Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce: The New York Crank manages to finish up jury duty without his head exploding

 The old clichés are most assuredly the best clichés. I offer you “The wheels of justice grind slow,” as a flawless example. If you want proof of its flawlessness, just hightail your butt over to any of the courthouses in lower Manhattan and watch almost nothing happening at a majestically sluggish pace.

On the sixth of this month, eleven days ago in case you don’t want to count on your fingers, I showed up in one of the three separate court buildings I’d be entering and exiting in the ensuing two weeks. There was a long line stretching out into the street, because getting into a court building in lower Manhattan is a close approximation to boarding an airliner on a day when hijacking rumors are buzzing around the airport like platoons of rampaging mosquitoes wild with uncontrollable blood lust.

The courthouse airport shuffle

I took off my belt and tried to hold up my pants with my elbows while I took my cell phone, coins, keys and pen and deposited them in a Tupperware tub. Then I shuffled through a metal detector, which had been turned down low enough not to get set off by the fillings in my teeth, and retrieved my stuff just past the court officer with the electronic magic wand.

I spent the next hour or so in a large “jury room,” listening to a court officer drone on about how many perforated places we should find and tear apart on our jury summonses and in which basket on the front desk which part the summons should be deposited. Then they showed us a video that teaches how justice conquers all thanks to selfless jurors, and then let us sit and stew in our own selfless boredom for a while. (The courts do have Wi-Fi, but there’s no secureplace to leave your computer when you shuffle from building to building, floor to floor, and lunch place to court. You just have to lug it around with you all day. I wisely opted to leave mine at home.)

“We just can’t frisk you enough”

Right before lunch, a court officer led us downstairs, across the street, and a block to the south where we entered another court building, with more metal detectors and Tupperware boxes. From there we were led into another jury room, where we sat around for a while. Eventually, my name was among those of 60 potential jurors, who were lined up and sent downstairs to an actual courtroom for possible jury selection in a criminal trial.

It looked like it might be an interesting case. It had to do with crack cocaine. Some dude had sold “more than an ounce” – the dividing line in New York between "doing a little time" and sitting in prison until you rot –to an undercover narc. Almost instantly the jurors started to wonder aloud, to the discomfort of the judge and prosecutor, “Is this an entrapment case?” “How much more than an ounce? A microgram more or a truckload more? Do I have to sit on this jury if I think drugs should be legalized?”

Jurors of indeterminate gender

The judge finally stopped the jury from turning the tables and questioning the lawyers, since that would be like the asylum inmates grilling the psychiatrists. Eventually, the defense lawyer and the prosecutor chose their jury. I wasn’t wanted. Sex evidently played a role in the selection of this particular jury. The lawyers had chosen ten women and two people whose gender appeared undecided.

We were told to go back to the first room we had visited that morning, which meant crossing the street, going up the block, and going through the security line and the metal detectors again.

“If you’re here, go there.

But if you’re there, come here.”

Back in the first cattle pen, the clerk announced that we had blown our chance for a criminal trial and were now about to get shunted to a different court building for a civil trial. Again, we lined up, went downstairs, marched two blocks this time, entered the “Supreme Court” building (which in New York belies its title by conducting jury trials and having two levels of appeal above it.) Next, again having been duly frisked electronically, were told we had an hour for lunch.

Meanwhile, sixty jurors who were in the Supreme Court jury room when we arrived there were sent back across the street to a criminal case. The rule of thumb in New York courts is, wherever you are, you need to go somewhere else.

"Hey, we're close to Chinatown!"

"Fuhgeddaboudid!"

One hour is just enough time not to be able to make it over to one of those great cheap Chinatown eateries, order something exotic, gulp it down, run back to court, and stand in the long security line for yet another frisking. So I ate a bad salad at a close-by bad deli, got back in line to get re-frisked, and returned to the jury waiting room in the not-so-Supreme Court building.

Early that afternoon, I got picked for a jury. This one had to do with a woman who tripped over a safety “shunt board” that covers electrical wires strung across a sidewalk. She tripped on it, took a flop and shattered her patella.

“If you think you’re impatient to get this trial going think of us,” whined one of the lawyers, while examining us to see if we were worthy to decide whose fault the wrecked knee was and how much it was worth. “We’ve been waiting for a trial for three and a half years now.”

Well, if they were in such a hurry to finish up the case, why didn’t they just settle it three and a half years ago? During the trial, I’d find out why.

“I want everything.”

“You’ll get nothing.”

The utility company that had placed the shunt board that the woman tripped on took the position, in effect, that “She shoulda watched where she was goin,’” and that therefore, they had no responsibility and owed her nothing. True, they had provided not an iota of extra light at night near the sign on a dark-ish block. No, there were no visual cues that the bump in the sidewalk was coming, such as orange cones or stanchions. But she shoulda watched where she was goin’. Hey, this is Noo Yawk!

The woman with the busted knee claimed no days of lost work, is not confined to a bed, wheel chair or a walker, presented no medical expenses (she’s presumably insured), demonstrated no loss of income or ability to make a living, paced the corridors during breaks and crossed her legs in the back of the courtroom. She complained only that she had some ongoing knee pain and that she could no longer take long energetic walks every night with her husband, (thus destroying her lifestyle, one supposes.) Then, perhaps fatally, she declared during her testimony, “Well, I feel I’m entitled to compensation.”

Entitled? Bad choice of language. If you live in one of the fancier ‘burbs and have a husband who testifies he’s a tax and estates lawyer, it’s not smart to claim entitlement in front of a six-person jury where two of the women are working-class Hispanics and everybody’s losing work listening to your complaints and demands.

Especially not considering that, after the jury was chosen, the trial was postponed for three days by one of the participants, and further into it, postponed another day by the judge.

“Can’t we just give her money

without somebody being at fault?”

But if you think the use of “entitled” blew some minds on the jury, you should have seen the shock when the plaintiff’s lawyer wrote “$500,000” on a big art pad with magic marker and suggested to women who deal with the daily aches and pains of their work for a salary less than a tenth of the award he wanted, that half a million bucks would be the only fair compensation to his victimized client.

Back in the jury room, it was chaos. None of us thought the pain and suffering caused by the injury was worth more than 50 grand, much less 500 grand. At least not on the basis of the evidence presented to us. And some wanted to give less. One woman, buying the electric utility lawyer’s reasoning, wanted to pay nothing because the plaintiff shoulda watched where she was goin’. Another wanted to award some money, but didn’t want to declare the electric utility culpable of negligence. It took nearly superhuman effort, and a not inconsiderable amount of time, to explain to her, over and over again, why you couldn’t give somebody money unless the other side was negligent. I mean, if you want proof that our schools are failing us when it comes to simple reasoning, just go sit in a jury room.

As the deliberations droned on, I kept hoping the lawyers in the courtroom would settle. “Maybe we can force them to settle,” I said sotto voce to a fellow juror. “We can send out two questions to the judge: 1. How many zeros are there in a gazillion dollars? And 2. Can we order the plaintiff to pay the utility’s legal fees?”

In the end, I think both parties got what they deserved. The jury put the utility on notice that while “Hey, jerk, watch where ya goin!” is a familiar New York idiom, that attitude might one day, although not with this jury, start costing them some serious money. And that maybe they ought to think about shining more light on those shunt boards. Or maybe just decorate them with reflective tape.

And the trip-and-fall lady and her negligence lawyer get to divvy up the 25 grand for pain and suffering and three and a half years of legal representation, however they agree to do it. Maybe next they can sue each other. Meanwhile, the lawyer with the watch-where-you’re-goin’ attitude has another lost case on his tally sheet. Next time maybe both sides will settle.

I coulda gone to Paris

As for me, I’m self-employed in a business where unless I can commit in advance to assignments, I can’t get them. While I spent only spent six days in court, those days were spread over two full weeks, thanks to the four days total of postponement. The state compensated me, $40 a day for the days I was in court only. I’ll never know how much daily income I lost.

Meanwhile, I had been through the courthouse metal detectors more so many times, I could have taken several airline trips to Paris.

As the jury exited the courtroom, I could nearly feel the glares from both parties burning into our backs. Oh yeah! We left nobody feeling happy.

Let me tell you jokers something. If don’t like the result you got, settle this crap on your own next time.

Blogger on jury duty. Come back again tomorrow. Maybe I'll be free. Maybe not. Go know.

Right you are, Mayor Bloomberg. More stop-and-frisks mean fewer crimes. And if we put everybody in concentration camps, there’d be fewer crimes still.

The scandals growing out of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policy grow larger and more outrageous every day.

In the Bronx, an Afro-American medical student named David Floyd got stopped and frisked twice, once for being black while walking, a second time for having the temerity to help a neighbor who had been locked out.

An organization called the Center for Constitutional Rights, after interviewing stop-and-risk victims – “victims” is the only proper term for most of them – made this finding:

A number of people interviewed by CCR stated that during the course of being stopped by the NYPD they were inappropriately touched, sexually harassed, and/ or sexually assaulted. Several interviewees described having their genitals touched or groped by the NYPD during searches and/or were told or forced by the NYPD to remove their clothes in public. Speaking out against inappropriate touching can lead to a charge of resisting arrest. These experiences often leave people feeling disrespected and violated. 

And the victims have a right to be scared. You can be innocent of anything, and spend weeks and months going back and forth to court, after being arrested on a trumped up charge after a stop-and-frisk search. Your life and your future can be ruined even if a judge eventually throws out your arrest as unwarranted. You can lose your job (and quite a few people do.)  Few companies want to hear that their employees have been absent because they’ve been arrested. You can even lose your homeless shelter pass for not being there because you were being held by a cop trying to make quota.

A whistle-blower policeman named Pedro Serrano, now in deep trouble for getting fed up with the system that forced him to stop, frisk and sometimes arrest innocent people, tape-recorded his supervisors giving clearly illegal orders and suggestions. 

Bronx NYPD officer Pedro Serrano taped his supervisor telling him, in a recording that was introduced as evidence in court, “The problem was what? Male blacks. And I told you that at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this: male blacks 14 to 20.”

And then there are stop-and-frisk incidents that lead to sheer, unwarranted brutality, like this one:

My jeans were ripped. I had bruises on my face. My whole face was swollen. I was sent to the precinct for disorderly conduct. I got out two days later. The charges were dismissed. At central booking, they threw out the charge. No charge. I felt like I couldn’t defend myself, didn’t know what to do. No witnesses there to see what was going on. I just wish someone was there to witness it. I felt like no one would believe me. I couldn’t tell anyone. I kept it in till now... I still am scared.

You’d think that anyone with a sense of justice, or even a dim inkling of basic morality, would be outraged by this. But not Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is all but commiting verbal assault against those who support moves – from court actions to proposed legislation – to limit these stop-and-frisks and to have an Inspector General review cases. Hey, the U.S. Army has an IG. The State Department has one. So do numerous other Federal departments and agencies. But heaven forbid we should have impartial inspectors in New York City government. The police department and the mayor insist they should be above the law. Why?

In what was described as “a 45 minute tirade” by the Huffington Post – a rant amplified by other statements made he to TV cameras in New York City ­– Bloomberg blasted the enemies of police state-ism.

"Make no mistake, this is a dangerous piece of legislation and anyone who supports it is courting disaster," Bloomberg said, addressing a crowd of dozens of uniformed police officers on the second floor of police headquarters."If you end street stops looking for guns, there will be more guns on the streets, and more people will be killed. It’s that simple."

No Mayor, only a simpleton would think it’s that simple, and the fact that you did your preaching in a roomful of the converted is almost prima facie evidence that you know damn well it’s not that simple. 

What you’re doing is the equivalent of bombing and strafing the entire Boston Marathon – runners, innocent bystanders and the press – to kill some bombers “before they do any harm.” Your cops aren't looking for guns. They're searching people whom they know perfectly well aren't carrying guns. Your cops are looking to make their stop-and-frisk and arrest quotas.

Some facts and figures you don’t want to hear, Mayor:

▪                In 88 percent of these encounters—4.4 million—the person detained was doing nothing wrong.
▪                Nearly 90 percent of those stopped were Black or Latino.
▪                Only 1.9 percent of those frisked in 2011 had a weapon.
          In 2002, there were less than 100,000 stop-and-frisk stops; in 2011 there were 685,724—a 600 percent increase.

The truth is, for seven years or so I lived three blocks from the mayor’s private mansion, which is located on East 79^th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenue, in New York’s richest zip code, 10021. In all that time I saw not one of these over half-a-million stop-and-frisks, simply because they don’t happen to white people in rich white neighborhoods.

If they did, if the teenager children of bankers and bond brokers and corporate moguls got stopped and frisked and felt up and brutalized and busted on the way to prep-school, the way it happens to kids in other boroughs and parts of Manhattan on the way to high school, the practice would stop in a millisecond.

Yes, a reasonable ­– I said reasonable – suspicion of illegal possession of a weapon, or of possession of stolen property or hard drugs ought to be investigated. But the cops aren’t acting on their suspicions, based on the search victim's "walking in a furtive manner," whatever that means. The cops are just trying to make their numbers. And the mayor and the police commissioner know that, perfectly well.

Kim Jong-Who? Still focused on a Boston terrorist bomb after a week, our memory-starved news media all but forget the threat of an A-Bomb. Quick – somebody run out for Ritalin!

So there we were, almost the entire world full  of us poor humans, sitting on tenterhooks wondering whether Kim Jong Un,  the North Korean bad boy with the worse haircut, would blow the world up.

Morning, noon and night you could turn on your TV or your Internet browser, or smartphone, or pick up your favorite print news medium, and the story would smack you in the face:

Kim Jong-Un was threatening to “incinerate” us.  He had an A-bomb. He had an A-bomb small enough to mount on a missile. He had a missile that could reach South Korea, or Japan, or Hawaii, or maybe even the West Coast. Or he didn't, depending on what you were reading. He was forcing South Korea to want a missile of their own. But in any case,  he was clearly a big fat menace.

Commentary galore! 

And ho boy! Did we ever get opinions! We should negotiate with him. We should not negotiate with him. We should take him out before he takes anyone else out. We should enlist China’s help. We should this. We should that. The talking heads were blabbering a mile a minute. The front pages were full of bad haircut photographs. The op-eds were generously sprinkled with fatwas aimed at the fat boy.

Worse, I suspect that half our nation was really, deeply, intensely worrying not about the bomb, but about who the damn kid’s barber is, and how to make sure we avoid ever getting a haircut in even so much as the same hemisphere as North Korea.

But even if Kim Jong-Un turns out to be nothing more than a bad joke (last heard from, he was begging food from Mongolia; the diplomatic equivalent of looking for a not-too-rotten banana in a dumpster) he’s the kind of joker you really need to keep a close eye on. Which is why I’m surprised he suddenly dropped off the front pages and even most of the back pages, not to mention most of the blogs, e-news websites and twitteria generators of the United States.

Well, to be fair, we had an horrific act of terrorism in Boston, with awful consequences, and it’s no surprise the news media focused entirely on that for a few days. But hey, the bombing was Monday, April 18^th, and a week later the news is still all Chechen  pressure cooker bombers and the equivalent of the speech every police beat reporter has heard since the dawn of moveable type from the mothers of murderous juvenile delinquents.  ("He was a good boy, my Mikey. He was such a cute baby. He was never in no trouble before. He always made his own bed. He was at the top of his class in continuation school. Somebody must of framed him.") 

Meanwhile, there has been virtually nothing on North Korean atomic bombers, who could do a lot more damage than you can ever do with gunpowder and a pressure cooker.

We interrupt this drivel to

bring you  more drivel

Still intently shoveling through the dregs of the Boston story, the news reporters and editors are now focusing the Tsarniev brothers’ mother’s state of denial and insistence that the bombing never happened.  And besides, she’s saying, it was all really a plot by the U.S. government or somebody to frame her sons. Hey, stop the presses! The mother of a criminal is in denial about her son’s guilt!

What is it with our wayward news media? Have they suffered a massive attack of attention deficit disorder? Or is it not ADD but amnesia, contracted by constantly bumping into each other while waiting for the next Boston press conference to start? Or is it a pandemic of Institutional Alzheimer’s Disease?

I’d accuse the news folks of being too dumb to hold two thoughts in mind at the same time. But the walk-and-chew-gum theory doesn’t really work. Unfortunately, these news folks are doing many things at once. They no longer can just report. Kind of like the old Hoover vacuum cleaner slogan (“It Beats While It Sweeps While it Cleans”) these guys have to report, while they blog, while they tweet. Otherwise I’d be taking up a public collection to send Ritalin to the press.

No, I blame the editorial high honchos, who must assume that we’re all too dumb to read, or to watch two things in the one day, and thus don’t bother to tell us more than one story at a time.

Unfortunately, this will keep up either until we have another mass shooting in some suburban town, or until Kim Jong-Un incinerates Tokyo. And at that point it will suddenly become:  “The Boston What?”

The cyclists, the drivers, lives interrupted – and then the ghosts

Photograph by Bob Castro

It’s funny – or in this case sad and not-so-funny – how the endless variety of people, places, and events in New York can change the way a day starts out.

I had joined one of the city’s several bicycle clubs this past Sunday morning for a no-stress ride on a sunny day. At some point in the early afternoon, our for-pleasure ride merged with a ride of far more serious intent.

An organization called Ghost Bikes had organized several somber "Rides of Silence" in the city to remember some of the more than 100 New York  City riders who had been killed in accidents with cars and trucks during the past year or so. In a city as big and spread out as New York, there couldn’t be just one ride, I discovered. There are too many places where riders have been struck. And too many dead.

So I ended up with a group that began by pumping up a rather steep hill in the borough of Staten Island to a spot just a past the beautiful and almost bucolic hilltop campus of little Wagner College. It was there that on February 12, 2012, a student named R.J. Tillman (that was him, at right) had left the library around 9 p.m. after studying, to head back on his bicycle to where he was living. 

Somehow, on the steep hill, a black SUV managed to hit him so hard that one of his sneakers flew off. This may not have been the first time the SUV’s driver had been in an accident, since police reported that the car’s front grill was missing. Or perhaps R.J. was struck so hard that the grill was smashed off. It's hard to know for sure because this was a hit-and-run

Ghost Bikes, which is now active not only in the U.S. and Canada but also in  26 countries from  Cyprus to Singapore, had erected a simple memorial for R.J. It’s a steel post to which a spray-painted white bicycle has been chained, and above the bicycle a sign commemorating the student’s death.

The ghost bikers brought flowers to insert in the spokes of the memorial bicycle. R.J.’s parents, who had traveled here from Syracuse, New York, a distance of 247 miles, brought something more heartbreaking: his ashes.

A solemn young woman who was leading the ride and who gave her name only as Jackie read a brief memorial service. R.J.’s parents, grim but stoic, stood by. When it was his parents’ turn to speak, his mother produced the box of ashes. She said she hadn’t been ready to do this the previous year, but now she wanted to leave some of R.J.’s remains at the place where he was killed. She invited others to spread his ashes with her.

It was hard for some of the bystanders to stay completely composed. Imagine: you raise a son and proudly send him off to college full of high hopes and great expectations. Then, suddenly, he's dead. Grieving with R.J's parents would have been enough for one day, but from there we bicycled on to 23^rd Street in Manhattan, just off Fifth Avenue. Here, on January 4^th of this year, a lovely woman named Jean Malizia, had gone to pay some bills.

At 58, Jean had been working hard and for many years to better herself. She started when she was 16, beginning as a waitress. She later became a bartender, then a cab driver, and then discovered her true calling – helping, caring for, comforting others. She had been studying nursing and was about to take her RN exams. That was Jean, at right.

But one day at 12:20 in the afternoon, she stepped into the street with her bicycle and was killed by a garbage truck from a private carting company. Her fiancé wrote:

The report said the truck was pulling out and clipped her; not true; he ran her over twice. There were no charges made and the driver was issued a ticket for failure to have a fire extinguisher in the truck…really?

Jean’s fiancé reported that the allegedly “clipped” woman was alive for 10 minutes under the truck’s wheels. And as for the driver, “on a bright, sunny day he did not see a 5’8” blonde woman with a bright red bike.” 

There was nothing for us to do but distribute the flowers and contemplate her finacé's skepticism.

Jean's story was read to us in front of the white ghost bike chained to a pole in honor of Jean. Her family stood by, fighting hard and not always successfully to hold back their tears.

One wonders about the police officer or officers who “investigated” the tragedy and decided that a woman lying dying with the wheels of a garbage truck on top of her had merely been “clipped,” and that the driver’s only misdemeanor was not having a fire extinguisher. A New York City cyclist and writer named Richard Rosenthal has wryly observed that in police reports, the bicycle almost inevitably strikes the motor vehicle, rarely the other way around.

Forgotten in all this is that the victims of carelessly driven cars and trucks are not only the cyclists, but also the cyclists' mothers, fathers, brothers, husbands, wives, children and fiancées.

It isn’t only some cops who sometimes have a flippant attitude toward bicycle fatalities. It’s the person in the street, and the person behind the wheel, too. Drivers resent the slower moving bikes, or the necessity of going around them. One driver out in the Hamptons, furious that a cyclist in front of him had slowed him down, once angrily told me, “People shouldn’t be allowed to ride bicycles around here. They’re just toys.”

No sir. A bicycle is a simple, relatively cheap, and pollution free machine for getting around. Your Lamborghini Adventador LP 700-4 is a toy. 

New York City Councilman Dan Garodnik doesn’t seem to care. Not for an unfair glitch in tax laws that screws middle class homeowners. Not for non-profits. Not for anything of consequence.

I’ve made it a practice since I began writing this blog not to bother with political smallfry. I’ve had my say about a president or two. I’ve taken on the Mayor of New York several times. But an inconsequential member of the New York City Council?

Well this time, yeah. And maybe more like this in the future now that I’ve started. Because ultimately, a certain number of crummy councilmen become crummy congressmen, crummy senators, or crummy mayoral candidates. Best to try nipping them in the bud. So first off, a note to Garodnik’s colleagues. If I come after you, it’s because Dan Garodnik inspired it.

What started this all, more than a month ago, was a three-part e-mail to Gorodnik. The most important part had to do with a messed up revision of the city’s real estate tax laws, which left the middle class holding the bag for the very rich. I wrote:

I was surprised and annoyed to learn that tax abatements will be discontinued for New York cooperative apartment shareholders who are not using their apartments as their primary residences. 

While my own apartment is my primary (and only) residence, the building I live in is full of small studio apartments. Since studios are not appropriate for families or most couples, the only way to create a market for these apartments is to allow parents to purchase them for occupancy by their children, or for "grownups" to use these as pied-a-terres. 

The problem is, like most New York co-ops, our middle-class building takes the rebates and applies them to our operating budget. When you exclude parent owners and pied-a-terres, you in effect reduce the rebate that all of us are enjoying in the form of lower maintenance, through application of the rebates to our building's operating budget. 

I've previously lived in Park Avenue co-ops where there were no pied-a-terres or parent purchasers. Those far wealthier buildings will continue to enjoy full rebates while buildings like mine, with smaller, less-expensive apartments will not. 

So congratulations – the City Council has just joined the far right wing screw-the-middle-class movement. I wonder whether you can tell me if any member of the city council even considered this possibility when you were re-engineering the tax rebate program?

As I’ve already suggested, Gorodnik is very small potatoes. The heroic-looking photograph above, pirated from his website, shows him fearlessly daring to stand up and challenge one of the world’s most powerful and dangerous threats to western civilization, if not to all humanity: confusing parking signs in New York.

To be fair, he has also mounted a challenge to something that actually matters – the nasty habit employers have of running credit checks on job applicants. But from the floor of the City Council chamber here, his effort to ban credit checks on job applicants stands about as much chance of having a real impact on corporate hiring practices as a pea shooter aimed at Mars has at kicking up a dust storm.

As for the real concerns of Dan Garodnik’s constituents? Well don’t count on him caring. The other day, I sent an e-mail to his press aide. Or at least to person listed on his website as “press secretary,” one David Kimball-Stanley. I said in an e-mail: 

Dear Mr. Kimball-Stanley,

A month and a day ago, I wrote to Councilman Garodnik via his website about three matters:

• Why he doesn't publish his own e-mail address on his website (although he publishes a link to yours), forcing people who wish to write to him to use a website form, creating more complexity than necessary.

• A complaint on how the elimination of tax rebates for co-op apartments used as pieds-a-terre or bought by parents for their children penalized not only those tenant-shareholders, but also others in the same building.

• An appeal on behalf of a nonprofit, volunteer organization, Big Apple Greeter, detailing what the release of $5,000 in discretionary funding to this organization could do economically for the city and for Councilman Garodnik's own district. 

Again, that was a month and a day ago. I have received no response. I saved the text of my note to Councilman Garodnik… And as you can see, I wrote, "I would be very much interested in your response to each of the matters mentioned above, and would consider publishing your responses (or lack of them) on my blog, http://TheNewYorkCrank.blogspot.com, which  has had, as of this writing, 166,799 readers since I began publishing it."

I'm on the verge of doing just what I said I'd do. If you, as the councilman's press officer, or the councilman himself, can get back to me by noon tomorrow with either Councilman Garodnik's response or an explanation as to why he hasn't responded in the past month, I would appreciate that. Otherwise I will feel free to write an article featuring Councilman Garodnik's unresponsiveness in the unabashedly blunt manner that befits a blog called The New York Crank.

Not that I need to remind you, but the Internet is forever.

I had hoped that a press secretary, accustomed to responding on a dime to people covering breaking news, or at least accustomed to doing so when he feels like it, would get back to his boss’s constituent, who hadn’t received a reply in a month and a day.

Silly me. If the Councilman doesn’t give enough of a damn about an economic injustice, or about a nonprofit organization that’s doing good for his city, or about the difficulty his constituents have sending him an e-mail, why should the man’s press secretary give a damn either?

From where I sit, it looks to me like the Councilman rises only to those occasions that might generate some favorable publicity for him, such as girding his loins and wading into pitched battle against those confusing parking signs.

But if one of the eighty-year old widows in my building is overpaying on her rent because a revision in the tax law takes money away from her and in effect hands it over to a Park Avenue hedge fund billionaire, she can go rot. And if you want to write to him about it, lotsa luck finding his e-mail address.

This guy needs to get voted out of office and sent back to a law firm where he can go chase some ambulances.

It’s not enough to redistribute the wealth. We’ve also got to redistribute the work.

I was a college student early in the second half of the last century when I decided that a fellow student had gone stark, raving bonkers.

“I’ve been reading up on something called automation,” she said, “and I’ve learned a day is coming when it will be a privilege to work.”

Actually, it sounded even crazier than you might guess if you could remember the pleasant ethos of almost-fully-employed America in 1957. It sounded crazy not only because the notion that it would be a privilege to work seemed inconceivable, but also because she had a quirk of speech that conjured up images of Elmer Fudd. She said it something like this: “I’ve been weading up on something cawed awtomation, and I’ve wearned a day is coming when it wiw be a priviwedge to work.”

[Note to my friend and fellow former college mate Buce: Yes, it was the same woman who once told you, “I want a man to make my awm feew wike a piece of cown.”]

Where's the 35-hour week

now that we need it?

Not many years later, I heard futurists talking about essentially the same thing, and the coming of the 35 hour work week. Which also sounded crazy at the time. But that was before computers were commonplace and the Internet was invented. [Note: the 35 hour work week did happen, but in France.] 

In retrospect, maybe a 35-hour week isn’t such a bad idea. And maybe it would be even better if it were a 24-hour work week. 

Think of it. With the work week cut nearly in half, we’d be able to re-employ millions of unemployed Americans,  – doing part of the jobs that currently are being done by only one overworked person, not two with bearable work loads. The new work force might include students, just out of school and carrying hefty college loan obligations, who presently can’t find work even as Starbucks baristas. And it might include laid-off Americans in their 50s and early 60s, who are deemed “too old” by human resources hacks to be re-employable, even though some in Congress want to raise the retirement age to 68, or 70, or worse.

But wouldn’t a 25- or 35-hour work week that mean a huge slash in productivity per worker? And if so, how would the loss get paid for?

Yes, it would mean a big productivity cut. And how to pay for it is indeed a big question.

I was scratching my head over that one, until the proxy vote solicitations for the stocks in my retirement funds started coming in the mail. They asked me for  my "advisory" vote (meaning they'll just ignore it) on, among other things, how senior officers get paid.

How the money for shorter work weeks

gets siphoned off by senior corporate officers

One CEO makes a $2,000,000 salary which represents 20 percent of his earnings, which come to slightly in excess of $10,000,000 a year (That's ten million bucks. A year.) when bonuses, stock grants, options, retirement benefits, and other perks from “financial planning” to airplanes get factored in. Another one makes only $1.5 million in salary, but gets $50,000,000 a year in extra "incentives" – and on, and on, CEO after CEO, ad nauseum.

And you thought you’d be well off, if only you could win the big Powerball lottery?

Then there are the presidents, executive vice-presidents, chief financial officers and other C-suite officers, themselves pulling down annual remuneration in the multu-millions. Why?

"Retain" shmetain

The corporate proxy statements always say the nearly obscene pay is necessary to “attract and retain talent.” Talent for what? For firing people, shipping jobs overseas, or simply not rocking the boat? Real talent doesn’t demand that kind of money. Can you imagine the late Steve Jobs refusing to get out of bed because he wasn’t permitted to earn over, say, $300,000 a year? Or Thomas Edison, a century before him? Hey, when you can get a five-star general to risk his life on the battlefield for relative peanuts, not to mention a a private in our volunteer army, why do CEOs need ten, or twenty, or fifty million bucks a year before they can haul their sorry posterior fundaments out of bed.

"Align" shmalign

Almost always, the proxy statements, or I prefer to call them misstatements, will say the staggering bonuses and other "performance awards" are necessary “to align the interest of the CEO with the interests of the stockholders.” That is a lie because if a CEO or other senior officer is not working in a way that is in the interests of the stockholders, he ought to get dumped, same as he himself will dump a $15-an-hour peon who is not acting in the interests of the stockholders.

Remember, all the money that is going into the overpaid officers’ pockets would otherwise, under current laws, either go to the stockholders (that’s real stockholder interests) or get reinvested in growing the company and hiring more and better employees.

The truth is, most real talent – the talent that richly deserves to get rich – isn’t doing it for the money. They’re doing it for the emotional, and aesthetic, and popular feedback. Or for because they’re pushed by an unexplainable internal drive to make a company better, make it more beautiful, make it more functional, make the world change. Or just the urge to be the boss.

Bought consultants

Alas, “impartial consultants,” who are paid only with the direct or implicit approval of the CEO, who nearly always also chairs the Board of Directors...These consultants get hired to determine what the CEO's salary should be. And unless executive salaries continually escalate, the consultants will quickly be out of work. So guess what’s going to happen to executive salaries, year, after year, after year? And guess whose pay check or dividend check the money is coming out of?

On the other hand, if we had a law that either limited executive salaries, bonuses, stock awards and fringe benefits or taxed away every penny after the half million dollar mark, there’d be a lot more money to pour into new jobs while shortening the work week. And that would plow a lot more money into the economy, instead of letting it sit in some Fortune 500 CEO’s bank account. Which would mean prosperity for all. Or nearly all.

Don’t just redistribute the wealth. Redistribute the work, too.

You don’t want to cheat death? You think it’s somehow immoral? Then drop dead.

You know this country is heading straight down the toilet when a hospital advertising slogan, designed to encourage better public awareness of what people can do to improve their own health and extend their lives, gets pounded into oblivion by the religious right.

Reuters is reporting that this is exactly what happened in Gastonia, North Carolina, where the Caromont Regional Medical Center was forced to drop its advertising slogan, “Cheat Death,” by political hacks kowtowing to religious crazies and know-nothings.

According to the Reuters report by Colleen Jenkins, calls were coming in from ministers and religious leaders “who thought the term was blasphemous,”  a county commissioner explained. The commissioner is also on the hospital’s board of directors.

There had been plans for the hospital to partner with athletic clubs and restaurants to offer “cheat death” workouts and healthy menu options. But hey, that might contradict "God's plan for you." You know what plan I'm talking about. The one where you die at the age of 60, coughing, spitting blood, and gasping for air thanks to lung cancer. And that would be only a few months after they amputate all the toes on your right foot, along with your left leg, thanks to diabetes. I won't even get into that paralyzing stroke.

The hospital is hunting around to find another way to get its message across. But don’t count on it having nearly the impact of “cheat death.”

Maybe the religious leaders would prefer that you “assist death.” Go stuff your face with fries and lard while you sit in front of the tee-vee. And while you're at it, smoke a few packs of cigarettes every day. Isn’t that exactly what God wants you to do, before you grab your automatic rifle and, avoiding any mental health assistance the hospital might offer you, blow away a few dozen children who would otherwise be “cheating death?”

Morons!  

Have a real nice cry. It's good for you.

And thanks to Comrade Misfit of Earthbound Misfit, the blog that called my attention to this story, called The Teddy Bear Incident.

Just one observation, if I may: there was a time when Americans, even corporate Americans did the kind of stuff that's in the Teddy Bear story as a matter of course. In fact, when I was about five years old, I had friends, still young enough to wear short pants, who deliberately got on the subway and got lost, then walked up to a policeman and reported themselves missing, just they'd get taken to the precinct house where the cops would go out and buy them ice cream. Yup, that was when the only people who couldn't create outrage and total opprobrium by gaming the system were five year olds, and when people at big companies answered the phone and tried to help callers with their problems.

But you're probably not old enough to remember any of this. And your congressional representative probably calls it Socialism.

Everything you always wanted to know about the banking disaster in Cyprus but were afraid to ask

Usually, obscenity is discouraged here at the New York Crank and profanity, while sometimes permitted in small doses, is tightly regulated.

But recently, we found the fellow below, who is even crankier than we are. He seems, in the midst of a meltdown tjat I encourage you to watch, to have performed a thoroughgoing analysis of the situation in Cyprus, the Eurocurrency nations, and even England where, evidently, there will always be a pound. His rant has been floating around the Internet for a few weeks now. But if you miraculously haven't seen it yet, stop everything and watch. And even if you have seen it, stop everything and watch anyway.

WARNING: This video explains, in the highly learned vernacular of a London cabbie, what's wrong with the world, the one percenters, the banks, the governments and the universe. Shoo the children out of the room, strap yourself tightly into your seatbelt and launch the video below.

So long (I hope for only a little while) Soledad O’Brien. And please, please don’t stop doing what you were doing.

I was shaving this morning when, from the next room, I heard Soledad O’Brien say farewell on her morning CNN show. Her gig there is over.

You barely needed a pulse to be aware, for several weeks, that it was coming. It had been all over the news. But for just a minute I turned off my electric razor to listen. The emotional sensation was something like squeezing the hand of an old friend who is about to be wheeled into a room down the corridor for neurosurgery. Will she survive?  Will what makes Soledad uniquely Soledad survive? Will she resume what she was doing somewhere else?

As you might gather from this, I like her, although to tell you the truth, I grew to like her slowly, and perhaps even a bit grudgingly.

She had been less than a major player at NBC, where I’d occasionally catch her and surf past her. When she showed up on CNN, sometime back in 2005, I was underwhelmed.

Her voice sounded squeaky to me. Perhaps something sexist still lingered in my own verge-of-dotage view of the world. But what I thought is, “They can’t be serious. She’s a minor player who sounds like Minnie Mouse.”

Minnie Mouse indeed! As she proved, interview after interview, she was the mouse that roared. No, I take that back. She was truth’s tiger. Just take a look at this interview (below) with John Sununu, in the role of a Romney Campaign propagandist, during the last election

Among all the people who conduct interviews on television, O’Brien is the only one I can think of who regularly pushed back against the baloney and unabashed falsehoods that political spinmeisters too often get away with. Others made an effort to do this on CNN and other networks, too, but particularly against seasoned pros who lie for a living, the efforts have been mostly puny.

On the other hand, trying to get a lie past Soledad O’Brien must be like trying to throw a pork chop past a starving hyena.

She clearly did her homework before each interview. And when the politicians threw out their fastball lies, she caught them and threw them right back at the politicians. Sometimes they’d ignore her contradictions and try to talk over her. She wouldn’t put up with it. She kept at the liars, confronting them with what the real facts were.

That’s just the opposite of what most news interviewers appear to be doing these days, letting the lies sail into the camera and also into the public consciousness. Too many interviewers, either under-briefed or under-aggressive, simply move on to the next question somebody has listed for them to ask.

O'Brien's morning competition couldn’t, or didn’t stop their interview subjects from lying. Matt Lauer, for example, doesn't seem to know a straight-shooter from a curveball pitcher. At least, not that I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I've asked myself, 'Where in the world is Matt Lauer?" not when he was doing one of his travel features, but when he was doing studio interviews. Even some of the “serious” Sunday morning interviewers like Bob Schieffer have either let the lies fly by like floating creampuffs, or offered such agreeably gentle questioning of what his guests said that you could easily miss that there was reason to be dubious..

Evidently, Jeff Zucker, the infotainment executive who was behind the Today Show for many years before moving to CNN, has something else in mind for CNN. I am not pleased, although not ready to beat Soledad’s replacement into the mud before she even starts, as at least one blogger has. Let’s at least give Kate Bolduan a chance before we kick and stomp her.

That said, I suspect Soledad will be hard to replace. The truth needs to be respected, and Soledad is among the few broadcast news interviewers who unequivocally know how to respect truth with tenacity.

“The bankers have rioted again, Joeren. We must punish the poor to make a horrible example."

Never trust a Dutchman named Jeroen, Or even a Dutchman who uses the alternative spelling of Joran. Hans? He’s fine. Ditto Joop, Jan, Bastien, Laurens and Maartin.

But when you get to a Jeoren or Joran, watch your back! Not to mention your neck. And your pocketbook.

First there was Joran van der Sluit, who in all probability murdered Natalie Halloway on the Caribbean Dutch island of Aruba. And even if he didn’t, according to an interview he gave (and later retracted) with Greta Van Susteren, he sold Halloway into sexual slavery.

Van der Sluit may have gotten away with that one, but before you know it he was arrested, tried and convicted in Peru on charges of robbing and killing another young women.

Now we have Jeroen Dijsselbloem, a Dutch financial type who heads up the Eurozone finance ministers. Kindly Mr. Dijsselbloem suggeseted, according to an article in Reuters, that when European banks begin to fail, “euro zone officials would turn to the bank's shareholders, bondholders and uninsured depositors to contribute to its recapitalization.”

He didn't say a word about clawing back a nickel from the money launderers (in the case of Cypress) or their co-conspirators, the bankers, who helped create the problem. In other words, we must punish the innocent and the poor by confiscating their money to atone for the sins of the rich.

Please understand that, at least the way I plough my way through the news reports, most of the depositors weren’t necessarily guilty of anything more malfeasant than putting their paychecks into their checking accounts so they cold pay their rent and grocery bills. Ditto most of the shareholders and bondholders, I must assume, were simply making investments. Although some segments of each category might be complicit in a bank failure (for example, there might be foreign money launderers who are also depositors, or shareholders who elected directors who chose the CEO) the really bad guys are the bankers and money launderers who participated in these fiascos, most recently the fiacso in Cypress.

You'd think you’d want to punish those guys. Oh wait a second! You say they’re very rich and powerful and you don’t want to mess with them? Nevermind then. Decapitate the wretched poor! If you don't, they'll probably only reproduce anyway.

POP QUIZ ON THUGGERY

One of these guys is Jeroen, the other is Joran. One of them assaults young women, sometimes kills them, and may have sold one into sexual slavary. The other assaults bank depositors to confiscate part of their savings, which helps to kill national economies and stock market gains, ruining everyone's retirement dreams while punishing the innocent. For ten points of extra credit, determine which is which and write an essay explaining how you arrived at your decision. 

WARNING: The order in which these photographs was placed may constitute a trick question. 

Or maybe not.

Sociopaths, vandals, break-in artists and The Atlantic Wire

 

The Atlantic Wire, the online publication of a magazine I once venerated, has leaped to the defense of Matthew Keys, 26 years old, who has been fired from his editorial job at Reuters in New York after an indictment. The indictment charges that Keys hacked the Los Angeles Times website with help from the infamous hacking group Anonymous.

And there was a bit more to it than that, according to a Reuters story:

The indictment charged Keys with three criminal counts, including conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer. The indictment said that he promised to give hackers access to Tribune Co websites and that a story on the Tribune's Los Angeles Times website was later altered by one of them. 

 A gush of sympathy for the malicious

Remarkably, this act, which was malicious vandalism at the very least, has created an outpouring of sympathy for the perpetrator “You can’t help but feel bad for Adam Keys,” began an article by Adam Clark Estes in The Atlantic Wire.

Estes complains, “Here’s a media enthusiast who suddenly finds himself potentially unemployed and facing up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines for a few keystrokes.”

Wow, if the degree of a crime’s gravity (or depravity) depends on how many times you manipulate a finger or two stroking some keys, maybe we should let off mass murderers who only finger the trigger of their semi-automatic weapons ten or twenty times.

Moreover, it turns out that Keys may have been motivated by wanting revenge for his dismissal from the Los Angeles Times. Even hacker sympathizer Estes admits, “It was probably a bad idea to tell Anonymous hackers to ‘go fuck some shit up’ after giving them login credentials for the Tribune Company.”

That’s malicious intent, if you ask me. It's not terribly far from a disgruntled corporate or postal employee who gets fired and returns to his workplace with a weapon, also to wiggle his finger a few times and "fuck some shit up."

Count on Congress to do the wrong thing

Remarkably, even right wing Repubican California Congressman Daryl Issa, usually a law-and-order fanatic, has jumped in to launch an “investigation” relating to the suicide of another criminally-charged hacker, Aaron Swartz, in January.

Similarly, Congresswomen Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, is pumping for an “Aaron’s Law” that would keep prosecutors from being mean to these poor babies who hack into other peoples’ property.

How serious is hacking?

Forget, for a moment, that one of the greatest threats this nation faces is from cyberatttack. Forget that, just as the United States set back Iran’s nuclear development by hacking into their nuclear labs and destroying centrifuges, some hacker can do something similar to the United States’ capacity for defense, manufacturing, banking, the financial markets, air traffic control and the power grid. Or to steal industrial secrets, as China evidently has been doing.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter whether the hacker happens to be an economic rival, a mortal enemy of this nation, or just an arrogant twenty-something trying out “a few keystrokes” to see what will happen. The damage to property, income an reputation is the same, regardless of intent.

Sociopaths, vandals and break-in artists

However, I’ll go beyond that, and suggest that these hacker vandals are little more than sociopaths, unsympathetic to the plight of individuals, small businesses, or the public at large, which can be harmed in a variety of ways by their “innocent” games. You may feel sympathetic now to a hacker facing a long sentence for messing with a newspaper. But what if the next hacker gets into your stock brokerage account and bankrupts you just for the hell of it? Or removes all the cash from your bank account? Or puts statements on, say, your Facebook page, allegedly written by you, that make you look like a sexist, or a racist, or a rapist?

I speak out against hacking from personal experience. I maintain a website for my freelance writing business under my own name, which I don’t openly advertise on this blog for what I hope are obviously valid reasons. In February, my website was hacked, and began sending out, I gather, thousands of spam e-mails under my name. That certainly couldn’t have helped either my reputation or my income.

I learned about this when my web hosting company contacted me, informed me that as my own webmaster I was responsible for the spam, and that I’d better disinfect my website, or else. Their time-consuming over-the-phone tech support, for an hour or more at a time, proved unequal to the problem. After many hours of trying to remove malicious code on my own, I had to hire a consultant to fix the problem.

A personal toll of money and misery

Well, it took the consultant, a large website design company, about a week to get the mess cleaned up. That set me back $1,900. If the money had been taken directly from my wallet by a thief, instead of indirectly by the actions of a hacker, the act would have been grand larceny.

Meanwhile, backing-and-forthing among the consultant, me and the web host contributed to destroying a vacation I happened to be in the midst of when this happened.

Who hacked me and why? I don’t know. Nor do I know how what the hacker did was any different than someone who smashes a window of your home to let himself in, deliberately turns up the stereo full blast to annoy your neighbors, and then spray paints grafitti on your walls and defecates on your pillow.

Sure, nobody gets “hurt,” in the physical sense of the word. But the break-in artist (or hacker) has done serious emotional and financial damage to you for no reason at all. If you came home one night, and found someone in the process of doing what I’ve just described, I suspect you’d be legally justified in shooting the intruder dead.

So why shouldn’t hacking be considered a serious crime worthy of a long stay in prison? It’s the wanton act of a sociopath, and sociopaths need to be locked up early, before they do increasingly greater damage to society.

Matthew Key and his ilk get no sympathy from me. And shame on The Atlantic for letting its web creature, The Atlantic Wire, support blatantly antisocial behavior.

Here's another example of how the United States of America has become a corruptocracy, while permitting big business to rob you (and this nation) blind

The following is lifted from a proxy statement, received this week from AT&T. A stockholder is seeking to make the company report to stockholders the details of all political contributions. AT&T recommends voting against the proposal.

(Full disclosure: I’m a small stockholder in AT&T, which is how I became aware of this stuff in the first place.) Says AT&T:

Political contributions, where permitted, are an important part of the regulatory and legislative process. AT&T is in a highly regulated industry, and the Company’s operations are significantly affected by the actions of elected officials at the local, state and national levels, including rates it can charge customers, its profitability, and even how it must provide services to competitors. It is important that your Company actively participate in the electoral and legislative processes in order to protect your interests as stockholders.

After reading that, can you possibly wonder why the majority of Congressmen, Senators and even state and local legislators could be mistaken in broad daylight for whores? Or why many, Republican and Democrat alike, are so crooked they could hind behind corkscrews? Or even why you phone bills are so high, with politicians bribed with "contributions" to let AT&T charges you whatever it thinks it can get away with before you bleed to death?

Blame much of it on Citizens United

Corrupt influence in politics has always been bad, but the U.S. Supreme Court decision that money is speech in the Citizens United Cases sealed the doom of democracy in the United States of America. Because now there's no limit to how much and who AT&T and other companies can pay off to make the law go just the way they want it.

And if you’re an AT&T stockholder and think AT&T’s political contributions are good for your investment, have another think. The political influence of the corporation’s top executives allows them to rip you and me off (as well as their employees) for many tens of million of dollars, which they use to line their own pockets.

Executive toys to go with the money

For example, according to the same proxy statement, the CEO of ATT alone receives a total annual compensation package of $19,000,000.00. (If you're getting dizzy from all the zeros, that's nineteen million bucks. A year.) That doesn't include compensation for his chief operations officer, chief financial officer, and other "C-suite" greed-a-holics. And with all that dough, they’re trying to up their compensation. Moreover, that’s only the cash part. The CEO and his fellow senior executive ripoff artists also receive playthings and cash for playthings…

…including an automobile allowance and maintenance, which is an important recruiting and retention tool; club memberships (we allow Company- owned memberships, but do not pay country club fees and dues for executive officers), which afford our executives the opportunity to conduct business in a more informal environment; home security for the safety and security of our executives; tax preparation, estate planning, and financial counseling, which allow our executives to focus more on business responsibilities; and executive disability benefits. The financial counseling benefit provides financial counselors to executives, which helps the Company by ensuring that our executives understand and comply with plan requirements. We provide our executives communications, broadband/TV and related products and services, which are offered by AT&T at little or no incremental cost. We permit our executives to use Company aircraft for personal reasons, which allows for the efficient use of their time and for them to privately conduct Company business at any time. However, beginning in 2013, the CEO will be required to reimburse the incremental Company cost of all such personal usage. Other Executive Officers are also required to reimburse the incremental cost of their personal usage unless the CEO decides otherwise on a case-by-case basis.

Poor babies ! Ninteen million bucks a year and they can’t even afford their own cars and burglar alarms. Or tax lawyers. And it's so-ooo hard to retain these guys.

It's not just a disease. It's an epidemic.

I wish I could tell you this is an exceptional case, but I read lots of proxy statement and I gotta tell you, it’s commonplace.

So bend over, America, and enjoy getting raped.