ROY EDROSO

When he led the Clash through the '70s and '80s, Joe Strummer was So Bored With the USA, he dreamed of a White Riot. As recently as 1999, incensed by our draconian cabaret laws, he bitched out Rudy Giuliani as an "old guy living in the suburbs, thinks he can run New York City" (See it on video here). Much has changed. Interviewed by the Brooklyn Paper (April 1), a local free weekly, on the occasion of his five-night stand with a new band, the Mescaleros, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, Strummer gave this assessment of Rudy during the 2001 mini-Blitz:

I think he was really just magnificent, you know. And it's kind of like, I'm kind of like a street rat moaning about it down on the street but you know, perhaps you've got to look at the wider aspects of getting the city free of fear and crime, which is something we're gonna have to do now [in London]. You know it's been getting quite out of hand here in London. I certainly wouldn't drive around London in a car worth more than a certain amount or wear a watch worth more than a certain amount.

Rudy Can't Fail, indeed. Strummer's tune "The Minstrel Boy" currently appears on the soundtrack of the motion picture Black Hawk Down.

A different perspective is given at another local freebie, the Brooklyn Rail (March-April), in an article by Williams Cole and Theodore Hamm called "New York City, LLC."

Cole and Hamm point out that while most city services will suffer massive cuts under Mayor Bloomberg's new, "no sacred cows" budget (e.g., Health and Hospitals Corporation: 26%), large businesses that maintain offices in New York have not been asked to make similar sacrifices, and almost certainly will not be asked in the future: "According to the City Project, corporations in New York City have received more than $2 billion in subsidies from the City and State since 1994. However, out of the 80 major 'incentive' deals made by the City since 1989, at least 29 were made with companies that later shrank, merged, or moved, losing 40,000 jobs for the City."

Observing that "it is now commonplace to say that the city has a 'new CEO'" in the business-based Bloomberg, Cole and Hamm suggest that "the most appropriate business model for the Bloomberg Administration is that of a Limited Liability Company. Such companies tend to reward those at the top and, in terms of operation, require only a modicum of overhead and personnel. The goods that they offer--a lease, an investment opportunity--confer no responsibility to the owners of that company for the well-being of those who join in... It shouldn't take too long for the tenant/client/customer/citizen of the new city to understand the new contract."

And you still can't dance in our bars, either.