We're In The Money

Photo by Yehudit Mam

Actually, no. We are not in the money. Like almost everyone we talk to these days, we are nowhere near the money. But the good news is that we are working a freelance gig in the Financial District. We are among the money!
A lot of people around here hate working in the Financial District. Well, I am loving it. It is funky!
I am working at a building on Broad Street, almost across from the NY Stock Exchange. Broad Street used to be a beautiful curved, wide street; that is, before the terrorists made everything around here into a crappy barricade. Still, it has a je ne sais quoi that transports me to the olden days. I can imagine the horse carriages and the cobblestoned bustle of old New York as it was learning to make money. There is a completely preposterous Hermés store amid the police checkpoints and the canine squad and the bad food joints like Au Bon Pain, Cosi and Pret a A Manger. And a big Tiffany's around the corner. Maybe, every day, when they finish robbing us blind, the wheelers and dealers go downstairs and get their honeys a diamond ring or themselves a silk tie. I don't see no one else raiding the shelves at Hermés.
I love this street with reams of tourists taking pictures of the stock exchange and the statue of George Washington across it. Not far from here is the Customs House where Herman Melville toiled, perhaps not knowing that soon thousands of embittered Bartlebys would populate this teeming neighborhood.
I had lunch with my friend Ildy at Fraunces Tavern, which is ancient, and has just reopened after being flooded by Sandy. It stinks of mold and the food is bad, but it hails from the 18th century. The narrow streets with archaic names like Stone and New and Ann are peppered with old landmark buildings among the steel behemoths. On New Street, there is a crummy barber shop where they also buy gold. In contrast to every other neighborhood in this city that has been prettified, gentrified and generified, here it is still ugly, which is wonderful.
And it is so crowded!  It's where the robber barons and the plebes meet. There are ridiculous fancy restaurants for the Masters of the Universe that seem to offer exclusively carnivore menus in very masculine decors, as befits the alpha males working above them. For the rest of us drones there is a lot of shitty food to be had, with nary a place to sit down, in the guise of endless Subway chains, horrible delis, nefarious Chinese dumps, revolting pizza places etc. However, I have been able to locate some decent food. Sophie's Cuban, a franchise of dependably greasy and yummy Cuban food is on forlorn New Street and it's cheap and plentiful. Today, I had a spectacular pho at Nicky's Vietnamese Sandwiches on Nassau St. Yesterday, I had a very decent Vietnamese sandwich at Baoguette. Tomorow I may try the Korean Taco place, which doesn't even have chairs. None of these joints goes to the trouble of decorating. They all look like dumps. Many of the fast food joints are tiny enough that drones are discouraged to eat out. You see armies of them brown bagging their lunches to their desks, like modern slaves. Like those men who manned the oars at the crack of whips on Viking ships.
Everything reminds you here of the haves and the have nots and nowhere in NY are they in closer proximity to each other. I just love how horrible it is.
If you walk north from the NYSE, you hit Nassau street, which is New York's version of every funky, graceless street that exists in every big city in the planet. Narrow, dirty, crammed with ugly, cheap clothes stores and fast food places.
The Bank of New York building on Broadway has a spectacular art deco mosaic lobby. It is breathtaking. The neoclassical building of the Chamber of Commerce looks like a beautiful, forgotten cake, dwarfed by ugly giants.
On top of it all, this area was pretty screwed by hurricane Sandy, so many businesses are closed, and there are many noisy trucks still draining water from basements. There is little sunshine in this narrow heart of New York. I am afraid my love affair with this part of town may not last long.

I Ain't No Revolutionary

...and usually I excuse myself from protests. I have zero patience with flower children, people who do not understand the concept of being on message, and people who take the opportunity to act out their authority issues. However, I gotta say, Saturday night's crowd at Times Square in support of Occupy Wall Street was much better than that. There were people of all ages, neighborhoods, incomes.
It felt like a party until the NYPD arrived to squash the fun out of it.
Their crowd control methods, like barricading people into separate pens, so as to impede the concentration to be unified in one large mass, is really frustrating, and since Americans are the best behaved crowds in the world, and New Yorkers so far the paragon of a smart crowd, the police's shtick is redundant, unnecessary and particularly offensive when the crowd exhibits stellar behavior. 
The crowd was demonstrating happily and peacefully until a completely over the top show of macho force arrived in the shape of police in motorcycles, followed by officers brandishing the infamous orange netting, mounted police and even riot police. This was an overreaction, given the fact that the crowd was as chill as it is humanly possible to be as a crowd. I was right at the barricade in front of a line of police officers. Most of them were cool and restrained. One asshole policeman, a senior guy, pushed a protester quite violently for no apparent reason and everybody started screaming at him.

Absolutely everybody had some sort of camera, which made the histrionic and absurd police charade of videotaping the crowd, this pantomime of intimidation, seem even more ridiculous. I thought, if they videotape me, I'll blow them a kiss. The police pantomime is pure pageantry: at one point the officers deployed the white plastic handcuffs, in a sort of silent threat to the crowd. But every time I turned back to look at the crowd behind me, all I saw were the kind of people, like me, who could not get arrested if their life depended on it. Nobody was doing anything to provoke any sort of police response, except for a drunk, lice-infested Belgian hooliganette I kept wishing the police would arrest, beat the crap out of and send to some CIA prison abroad for more of the same.

What's with the police videotaping the protesters and the forbidding of megaphones or amplification? This last one has spawned that chanting method where the crowd repeats what someone says in lieu of amplification, that everyone but me seems to be enamored of. I find it corny and too self-ingratiating, even if it is effective. I guess I just really hate crowds. Luckily, I was standing on the west side of the plaza, where there was more space and we didn't feel so penned in. But the people across us who wanted to join us, had to deal with horses and police pushing the barricades and quite a bit of unpleasantness. If the police would allow the crowd to spill over Times Square instead of forcing it on the sidewalks, there would have been no tension. After about 15 minutes of the mood souring very fast, somehow the tension subsided. I assume the police wisely decided to push back their ball breaking tactics. I tell you, had this happened in a more hot blooded, less orderly country, there would have been severe abuses on both sides. Americans are way too well behaved, and the police, assholes that they are, could actually be much worse. I read that in Rome, where there were violent riots, there were 20 arrests. In NYC yesterday, between Times Square and Washington Square Park, where there was no real violence whatsoever, according to the New York Times, "at least 88 people were arrested". A bit too much, the NYPD, creating drama where there's no need for it.
It was very cool to see how many people showed up to support the OWS movement and the ideas behind it. And it was particularly cool that it happened in Times Square, a much more dramatically symbolic place than puny Zuccotti Park. Even though I understand the symbolism of camping out at Zuccotti Park, that place is too small and too insignificant, even if it is across the street from Wall Street. There is something about the camping that may quickly create public opinion fatigue, but if the movement can somehow continue to bring the support of a lot more people, as it did on Saturday, willing to concentrate in different significant public spaces; for instance, Battery Park, across the river from the Statue of Liberty; Central Park, where it is possible to bring together a lot of people, and in front of the White House in Washington, it may grow and resonate more. I'm not advocating that people go camp on Times Square, but that space was truly powerful, it was spectacular and dramatic, for the visual ironies were rich: below was a sea of flesh and blood protesters, and above them all the blazing neon logos of the American corporations who effectively rule this country.
In the end, protests are for nothing if there is no effective public pressure to really effect concrete change. The grievances of OWS are pretty clear: pursue accountability for those responsible for the financial debacle, bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, tax the rich more fairly, abolish the corporations are people law, reform campaign finance laws. All of these are rational and doable. There should be at least a third party or independent candidate, the American people should fire every sitting member of Congress regardless of party affiliation, and this popular discontent should leave the realm of the quaint sloganeering and somehow coalesce into concrete results in realpolitik. If you know how to do that, you may want to be the leader of this movement.

Who do you hate more? Insurance or credit card companies?

It's a tough choice. I have always been a model debtor; meaning, I have no debt, pay all my balances in full, have a stellar credit report, do not live beyond my means and don't buy shit I can't afford. For this reason apparently, my friendly bank has decided to punish me by adding usurious foreign transaction fees for every instance in which I paid with my credit card while I was in Europe. This without my prior knowledge and for the first time ever.
That is, a bunch of American losers default on their payments and now the bank thinks its going to make those bucks back from responsible customers like me. They can kiss my ass, the motherfuckers. I already sent them a letter telling them I refuse to pay those charges, which amount to around $35.00 (and only because I decided to use as much cash as I could to avoid huge statements).
My loved ones think I am on a quixotic crusade that will only crush me in the end and destroy my credit rating, but I don't care. This Commerce Bank, which has an image of friendliness and convenience, cannot start playing rough with the likes of me. I'm not paying the fees, and I'm canceling the card and let them throw me in gaol, for all I care. Wasn't Obama going to pass a law curtailing the abuses of these leeches? There needs to be a massive popular backlash against these people.
As for insurance companies, that fucking hole of disaster called the Freelancer's Union, to which I pay around 400 bucks a month to make sure I'm not left out on the street if I ever get sick, (thanks to the majority of morons in this country who insist that national healthcare for all is communism), on top of charging 50 dollars a copay, it now turns out that it also requires a co-insurance, so I have to pay almost 80 bucks on top of everything. What the fuck is the point of insurance then? I wonder: if you are healthy, it's probably cheaper to pay for a private doctor in full, and not be hemorraghing almost 5000 bucks a year plus copays and coinsurances and cobullshit FOR NOTHING.
I'm telling you, we are being manhandled and abused by crooks and it nothing but our own fault for letting it happen.