Let’s face it: The new Freedom Tower, designed by a series of mishaps, committees, politicans, and egoist architects is a superbad idea. Today, The New York Times today shows some examples under the banner headline Redesign Puts Freedom Tower on a Fortified Base. The base itself looks shimmery and light but the reality of it is that it’s made to withstand heavy duty terrorist activities.
It’s not necessary to make the case this is a collosal waste of money. There are still no takers for office space in this tower and I can’t think of one person who lives in New York who would eagerly go to work every day in this Freedom Tower. It’s too big a target, too rarified a structure and too high in the sky for any sane person’s self-interests.
The best critique I’ve read of the plans for the area is by Ron Rosenbaum in his piece called Ground Zero Hype: Is Giant Skyscraper A Freedom Folly? in the Observer.
I do understand the general desire of polticians and heros to “buck” the terrorists and stand up to their depravity by building something bigger and better than the Twin Towers. I also understand the interests of a few to make a clear pronunciation that the Freedom Tower is a sign of our willingness to transcend, to embrace “life,” and to construct anew. But what better way of signalling this is there than to use the entire area as a public arena – a museum, a park, a memorial, a preserve, a place of rest and repose and a symbol of our belief in living?

Totally could be wrong on this one, but I have a small prediction to make, partly in light of the last post on Deckchairs a few days ago:
“In the next year or three, big business will begin to petition the administration for long-range and transformative heathcare changes that will not be called National Health Care but will feel like it when they’re provided to citizens.”
Here’s the logic: Companies can no longer afford to provide good health care for their employees. It will soon be nearly impossible for even companies like GM to continue lining the pockets of the insurance industry. They recognize that all other countries to the North and South and to the East and West provide healthcare and that they can no longer compete by providing what is essentially two salaries to every American employee. They will argue for a nationalized plan that will ration health care (and probably pretty poor care at that) to the working and middle class and will allow them to cut down dramatically on their insurance premiums.
I’m assuming that there will be an industrial consortium or PAC that will get this done and that the name of the plan will be something Orwellian like “Health for America” or “Heart America.”
I’m also assuming that the average worker will be paying for part of the plan through increased taxes.
I’m also assuming that the new plan will offer less overall insurance to Americans but it will guarantee that employed (not self-employed, those on Medicare or Medicaid, illegals, or generally just plain poor) citizens will have a modicum of healthcare during their lifetimes. I also imagine that the plan would go along with a national ID system to make sure that citizens are in the “system” and are not abusing it; this national ID system (used in many other countries as well) with be a persuasive component of the new laws.
The funds will probably have to come out of additional tax revenue from businesses, but the lionshare of the burden will be on smaller companies because they will be perceived as getting the biggest “break.”
All of the very smart, able, and excellent activist health and labor organizations like Working Today will need to quickly provide education to the media about these initiatives and weigh out the public versus private benefits. Big business, in hand with the Administration seeking to make a dent in its domestic policies before 2008, will be depicted as the saviors of the American economy and the American workingman.

I’m not trying to be cute (well, that might be hard at this point) but the number of stories in The New York Times about housing, market, economic, and other types of bubbles is starting to reach grand or grandiose proportions. I’ve long thought that residential housing was a big ol’ bubble just waiting to burst and still think it is in most of the metropolitan areas of the country but it does seem that the hype of bubble myth-making will have its own bubble.
Here are just a few pieces in The Times lately. Each on is more persuasive than the other. Our new deficits, now owned and managed by the Chinese, coupled with massively over-financed housing, tied with over-leveraged families with credit debt and no savings, wrapped around an economy based on a war-time footing rather than an investment-side caravan, strapped together with shaky free-trade markets and a speculative oil and gas system does indeed seem like disaster waiting to happen. The house of cards has to fall at some point.
But I also wonder out loud whether the bubbles that all these journalists are prognosticating are actually missing a larger piece of the puzzle that we’re not thinking about. I don’t know what that puzzle piece is – perhaps it’s AIDS or avian flu or terror or just some new technology – but my guess is that something else will make the cards fall and not the house itself. In other words, it will take some outside force to push the the thing over; cards themselves have no desire to change their position in the fine hierarchy of various advantageous positions.
The bubble stories are coming fast and furious but they, too, probably represent a bubble that can’t see the next prick on the horizon.

My friend V.S. sent to me a few months ago the bone-chilling BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. This link will take you to a small version and a BitTorrent file of the documentary, which is in three parts.
I’ve only seen two so far, but the documentary brilliantly makes the case that the neo-cons and the sleazy men of Al Qaeda formed out of the political liberation and economic reconditioning of the 1950s in the U.S. Two male intellectuals, Sayyed Qutb and Leo Strauss, end up changing the face of the planet because of their overwhelming desire to form minds out of ideas and provide fantastic logic to their populations.
See it. While it’s conspiratorial edge is sharp, it will help explain the illegitimacy of Clinton’s supposed downfall, the rise of anti-Soviet policy which was based on America’s own propaganda, the political use of terrorism to control minds and hearts, and the odd juxtaposition of Jewish intellectuals sucked into the desires of evangelical Christians.
Big BTW: What ever happened to the terrorism alerts that Homeland Security used to issue regularly in 2004, before the election? Did we all forget? Did the media forget to remind us that there have been (I believe) no new alerts since November 2?

Last night I tuned into The West Wing, a fictional tele-communication that, for the past few (Republican) years, shows what it might be like if a smart, hard-nosed Democrat ran the Oval Office and the Oval Nation. It’s a pretty enjoyable show and it has its flaws but overall, it’s a wonderful fantasy.
Others have written about The West Wing, but I keep thinking that the Hollywood television industry has been out to lunch since 2000. In the show last night, which was the season finale, it depicted the inimitable Jimmy Smits (as Matthew Santos) announcing his candidacy and winning the Democratic nomination. I was excited to watch him pronounce, at the convention, his allegiance to democracy with a small “d,” to Democrats with a large “D,” and to veracity, leadership, and popular honor. It was a slightly impressive little speech he gave, better than any Kerry had given in retrospect, perhaps, and it made me want to vote.
The U.S. one day will look to a candidate like Santos, but it’s a long ways away right now. Santos is too good-hearted, too clean, too minority, too composed, too smart, too strong, and too good-looking for 2005 or 2006. He is the other-Bush, the one who probably should be in office and who would be in office of Hollywood writers had their say.
For me, the questions mount: Is this just wishful thinking on the part of Hollywood? Is this entertainment a fantasy based on our collective real desires? Is The West Wing literally out on a wing or does it reflect a secondary reality that liberals inhabit on their better days? Will there one day be a minority candidate? Most importantly, when does the new season begin?

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why our great and powerful Government has lately turned to the insane, inane and profane for its legislative activities. Today, a Sunday, the Senate passed legislation that will keep a poor, completely damaged woman on life support. This is what Republicans mean by pro-life? A few days earlier, our vaunted Government found it very important to bring some of baseball’s most celebrated athletes to a select House committee to learn about steroid use among this self-selected group of wealthy individuals. And a few days before that the President decided to slap a bunch of multi-lateralists in the face with his selection of Paul Wolfowitz for leader of the World Bank and John Bolton to “help” the United Nations.
It’s as if our Government has decided to redefine the words “millions” and “billions” as being applicable to money and not to populations.

I was listening to the radio today and there was a news segment on a Michigan insurance company that is testing workers for smoking. If they are found to be positive as smokers, they would be asked to leave the company. Four employees left, all presumably committed smokers.
On the segment, a question arose about the First Amendment. Granted speech and smoking are not the same; however, the assumption is that legal behaviors are legal in the workplace. We’re taught in school and on television and in the movies that you have a right to say and do whatever you want so long as it doesn’t harm others in the process. Of course, there are many shades of gray around the First Amendment and these shades of gray dutifully employ many lawyers and nonprofits. One shade of gray, of course, is whether overweight people, those who skydive, and motorcylists should also be held up to rigorous employment standards.
But what isn’t so gray is that employers don’t have to give a damn about your freedoms. One of the commentators on the radio show said explicitly, and I quote, “You have no right to freedom of speech where your employer is concerned. The First Amendment only concerns your rights that apply to the Government.” I did not know this. The commentator mentioned that last year, a woman in Alabama was fired for driving to work with a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker.
I feel dumb, confused and bamboozled by my own ignorance. I’m less “mad” at the Government than at the educational system that tells us our freedoms are sacrosanct. Where did the educational system go wrong in telling us that we had the freedom to speak our minds? How did employers become immune to First Amendment law? Where does the “ownership society” take us if it is our employers that own us?

Here are a few random things I’ve noticed while riding the subway almost all morning, going to and fro from client to client and back again:

• There seems to be an increase in the number of designers relying upon outlined fonts to make their words display better. Perhaps the most seen and diagnosed version is used in the new and now old The Life Aquatic.
• I don’t remember a State of the Union address that has received as much attention as the one tonight to be given by our President George W. Bush. This must due, in part, to the immense following Mr. Bush has from both the right and the left. It goes unreported but there will be probably just as many red state beer-drinkers tonight watching Mr. Bush as there will be wine-swilling blue staters. I hand it to the President for giving the people what they want — even the 49% percent who didn’t want him.
• For a number of reasons, I’ve had to deal with some state and city government bureaucracies lately and to a tee, all of the people I’ve been in touch with (either on the phone or in person) have been pretty nice, straightforward and easy to deal with. As much as we all bash our government custodians of civil society, I’ve been impressed with the efficiency and carefulness of their work.
• There was a small news item in today’s newspaper about the largest Canadian t-shirt maker, Gildan Activewear, Inc. shutting down their plants in Canada and will move some of its operations to the United States. This may be one of the first examples of offshoring Canadian work to lower paid Americans.

Interesting. Two days ago I posted a comment noting that I was surprised that the U.S. Government has not been policing the Public Broadcasting Service and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I knew it was only a matter of time.
Today, the Education Secretary has criticized a kids show for depicting lesbians. The show, which I’ve seen many times, is called “Postcards from Buster” and it features the wiley Arthur character Buster filming people, including religious Jews and country farmers, and their lifestyles, habits, and families. Apparently, PBS has already pulled the plug on the show’s episode but a station in Boston will air it. Pathetic.

I’m here listening to the United States Senate lob nice, gentle questions to Condeleeza Rice, the person who could not anticipate any terrorist acts against the country despite her access to every bit of intelligence the country held. It’s amazing to me that Rice is treated so kindly and thoughtfully and that the Democratic Senators perceive themselves as having so little “political capital.”
What’s the point? The point is that today, while these hearings are going on, Airbus has released the massive and immensely fascinating Airbus A380 family of planes. A collaboration among almost every major European country, the new airplane is supremely fuel efficient, can carry 555 passengers, and will be available for service in 2006. The airplane has two decks and (in typical European fashion) three classes. The development and production of this airplane is an indication of Europe’s new economic, technological, and monetary strength and stands in sharp contrast to the more-of-the-same coming out of our Washington, D.C.
Interestingly, one of the U.S. Senators today mentioned a new book by a journalist named T. R. Reid called The United States Of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. I finished this book yesterday and it’s an absolutey must read for anyone concerned about the future of these United States.
Reid, a Washington Post writer, has written a book that demonstrates how Europe has quietly constructed a powerful new United States that is quickly becoming more economically instrumental in the world while maintaining its high quality of living and social security. The twenty-five nations that banded together to form the European Union have spent their entire “political capital” to ensure that their collective nationality can not only become an effective economic force but maintain its high standards for health, human rights, and transportation. Reid is careful to point out that the extraordinary amount of money used to support the European welfare state comes in part from the subsidies of the U.S. over the past 50 years in the form of military and other assistance. But Reid’s overall point is that the new U.S.E. has created a political, cultural, and social powerhouse despite its darkly divided historical record — and it’s done so with very little recognition on the part of most Americans of prominence.