Photos of the Week

May 8, 2011

(Click photos to enlarge)

All photos by Steven Greer

Joplin tornado by Twisterchaser

Nothing is off limits to cash-strapped NYC: Cyclists ticketed

January 24, 2010

The New York Post is reporting that the city has issued a record 1000 tickets to bicyclists in the month of January alone, for benign infractions that normally went unnoticed, such as cycling on sidewalks or going through red lights. It is debatable whether motor vehicle laws apply to bicycles. Moreover, with the snow from the unplowed streets, many of the bike lanes have been impossible to use, forcing cyclists onto sidewalks.

The budget deficit of the city is causing all sorts of egregious secret taxes, it seems. The city is charging for emergency responses to accidents. Now, it is going after cyclists in the depth of winter.

A new species: Polar Mallards

January 20, 2011

Is this a new species: the Polar Mallard? Amazingly, some mallard ducks have either stayed over for the winter, or are ducks migrating south from Canada. Either way, it is unclear what they survive on for food and how they lived through the blizzards.

Is this Naples, Italy or New York?

January 3, 2011

The unions and mafia in Naples, Italy, caused a year-long slowdown in trash cleanup resulting in piles of trash. Here in New York City, it seems the sanitation unions are mimicking Naples.

The New York Post and BatteryPark.TV have reported several stories about intentional slowdowns by the NYC sanitation union. Now, the New York Times is reporting on the trash that is piling up. It seems that our waste management is being run more by Tony Soprano than the City or State.

Time for Time to go away

December 15th, 2010

It’s that time of the year again; when the old print media issues bogus awards. It starts with the People Magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” award, which rarely coincides with actual public opinion. Then, Time Magazine inundates the web with “Best of” lists, culminating in the Time “Person of the Year” award. Whoopee!

With the demise of Newsweek, US News and World Report, and many other print magazines, Time remains one of the few standing in print form. If it were not for the backing of its large parent company, Time too would have bitten the dust.

In order to garner attention, Time has been selecting increasingly controversial people to be “Person of the Year”. The tabloid used to go for the politically esoteric oddball choice like “The Whistleblowers” of 2002, “Vladimir Putin” of 2007, or who can forget, the “You” of 2006. Now, as the revenue of Time Magazine dries up, desperate times mean the outlet is reaching for the masses; no more highbrow tooting falootin’ stuff.

This year, Time went for maximum mass appeal and picked the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, as “Person of the Year”. Mr. Zuckerberg has been on a whirlwind public relations character-repair blitz this year. It started ahead of the film “Social Network” that portrayed him as an unlikable thief of intellectual property. He then adorned the stage of Oprah, with a bogus donation of $100 Million to Newark, New Jersey schools, contingent upon many things, including the broke city matching the funds. Then, and only then, would the opaque donation be delivered years later.

More recently, Mr. Zuckerberg and his PR firm tried to gain similar press by claiming that he was giving away the majority of his wealth to philanthropy, along with true billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. This imaginary wealth that Mr. Zuckerberg is giving away is based on his private equity shares in Facebook, which are worthless until there is an IPO. The IPO has not happened. Moreover, the entire business plan of Facebook will go down the drain if the FCC and congress institute laws prohibiting the gathering of personal information of online users and selling it to marketers.

Yet Time Magazine chose Mr. Zuckerberg to be Person of the Year. To be sure, 2010 was the year that Facebook gained critical mass, at least in the press. If one believes the Facebook-supplied data, “500 Million users” are on Facebook, and an Academy Award film is based on his life. However, who are just some of the people that were far more popular and/or important this year?

A creepy skinny guy named Julian Assange succeeded in taking on the most powerful country the world has ever seen, rightly or wrongly, and has made possible for other internet hackers to do the same thing. Foreign policy will never be the same. If information is power, then the small individual gained leverage against the countries that own the militaries.

The Tea Party, or better yet, the pissed-off-struggling-regular-dudes, who were responsible for the landslide midterm elections were also a wee bit more important than Mark Zuckerberg.

How about the leaders of Greece, Ireland, or the UK trying to implement austerity and salvage the Euro? Those men and women were covered more in the press and were more relevant than Mr. Zuckerberg.

Public relations firms have a strong influence in who is named “Sexiest” or “Person of the Year”. Mark Zuckerberg likely transferred some of his wealth through middlemen PR firms to garner this award. Anyone who does not believe that assertion can contact us for some hot CDO’s packaged in a financial instrument called Abacus to purchase. We also have a bridge from London in our inventory.

Time Magazine has become a tabloid now, struggling for readership and advertising revenue. The lists that it spews out with ever increasing volume are irrelevant. It is time for Time to go away.

Big decline in apartment prices

July 7^th, 2010

The WSJ is reporting today an update on apartment sales prices and number of units sold. The good news is that the number of units increased 179% yoy to 383 units (137 in April of 2009), and a 20% increase from last month. However, the bad news is that prices are way down. Compared to 2009, the selling price of apartments in Battery Park City and the Financial District had the largest drop of Manhattan: down 17%.

Red areas represent the largest price declines.

Keep in mind that 2009 was the bottom in the economic recession in NYC. Despite the ample bonuses paid out in 2010, it has not seemed to impact selling prices.

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Exclusive: Will Goldman Sachs fulfill its $500 Million promise to aid small business?

Op-Ed February 5, 2010

Unemployment and job creation via small business assistance is now the Obama administration’s top priority in the public arena and has been a concern for more than a year. Realizing this last November, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, chose small business support as the topic for a public relations move to counter the populace outrage over bankers being focused mostly on Goldman Sachs and AIG. He issued a statement that some in the press called a mea culpa, and paired it with a $500 Million gesture to the community called the “10,000 Small Business Initiative”. The plan was to give $300 Million in aid to small business as loans or grants, and $200 Million was to go to educational centers to help teach about “Business and Management Education”.

Whatever became of the “10,000 small business initiative”? Being located near both the old and new Goldman Sachs headquarters, BatteryPark.TV (BPTV) decided to investigate. Were the funds distributed properly, or at all? Have any small businesses received loans to date?

The Goldman Sachs press release did not provide details on how to apply for the assistance. Last year, press officers explained to BPTV that details would be provided in January of 2010. This week, the same press person directed us to a third-party administrator, or Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), handling the program in the New York area: Seedco.

A BusinessWeek article explains the CDFI process and the Goldman/Seedco relationship. Essentially, once the Wall Street banks were forced to convert to bank holding companies in 2008 as a condition of the TARP funding, these Wall Street entities outsourced the lowly commercial lending operations to CDFI’s. Federal regulations of commercial banks require certain percentages of loans to be made to low-income or minority communities. Seedco serves this need by targeting areas in New York City such as Harlem. Of note, BPTV was unable to confirm the facts represented in the BusinessWeek article as Seedco and others did not reply to many of our questions.

On February 1, BPTV made several calls to Seedco using the phone numbers listed for their offices on the Seedco website. No one answered the phones or replied to our messages until Goldman Sachs was informed of the problem. On February 3, a person representing himself as a “Senior lender” for the division of Seedco that awards small business loans finally called BPTV.

BPTV discussed with the lender small business scenarios that Seedco might find acceptable for issuing a loan. An example was used of a business with more than $100,000 in revenue, 80% profit margin, no collateral, three years in business, and requesting a $50,000 or greater loan. These would be typical, if not exceptional, characteristics of a low-income district small business. The lender said that no loan would be given in such a situation and that it was more a case of “equity” like a venture capital arrangement. When asked how Seedco differed from a regular commercial bank that would also not lend to small businesses, he declined to answer. Moreover, the lender seemed only interested in business locations in low-income areas of NYC.

BPTV asked the Seedco lending official about the status of the “10,000 small business initiative”. He explained that Goldman Sachs has so far delivered only $20 Million to Seedco for lending to small business, consistent with the BusinessWeek article. When asked whether any loans had been awarded to date, he declined to answer and discontinued the call.

A Goldman Sachs representative confirmed that Seedco is the one and only CDFI administering the $500 Million pledged for the “10,000 small business initiative”, so far. Therefore, only $20 Million has been allocated, at most, and it is nearly three months since Goldman Sachs issued the press release on November 17, 2009.

The impact of the “10,000 small business initiative” to New York City seems nonexistent. As mentioned above, neither Seedco nor Goldman Sachs would confirm that a single loan or grant has been issued to a small business. To find answers, BPTV asked various local officials who might know about Seedco, ranging from a former Mayor of NYC, representatives from Community Board 1, Manhattan Borough President, and the Battery Park City Authority, and none of them had heard of the name Seedco, much less knew of any assistance provided to small business. The local Better Business Bureau has no file on Seedco.

It is fair to say that the Goldman Sachs small business assistance plan is not working yet. Are the smartest bankers in the world suddenly inept and unable to administer a relatively small $500 Million financing program, or is this engineered incompetence meant to delay the parting of cash that would otherwise be a few banker’s bonuses? Who are the people overseeing this grand charitable plan?

The Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs “10,000 small business initiative” consists of some of the most respected and successful business leaders in the world, including (from the press release):

• Lloyd C. Blankfein Co-Chair
• Warren Buffet: Co-Chair
• Dr. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School
• George Boggs, President and CEO, American Association of Community Colleges
• Dan Danner, President and CEO, National Federation of Independent Business
• Glenn Hubbard, Dean, Columbia Business School
• Robert Litan, Vice President for Research and Policy, Kauffman Foundation and Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution
• Marc H. Morial, President and CEO, National Urban League
• Javier Palomarez, President and CEO, United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
• Hilary Pennington of the Gates Foundation
• Thomas S. Robertson, Dean, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
• Leonard Schlesinger, President, Babson College
• Ellen Seidman, Vice President, ShoreBank Corp.
• David J. Skorton, President, Cornell University
• Margaret Spellings, Former Secretary of Education
• Thomas Tierney, Chairman and Co-Founder, The Bridgespan Group

Mr. Buffet is a significant investor of Goldman Sachs. Full disclosures of the other advisors are unknown. None of the members of the Advisory Council contacted would comment as to the level of detail to which they are involved, however we suspect that they are mostly figureheads and not involved in a detailed manner.

To be optimistic, the Goldman Sachs plan to help small businesses is in the early stages and can still be put back on track if the Advisory Council is made aware, which is the main purpose of this Op-Ed. Most of the cash is yet to be allocated.

With job creation and small business assistance priority number one to the country now, can the brightest minds in business get this simple task right? Or, will crony capitalism and puppet board members rule the day and allow Goldman Sachs to issue a $500 Million promise to small business and not deliver? Stay tuned.

Steven Greer, MD: the other guy, not the UFO zealot

Steven Greer, MD, not the Steven M Greer MD UFO zealot found when one Googles “Steven Greer MD”

http://www.youtube.com/user/Batteryparktv#p/u/39/c1mpQbGfxYM