March & Mike's Neo-Liberalism (the Mayor who can't be bought at any price) The Bloomberg Way:

[Mark Kohut]

LIKE.....so in some way the plot of BE is necessarily linked as metaphor
with NYC---and the world?    
That Robert Moses line....so much else....


----- Original Message -----
From: Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Friday, December 6, 2013 5:38 AM
Subject: March & Mike's Neo-Liberalism (the Mayor who can't be bought at any price) The Bloomberg Way:

So, it's said that March can't be bought at any price. And she uses a
parable to teach young people about corruption ; the parable is about
a corrupt king (Mayor of NYC) who tries to buy off a bag lady. Of
course, Giuliani is mayor and he's not king. Can you follow this? Can
we follow the money, the campaign dollars, the deal making? And once
we lay Bloomberg over Giuliani, over Moses, as Pynchon does in BE,
we're lost like Maxine.


Mike Bloomberg, who has billions before he was elected, is not your
average politician, though we've seen billionaires before and we are
seeing more billionaires in politics.

  "The Bloomberg Way" refers to an ostensibly pragmatic,
nonideological approach to urban governance that places a premium on
management skill, technical expertise, and data-driven evaluation. In
its core formulation, the mayor serves as CEO, the city government is
a corporation, businesses and residents are clients and customers, and
the city itself is a product to be branded, marketed, and developed.
On this logic, the city’s bottom line depends on its ability to
generate more property tax revenue, which therefore is a primary
consideration when it comes to land use policy and economic
development. The flip side, of course, is that distributional concerns
— for example, the quality of jobs produced and the impacts of public
actions on the stability of neighborhoods and fragile networks of
small businesses — are of secondary importance at best.

Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City
By: Julian Brash
Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2011
Reviewed by Dan Steinberg

http://newpol.org/content/planning-neoliberal-city
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l