I just have to understand where that word came from, and then we can move on to New York and it’s new deal..
In this article, I feel that Wallace is saying exactly what the class was saying in the past couple of weeks; New York is much too dependent on investment and the “money market.” We have freely given away and neglected any other means of making money, such as manufacturing and production, and it has cost us severely. Wallace points out that this market is far more unstable than any other, suggesting that that the problem isn’t that we rely on only one source of business, but rather we rely on the wrong one. I’m not sure I agree. I realize the city is small and there isn’t room for a huge manufacturing plant (although, again, debatable) but we should balance out economy on many things, rather than, using Wallace’s analogy, on one leg.
I like the idea of having New York provide the small products that help fuel the larger companies, as he suggests on pg. 215. It would make a great deal of sense to make even more money off the companies that are already using our space and our consumers. The little things that are seemingly insignificant but are vital to a company, such as mannequins to a department store as he suggests, would give the city a more stable “income,” not to mention create jobs that had been lost. Wallace’s other idea, reestablishing taxes that had been cut when the economy was doing well, is not so bad of an idea. I know we all hate hearing about taxes being raised (and as a minimum wage earner, I am the first to object to them), but the tax changes he is proposing seem quite reasonable. To tax private companies for public property makes a lot of sense, since the space would be used for things is was not intended for. Making the tolls on bridges fluctuate by the hour would be great too, it might seriously reduce the traffic of rush hour and save people a lot of money, whilst still guaranteeing the government its share.
Let me just jump to Bloomberg for a second. The beginning of Chapter 5, “The Bloomberg Way: the mayor as CEO, the city as a corporation, valued businesses as clients, citizens as customers, and the city itself as a product,” that is the problem I have with Bloomberg. I’m not quite blaming him, for it could be that this was a global trend, but he holds a contribution as the first CEO mayor. He has turned the city into something to be sold as explicitly stated and described by Brash in chapter 4. Everything is about turning profit and getting the customer to pay top dollar, whether through honesty or by means of swindling. We have gotten to the point where we even by and sell people. It just takes away from our humanity. The business world is vicious, and you must become vicious in order to fit and make something. It may be because of American capitalist ideals, but I feel like the city is on a runaway train, delving deeper into the depths of consumerism and business corruption. I can’t help but be reminded of the principles of the robber barons of the early 20th century: they acted purely for profit; can we be moving in the same direction?
