Michael Tomasky's case against New York City

[BurtWorm]

As site of the next Democratic Convention. I'm a New Yorker, but I'm with Michael:


http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12368

But what I really want to make here is the case against New York.

I lived there nearly 20 years. I still love some things about it, and yes, it's special. But it's a lot less special than it used to be. Whenever I go back, the thing that strikes me over and over and over again is how relentlessly materialistic it has become, and how utterly without shame it is about celebrating its materialism. People think of the 1980s as the decade of rampant consumption and greed; if you ask me, the New York of the 1980s doesn't hold a stick to today's New York in this department.

The recent spate of attention about those notorious Wall Street bonuses involved a lot of professed collective shock. But only those who haven't been paying attention to New York could possibly have been surprised. What's true on Wall Street is also true on a scale of more concern to the rest of us. The $23 plate of pasta, once limited to two or three ZIP codes, is now de rigueur all over town, as is the $370 hotel room (for a shoebox) and the $180 theater ticket, for an evening's "entertainment" that's virtually guaranteed to be slushy and mediocre. Howard Dean might well ask himself if he wants to foist those hefty tariffs upon the schoolteachers and municipal employees and pipefitters' union factotums who tend to populate Democratic conventions.

We're living in an age in which the overclass, with the help of politicians it has duly bought and paid for, has systematically assaulted the middle and working classes. If the Democratic Party should stand for anything, it should stand for the people who've faced the assault. I'm sorry to say that New York, Democratic as it is, also symbolizes like no other city in America the triumph of overclass values.

Mr. Chairman, go West. It's the easiest decision of your tenure.

[ThomCat]

1. I agree too.

I don't want the convention here. I live here too and I see what he's saying.

Besides, having the democratic convention here would reward NYC after what this city did during the last republicon convention. This city hasn't owned up to the civil rights abuses, the rounding up of crowds of innocent people for no reason, keeping people in a makeshift holding center in a toxic warehouse rented from a republican crony, etc.

Mayor Bloomberg and the police chief are no more Democratic than my last fart. I don't want to do anything to polish their reputations.