9/11 aftermath sketches

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Now, nearly a month after the WTC attack, you can still smell burning
plastic in the air of NYC.

Yesterday I found out from my old friend Elliot, who teaches at the
Borough of Manhattan Community College, that half the campus was
obliterated by the WTC attack. This is the same institution that has
until this year hosted the yearly Socialist Scholars Conference.

As one might expect given these circumstances, the administration has
pulled out all the stops in organizing all sorts of quasi-therapeutic
sessions on 9/11. Elliot went to one the other day for members of the
faculty, who sat around in a circle where they would volunteer their
feelings. Nobody gave a political interpretation, including leftist
professors, until it was his turn to speak. He said that the main
cause of the attack was more than fifty years of a terrorist US
foreign policy. After he spoke, other left-leaning professors got the
nerve to say similar things.

People like Elliot are a kind of informal vanguard that exists across
the USA, especially in large cities on the coast. Veterans of the
Vietnam antiwar movement, they were never won over to the other side
like many veterans of the 1930s trade union movement were during the
witch-hunt. Such people can be counted on to provide the kind of
leadership he exhibited at this faculty meeting. Besides his
politics, there are aspects to his personality that make him
especially resistant to going along with the crowd. He is a working
class Jew who does not suffer fools gladly, either from postmodernist
colleagues in the university or from jingoists on campus.

As it turns out, there is very little evidence of jingoism at his
school. Many students are not only working class, but come from other
countries. A typical student might be a Haitian with a day job as a
clerk, while studying accounting in evening classes. They are too
busy making a living and studying to volunteer for the flag-waving
brigades.

People with this kind of background are on my programming team at
Columbia University. Of the 15 or so people on my project, nearly
half come from other countries, including Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana and
Senegal. None of them are involved with the stars-and-stripes
paraphernalia, which tend to be more in evidence on the floor where
upper management has its offices. The big boss, who flew a bomber
during Vietnam, wears a flag pin on his lapel.

The other day, one of my co-workers who hails from Jamaica, told me
that she saw "Life and Debt", a documentary about the impact of
neoliberalism in her country. She said that it demonstrated that
hard-working Jamaicans were victimized by a system that they had no
control over. She also said that it helped to explain why there was
so much resentment toward the USA in the rest of the world, pace
9/11.

Yesterday I ran into my neighbor Jeff on the street outside my
building. He just lost his programming job at the Depository Trust
Company, a 'back office' type institution involved with the stock
market. The DTC is just one of many companies in the financial
district that is taking 9/11 out of the hides of the workers. At the
age of 55, his employment prospects look bleak. To ease his
transition into the ranks of the unemployed, the DTC is giving its
employees a meager 'buy out' package. For Jeff, this comes to $600
per month. In NYC, this amounts to a week's rent for a one-bedroom
apartment. Since our rent-subsidized building is in the process of
being transformed into market-oriented real estate, this is a very
threatening development for him. I told him I'd look into any job
possibilities at Columbia, where age discrimination is nonexistent.
Thank god.

9/11 resulted in postponement of election primaries in NYC. They were
held about a week ago and now we see an endless stream of commercials
for the two Democrat candidates for mayor, who are in a run-off, and
the Republican. The ads have been recalibrated to evoke how each
candidate reflects the kind of pluck needed to rebuild NYC. Each
candidate is draped in the flag in the ads.

The race between the two Democrats is turning nasty. One is Bronx
President Fernando Ferrer, who has the backing of the black and
Latino political machines in the city--including Al Sharpton's. This
has led to rightwing Jewish groups backing his opponent Mark Green,
who was consumer affairs commissioner. Green has been shifting
sharply to the right over the past year or so, in a calculated bid to
get the Giuliani vote. This is particularly disgusting since Green
was a sort of leftish icon for many years. Not only did he have a
senior position in Nader's organization, he was the darling of the
Nation magazine which has endorsed his campaign uncritically.

On the Republican side, we have the odious Michael Bloomberg, a
financial media mogul who has pumped millions of dollars into
television ads. These ads portray him as a roll-up-the-sleeves
businessman who knows how to get NYC rebuilt and working again. No
matter how much money he pumps into his ads, nothing can seem to
overcome the bad publicity he generates himself.

For instance, it was revealed during the summer that his employees
presented him with a book filled with his wit and wisdom, mostly
racist, homophobic and sexist gags that he dotes on. When I was at
Salomon Brothers in the mid-70s, I did some work for Bloomberg, who
was head of the equities desk at the time. My co-worker Barrie, an
African-American, gave me a sour look when she discovered that I
would be dealing with him. What's the problem, I asked? She said that
he was the biggest pig at the firm. For a place like Salomon Brothers
filled with "big swinging dicks", that is quite a distinction. She
said that typically when a female Puerto Rican secretary would walk
across the gymnasium sized trading floor at Salomon, Bloomberg would
yell out something like "Look at the tits on that spic."

The aftermath of the WTC will certainly raise class and racial
contradictions to a higher level internationally. I expect that this
will play out in NYC in a fashion geared to the peculiar
circumstances of the financial capital of the world. I will report on
developments as they unfold.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 10/06/2001

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org


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