This guy Michael Yon is doing some amazing war reporting in Iraq. If bloggers could get the Pulitzer Prize (and why not?) he probably deserves a nomination. Nothing I've seen produced by the corporate media about Iraq the last two years measures up to this blogging that Yon is doing, entirely on his own. It is detailed, close-the-the-ground and almost cinematic. Whereas a lot of the stuff I see on TV or read in the paper feels propagandistic, Yon's stuff doesn't come across that way despite the fact that he is very clearly supportive of the military and highly ideological. He invariably calls the people that U.S. troops are shooting at "terrorists." You get the sense that this is how the soldiers he is with see it as well. There is a genuine, subjective honesty to Yon's reporting. You're seeing the conflict through the troops' eyes. It probably helps that Yon was once himself a Green Beret.

In this latest dispatch, Yon isn't just taking notes and snapping photos. When the commander he has been following gets shot and no one steps up to help him, Yon drops his camera, picks up a rifle, and gets into combat. It is almost too incredible to believe but even the New York Times' reporters, presumably spending most of their time hidden back in the Green Zone, are pulling material from Yon's blog for their own dispatches. So, this is probably credible.

Check out this excerpt from his latest posting:

...I picked up Prosser's M4. It was empty. I saw only Prosser's bloody leg lying still, just inside the darkened doorway, because most of his body was hidden behind a stack of sheet metal.

"Give me some ammo! Give me a magazine!" I yelled, and the young 2nd lieutenant handed over a full 30-round magazine. I jacked it in, released the bolt and hit the forward assist. I had only one magazine, so checked that the selector was on semi-automatic.

I ran back to the corner of the shop and looked at LTC Kurilla who was bleeding, and saw CSM Prosser's extremely bloody leg inside the shop, the rest of him was still obscured from view. I was going to run into the shop and shoot every man with a gun. And I was scared to death.

What I didn't realize was at that same moment four soldiers from Alpha Company 2nd Platoon were arriving on scene, just in time to see me about to go into the store. SSG Gregory Konkol, SGT Jim Lewis, and specialists Nicholas Devereaux and Christopher Muse where right there, behind me, but I didn't see them.

Reaching around the corner, I fired three shots into the shop. The third bullet pierced a propane canister, which jumped up in the air and began spinning violently. It came straight at my head but somehow missed, flying out of the shop as a high-pressure jet of propane hit me in the face. The goggles saved my eyes. I gulped in deeply.

In the tiniest fraction of a second, somehow my mind actually registered Propane...

FIREBALL! as it bounced on the ground where it spun furiously, creating an explosive cloud of gas and dust, just waiting for someone to fire a weapon.

http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/

12:08 AM | Link | (0) comments   

The last remnants of former editior Jeff Koyen's regime have been purged from the New York Press. Koyen, you may recall, was run out of town after publishing the misguided and not-particuarly-funny cover story, "The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of The Pope." A fellow named Harry Siegel is coming in to take over the newspaper. The Brooklyn native is founder of a blog called New Partisan. Apparently a favorite of Russ Smith, the still-influential former owner of the paper, Siegel will lean the paper in a much more conservative direction than the previous editorial staff. Hopefully, for Siegel's sake, the corporate owners of the Press will give him the resources he needs to do a decent job. Previous editor Alex Zaitchik never had that.

With the change of editorial staff, my weekly column on urban environment, transportation and development is no more. I'll be taking the opportunity to branch out into some other publications, focus on a book project and maybe clean out my basement too. If you've been reading, thanks! Without the regular weekly deadline things might be slowing down a bit here on the blog. We'll see. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, if you have comments and ideas for the Press or just want to urge them to continue to cover the issues that I was writing about (lord knows the identity politics-obsessed Village Voice won't cover them) send them an e-mail: editorial@nypress.com.

11:43 AM | Link | (7) comments   

There’s pretty much only one thing standing between New York City and total barbarism. It’s not the cops, the courts or Carnegie Hall. The city’s single greatest civilizing force is the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles form MV-15. The MV-15 allows you, the average, anonymous citizen, to access the driving records and personal information of any motorist with New York license plates.

Libertarians can say what they want about the slippery slope of privacy rights. We are already close to the bottom of the slope when it comes to motor vehicle carnage. Reckless, careless or just plain idiot drivers are, by many measures, the single biggest threat that New Yorkers face on a daily basis, more dangerous than either street crime or terrorism. In 2004, there were 190,000 car crashes in New York City, a staggering 520 per day. In these crashes 287 motorists and 179 pedestrians were killed, and about 15,000 injured. And 2004 was a good year. Nationwide, about 45,000 Americans are killed in car wrecks annually, the equivalent of a couple of fully loaded jumbo jets going down each week.

If the subway or any other public transportation system failed this badly and this often, it would be shut down immediately. Yet, motorists continue to cruise New York City’s streets with almost total impunity. The NYPD rarely stops anyone for moving violations (unless they’re on a bicycle). And if you kill someone with your car, as long as you’re not drunk or driving with a suspended license, the cops will likely chalk it up as an “accident.” The media will barely bother reporting it.

I can’t even use the word “accident” anymore when I talk or write about motor vehicle deaths. Calling it an accident assumes, usually before the facts are in, that the wreck was no one’s fault. Sure, lots of crashes truly are horrible accidents. But if you spilled milk dozens of times a day in somewhat predictable ways, would you continue to call it an accident every time? I’ve taken to calling them “crashes” or “incidents.”

When I first came to New York after graduating from college I remember sometimes thinking that it was kind of amazing that people weren’t more often pushing each other in front of moving trains or lobbing bricks off of rooftops. The opportunities to wreck havoc are so abundant in New York. Yet, by and large, people don’t. It can’t only be fear of punishment or a narcoleptic, TV-induced consumer trance that prevents this fractious and diverse city from breaking down into total mayhem. A tacit social contract governs life in New York City. It is a testament to how far New York City has come in the last dozen years that, today, the most frequent and egregious violator of this social contract is the guy in the souped-up SUV, tearing down the street, leaning on his horn, trying to make the next traffic light no matter what the risk or cost to the people outside his vehicle.

We have pretty much come to assume that the motor vehicle’s destructive dominance of public space and motorists' sociopathic behavior is the natural order of things. A century ago, New Yorkers assumed cholera epidemics, tenement fires, and child labor were inevitable and unavoidable products of big city life. It took years of work by highly organized, politically powerful, morally-driven progressive reformers to cure the city of those ills. Likewise, it will take years of work to repair the damage caused by our near-religious devotion to automobility.

In the meantime, there is no reason why you have to let the guy in the SUV get away with it. MV-15 his ass. When you see a motorist do something dangerous or socially repugnant on a crowded New York City street, take note of his license plate number. When you get home, google “New York State DMV form MV-15.” Fill out the form. Getting the driver's name, address, phone number and complete driving records will cost you $12, and because you’re dealing with the ineptitude of New York State government, it will take something like 3 to 5 weeks to arrive at your door. It's worth wait.

Once you have that information your creativity is the only limit to what you can do with it. Was the guy’s car alarm going off in front of your house all night? Give him a phone call at 3:30 a.m. every morning for a week and let him know that someone is trying to break into his vehicle (Don't forget to turn off your caller ID tag!). Was he blasting his horn needlessly or driving like a maniac through your neighborhood? Write him an anonymous letter and make sure he understands that his public behavior has been noted and, yeah, you know where he lives. Be polite and civil, don’t say anything you’d be embarrassed to have come back to you, and don’t do anything violent or illegal. But go ahead and use that MV-15. Let the motorhead know that the social contract that makes New York City function is still intact. Out in public he may be hidden behind tinted windows, reclined in plush bucket seats and cocooned within 4,500 pounds of metal. But let him know that he is still being held accountable for his behavior. And there will be consequences.

12:53 PM | Link | (11) comments   

Last Wednesday the Metropolitan Transit Authority voted to enter into exclusive negotiations to sell developer Bruce Ratner the rights to build an arena and 17 high rise towers over the Vanderbilt Railyards in Brooklyn. The MTA selected Ratner despite the fact that his $50 million bid came in $100 million less than a rival developer's and $165 million less than what the MTA believes the 8.4 acre property is actually worth. Though the vote was entirely pre-ordained, the week's events were still a priceless lesson in how big business gets done in New York City.

At about 7:00 a.m. on the morning of the vote, Brooklyn neighborhood advocates started lining up in front of the MTA's Madison Avenue office. They were late. The first nine spots in line belonged to Ratner supporters from an organization called Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development. BUILD members had been camped out in front of the building since midnight.

BUILD is what you call an "astroturf" organization. The group is designed to look, sound and feel grassroots but it was conceived in the Forest City Ratner board room with the express purpose of providing the developer a "community organization" it could deal with. The mission of BUILD, ostensibly, is to create jobs for Brooklyn's unemployed. Notably, the organization has been in business for about a year and a half and the only jobs it has created are the staff positions at BUILD.

Also around 7:00 a.m. a caterer arrived dropping off "what seemed like enough boxed lunches and drinks to feed half the people in Prospect Heights," according to Eric McClure, a neighborhood advocate from Park Slope. A gaggle of cell phone-bearing Forest City p.r. women in designer threads distributed the grub to the BUILD folks. Then a livery van rolled in and unloaded about a dozen more BUILD people. The Ratner crew also continued to multiply. At one point, McClure estimates there were as many as 20 Forest City staff people bustling about the sidewalk.

This has become standard practice at big, public events where the Railyards are being discussed. Ratner buses in supporters. They ensure that anyone who raises questions, concerns or objections to the project are shouted down at meetings or painted as racists and enemies of working people in the media. Their rhetoric is deeply divisive and flat out irresponsible. At a march in Brooklyn the Sunday before the MTA's vote, Ratner supporters promised to "wage war in the streets" if the MTA did not hand over the land to Forest City. The irony of all this, of course, is that the self-proclaimed proletarians have the backing of a multi-billion dollar corporation. The supposedly "wealthy, white" opponents have to take time off work to show up at meetings. Needless to say, the Brown Shirt tactics have been incredibly effective.

At about 9:30 a.m. the MTA meeting began with public comments. One by one opponents and supporters got up and made their two minute statements. By the time all 53 speakers finished it was nearly noon. The moment the comments period was finished, MTA chairman Peter Kalikow declared he needed a board member to introduce the resolution he was holding in his hand and another to second it. Done. The resolution, which he then read aloud, stated that the MTA would take the next 45 days to negotiate exclusively with Ratner in the hope of convincing the developer to increase the value of his offer, which Kalikow described as disappointing and lower than expected. With a vote of 11 to 1, the board quickly approved the resolution.

The lone dissenting vote came from the board's Suffolk County member. Mitchell Pally said both bids were insufficient and rejected the idea of conducting exclusive negotiations with just one bidder, the lower cash bidder at that. Kalikow, a real estate developer for 38 years, countered that he had never negotiated two leases for a property at once. That, he said, would be "immoral." But Kalikow isn't negotiating a lease. Rather, he's auctioning off an incredibly valuable piece of public property. You don't have to be an eBay PowerSeller to know that an auction works best when you've got more than one bidder.

In a funny way you almost have to appreciate the MTA's brazenness. Once public comments were finished Kalikow could have gone behind closed doors for a half hour to give the impression that the public's input had some bearing on the board's decision-making process. But this is New York City. There's no time to waste on a semblance of democracy when business needs getting done.

None of this is particularly surprising. It's the way things have always been done. In the 19th century the political machine ran New York with Boss Tweed honing the art of "honest graft" from his Tammany Hall headquarters. In the 20th century, the all-powerful, unelected bureaucrat took over. Robert Moses tore down neighborhoods to build expressways, reshaping New York by asking, "if the ends don't justify the means, what does?" Here at the dawn of the 21st century it is the big-time real estate developer who doles out the jobs and justifies the means. Meet the new Boss. His name is Bruce Ratner. You can fight him or apply for a job.

12:32 PM | Link | (1) comments