yesterday and today and tomorrow
with Andrew Rasiej coming in at 5% in the public advocate’s race i think its pretty obvious - as it was from very early in my own race - that bloggers are not to be relied upon as a political force or to deliver votes at the polls.
bloggers are just people with very little in common besides a need to write on the internet, overinflated senses of their own importance and, often, a love of drinking to excess.
that being said i think that the technological issues raised by rasiej and my campaigns, and the potential that blogging & new media hold for the future of politics, are importnat. I think information technology and new systems and models for communication will continue to be a factor in culture and government, both in how we interact with government and how government conducts business.
still, the future is the future. Today it is business as usual and very little is likely to change. Ferrer is an ineffectual bumbler and Bloomberg, spin or not, is still in the pockets of the big corporate real estate developers. Just witnes the debacle that is the Bronx Terminal Market redevelopment plan. There’s an article in the NY Daily News about it that says:
Alex Savinon, who runs a small restaurant supply company at the Bronx Terminal Market, is baffled and fed up. So fed up he went on rent strike yesterday.
More than a year ago, Savinon and two dozen other wholesalers at the Bronx market met with city officials about a new $400 million big-box commercial venture the Bloomberg administration has slated for the very site their businesses now occupy.
Stephen Ross, the head of The Related Companies, had just purchased the 33-acre Bronx market site and landed a sole source development deal from the city for the project he has dubbed Gateway Center.
Ross is not only one of New York’s biggest developers, he is also a former business partner of Mayor Bloomberg’s economic development czar, Dan Doctoroff.
Later on the article states that Ross collects $280,000 a month from the tenants while paying only $22,000 to the city.
Nice.