be ashamed of ourselves for tolerating both sets of crazies.
Unless we are idiots, action should come next, and damned soon. The truly great thing about a 61° day in New York City in March (in March!) is that it makes it more enticing for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers together in public spaces to protest and demand sanity from their overlords. There are no winter coats or cold-stiffened bones to stop demonstrators from hurling teargas canisters back at the cops.
Saving ourselves must begin with a mental shift.
There is, as an older gentleman who drove me in his taxi told me a couple of years ago, no good weather or bad weather. There is only weather. To a farmer, rain is often welcome. To which I would add, given the context of global warming, there is only appropriate weather — appropriate to its time and place and based on the assumption, which needs to become true if we want to live, that the human race is no longer affecting that weather.
An 80° day at the South Pole might be pleasant for sunbathing scientists. But it would be radically inappropriate regardless of the time of year. A 20° day in Bali might be fun for Indonesians who’ve never been in a snowball fight. But it would be wildly wrong, allowing for normal variations of high and low.
I come to you in praise of “bad” weather. On the 9th of March, New Yorkers ought to be happy to see sleet. They should smile at their neighbors as they tiptoe through filthy slush puddles pooled at the street corners. Climate change has turned the world topsy-turvy; in a topsy-turvy world, good weather is bad and bad weather is good.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
#StopWhatever
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The city of New York has paid $5.9 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Eric Garner, the unarmed black man who was choked to death by New York police on Staten Island and whose dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became an iconic symbol of police brutality. But no cops have been charged and the city hasn’t formally accepted responsibility. Isn’t it absurd to pay for a death for which you refuse to acknowledge responsibility?
A Fast-Track Plan for New York
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Originally published by The New York Observer:
Throughout New York’s history, change has been a constant feature of the city’s transportation infrastructure. Well, it used to be.
Aside from the long-delayed Second Avenue subway, civil engineers haven’t had much work to do in the past five decades. A time traveler from 1961 would find the city’s traffic patterns, street grid, highways, subway lines, river crossings and airports basically the same.
New York’s second-newest major bridge, the Throgs Neck, opened nine days before JFK delivered his “ask not what your country” inaugural address. The Verrazano came in 1964. Then that was it—unless you count the link between Rikers Island and Queens in 1966. Aside from a few extensions on the outer borders of Queens and the minor 63rd Street tunnel, the subway looks much the way it did during World War II. For many New Yorkers, getting to LaGuardia still requires a cab, despite the half-assed AirTrain. Ditto for JFK.
The Center for an Urban Future recently concluded that too much of our “essential infrastructure remains stuck in the 20th century,” posing a barrier “for a city positioning itself to compete with other global cities.”
There is little reason to believe things will improve. Despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recently announced plan to add some ferry routes launching in 2017, his administration has reduced infrastructure spending from budgets under Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who devoted most of that money to new parks and schools.
New stuff? As the parking sign says, don’t even think about it.
But that’s a choice.
New York could fund big-ticket transportation projects through the imposition of a modest stock transaction tax on the $45 billion traded daily on the NYSE. Some liberal Democrats are floating a 3 basis point (.03 cent) tax on trades. That’s not enough. From 1914 to 1966—while America won two world wars and became the world’s dominant superpower—it was 10 basis points. Precedents include France, which has a 20 basis point tax and Taiwan (10-30 basis points).
A securities tax would generate an estimated $10 billion annually. Enough to pay for a slew of ambitious, and needed, projects over the next decade or two.
Let’s start using this money to expand subways.
The long-awaited extension of the 7 subway may open as early as this month. Nice start, but the old idea of running the 7 out to the Meadowlands to alleviate Lincoln Tunnel traffic and provide an alternative to Penn Station for boarding New Jersey Transit, is just as overdue.
Even after the projected 2019—yeah, right—opening of the Second Avenue line, Lower East Side residents will remain woefully underserved by subways. The MTA should add a train along the Harlem River waterfront to connect Avenue D and East End Avenue to the rest of Manhattan.
A major shortcoming of New York’s current subway configuration is its failure to adapt aspects of the efficient spiderweb or grid patterns urban planners favor in more modern systems like Paris, London, Seoul and Tokyo.
Any transit expert would look at a NYC subway map and ask with puzzlement: Why isn’t there a line running around the city’s outer perimeter along the Westchester and Nassau County borders? To get from the Jamaica section of Queens and to Flatbush, Brooklyn, you have to head halfway to Manhattan to switch subways, or endure long rides on local city buses. That’s stupid.
Huge swaths of Southern Queens, currently off the grid, should be connected via a new line arcing west-to-east through the Bronx, then north-south through Queens and Brooklyn, parallel to and east of the G.
No borough is more subwayless than the city’s redheaded stepchild, Staten Island. But it doesn’t have to be that way. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been blocking the century-old dream of running a subway line under New York Harbor from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, but half the idea would still be an improvement. Let’s revive the Staten Island-Saint George tunnel between Brooklyn, which the city abandoned in the early 1920s.
In most major metropolises, rail systems connect directly from the city-center to the terminals. Not here, mostly due to NIMBYism and highway-obsessed Robert Moses. Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently floated a proposal to build an elevated AirTrain to link LaGuardia to the subway system, but transportation blogger Ben Kabak would better solve the airport access problem by extending the N along the Grand Central Parkway.
Anyone who drives in New York knows we need to add bridges and tunnels. Crossing the Hudson River during rush hour, as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall back in the day, could become slightly less hellish by executing one or more of the numerous forgotten plans for bridges at 23rd, 57th, 70th and 125th Streets. I’d go with 70th Street, more or less splitting the distance between the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge; either bridge or tunnel would be fine.
Conventional wisdom among liberal transportation types dictates that highway construction begets increased traffic: Build them and they will come. I don’t buy it. Even old-timers who curse Robert Moses for destroying the Bronx recall with a shudder the horror of sitting for hours on Broadway in upper Manhattan, waiting to get to the Bronx as stuck cars overheated, making congestion worse.
Driving from Long Island to Western Brooklyn, and/or on to New Jersey via Staten Island, requires extremely circuitous routes: Via the congested LIE and BQE, or skirting around the bulbous outline of Brooklyn. The obvious solution is to extend the Jackie Robinson Parkway, which currently begins at the Grand Central and Van Wyck Parkways in Kew Gardens. Nowadays, it dumps that highway traffic at Jamaica Avenue in East New York (there used to be a major train station there). We should extend the Jackie Robinson west toward the BQE.
Last but not least, it’s time to replicate the success of forward-looking cities like Dallas, Seattle and Portland, Ore., by bringing back streetcars. They’re relatively cheap. They’re cute. When their tracks run in dedicated, carless lanes, they’re faster than automobiles. There are smart plans for new streetcar lines along the waterfront in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, 42nd Street in Manhattan and Astoria in Queens.
We have work to do. Let’s get New York moving again.
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Ted Rall is the author of the forthcoming book Snowden by Ted Rall
But the President is a Black Man
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A New York City grand jury decided not to indict a NYPD officer despite videotape that clearly shows Eric Garner, an African-American father of six about to be arrested for selling untaxed loose cigarettes, being strangled to death by the cops. Takeaway: symbolic changes like an African-American president won’t change the system itself.
