If you want to know one of the reasons why some people in the Northampton area objected so strenuously to a proposal by a few local businesspeople to create a Business Improvement District in Northampton, you might start by reading Matt Taibbi's latest piece for Rolling Stone magazine.
Taibbi begins his article, "The Big Takeover: How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution," by focusing on the gullibility of the American public: "So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial—we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. … the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck—bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: 'The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now,' he said. 'When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too.'…
"People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'etat. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations."
No doubt, proponents of the Northampton BID will take offense at my comparison of their proposal to the sordid behavior on Wall Street that Taibbi describes. Surely, the organization of what city planner and BID supporter Wayne Fieden calls "a collective purchasing arrangement," under the enabling legislation of MGL Chapter 40.O, bears little semblance to the unregulated creation and use of newfangled financial instruments—collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit-default swaps (CDSs)—by companies like AIG.
Yet, as benign as the Northampton BID may prove to be, it owes its existence at least in large measure to the same political ethos that spawned increasingly dubious forms of deregulation over the last several decades.
BIDs—quasi-private entities with rights and powers, as spelled out in MGL Chapter 40.O that include: "retaining or recruiting business& promoting economic development; managing parking; designing, engineering, constructing, maintaining, or operating buildings, facilities, urban streetscapes or infrastructures to further economic development and public purposes; conducting historic preservation activities… supplementing maintenance, security, or sanitation; planning and designing services"—reflect the view expressed by most politicians, regardless of party affiliation, that government has a role to play in helping businesses succeed.
The Northampton BID is just one small example of government giving private interests special status in the administration of public space. The rationale for the BID is fairly simple: private interests, by investing in their own long term well-being, serve the public's interest in having a safe, beautiful, prosperous downtown.
Had the BID come up as an issue just a decade ago, it's unlikely that anyone would have objected. But a decade ago, the public was still in thrall to the Reagan-era notion that what's good for business is also good for the public.
Matt Taibbi argues that the misbehavior of AIG and its enablers in elected office was born in ignorance. The average taxpayer has no real understanding of Wall Street or the laws intended to regulate it.
"As complex as all the finances are," Taibbi writes, "the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future."
It may be wholly unfair to lump the Northampton BID in with AIG, but that's exactly what's happening. Coming out of a political climate in which it was nearly heretical to question the government's responsibility for "doing" economic development—for example, for building stadiums and providing tax breaks for industries, concessions that often did not yield the promised benefits to local economies—the worm has finally turned.
The public's faith in unregulated capitalism is shattered. The average taxpayer has grown increasingly distrustful of politicians whose pro-business initiatives amount to nothing more than giving business what it wants. The question isn't whether people are angry right now, but whether they're, as Taibbi puts it, "pissed off enough."
