We all know that American politics is dominated by money. The U.S. Senate is a millionaires' club, and the politicians who aren't personally rich are typically bankrolled by corporate interests. Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg personifies this plutocratic order - and his declaration that "the city is going fine" during the blizzard because "Broadway shows were full" demonstrates what plutocracy means in practice. It means that when an emergency does not hurt the Blooombergs of the world, our government does not see any emergency at all.
Yes, as long as the Bloombergs' streets are plowed (as the mayor's was), as long as the all-important rich are enjoying their theater engagements, the plutocrats think everything is A-OK. They don't care that, say, an outer-borough newborn died because EMTs couldn't get to the baby's home for nine hours. They don't care that another outer-borough woman had to wait 30 hours for an ambulance after breaking her ankle. And those plutocrats certainly aren't about to change the conservative economic policies that help make these crises so horrific for the non-rich.
Again, this triple threat of climate change, economic conservatism and plutocracy is not limited to New York. It's the new ubiquitous normal in America, which is why the Big Apple's blizzard experience is so significant.
A real-time counter to demagogues' more sensational predictions of our doomsday, New York's winter trouble presents the nation's gloomy future in more banal - but equally troubling - terms. The blizzard suggests that America's decline will not look like an Armageddon-ish explosion in Washington. It will look like a traffic-snarling snowdrift in Queens.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/30/EDDO1H1SI3.DTL#ixzz19iE2h6Tp
