All posts by Joel Schlosberg

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The Ziegfeld’s Last Picture Show

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The Ziegfeld, New York City’s most elaborate movie theater, shut its doors after final screenings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on January 28. Its sumptuous decor in the tradition of early-1900s movie palaces made it the go-to place for premieres. A throwback even when it opened in 1969, let alone in an on-demand era, is its last bow a sign that the culture of moviegoing as a special event belongs just as much in the past?

More foreboding is the site’s planned transformation into a ballroom for “society galas and corporate events” (The New York Post, January 20). As a luxury experience available to a mass audience and iconic beyond its immediate function as a commercial space, it was perhaps rivaled in New York only by toy store FAO Schwarz (which folded last year). The venue that had offered a royal occasion for the price of a movie ticket will be reserved exclusively for the bona fide economic elite. Two years into Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, the rich and poor “two cities” identified by his campaign are growing even farther apart.

Florenz Ziegfeld was skilled at foreseeing popular taste, discovering such talent as W.C. Fields, Will Rogers and Barbara Stanwyck for his stage shows. Yet his namesake, absorbed by the Clearview and Bow Tie chains, served up for its distinctive single screen the same movies — and the same popcorn — as the multiplexes. Meanwhile, innovative upstarts like Alamo Drafthouse have thrived with upscale menus and eclectic programming. And the popularity of their revival and special screenings demonstrates consumer demand for “going to the movies” as a communal activity, not only for convenience of access above all. Institutions of film culture are vanishing from the city of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese not because they are unwanted, but because they are unaffordable. The Ziegfeld’s midtown Manhattan is the epicenter of a real estate bubble that has driven its clientele farther and farther away. The entrepreneurial spirit can tackle the economic gap as well.

A closer look at de Blasio’s programs for making the city affordable confirms what Samuel Stein (“De Blasio’s Doomed Housing Plan,” Jacobin, Fall 2014) observes: They operate “without fundamentally challenging the dynamics between developers and communities, landlords and tenants, or housing and the market.” De Blasio’s modus operandi is cutting deals with developers, offering preferential regulations and outright subsidies in exchange for construction including some rent-controlled units.

Politicians in any city can be more effective by getting out of the way.  Instead of granting preferential exemption from zoning restrictions in ways friendly to big business (and which accelerate gentrification), said restrictions could be repealed altogether, starting with those most burdensome to the neediest. Shifting tax revenue onto land value would make productive use of real estate more gainful than withholding. And corporate welfare handouts could be cut from nine and ten figures to zero.

The curtain has closed on the Ziegfeld, but the show can go on elsewhere — and tickets don’t have to cost a king’s ransom.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

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The GOP, the Boxes, and the Uber

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English: Chinatown, Manhattan, New York City 2...
Chinatown, Manhattan, New York City 2009 on Pell Street, looking west towards Bayard and Mott. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On August 4, Vikas Bajaj devoted a New York Times op-ed to the politics of Uber. The headline contends that “Republicans Are Trying to Turn Uber Into a Partisan Issue,” and that companies like Uber and Airbnb based in the “gig economy” rather than the 9-to-5 realm “hardly fit into the kind of neat ideological boxes in which Republicans would like to put them.”

Bajaj then attempts to turn Uber into a partisan issue, fitting it into the Democrats’ neat ideological boxes. Republicans spotlighting startups with hi-tech cool and youth appeal is exposed as a ploy to distract from their reactionary stands on issues like same-sex marriage. This is in no way like Bill Clinton playing the sax on TV while rubber-stamping the Defense of Marriage Act away from the cameras.

To Bajaj, Uber’s “aggressively challenging or flouting taxi regulations” appeals to Republicans’ hostility toward the regulatory state (ignoring the key role of Democratic stalwarts like Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter in trucking deregulation misses an opportunity to score partisan points.)

Bajaj’s model is the detente between New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and Uber, two brash upstarts whose confrontational image is rapidly yielding to accommodation with the status quo. Not that de Blasio’s radical imagination ever approached that of true mavericks like Paul and Percival Goodman, whose 1961 remedy for Manhattan’s traffic congestion featured specialized half-length, electric-powered, 40-MPH cabs.

Bajaj notes that conservatives have backed municipal restraints on Uber, showing how “the political influence of established local businesses and labor groups” trumps professed ideology. Indeed. Bajaj points out support in Uber’s management for Obamacare “which Republicans love to hate” (but the templates of which Republicans like Mitt Romney designed to offload labor costs).

Professionals benefit in obvious ways from prohibitions on less skilled and informal competition. But contra the mythology of overpaid, underworked employees running the asylum, labor has always been a subsidiary partner in the corporate liberal coalition, in capital-intensive industries where it accounts for a relatively small proportion of operating costs. The same grassroots pressure that compelled General Motors to accede to United Automobile Workers can be applied to Uber.

Bajaj concludes that if economics doesn’t do the job, demographics will, with diverse millennials a captive constituency of the Democrats. Thus, as the Goodmans observed, voting is “according to ethnic and party groupings. The rival programs are both vague and identical.” In the 1970s, the Times was so charitable to the nascent libertarian movement (whose political party already officially supported same-sex marriage) that two of its young voices were given space in The New York Times Magazine to call JFK “one of the leading reactionaries of the sixties.” Mentioning that Uber’s CEO “holds libertarian views” only to lump them into the red-state side of the aisle, Bajaj is four decades behind the times. Where we’re riding, we need neither Republicans nor Democrats to build roads.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

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Love Me, I’m a Hollywood Liberal

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During the 87th Academy Awards ceremony on February 22, films about Martin Luther King, Jr. and whistleblower Edward Snowden, Selma and Citizenfour, received statuettes for, respectively, Best Original Song and Best Documentary Feature.  But the shutting-out of Selma from other Oscars due to industry backlash against its less than fully idealized portrayal of former US president Lyndon B. Johnson, and host Neil Patrick Harris’s quip that “Edward Snowden couldn’t be here for some treason,” made clear the limits of Hollywood liberal tolerance for dissent.

To update Phil Ochs’s classic indictment: “I cried when they shot Martin Luther King Jr.  But Edward Snowden got what was coming. So love me, I’m a liberal.”

Harris might have been tongue-in-cheek, but imagine if he’d made the same remark about a surviving but jailed 86-year-old King. And if he didn’t intend it as political, that merely shows what sort of political assumptions Hollywood takes for granted.  For instance, that the very existence of the National Security Agency is not infinitely more a betrayal of American ideals than Snowden’s exposure of its secrets.  In fact, the NSA helped implement the federal government’s surveillance of King as portrayed in Selma.

Another dissident subject of an Oscar-winning film (Karl Hess: Toward Liberty, Best Documentary Short Subject) observed in his autobiography Mostly on the Edge that “the support of big business flowed naturally to Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to wheel and deal with corporations that felt they had the right to be treated as virtually a fourth branch of government.”  As exemplified by Hollywood’s ties to mostly-Democratic administrations, e.g. Jack Valenti’s move from LBJ’s personal aide to head of the Motion Picture Association of America.

In his acceptance speech at the 53rd Oscars, Karl Hess: Toward Liberty co-director Roland Halle contended that “[Hess’s] ideas on how [to] take control of one’s life I think can map our route toward liberty, and liberty is all this country’s about.”  With his statement “that the really American revolution would be to destroy power,” Hess’s notion of what “this country’s about” clearly differed from identifying it with the covert functioning of the NSA.  Its documentation of Hess’s journey, from his expulsion from the top ranks of the Republican Party to his pioneering of solar power and other decentralized ecological technologies — all without ever being a liberal, Hollywood or otherwise — offers prescient lessons for bringing liberty to a post-NSA America.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

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