Slow Motion 9/11 Sequel in New York and America

While fortunately not as grisly and dramatic as the World Trade Center 9/11 disaster a slow motion 9/11 sequel is slowly making its’ way across New York and America.

At the “a regular antidote to the mainstream media” web site of Tom Dispatch a chilling article named “A Second 9/11 in Slow Motion” by Tom Engelhardt outlines the fallout from the economic crisis that started on Wall Street but that now engulfs much of New York City, America, and the world.

Here is a small portion of the must read article.

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A block from my apartment, on a still largely mom-and-pop, relatively low-slung stretch of Broadway, two spanking new apartment towers rose just as the good times were ending for New York. As I pass the tower on the west side of Broadway each morning, one of its massive ground-floor windows displays the same eternal message in white letters against a bright red background: “Locate yourself at the center of the fastest expanding portion of the affluent Upper West Side.”

Successive windows assure any potential renter that this retail space (10,586 square feet available! 110 feet of frontage! 30 foot ceilings! Multiple configurations possible!) is conveniently located only “steps from the 96th Street subway station, servicing 11 million riders annually.”

Here’s the catch, though: That building was completed as 2007 ended and yet, were you to peer through a window into the gloom beyond, you would make out only a cavernous space of concrete, pillars, and pipes. All those “square feet” and not the slightest evidence that any business is moving in any time soon. Across Broadway, the same thing is true of the other tower.

That once hopeful paean to an “expanding” and “affluent” neighborhood now seems like a notice from a lost era. Those signs, already oddly forlorn only months after our world began its full-scale economic meltdown, now seem like messages in a bottle floating in from BC: Before the Collapse.

And it’s not just new buildings having problems either, judging by the increasing number of metal grills and shutters over storefronts in mid-day, all that brown butcher paper covering the insides of windows, or those omnipresent “for rent” and “for lease” signs hawking “retail space” with the names, phone numbers, and websites of real estate agents.
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Go to Tom Dispatch to read the balance of this insightful and informative article.

The Long Crisis in New York City and America may be a slow mover but it is already shaping the way we live and our expectations for the future. Do not believe those who cheerily talk about a quick recovery. This is not a run of the mill recession. It is a depression and the government’s insistence on trying to modify the natural “destructive creation” forces of capitalism are going to make matters worse.

The spending of trillions of dollars in bailout funds that we do not have (except by borrowing them or creating them on a computer monitor) may provide modest short term relief but will likely cause the collapse of the dollar and will mire the US in economic quicksand that will be extremely difficult to escape from. In the end it will be the United States that will need a bailout but who will be there to help us?

The United States is moving down the same road traveled by the Japanese starting in 1989. AS the Japanese economy is still in depression that is not an encouraging development. Over the next few years the long crisis will transform America as it is now transforming the Upper West Side of New York. Drastic unpleasant change, aided and abated by our own government, is on the way whether we like it or not.