Has any New Yorker besides me noticed this Republican phenomenon?

Of the two leading Republican candidates in the New York City Mayoral Primary....

                                     One resembles a toad on Ambien....

The other looks like Satan with his horns cut off

“Patriotic” thugs may try to take over your property to enrich themselves, ruining your reputation in the process. This book tells the horrifying story.

A number of years back, my friends Bruce and Nancy Cole Silverman of the Los Angeles area told me a hair-raising story.

Seems a house that Nancy owned had been taken over by – were they crazies? Were they right wing neo-Nazi fanatics? Were they forgers acting on bizarre economic and legal theories? Were they a gun-toting militia? Or were they just plain outright thieves?

Turns out they were all of the above. Posing first as simple renters, they ended up trying to claim Nancy’s house lock, stock and deed, using a variety of forged documents. The FBI got on the case and Nancy finally got her house back. But not before the so-called "sovereign citizens" who tried to rip her off caused enough grief to turn your hair gray and leave you chewing on a stick.

Recently, Nancy (That's her on the left.) told the story as a work of fiction called “When In Doubt—Don’t!” I’m not in love with the title nor with the off-topic book jacket design, but the story is both a can't-put-it-down chiller and a  romance, whose timeliness has been amplified by a recent article in the New York Times.

I strongly recommend that you read the Times article here, before racing off to Amazon.com to order Nancy’s book, here.  But when you do, understand that these batcrap crazy thugs, somewhere to the right of the right wing Tea Party movement, are what happens when ignorance and misinformation gets not only tolerated in this society, but allowed to flourish as a business, driven by "educational seminars" that the Federal Trade Commission ought to sledgehammer out of existence.

Ignore these sociopathic lunatics (that’s the most charitable description I can use to describe the "sovereign citizens" movement and its members) and it could affect your credit rating, your ability to find a job, your peace of mind – and many thousands of dollars in legal fees, even if, after months or years of clearing up fraudulent liens against your property, you get to keep the house you bought and paid for.

Again, go here for the New York Times story. Then here to buy the book. Then pray that Federal law enforcement launches an all-out campaign against these right wing gangsters before you become another one of their victims.

A few choice words from the Guardian. And one from me: Bravo!

The English newspaper The Guardian, publisher of Glenn Greenwald and some of the material provided by American contractor Edward Snowden, has much to say about the British spy services. While you can find full details here, I take the liberty of sharing a few choice morsels of Simon Jenkins' commentary for the delectation of those too busy to read the whole thing.

You've had your fun: now we want the stuff back. With these words the British government embarked on the most bizarre act of state censorship of the internet age. In a Guardian basement, officials from GCHQ gazed with satisfaction on a pile of mangled hard drives like so many book burners sent by the Spanish Inquisition. They were unmoved by the fact that copies of the drives were lodged round the globe. They wanted their symbolic auto-da-fe. 

(snip) 

Last week in Washington, Congressional investigators discovered that the America's foreign intelligence surveillance court, a body set up specifically to oversee the NSA, had itself been defied by the agency"thousands of times". It was victim to "a culture of misinformation" as orders to destroy intercepts, emails and files were simply disregarded; an intelligence community that seems neither intelligent nor a community commanding a global empire that could suborn the world's largest corporations, draw up targets for drone assassination, blackmail US Muslims into becoming spies and haul passengers off planes.

(snip) 

The arrogance of this abuse is now widespread. The same police force that harassed Miranda for nine hours at Heathrow is the one recently revealed as using surveillance to blackmail Lawrence family supporters and draw up lists of trouble-makers to hand over to private contractors. We can see where this leads. 

I hesitate to draw parallels with history, but I wonder how those now running the surveillance state – and their appeasers – would have behaved under the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. We hear today so many phrases we have heard before. The innocent have nothing to fear. Our critics merely comfort the enemy. You cannot be too safe. Loyalty is all. As one official said in wielding his legal stick over the Guardian: "You have had your debate. There's no need to write any more."
Yes, there bloody well is.

A modest proposal for New York’s Stop-And-Frisk supporters, Mayor Bloomberg,and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly

Somebody ought to stop and frisk this character. This cranky post tells you where you can find him.

Hey NYPD, if you’re really looking for contraband, and if you’re really, really not doing racial profiling when you repeatedly stop all those Afro-American and Hispanic people coming out of their own homes in Harlem and Bed Stuy, I have a very helpful idea for you.

Why don’t you take, oh, say six months, and move a couple of dozen of your best stop-and-friskers to a few new neighborhoods where you can clearly demonstrate the color blindness and gender blindness of your stop-and-frisk policies?

I’m talking about the East and West 80s and 90s of Manhattan. Plus the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

That’s where you’ll be able to station stop-and-frisk cops around the private prep schools catering to the adolescent children of New York’s rich and powerful. They’re mostly white kids (with a some Asians, and a few Afro-Americans and Hispanics thrown in, sometimes on scholarship, as a token to diversity. And the schools prominently feature those minorithy kids in photographs on the school websites because...well, that's open to interpretation. But I'm getting off track here.)

Just stand at the entrances to any of those schools and pat down a few of the (mostly white) kids as they go in and out, after you notice them “behaving in a furtive manner.” Make 'em stick their hands in the air. Make 'em lie down on the sidewalk in their blue blazers, or plaid skirts and white blouses.

I’m talking, for example, about the preppy students of Chapin on East End Avenue, which in 2010 boasted an endowment of $78.5 million and charged tuition of $33,400.

Or how about the Dalton School, Trinity School, Horace Mann, and Riverdale Country School, whose website declares it’s in favor of (“Mind Character Community.”)

Or schools like Nightingale Bamford, whose motto, according to their website (it's nearly perfect for an institution that turns out future Mistresses of the Universe) is, “Being a Nightingale means that ­ no matter what you want to say to the world – you have the confidence to say it.” Which is close enough to the motto I propose for all of these schools, “Being filthy rich means never having to say you’re sorry.”

That’s only a partial list of New York prep schools, of course, but I think you get the idea. Their students are kids who aren’t likely to be carrying guns, but I’ll betcha that some intensive stop-and-frisking near their shcools will reveal a treasure trove of drugs, prescription medicines in possession of the wrong person, a hip flask or three filled with the hard stuff, and even some non-ballistic weapons. (“But these nunchuks and this 40-inch sword are for my after-school martial arts lessons, officer!”)

A few weeks of stop-and-frisks on the Upper East and Upper West sides and in Riverdale would create  such a hullaballoo that the practice would end, and the rest of the world would never have to endure warrantless, racially-targeted, quota-driven stop-and-frisks again. And I do mean a hullaballoo. After the first dozen or so arrests, the kids' parents, mostly denizens of Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park West would march en masse from Wall Street, first on City Hall, then on Police Headquarters, and finally on the mayor’s personal private mansion itself, on 79^th between Fifth and Madison. They would pull the plug on municipal bond financings and political campaign contributions, upsetting the whole socio-political setup.

And stop-and-frisk would become a thing of the past.

Now Emperor Bloomberg’s I-don’t-give-a-damn administration feels free to make a residential building unlivable for its tortured inhabitants

The world is beginning to discover what an insufferable s.o.b. Mayor Michael Bloomberg really is. Well, it’s about time. This blog has laced into the mayor on numerous occasions, for egregious acts ranging from overturning vote-approved term limits, to fibbing about how he commutes to work, to persecuting scrap collectors. (A longer but still partial list, with links, at the end of this post.)

At last, the press in New York is beginning to wake up to the mayor’s racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics via his baseless stop-and-risk policies, thanks to a Federal judge who put a kibosh on the city’s policing policies.

"You're complaining about noise?
Sorry, I can't hear you."

Now there’s a new nightmare. Nearby residents in the West 50s of Manhattan are subject to ear-splitting barrages of noise, all day, all night, around the clock, while the mayor’s Department of Buildings looks on benignly, completely ignoring  justifiable noise complaints.

So says reporter Heather Holland of the online publication DNA Info. Seems that a high rise luxury condo at 157 West 57^th Street is under construction – 24 hours a day. The fewer calendar days spent building the building, the sooner the developers can start selling off apartments and earning rich profits, so you can’t blame them for trying.

But you can blame them, and the Department of Buildings, for the brutal, nonstop assault of noise.The builders, Holland reports, have received over 300 variances from the Department of Buildings, despite irate complaints of residential neighbors.

Much of the noise comes from a hoist. One neighbor told Holland, “The hoist is incredibly loud. Imagine sitting in a subway station. When the train comes through, you can’t talk….”

Another residential neighbor complained to Holland, “There’s no place in this apartment that’s remotely quiet. When things have to be done, I have to step out in the hall. I have to turn everything up to its loudest level, to hear anything, and even with the soundproof windows, I have to wear headphones on the computer to hear what I have to hear.”

"This is not my department.
Also there is no department."

“Noise is not their issue,” a spokesman for the Department of Buildings said of his department. Except, of course, that it’s pretty damn rare (if this isn’t actually the only case) that 24-hour permits are issued for construction work. Evidently, complaints to the city’s Department of Environmental Conservation have also failed.

All of this leaves the city open to some cranky (and justifiable) speculation.

We suggest following the money

Are the builders also the buddies of Mayor Bloomberg, or of City Council President Christine Quinn (a Bloomberg disciple and herself a mayoral candidate) – and therefore getting special dispensation to make the lives of some New York City citizens miserable?

Does the billionaire mayor have a big investment in the building, which will be the tallest residential building in the city when it’s completed? If so, his administration’s failure to grant relief to the neighbors would be a clear case of corruption.

Is somebody in the Department of Buildings, or the Department of Environmental Protection, taking payoffs to issue these quality-of-life destroying variances, in violation of criminal law?

Some enterprising investigative reporter ought to look into the matter. Are you listening, all you young Turks at the New York Times?

A cranky (partial) catalogue of previous

sins of Michael Bloomberg

commented on by The New York Crank

Sexual discrimination at Bloomberg News when Michael Bloomberg was directly running the place. 

Fiercely fibbing about his “subway commute” (in part via two limos, as it turned out) from home to City Hall. 

Overthrowing the will of the people on term limits: 

Implying that you have to be a communist if you think people in New York should earn a living wage. 

Blocking reports of police spying on legitimate political activity. 

Persecuting scrap collectors.

Multiple offenses.

The sacred U.S. Constitution guarantees us freedom of religion. Freedom of MY religion that is, not YOUR religion. What next – witchcraft trials?

I don’t know what it is with parents. After listening once to Johnny Cash singing “A Girl Named Sue,” most of us should know better than to name our boys Sue, our girls Butch, or any of our kids with any kind of name that verges on outlandish.

That’s common sense, I suppose. But naming our own kids is still a more or less tacitly understood right, which a court should have no right to take away.

Except, of course, in red states like Tennessee.

Seems that down in Cocke County, Tennessee, Judge Lu Ann Ballew of Chancery Court ordered a child’s name changed from Messiah to Martin. Her reasoning, a landmark in American jurisprudential dunderheadedness, marks Judge Ballew as one of the greatest legal minds of the 17^th Century. And here it is:

“The word Messiah is a title and it's a title that has only been earned by one person and that one person is Jesus Christ.”

In other words, hew to the judge’s vision of religion, the diety, and Christianity – or else. Another interpretation, "There's nothing about this in the legal code, so I'll make up my own law."

Of course, this isn’t the first time in America where citizens have been punished for thinking differently, although most of them happened four centuries ago. Back in the mid-1600s, a Rhode Island man named Christopher Holder had one of his ears cut off for preaching Quaker beliefs.

Rhode Island, if I need to remind you, was founded by Roger Williams, a dissident Puritan who was on the lam from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for not hewing to their religion. And the Massachusetts Puritans, of course, founded their colony because they had to flee from England or lose their heads. Speaking of Massachusetts Bay Colony, I also ought to give a nod of recognition to all those “witches” who got burned at the stake.

Anyway, pending the first witch burning in Tennessee, which ought to come any day now if judges like Lu Ann Ballew (whose own name, speaking of names, sounds as if it was lifted straight from the L’il Abner Comic Strip)…if judge Ballew gets her way.  Meanwhile, go here and enjoy Johnny Cash singing “A Boy Named Sue.”

French egg farmers revolt! Awful punsters cheer at omelet-based opportunity.

This is eggzactly what I was hoping for on a dreary Friday afternoon with no prospects of the day improving and no billable hours on my schedule – a farmers’ revolt in France that has resulted in the smashing of 100,000 eggs. I’m not eggsagerating.

The French farmers are angry about the prices they get for eggs. They consider it practically a yolk that the market shells out a mere 94 cents a kilogram (roughly 2 lbs.) for eggs. Their incomes are getting fried. So they’ve begun smashing their eggs in the streets. As Adam Taylor, a writer for Business Insider put it, they are "scrambling to drive up prices."

To paraphrase the late Nikita Khrushchev (sort of), “In order to raise egg prices, it is first necessary to step in some omelets.” Or something like that.

Consequently, crossing the road in the town of Ploumagoar (I’m not making this up, that’s the name) is like walking on eggs. Eggsactly like walking on eggs, as a matter of fact. The cobbletones of Brittany are running yellow with bad yolks.

And if you expect local officials to be eggstremely outraged, you’re cracked. If America had a Boston Tea Party, the French are having a Brittany Egg Party. Helene Guillemot, adjunct for the mayor of Carbaix, another town in Brittany where broken eggs are flowing like blood over the cobbles of Paris in 1789, seemed to be egging the farmers on.

“We’re in solidarity with the protest because there’s a true crisis at this moment.” said the mayor’s adjunct, in an eleggant statement on behalf of the farmers. She called the protest “symbolic” and “tres pacifist.” (I wish she had used a pun-able English synonym for “tres,” like “eggstremely,” but she didn’t.)

Okay, you get the idea and I’m gonna run out of here before my puns get any more puny. Got a  wad of money in your pocket and nothing much to do? Hop an airplane France and head straight to Brittany. Be sure to pack your spatula and your omelet pan.

Clash of the Titans! Greedy CBS vs. Greedy Time-Warner. The guilty bystanders? Our paid-off Congress.

I forget exactly when I tuned my TV to WBCS-TV news in New York and saw a printed message instead of a TV broadcast, but it was about a week ago. A day or two after that, that particular channel (Channel 2 or HD Channel 702) has been broadcasting some third rate movie channel in the place of CBS.

What’s going on? CBS had blocked Time-Warner Cable from transmitting its shows, in a dispute over the fees Time-Warner pays CBS for the privilege.

For weeks before, viewers in New York like me had been bombarded with TV spots from both sides. Each side told me what a greedy, unreasonable, grasping, evil bunch of bastards the other side is.

Know something? I think they’re both right about that.

The real victims

The only victims in this war are cable TV subscribers, who are paying Time Warner for CBS  and not getting it. You’d think Congress might have something to say about this. Hah! According to the trade newspaper Advertising Age, Washington sees no percentage in getting involved with this, because the broadcast lobby is a big political campaign contributor, and nobody wants to turn off the spigot. I quote from Ad Age:

Congress probably won't act quickly, in part because broadcasters are a potent lobbying force present in every lawmaker's district, said Jeffrey Silva, a Washington-based analyst with Medley Global Advisors. 

Political nonstarter
"This is a fight between two parties," Mr. Silva said. "What upside is there from taking on the broadcasters?"

Nor should anybody weep for Time-Warner, the second largest cable broadcaster in America. Their parent company, Time Inc., just posted a 25 percent gain in operating earnings: nearly three quarters of a billion dollars for the second quarter of this year, as compared to less than half a billion dollars for the same quarter this year.

However the resolution shakes out, in the end the greedy bastards will end up directly or indirectly raising cable subscription rates for millions of cable subscribers like you and me, so that Les Moonves of CBS and Jeff Bewkes of Time-Warner can reward themselves with bigger bonuses, and keep paying off Congress.

Hurt them. Hurt them both.

One of the things Cable Viewers can do to sting these guys back, at least a little, would be not to complain to Time-Warner about the absence of CBS and to look into switching to RCN or – even though I hate them, too – look into Verizon Fios.

The switch would hurt Time-Warner. Meanwhile, the decrease in advertising revenues (which are based on audience size) will hurt CBS.

In an ideal universe, CBS and Time-Warner would put each other out of business, like two gladiators armed with long-poled hammers, simultaneously clobbering the other in the head. That failing, their respective chairmen could be locked together, stark naked and face to face, in a very small trunk, unequipped with a toilet, for eternity, in hell. Well, maybe we could squeeze in a few congressmen and senators, too.

The redder the state, the shorter your life

It's not an absolute correlation, and contains a few exceptions,  but studies seem to show that people who live in blue states as a rule of thumb live longer than people in red states.

It's not just a matter of poverty, either. Vermont, one of our poorer states, is blue and and yet its citizens have a longer life expectancy than far wealthier Texas.

I'll leave it to you to ponder why.

Ad biz: “We’re too big, rich and powerful to pay attention to no stinking U.S. Government

Back in the days of the “Madmen” era, a very sane Brit named David Ogilvy set up a Madison Avenue advertising agency. His original working capital was $6,000, the now-deceased Ogilvy recalled in his book, “Confessions of an Advertising Man.”

For  at least for the first 35 years or so, his agency was dedicated to – and actually hewed to – values never before or since seen or heard from on Madison Avenue. Complete civility. Genuine care for the welfare of its employees as well as its clients. Literate advertising. And respect for consumers. “The consumer is not a moron,” Ogilvy thundered at his colleagues and anyone else who would listen. “She is your wife.”

Today's greedy vermin

These days? Forget it. The industry is infested with a new kind of greedy vermin, intent not only in getting as wealthy as a hedge fund manager masturbating with an image of Croesus in his head, but also in ignoring U.S. government agency rules and regulations, and roaring full speed ahead toward an anarchy it thinks it can dominate.

Case in point, a recent headline from the industry leading American trade publication, Advertising Age, having to do with a Federal Trade Commission proposal that private industry should not track what people look at, or where they go, or whom they call, or what they look up on the Internet – unless they agree to this invasion of their privacy.

Here’s the headline: 

“Ad Industry Proposal:’Do Not Track Should Let Us Track Anyway.”

Or to put it in the vernacular of the common man whose private business the advertising industry wants  to snoop on, “Screw your proposal and your laws and your government. We’ll do what we want.”

I commend you to the industry’s explanation here, filled with verbosity, techno-jargon and self-serving reasoning – perhaps made deliberately dull so you’ll nod off in a stupor instead of exploding with rage.

Remember, these folks are from an industry that’s all about – or at least used to be all about – “communicating” with you, me, and other consumers. If what they write puts you to sleep, it’s because they don’t want you to wake up before they’ve rolled over your privacy and plopped every last mosel of information about you into their databases, ranging from what you read and watch on TV, to where you ate lunch yesterday, probably all the way to when you last picked your nose and which finger you used.

They can afford to be such bastards because advertising agency management has grown – from a few clever people at each of many dozens of agencies, each with a few grand in their pockets and the intention to delight and inform consumers, to a bare handful of conglomerates with more than a few billion bucks in their own jeans, intent on grabbing more and more money.

Mega-metastasis

Latest case in point, the merger of Omnicom, one advertising mega-conglomerate, with Publicis, another advertising mega-conglomerate. They are now a combined $35 billion mega-mega-supermega-conglomerate with which no startup Brit with six thousand bucks in his wallet could ever compete.

And the industry as a whole is so big that if they don’t like what the government is doing, they simply tell the government to screw off. And if that doesn’t work, they’ll buy every Congressman and Senator in Washington and come after those who protest with a tank division.

Because if “Do not track,” can mean “track,” then “do not bribe” can mean “bribe” and “Thou shalt not kill” simply means, “Slaughter them, they’re only citizens.”

Anthony & Huma & Elliot & Silda

A handful of years back, after he resigned from the governorship of New York State following the disclosure that he was patronizing high-priced hookers, I found myself sitting in a restaurant, a yard or two from Elliott Spitzer.

It was a neighborhood kind of thing. He lived on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks to the west of the restaurant, Quatroze, on East 79^th Street. At the time, I lived in the same general vicinity.

The disgraced governor and his wife, Silda, looked relaxed. He was dressed in Chinos, an open-necked dress shirt, and a blue blazer, nothing like either the suited television commentator he was at the time, or like the controversial governor he had been before that. His wife Silda also looked relaxed and was smiling. There was laughter at the table. They were with another couple, having a good time.

Real life, real pretty

What I remember most from that very New York-ish accidental celebrity sighting, if you can call it that, was that Silda in real life was much younger, much prettier, and much happier-looking than she had appeared on TV and in news photographs when, frowning and clearly unhappy, she stood next to Spitzer at a press conference and watched him field the shrapnel exploding from his self-inflicted scandal.

Presumably he had learned his lesson, if only the lesson that the principle difference between a $3,000 hooker and a $300 hooker is $2,700, and that ultimately paid sex is a tawdry and emotionally unsatisfying experience, a clear demonstration that there’s no place like home.

“Good!” I thought to myself. “Spitzer has a new career, and he and his wife have patched things up, and may they live happily ever after.”

Boy, was I wrong!

Yes, dammit! Again!

Reports have it that Spitzer and his wife are now living in separate domiciles. His television career failed. And – oh crap, not again! – he’s back in politics, running for the low-key office of City Comptroller.

All this comes to mind because of another philandering (sort of) political dropout, who couldn’t stay dropped out for long. I’m talking, of course, about Anthony Weiner, who has what one might say is an abnormal fondness for sending racy electronic notes and photographs of himself to strange women, culminating, some have said, in telephone conversations and phone sex.

Evidently, there’s no evidence that Weiner has ever met any of these women and had real live sex with them. This of course raises a question. What’s up with that – aside from Weiner’s hardon?

When Spitzer did his extracurricular thing, at least it culminated in sex. That was his reward for the huge risk he was taking. And it was huge, politically (as things turned out) but also in terms of sexually transmitted diseases, robbery, blackmail, all the pitfalls of paying to have sex with a strange woman.

The old adrenalin rush

But Weiner? As “Carlos Danger,” a nom de guerre that the columnist Gail Collins has already pleasured her readers with, Weiner was all risk and no reward. Or at least no reward except for the adrenalin rush of risk that he might have equally achieved by standing on one foot atop a high ledge on the Empire State Building and holding up a large sail.

That’s why he strikes so many as “weird” and “creepy.” Or to put it another way, while both Spitzer and Weiner have ­– shall we call them “impulse control issues? – Spitzer is a serial philanderer, but Weiner is a serial pervert, preferring some symbolic expression of dangerous sex to the real thing.

There’s been lots of speculation in the press about why Weiner’s attractive wife, Huma Abedin, puts up with it. One reason simply might be that they have a toddler at home, and staying together might be better for the child than divorce. Another more insidious theory making the rounds is that Houma is modeling herself after her mentor, Hillary Clinton, and has political ambitious of her own that Weiner might somehow aid and abet.

Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t shudder at that theory. From the little I’ve read about her she’s bright, competent and experienced. She’d certainly make a better mayor than her husband.

I suspect an Anthony Weiner mayoral administration would be saddled with scandal after scandal, turning the mayor’s attention away from the beehive of problems and conflicting needs that is New York City. Weiner was a Congressman, not an administrator. He’s talking a good line about what he wants to do for the city – minus, so far, any detailed specifics about how he'll do it. But there’s no indication that he can manage any of it, and plenty of indication that he can’t even manage himself.

High profile, high powered

dead-end job

Besides, where does Weiner think his career will go after he becomes mayor? No mayor in the last century has ever gone on to a more exalted office. The closest to that was the late Bill O’Dwyer, who resigned his mayoralty and then got appointed Ambassador to Mexico in the wake of a political scandal.

As for Spitzer, if he’s elected as Comptroller, he’ll be in charge of bonds and pension fund investments. He did an admirable job as New York Attorney General, devoting much of his AG efforts to breaking the fingers of any Wall Street master of the universe he could catch trying to snatch something from the cookie jar – or even thinking about it.

Consequently, much of Wall Street hates Spitzer’s guts. Maybe that means he’d be able to scare the best deals out of them when administering city money. But maybe that means they’d be out to take him down from the get-go, tripping him up with tricky deals. Or even paying a hooker to lure him into a bed bugged not with insects, but with electronics.

Congenital screwup?

Undoing a Comptroller Spietzer would have to be easy.. Any fool who holds public office and pays for the illegal services of a prostitute with a credit card must be congenitally prone to screwing up.

Admittedly, most of the New York City electorate doesn’t seem to care. On the contrary, Weiner’s and Spitzer’s elevated name recognition has made them front runners, at least for now. But there’s a difference between an accidental philanderer and a habitual – well, whatever those two guys habitually have been, if they aren’t still. And eventually, in office or merely in the public eye, it will bring them down.

I wish them both the best of luck and the most of success. But in private careers, please. Frankly, I’ve had it with political sex scandals.

Post Script: After I posted this piece, I discovered that a just-released Marist Poll has Weiner already losing his lead, thanks to the latest revelations. Well, I've never seen any prediction I've made come true so quickly.

Here's more evidence that America desperately needs an excess wealth tax – unless we want to see a return of this contraption

I’ve ridden this hobby horse before, most notably here, and also here among other places, but this nation desperately needs to tax not only more of the incomes of the superrich, but also their accumulated wealth.

I give you as my latest case-in-point, the situation of the homeless in New York, and by contrast, the prices that the insufficiently-taxed superrich seem to be gladly paying for a place to call home.

According to a letter I’ve received from somebody at the Stribling real estate brokerage firm in New York concerning the city’s apartment market: 

· The $4 million and above luxury market in the first half of this year was the strongest
since at least 2007, with 759 contracts signed, compared to 807 such contracts for all
2012; 1/3 of the contracts were for new condos that won’t be completed for at least
years. 

· In the $10 million and above market, 142 contracts totaling $2.08 billion were signed in the first half of this year, compared to 160 contracts totaling $2.9 billion for all of last year; 44% of this year’s contracts were for new developments and were sold off of floorplans.

 Hey, $10 million “and above”  apartments (some of those “aboves” have paid above $50 million) can happen simply because millionaires and billionaires have the money to throw away for them. They’re largely a horde of little Anthony Weiners, waving around pictures of their apartments instead of their penises, boasting implicitly, “Look how big mine is.”

All that’s fine, up to a point. The point is where you see the statistics for homelessness in New York. The following is from the city’s Coalition for the Homeless:

•Each night more than 55,000 people -- including more than 21,000 children -- experience homelessness. 

• Currently 50,700 homeless men, women, and children bed down each night in the NYC municipal shelter system.   

• Additionally, more than 5,000 homeless adults and children sleep each night in other public and private shelters, and thousands more sleep rough on the streets or in other public spaces.

• During the course of each year, more than 105,000 different homeless New Yorkers, including nearly 40,000 children, sleep at least one night in the municipal shelter system. 

• The number of homeless New Yorkers in shelters has risen by more than 60 percent over the past decade.

Hey, $2.8 billion could rent a lot of modest one- and two-bedroom apartments for families that are currently sleeping in the streets. There’s not enough money available to do that, you complain, Mayor Bloomberg? There would be if the people were taxed differently if they can shell out $10, $20, $50 million for one out of what is likely to be two or more residences .

In fact, one of The Crank’s Laws states that if you pay, say, $45 million for an apartment and $10 million for a house in the Hamptons that’s so difficult to commute to, you have to charter a helicopter to get you there, you have far too much money for the good of society.

The problem isn’t only a New York City problem. It’s national. All but a handful of us are getting poorer, while the rich get richer and richer, living off the wealth our productivity has  produced and they have bled from us. Consider this:

Economics columnist Jon Talton recently did a rundown of the facts about today’s American economy. Among his findings: 

• Worker productivity has increased nearly 23 percent since 2000, but hourly wages rose a pitiful 0.5 percent in that period. 

• Taking a longer view back to 1973, productivity is up by 80 percent between now and then, but pay is only up by 11 percent. 

• People at the bottom of the wage scale are earning less now than similar workers in 1979. 

• Employees in the middle of the wage scale are getting 6 percent more than in 1979, but all that increase happened in the 1990s. 

• High earners, meanwhile, are making 37 percent more than back in the 1970s and the much-talked-about folks in the top 1 percent have enjoyed a 131 percent increase in earnings.

From another column by Jon Talton, I found this:

• People who became unemployed between 2007 and 2009 but found new, full-time jobs took an average wage cut of 10.5 percent. 

• In 2011, wages for males with college degrees were 5 percent greater than in 1979. For men with only high-school degrees, entry-level wages were 25 percent lower than in 1979. 

• College-educated women saw gains of 15 percent over the same period for their first job, but the wage was still 9 percent below what a college-educated man made in 1979. Women with only high-school education worked for wages 10 percent below the poverty threshold and 14 percent worse than the wages of women with comparable education in 1979. 

• In 1979, more than 63 percent of high-school graduates landed entry-level jobs with employer-provided insurance. In 2010, the number had dropped to 22.8 percent.

 If the superrich think they’re “winning” by choking off income from the vast majority of the nation, I have some old news for them. It’s called the French Revolution of 1789. You know, the one where they set up a guillotine in what is now the Place de la Concorde, and mercilessly rolled heads.

If this nation doesn’t restore some equity to incomes, it can and probably will happen here, in some modern form. Maybe the form relates to the ease of getting a gun. If the gates of Versailles couldn’t hold against a crowd of enraged peasants with pitchforks, I doubt that gated communities and doorman apartment buildings will hold against underpaid American workers armed with their Wal-Mart AK47s.

I hope that the income inequity situation will be corrected, or that I won’t live long enough to the consequences. But if I do, I plan to take a front row seat next to Mme. Defarge, this time no doubt texting with her I-Phone instead of clicking her knitting needles, and see how high a billion dollar head will bounce.

Guest Blog: CONTRACT VIOLATIONS

Note from The New York Crank: I've been in awe of Ben Kremen's reportorial skills since our college days. In 1957,  he came back from vacation to the  campus we both shared and he told me, "I've just been in Cuba. There's a revolution brewing there. I was up in the hills in a place called Oriente Province and this guy, Fidel Castro, he has tanks, he has guns, he has troops. He's getting ready to overthrow Batista." (Batista was then the dictator of Cuba.) I laughed and told Kremen, "You're full of crap. You're nuts! You're out of your mind. You've been smoking too much weed." But less than two years later, Castro rolled into Havana and Batista was finished. Now Kremen offers a piece on what's happening to the American labor movement and why it matters. I urge you to read it – and shudder.
—   The New York Crank

By Bennett Kremen | The Labor Educator | July 10, 2013

A contract's being violated brutally, in fact many serious, profound ones are, which will, if unchecked, deeply threaten the well-being of all working people — indeed, of almost all people. Basically, what's being violated here is called "The Social Contract". This concept isn't really a hard one to understand. For centuries philosophers and political thinkers have been describing it as the very basis for justice and law and social harmony. And what they're talking about are the many "unwritten" agreements among all of us to respect and defend the rights of others so that our rights too are defended and respected.

Without these unstated understandings, no law alone or police force or army could forever control the chaos that would inevitably stalk our streets because, in effect, only my desire and yours not to attack or rob or rape anyone as we walk along coupled with everyone else's desire to live and let live creates the everyday peace we all need and must have. This for sure is a silent Social Contract.

Of course, though there are many written contracts in labor-management relations, totally necessary ones, there are also many significant social contracts, which if they didn't exist could only make labor-capital negotiations, never easy, grim indeed. But in recent years to our dismay, these quiet social agreements are, yes, being violated and with severe and growing boldness by the most aggressive corporations and their hired political henchmen infiltrating our government at every level. And the most painful example, glaring example, of their contempt for a vital, time-honored social understanding that has created economic justice and kept the peace for more than seventy years is their vicious attack, every day, on Social Security.

For decades this program, as we all know, was not to be messed with! And despite there being no law preventing it from being challenged, almost without exception both Republicans and Democrats understood that threatening Social Security was like committing political suicide and indeed was called, "the third rail of American politics". Today, that indispensable, unwritten contract protecting Social Security and the feeblest among us is being spat upon by many in both parties without a flicker of shame and with largely disappointing opposition. Shouldn't we be hearing a fearsome roar and fire-breathing rearing up in the AFL-CIO and every union against this cold-blooded assault on our aging, working folks, who have little else to defend them? But, uh uh, I'm sorry to say, it's not our brave heart, crusading labor leaders who are keeping grandpa out of the poor house. Only a seventy plus percent disgust rate among the public at such a thought is doing the job.

If this isn't enough to demand sweeping and dramatic changes in the thinking and leadership of the labor movement, let's describe a few more disasters inexorably descending on our brothers and sisters in factories and warehouses, in schools and offices — in short, everywhere. How about our wages flat lining while the unearned income — the stocks, bonds, real estate and hustles of the wealthy — have grown so dizzily, it can give you a nose bleed.

Sadly, the labor movement once thought they'd corrected this type of income imbalance forever during the economic battles of the 1930s. And actually, wages and benefits for more than half a century were pegged often to corporate profits, which was a Social Contract that worked pretty damn well. Now there's only arrogant disregard by the powerful for this basic American concept of equality. And surely those who should be fighting tooth and nail for this fundamental fairness, our very, very well paid labor leaders, simply keep bungling and sputtering on and on in embarrassing impotence while this situation gets worse and worse.

For they were blind-sided when Wisconsin's governor Walker tore up with a sneer the long-standing Social Contract guarding collective bargaining itself. And tell me please, why's there a near deadly silence from the movers and shakers of the AFL-CIO while virulent Right To Work laws quarantined mostly in Dixie and the red states of the West have started aggressively metastasizing northeastward into Indiana and Michigan's industrial heartland and who knows where else it goes next. And, oh yes, the lockout! No greater insult to organized labor exists. And once through those quiet understandings, it was rarely used. Today, they're smacking us with it everywhere, sticking it in our eye like bullies in a school yard, which I saw recently in a lockout in New York at Sotheby's Auction House, the world's playground for billionaires, where a tiny Teamster local of diligently working art handlers were mercilessly harassed into giving up some of their hard-won health benefits while the company made five hundred million dollars in profits that year.

So what's wrong here? What is it fellas? I've always seen labor leaders as strong people, who don't take crap. But what's happening now, it hurts me to say, appears more often than not to be just the opposite. For over and over I keep watching actions and maneuvers by the labor movement that lack even a hint of courage or daring while much of the urgent energy needed to battle what's going on flounders in blatant, self-serving bureaucracies and petty, intra-union politics, where originality all gets slaughtered, leaving only a frightening lack of imagination that's truly worrying me. And seeing labor's mostly passive acceptance day after day of these non-stop violations of the Social Contract fills me with dark thoughts of what will happen if we allow this to go on much longer. No, we can't. And we won't!

Bennett Kremen has written about labor issues for The New York Times, The Nation and other publications and his latest book, "Savage Days Haunted Nights", is available at Amazon.com and Kindle. Email: BennettKre@aol.com

In praise of summer crankiness. And not just my own.

July 4^th is coming. Or maybe by the time you're reading this, it’ll have been here and gone. Whatever.

Here in the New York area, they’re calling for temperatures in the high 80s, on the Fourth, with high humidity. Your typical July day.

It’s the kind of weather where you get extremely irritated if somebody asks you to do something you don’t want to do. Or just brushes against you in the street. It’s the kind of day where you don’t want to breathe without air conditioning. It’s the kind of day where your whole body wants to tell people, “Hey, wait just a damn second! I don’t want to stand over a hot gas barbecue pit. Go burn your own damn frankfurters.”

Added to the oppressive seasonal heat and humidity, the last 30 days or so have been unbearably rainy. Roads are flooding too easily because the land doesn't have a chance absorb one downpour before the next one comes along. Cellars are leaking. Worms are drowning. Mildew is growing.  Every pair of pants I’ve taken off the hanger in the past couple of weeks has gone to the dry cleaners the next day. They’re not dirty. They’re just limp, and wrinkled from the rain.

To remind me about wet weather, New York Mayor Bloomberg’s little worker bees have sent me a brochure with an unintelligible map. Or at least it’s unintelligible to red-green-brown colorblind people like me. In reds and greens and browns, in just itty-bitty millimeters of space, it shows me what I think is my neighborhood on a map of Manhattan and tells me that if they declare a hurricane alert, I’ll have to get out. There are six levels of alert, each coded with a different green or brown, and when they call the color I can’t see, I’m supposed to pack a bag and move in with grumpy relatives, or go live in a shelter.

In a pig’s eye! They had to mail the brochure to me anyway. So they have my address. Why didn’t they just say, “When we declare your address is a Stage 6,” you gotta go.”

Because they’re the same kind of idiots who developed color-coded threat alerts (remember those?) for the Department of Homeland Security. Look, when those idiots became useless to Washington they had to go somewhere. So they went to City Hall in New york.

Besides, I live on the 10th floor. I admit it was miserable last year when a hurricane knocked out the power, causing my  building to lose water, lights, refrigeration, the elevators, and TV for a five days. But I was 80 feet above ground level, which in my neighborhood is another 10 feet above water level, so why doesn't Bloomberg cut the crap and figure out how to get homes for the homeless, who are the people truly in danger of drowning in the streets?

  

Meanwhile, I feel like I have jungle rot. I fully expect to take off my socks and find a crop of toadstools growing between my toes. My shoes are cracking. Damn it all, I’m cracking.

So I’m not surprised that the 13 Colonies declared their independence from England on July 4^th. Thomas Jefferson’s observations of the weather on July 4th 1776 only put temperatures in the high 70s, but hell, that was Philadelphia. Seventy degrees in Philly is like three weeks in a New York heatwave. Or nine weeks in hell. And Jefferson didn’t note down the humidity. And furthermore, the founding fathers weren’t exactly walking around in Bermua shorts and T-shirts.

Besides, even minus global warming, July on the East Coast of the United States has always stuck people with the kind of weather that gets tempers flaring and rage exploding. “Write another pleading letter to King George to end the stamp tax? Screw that, Martha. I’ll show that fat-assed king! Where’s my blunderbuss? ”

When you get right down to it, the American Revolution was road rage without the roads or the automobiles. People were getting hot and sticky and pissed off and England ignored us. Poof! There went the colonies.

If we had air conditioning back in 1776, we’d all probably still be British. 

You owe your freedom –whatever’s left of it after the Internet sends your phone and electronic mailing records to the Defense Intelligence Agency – anyway, you owe your freedom to crankiness. And that’s all I have to say, mainly because I don’t feel like writing any more. You want to make something of it? 

Governor Rick Perry of Texas talks a good free enterprise system. But when he can’t get socialist-style relief for his state’s corporation-made disasters, guess what he turns into?

So in the past few weeks, it’s been hard in New York City to tune into the morning TV news without having Rick Perry in your face.

He’s there been all over the screen, in advertising paid for by Texans, to ask New York businesses to pull up stakes and move to Texas.

Governor Perry is dangling lures in front of New York business the way Anthony Weiner dangles his…but I’m getting off track here. Perry is talking about no taxes. He’s talking about no meaningful regulations on business. He’s telling “bidness” people they’ll grow fatter and richer than a wet dream in the mind of Croesus if only they fire everybody in New York and come down his way.

Don’t believe me?  Go here.

Now all this would be fine. New York would suffer a tragic loss of masochistic business owners and senior executives who don’t mind the humid heat in Houston that could give a shovel full of desert silicon an incurable case of wet rot.

He’s also no doubt trying to lure business people who don’t mind the crappy schools in Texas, where school boards seek to outlaw critical thinking as part of the Texas program to grow adult ignoramuses.

He’ll probably also lure folks who are amorous of “Palmetto bugs” – those are cockroaches the size of Wladimir Klitschko’s fist – that fall out of trees on peoples’ cars and heads, as well as infesting kitchens and attics. Hey, if you or your wife or your kids find a few Palmetto bugs in sexual congress in the china cabinet, you can always say it’s a sign of good luck.

As I said, masochistic New Yorkers-turned-Texan could enjoy the “good life” there. Umm, except for a the little matter of what happens when the setup there gets you into deep trouble.

See, not long ago a fertilizer plant blew higher than a cowboy on loco weed in a Texas town called West. Turns out, there was enough explosive stuff stored there to kill 12 citizens, injure hundreds more, and flatten homes, businesses (perhaps some lured there by Governor Perry), a school, and probably a whole lot of outhouses. Now Governor Perry wants the rest of us non-Texans to pay for it.

This might not have happened had “business-friendly” Texas chosen to regulate plants where explosive chemicals are used and stored.

Didn’t happen.

It might have been avoided if Texas demanded enough liability insurance so that the insurance companies themselves would inspect the plant and threaten to cancel the insurance if the plant didn’t get safe fast.

Didn’t happen.

Or even, if Texas had a reasonable tax structure, like most states, the Texas treasury might have been able to handle the under-$35 million Texas needs to fix the mess – at least until next time. Hell, in New York City alone we spend more on that on subways in a month. Or is it a week? Whatever. In any case a reasonable tax structure didn’t happen in Texas, either.

So why should the citizens of the other 49 states reach into their pockets to help out Texas, when Texans won’t reach into its own pockets? I mean, it just might sound to some people like a bunch of lazy or greedy Texans are demanding welfare to fix up their own mess.

And that's why Governor Perry is crying like a baby with something disagreeable in his diaper.

So the citizens of West are screwed. And I do hope, when the survivors of West figure out that it’s their own governor that screwed them, they – may I borrow one of your own phrases, Governor? – I hope they treat Rick Perry real ugly.