On one of the Village Voice’s blogs, Green Party candidate for mayor of New York City Reverend Billy Talen was interviewed.  It was a lengthy interview that covered the topics of the city council, term limits, Reverend Billy breaking up a “near riot,” and more.

Let’s say you’re taking your program to the city council, and says Christine Quinn says we have to make some adjustments here –

Yetta Kurlander is gonna overwhelm her in the Chelsea district, Christine sold her soul to the devil and I’m sorry, she’s got to go in the desert and pray for 40 days and 40 nights. She has aroused real opposition in her home district. As long as we’re fantasizing, let’s fantasize Yetta in that seat.

Okay, so let’s say you have a sympathetic city council –

In some ways we already do. There’s the strongest rent control conversation going on now than we’ve seen in 15 or 20 years. I don’t know what kind of bill is coming, but you can’t be a public official and not be aware of the eviction-foreclosure epidemic. It reached a fever pitch last year when the cranes were falling on our heads, he had a corrupt agency that was being paid off, and every two or three days a worker would die — retaining walls were falling, it was a tragicomedy in that hyper-development phase and, I believe, Mike Bloomberg’s equivalent of Bush’s Katrina. Remember a year ago, in May, the Mayor assembled a press conference in front of the rubble of a fallen crane and said let’s go for it! Don’t let them stop us! They barely had the bodies out of the rubble — it was a mortal embarrassment.

We have a greatness in this city and it doesn’t come from mayorally building things in to the sky, it doesn’t come from making some people rich. We have here a place where working families live side by side with artists, and they create safe and exciting neighborhoods together.

Where’s the money going to come from?

The big ask for the stimulus plan is medicare relief that I wish they’d give New York… the source of stimulus funds are federal, and to the extent we can influence their expenditure, I would encourage it to go to neighborhoods as opposed to big banks. Bloomberg’s bubble economy has made us all unsafe… The neighborhoods that have been outside of that edge of gentrification and all the forms it takes, the neighborhoods that are free of that invading financial monoculture — those neighborhoods are okay. Their credit unions are accepting deposits and they’re loaning money out…

Bloomberg is aiding and abetting a bubble economy that considers the boroughs and neighborhoods to be a soft colony, a third-world country that you invade with your extracting industries. If you give a dollar bill to FedEx or Kinkos, 50 cents goes away, you can’t follow it. You give a dollar bill to the Source Copy Shop on 9th Street, you see that dollar bill come back into th community — Santo and Margaret, they’re local people, they’ll spend that dollar right there. That’s the magic of neighborhoods — neighborhoods are economies. But they’re not corporations! Corporations have to expand every quarter, and we’ve seen what happens from that: chaos and mayhem.

You were at NYU last week. What happened there?

I was at Gallatin at 715 Broadway, where I was interviewed by Gary Hunter, and then walked to Kimmel and tried to be a moderating influence between the police and the anarchist kids who were intent on shutting down the street — there were some people trapped in tax cabs, I tried to wave ‘em through. There I was, bouncing around in my cobalt blue suit. It was a near riot…

NYU has fallen into an opposition to the neighborhood. They have the corporate model, with billionaires like Tisch, just trying to grow bigger — they should invent a sustainable university.

Read the full thing here.