“Drop Dead City” is located in a category of documentary films that I think as Wonkish, but it is sweeping. The film was produced and directed by Peter Justice and Michael Rohatin, and it revolves around the financial catastrophe that struck New York City in 1975, when the forces that discovered that the city was $ 6 billion of debt. There was no money to pay anyone: firefighters, police, teachers, sewage workers. The city walked directly to the edge of bankruptcy. (This is not an exaggeration.) If New York City was nothing but New York City – if it was a company, family, or even another city – it would be another city – it would be another city – He was The bankruptcy was announced. But after the long logistical war on what to do, the city was considered too big to fail (although it failed, and is horrific).
The title of the movie refers to the famous New York Daily News that continued on October 30, 1975 (“Ford to City: Drop Dead”). President Gerald R. Ford has never these words, but the title appeared after New York representatives went to Washington to meet the Ford administration. They requested a federal rescue plan and were given the cold shoulder. There were complex reasons for this (the top advisers in Ford, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, were a reasons). But that title, 50 years ago, concluded the financial crisis in New York with the axis of legend.
The reason I call “Drop Dead City” is that the film is not a biography and cultural. It is really about money. The more the film follows the money, the more a story of New York – a story with a direct application on today.
In the mid -seventies of the last century, when New York drowned in potential economic ruin swelling, the city was legendary in another way. This was the CBGB and Summer of SAM period, when New York was a dangerous and dangerous famous, when complete sections of it were flammable of neglect. However, in all this deteriorating concrete, there were stray weeds and flowers-artists and those looking for excitement who took on the fold and fear. It became part of the myths in the seventies of the last century that New York City was a wreckage, but a wonderful wreck, an open nerve of a city, a bond of despair and creativity where there was a connection of life. However, for many people who were not a middle -class bohemians, the city has become hell. Hell and It was the power of life. (Just listen to Lou Reed “Dirty Boulevard”.
“Drop Dead City” shows us parts and pieces of that story, but it really relates to the economic engine that was so rusty that it reached a dead end. And you can feel uncomfortable in the pervasive bureaucratic tone of the archiving footage of the film, which are dominated by politicians, bankers and city officials. Next, this is a story of bad relationships, bad shirts, bad scraps, bad master, and bad lighting: New York that Sidney Lumet caught from “SerPICO” and “Dog Day Peend”. The real thing is even ugly. However, this is part of the drama-the scene of all these government squares that put their holy heads that hold it in the beans to withdraw the city from the abyss.
Why did New York become a disaster area?
There was a level of financial inadequacy that has passed for many years: the records are stuffed in a thousand different stairs, and for the notebooks … Well, there was nothing. There were no books.
However, financial chaos do not need hormone. The real problem, a problem that puts “Drop Dead City” in the forefront and the center, however it does not fully deal with the effects of the consequences that New York City was a generous stronghold that overflows the liberal dream. The unions had unusual power, and the city’s workers were well driven, with job security and pensions. Moreover, the city provided a wealth of services to the poor and the middle class. New York was Ur Melting Pot, the City of Migrants embodies a copy of the crowded eastern coast of the American Dream. New York was so liberal that even a Republican mayor, like John F. Lindsay was, in a democratic spirit. The city did not believe in a lower government. She believed in the government that many government took to help its citizens succeed.
This is what happened for years, to the city’s melody spending more money than it took. Everything reached his head when the mayor of Abe Beame was elected. It was a difficult and dry direction that spoke like the Badg and stood at 5’2, “but he knew, since his time as his observation, what is the miserable situation in which the city’s money was, and he wanted to clean it. After it was recruited in tourism, there was new news, there was new news, there was bad news. Religion.
The following is the orgy of preparing the fingers and lowering the budget. Bim’s mistake was! No, the union’s mistake! The first thing that Beame did is to cut the construction projects (Battery Park City, the second metro line), which leaves building workers high and dry. (This would have turned Archie Bunker into Trump.) And when the city began to dispense with its humiliating workers (2000 sewage workers, 2300 firefighters, 15,000 teachers), even they were police officers (5,000 of them), they were unprecedented in the city history, and these workers were suffering from a group deficiency. How can they do this? Get accumulated. Crime statistics have risen.
But there was no money to pay anyone.
“Drop Dead City” draws how those pivotal months from 1975, from spring to November, when a deal was finally concluded, revealed like excitement. Will New York fall out of a cliff? The city had already borrowed its way to forget. The answer cannot be simply … more borrowing. Beame has formed a business squad, a municipal assistance company, known as the Big Mac, which will try to re -financing the city’s debts. Big Mac was presided over by investment banker Felix J. Rohatin, who proved according to the documentary film as a major politician. One of the director’s coach is the son of Rohatin, Michael Rohatin, who may throw this conclusion by skepticism. However, I don’t think it is wrong. Felix Rohatyn was skilled in collecting different aspects together, and in recognizing what was required: a financial solution where everyone – unions, state, federal government – skin.
“Drop Dead City” picks up how an amazing contradiction in the heart of New York City in the mid -twentieth century. She would help her workers and residents, even if he could not. This looks noble, but it raises the issue: How is that sustainable? A way does not want the documentary to go there already. Gerald Ford has never said “Drop Dead”, but he gave New York the brush-even he did not. The federal government came. The same applies to the Teachers Union, led by the strict nuts, who went to the wire refuses to provide the teachers ’pension fund as a way to cover the bond payments in the city – even without his opinion. In some sense, what happened was a high -risk chicken game.
However, there was an ideological war that exploded under it, all of which revolve around the issue of what the government should do. “Drop Dead City” notes that Gerald Ford lost the 1976 presidential election because he was on the wrong side of that equation. New York electoral votes put Jimmy Carter at the top. The film says that Ford’s reprimand in New York cost the presidency.
It is too late, Jimmy Carter’s presidency appears more and more anomalous. Ronald Reagan was elected four years later, with a lesser promise than a government, and you should not be a higher mathematician to extract the line from Rigan’s reduction to the government to the saw of Elon Musk. (Reagan will tell you the romances like David Brooks of the New York Times that these two things are different, but this is part of the conservative illusion “not Trump!” But it is not like this simply the issue of caught the bad notebooks. What the financial crisis in New York, maybe, was a rift in the liberal dream.