The Most (un)American Icons

I was just mentioning this the other day when I was a the Mets game.  Can they still call themsleves american now?

dihard:

Have you seen the recent Budweiser “Great American Lager” commercials? You know, the ones that are oozing with everything American – football, tailgating, the Statue of Liberty, riding motorcycles, playing in a garage band, and, of course, a fat slice of apple pie. They’re trying to remind me that their All American beer is still All American. But is it? I’m pretty sure by now we all know the answer is no - Anheuser Busch was bought out by InBev, the Belgian Brewer. The deal, soon to close, will make the new combined company “Anheuser Busch InBev” the largest beer company in the world.

I’ve read quite a bit about Foreign Direct Investment into our banks, our businesses, and our real estate. Below are just some examples of iconic American brands, buildings, even roads that are not so American.

1. The Chrysler Building – In July, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council’s sovereign wealth fund bought a 90% stake in the Chrysler building for an estimated $800 million. The building management will remain under Tishman Speyer Properties, who owns the remaining 10%. Prior to Abu Dhabi’s purchase, the majority (75%) of the building was owned by TMW, a German real estate fund.
2. Citibank – Remember Prince bin Alwaleed bin Talal? He’s Citigroup’s largest investor, owning about 5% of the firm
3. The Plaza Hotel – The Plaza Hotel, near Central Park, NY, is co-owned by who other than Prince bin Alwaleed bin Talal and Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva’s El-Ad Group. The hotel’s ownership passed through the hands of the Hilton’s and the Trump’s until Trump sold to the partnership for $325 million in 1995.
4. Essex House in Manhattan – This landmark hotel was bought by the Dubai Investment Group in 2005 and is under management by the Dubai based hospitality group, Jumeriah, which operates the only 7-star hotel in the world, the Burj Al Arab in the UAE.
5. 7-Eleven – Yes, 7-Eleven is a subsidiary of the Japanese company Seven & I Holdings. The company faced financial difficulties in the 80s, and was rescued by one of the franchisees in Japan. In the 90s, Seven & I bid for and received a controlling share of the company.
6. The Chicago Skyway- In 2005, the city of Chicago sold a 99-year lease on the eight-mile Chicago Skyway for $1.83 billion to the Skyway Concession Company, a company jointly owned by the Macquarie Infrastructure Group of Sydney, Australia, and the Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte of Madrid, Spain. Chicago used the money to pay off debt and fund road projects.
7. Indiana Toll Road - “The Crossroads of America” is owned by the crossroads of Spain and Australia. It’s also owned by Macquarie Infrastructure Group of Sydney, Australia, and the Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte of Madrid, Spain.
8. Merrill Lynch – The iconic bull down in Battery Park may no longer represent United States’ economic fortitude. In January, ML raised $6.6 billion from the sale of its preferred stock to three foreign investors: Korean Investment Corporation, Japan’s Mizuho Financial Group Inc, and the Kuwaiti Investment Authority.
9. Trader Joe’s – Trader Joe, a manager of Rexall drugs, bought Rexall store chain, changed the name and began offering exotic, environmental, and healthy food. In 1979 ALDI, a German company, bought out the company.
10. Genentech – The largest biotech firm in America is actually owned by the Swiss. In fact, they just made an unsolicited offer to acquire the 44% of the firm that it does not already own for about $44 billion.

So what gives?
This American “Yard Sale” is the largest it’s ever been. Some of our greatest companies, cities, and builders are welcoming investors from around the world. The reason? It’s the economy, stupid. A weakening economy, huge national and local debt, a housing decline, and, of course, our weak dollar enhances other countries’ purchasing power, and positions the US as eager to be purchased. And eager, we are - last year, there were over 2,000 foreign-led acquisitions of US companies in deals worth about $405.4Billion. Foreign-led mergers and acquisitions have increased sixfold in the last five years.

And it’s all good… Foreign investment helps create more income and provides jobs to Americans. It aids financial institutions that may otherwise collapse. It may have kept the dollar from further decline. The increase in capital helps keep interest rates low so that people can borrow money.

… Until it’s bad. Though investment into American assets may be helping us now, what happens when the US turns itself around? Once the economy recovers, the money that we are producing will be going to these foreign investors. US. Economist Joseph Stiglitz said it best “If you were to look at America Inc. as a company… the fraction of America Inc. that is owned by Americans is diminishing.” I guess what goes around comes around..

Las Vegas

The Gothamist Covers my Balloon Project

This one is really credited to Karell —
she told them about it and they were interested enough to write a piece on it!

Check it out

The Balloon Project

Here is a LINK to some of the photos I took. 
Here is a LINK to my art-blog with other projects of ours
(Ours being Scott Albrecht and myself) 

I wanted to take aerial shots over the streets New York so I spent the last few months designing, building, and rethinking of ways to not only get my camera up in the air, but to make it fire some shots when it was up there. 

The idea boiled down to this:  I was going to build a platform for my camera to mount to attaching balloons on one end and a kite reel to the other end. The platform took on a few designs before my friend Josh (an engineering student) redesigned it to make it more efficient with better stability. I cut my platform out of grey presentation board using an Xacto knife and attached any pieces that needed support (like the tray that held the camera) with the same kite string I flew the balloons up with. This was really the longest part of the process since problems with usability kept surfacing and the mount need to be rethought and reconstructed.

Once that was done the next big hurdle was to figure out how to capture the photos when my camera was up in the air.  My initial thought was to use the 30 second self timer feature and try to hoist the balloons up as quick as possible. This meant that I would have needed a lot of upwards pull to get any decent height but that could be expensive buying all those balloons and hard to travel around the city with.  Randomly, I stumbled on a site that had tutorials on how to hack the firmware of my little point-and-shoot camera.  With the help of one of my web developer friends from Vimeo, we loaded this hack as well as a time lapse script onto my memory card.  The software was confusing to navigate at first and caused some problems during the test flight but I soon figured it out and the capabilities were amazing.  It allowed me to set how many photos I wanted my camera to capture and at what intervals I wanted it to fire.

With picture-capturing no longer a problem, it opened up the possibilities of a lot more height.  So the next challenge was to find an easy way to carry around a ton of string (500ft) without it getting all knotted up.  My first plan was to buy a little wooden spool-like kite reel, but after some research I found a heavy duty one from a serious kite store online.  The reel was only $30 and it was able to wind lots of string, really fast.

When all this came together, my friend Josh and I went out, got two 3ft red balloons and tried sending my camera up running the script.  The script wasn’t working properly and the balloons seemed to hit a ceiling around 15/20ft. We quickly researched the script and worked out the kinks as well as bought a dozen more balloons, this time, they were the normal sized balloons.  That was all it took to break the tipping point - the balloons could now go way beyond 15ft so we started snapping shots.  We took photos around Union Sq, Astor Place, and the traffic triangle over on 9th and 3rd.  

The first run of this project had some hurdles but after they were worked out, it was a complete success.  It drew more attention than I thought it would have and everyone would stop and watch as we sent the balloons up.  We ended up talking to a dozen people about my project that day as well as collected a few email address of people we had captured who wanted a copy of their photos. We had a lot of cameras pointed at us as we were preparing to launch so I’ll be checking flickr to see if anyone has posted anything.

We are going to launch again in 2 weeks in Central park and possibly take the balloons on the go through midtown.  We’ll see.   

The Gothamist

The gothamist used this series of photos I took the other day.  That rules

Memos for an old cranky Oil Tycoon