Screeds
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Comparative Obscenity
July 31, 2002
What we see everywhere tends to become invisible. What we hear continuously tends to become inaudible.
This isn’t theory. I’m a tinnitus sufferer, for some years now. “Sufferer” might be the wrong word, as the constancy of the signal has allowed me to filter it out of my attention. If it varied, I’d be distracted by it. As it is, I have to make a conscious effort to hear it.
No doubt you can think of examples from your own experiences. The ones I have in mind today come from the political realm, surprise, surprise.
About ten months ago, we had a little mishap in Manhattan that involved office towers and airplanes. You might remember it. The cleanup of the site has been completed, and various parties are now squabbling over what will replace the fallen spires of the World Trade Center. Many persons and groups have stepped forward to claim a right to participate in the decision.
The land on which the Twin Towers once sat is, by general consensus, the most valuable real estate in America, perhaps in the world. It’s owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which leased all development rights to real estate magnate Larry Silverstein, the man who built and operated the World Trade Center.
In law, Mr. Silverstein owes nothing to anyone. He has an absolute right to do as he pleases with the site, as long as he meets a single requirement written into his lease: to provide no less than six million square feet of office space. Yet Mr. Silverstein, the Port Authority and the city and state governments are under enormous pressure to admit the families of the Black Tuesday victims and other “stakeholder” groups, several of which are openly opposed to the construction of any new office space, to the redevelopment deliberations. ("At Trade Center Site, A Wealth Of Ideas,” New York Times Metro section, 7/28/02, Pg 25-27.) Imagine the clamor.
This is normal practice in the state of New York. A business can buy land, acquire the necessary zoning rulings and development permits, line up financing, contractors and labor, and be halted at the starting line by “stakeholders” and “community activists.” The delays these groups can impose on a project through clever use of grievance procedures and “fair notification” rules have bankrupted more than a few companies.
Sometimes the meddlers’ overt objections are environmental. Sometimes they’re premised in infrastructural concerns: the demands the proposed development would put on roads, water and power supplies, and so forth. Both these rationales arose in the now-infamous Carrefour episode, where a French consortium acquired a large parcel on Long Island, already zoned for commercial use, and was about to begin construction of a shopping center when activists persuaded the zoning board to forbid the project.
Sometimes they’re ill-disguised shakedown attempts, where the activists are willing to drop their objections for the right payoff. That happens quite a lot.
The whole pattern has become routine, an expected part of business in the Empire State. Companies routinely attach contingency accounts --funds to be used to buy off activist groups and preserve the development plan and schedule—to their development budgets.
Economically, this is obviously detrimental. Extortion always is. But legally and politically, it’s far worse.
Typically, the activists’ power is founded on their ability to sway a zoning commission, or to threaten its autonomy and confidentiality with court actions. Zoning commissions are among the most arbitrary of all political institutions. Their power to permit or forbid particular uses of land is based on vaguely worded ordinances and “master plans.” In practice, the only check on them is their members’ probity and discretion, quantities on which the serious student of politics knows better than to depend. Because so many of their decisions cannot be defended from the specifics of their constitutive law, they are vulnerable to having their internal workings exposed to the light of day.
Activist groups have responded to these recognitions. Whether they’re pressing their agendas out of sincere conviction, public spirit, or a desire to get their snouts into the trough, they’ve zeroed in on the weak point in the land-use regime and have learned to exploit it. They’ve joined the chain of extortion, lengthened it by a few links. Developers and the businesses that depend on them are left little choice but to pay.
“When you have made evil the means of survival,” wrote Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, “do not expect men to remain good.”
But what strikes me today is the terrible banality of the thing, and of extortionate politics generally. It’s so pervasive that it’s sunk into the subconscious, become completely invisible. No one is surprised by it. Few will rise to condemn it. Fewer still would hesitate to use it for their own purposes, should an opportunity arise.
Corruption is like that. The furtiveness, the sense of shame about one’s venality, dissipates with usage and ever-widening acceptance. “Everybody does it.” Hernando de Soto discovered this in his famous researches into the bureaucratic obstacles to setting up an entirely legal business in Peru. The functionaries there were completely unabashed about demanding their mordida—their “bite,” the expected bribe for acting on a request from a citizen, without which his forms would be conveniently lost. No effective action could be taken against them.
When anti-immigration forces declaim on America’s descent toward Third World status, they usually have lax border control and slovenly visa management in mind. More and more often, I think of the mordida, and of the horde of gaping mouths that await a bite of any proposed enterprise—a bite they’ve come to feel is theirs by right. We have begun to confront the immigration problem, but we routinely avert our eyes from rampant corruption and the multiplication of the participants in it. Which is more threatening to our society, I cannot say.
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