My column, Notes From A Polite New Yorker, is now back online at Kotori Magazine. It sits proudly as one of several columns. Kotori has taken over GetUnderground.com, where my column had been since 2001.
GetUnderground was hacked and if you had Googled it, its listing informed you that visiting the site may harm your computer. That’s quite unfortunate, since many of my columns were archived there. I hope to post the archive at Kotori, or somehow otherwise provide my faithful readers access to it. You can still read some of my old columns at Knot Magazine’s Web site.
But it is a new day, and my column continues and has new life. Rejoice and go visit Kotori.
Of all the career criminals that are routinely arrested by the police in New York City, Darius McCollum is the one who elicits the greatest amount of sympathy on the part of New Yorkers. He is not a murderer, thief or graffiti artist, but is obsessed with New York’s trains.
His crimes all revolve around New York’s subways and commuter trains. He was arrested for the 26th time yesterday at Penn Station by the MTA Police for impersonating a federal agent and boarding a train. He became famous (or infamous) at the age of 15 when he impersonated a motorman and drove the E train for six stops.
Whenever McCollum is arrested, New Yorkers remark that they wish the MTA would hire him. Here is a man who loves the New York City subways and wants more than anything and is so determined to do a good job for our commuters the he risks almost certain arrest and imprisonment every time he boards a train. McCollum has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a form of autism. He will likely end up in prison again.
He is the exact opposite of what most New Yorkers experience when they take the subways or commuter rail every day. Our trains do not run on time, and those that run them are often overpaid, rude layabouts who have a callous disregard for those dependent on their vigilance. MTA executives have received secret bonuses while claiming the MTA was pleading poverty and demanding fare increases.
While we certainly need to have our trains operated by trained professionals, it is a sad state of affairs when the hardest working person in mass transit is a mentally unbalanced trespasser. His criminal record may keep Darius McCollum from fulfilling his dream of driving a train, but he’s my favorite MTA worker, even if he’ll never be an employee.
Tonight’s Vice Presidential debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin was the most eagerly anticipated Vice Presidential debate in my memory. The anticipation centered on speculation over the performance of Gov. Palin.
Leading up to the debate, there seemed to be an effort to raise the bar in terms of the debate for Palin. After her disastrous interviews with Katie Couric on CBS and Charlie Gibson on ABC, this was portrayed as a make or break moment. In these interviews, she was woefully unprepared and looked foolish. As long as she didn’t wet herself or run away, her debate performance could be spun as a success.
The easy analysis would be to say that McCain thought he had a Republican Hillary Clinton and wound up with a female Dan Quayle. But there was no great “gotcha” moment (if I can borrow a misused phrase from the McCain campaign) that Biden scored against Palin the way that Lloyd Bentsen did against Quayle in 1988.
Palin seemed stuck on the same phrases and would veer off topic in order to return to some of the same points. Within the first few minutes, Gov. Palin provided all the catch phrases one would need to create your ownSarah Palin drinking game. If you took a sip of alcohol every time she uttered the phrase, “The Maverick John McCain,” or “Wall Street greed and corruption,” you would have been wasted before the forth question.
Biden definitely did a better job. While actual facts and figures may not impress the voters, they should. Biden knew more about the issues and did a better job presenting the case for the Obama-Biden ticket. Palin held her own on some points, but neither side likely won any converts.
Yesterday at work, the company emailed everyone a copy of its severance pay policy. Should we be laid off, we can expect a week’s pay for every year we’ve been working at the company. Since I’ve been there less then two years, I’ll get the minimum two weeks should I be laid off. It was apropos that the company sent this out on the same day the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced the biggest single-day loss in its history. Gamblers and conspiracy theorists are surely examining the extensive numerology of 777 for clues to the influence of the Bilderbergers and the likelihood of hitting a trifecta at Belmont Park.
Some of my coworkers described what we might do with our severance pay. One of my co-workers said he would spend it high quality cocaine. Another said he would move to Belize where his money would go much further.
I would get a gun with my severance pay. I first thought of a handgun but settled on a rifle that would be better to hunt deer and moose to eat. One moose can feed a family for an entire winter. It was good that I and my coworkers could joke about it. None of us have mortgages or families to feed.
And this is going to be a tough winter. Even if Congress had managed to pass the $700 billion bailout package today, our problems would not have been solved. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
I was laid off a little over a month after the September 11 attacks. I did not find gainful employment for a year and three months. Unemployment is fun at first, but it goes sour quickly when work doesn’t turn up. I will never forget the angry and confused desperation that sets in with long-term joblessness. There were second and third-round job interviews that went well and still resulted in no job, temp agencies that wouldn’t even speak to me because I was “overqualified,” and job ads that turned out to be scams.
I lived on unemployment and after that ran out I found various odd jobs. I also was lucky to have a family that was generous enough to give me a little money now and again. Without them, I’m not sure what I would have done.
The country is facing an economic crisis worse than the one that followed the September 11 attacks in 2001. It may be another Great Depression, or a decade-long recession similar to what Japan experienced in the 1990s. Nobody knows how it will end, but know that we will get through it, somehow.
The U.S. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, is advocating speedy passage of his proposal to bail out the country’s financial markets with what is essentially a blank check in the hands of the U.S. Treasury. Both major presidential candidates support the basic idea of the plan, though are calling for more regulations and a more detailed structure of the plan.
I can certainly find better ways to spend $700 billion (28 billion White CastleCrave Cases, for example). Considering we have veterans in need of health care, active duty military personnel in need of supplies and better pay, open borders that need protecting, roads and bridges that need repair, schools that are falling apart and subways that can’t run on time, bailing out careless investment bankers does not sound like it should be a top priority. Sadly, it’s a stop-gap measure meant to reassure the world’s financial markets and avoid a greater economic catastrophe
While the goal is to avoid a larger financial meltdown, the plan is essentially wrong. Our tax dollars are going to be used to bail out large banks and other investors who made bad investments. The plan will have the government buy these assets and then hire some of these same investors to help them sell it to some of these same investors, who will have the opportunity to salvage profit from their own bad investments, with our tax dollars.
The entire text of the proposal is fewer than 900 words (849 by my computer’s count). The document looks the product of a high school or college student who wakes up with a hangover and realizes they have a term paper due in 45 minutes. It has a two year time frame and the promise that the Treasury Secretary will report to Congress occasionally, but lacks any of the regulatory detail that the circumstances require. Members of Congress are going to have to be able to look their increasingly broke constituents in the face and tell them why he or she voted to bail out Wall Street millionaires while the homes of middle and working class voters are being foreclosed on.
To a certain extent, I can understand the lack of detail, since the object is to get the thing passed as quickly as possible before the financial markets get any worse and then let Congress haggle over the specifics. The roller coaster ride the markets have taken—shooting up when the proposal was made but then dropping as opposition formed and quick passage was not assured—lend credence to the government’s fears that failure to pass the measure would lead to more catastrophic bank failures and maybe worse.
However, passing a $700 billion spending package with a document that wouldn’t have passed muster in freshman economics class is not the way to go.
Then there’s this gem:
“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
So Secretary Paulson, who is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, and his successor, will have two years to go on a buying and selling frenzy and not have to answer to any court of law regardless of what he does? That’s a blank check with carte blanche, and that’s absurd.
I write a column called 'Notes from a Polite New Yorker' as well as short stories and poems. My writing has appeared in Ask A New Yorker, GetUnderground.com, Knot Magazine, The Black Table, Too Square, and other web sites and print publications.
