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One A Day…

It’s not really a new year’s resolution so much as a new month’s resolution. Seduced by the witty writing of  fussy, (aka Eden Kennedy), I’m joining NaBloPoMo tomorrow. What’s that you say? nahblowpomo?  The mind boggles with the possibilities inherent in that acronym (which, true, isn’t really an acronym, but it’s close). 

National Blog Posting Month.  It’s like the bikram thirty classes in thirty days challenge, but less sweaty: write a post a day, every day, for a month. 

February, being the shortest month, seemed like a good time to start.

So. Onward with a month o’blather and blither. Consider yourself warned.

Read full story · Comments { 0 } on January 31, 2010 in writing

Chump Change…chumps, change?

goldcoinsEarlier this week, Governor Paterson announced his new budget for New York State and in case you’ve had your head in the sand as a result of the crappyass news coming out of Massachusetts or the even worse news coming out of the Supreme Court, the budget numbers are brutal. Brutal in their bigness, brutal in what it’s going to mean for those of us who live here and don’t work for Goldman Sachs (but more about that later).

One of Paterson’s cost-saving proposals cuts 1.1 billion dollars from the education budget, which comes to about $405 million dollars for NYC public schools.

400 million. Gosh. That’s a lot of school lunches, school aides, new teachers, library books, science equipment…heck, for 400 million dollars you could build whole freakin buildings. Lots of them.  But I guess cost-saving measures are best enacted on the backs of those who can’t really fight back, right?

Perhaps we should look at it differently. You know, really? 400 million? That’s nothing. Chump change. Just a little mad money to tuck in your bra before you go clubbing, in case you need to make a mad dash for the first class lounge at British Airways.

Chump change, that is, if you work at Goldman Sachs, which just announced  that is setting aside a mere 16 billion dollars for the bonus pool this year. According to the story in the NYTimes, if that money were spread evenly among the 37,000 employees, each would take home about 400,000.  That won’t happen, though, because of course if everyone were to benefit equally from the company’s record-setting profits, that would be, gosh, socialism or something. And that would be bad.

Nope, only the “top producers” will see the big big numbers in their bonus envelope, while the lowly folks who do the crap like answer the phones and swab the terlets and keep the calendars and fix the computers and patrol the hallways, they will get a lot less. They make less to start with of course, and they don’t live in Greenwich, and probably their kids go to public school.

Which brings me to my point. If Goldman Sachs used its bonus pool to cover just the cost of what’s being cut from the NYC public school budget, GS would still have fifteen billion five hundred and nintey-five million dollars.

(Do you know that to do that substraction problem, I had to use the computer’s calculator? Mine couldn’t handle all those zeroes.)

There it is:  Goldman Sachs could cover the budget cuts to the public schools and keep FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS in their coffers. That’s a lot of mad money, if you ask me. (And believe it or not, GS employees are peeved that the bonus pool is so low this year. Truly, have these people sold their souls?  Or rather, it’s clear they have sold their souls, but what the hell is the going rate for a soul these days?)

Wouldn’t it be amazing if that would happen? If the “big producers” at Goldman could decide, gosh, let’s do something for the city where we work, for the not-rich people who work for us–hell, let’s do something just to be nice.

Never gonna happen. Scott Brown will start voting with John Kerrey before Goldman et al start acting in any way other than devoted self-interest.

Read full story · Comments { 1 } on January 22, 2010 in NYC, Politics

Cosmo winner, country loser

brown_cosmo

A year ago, I celebrated my 45th birthday watching Barack’s inauguration.  I drank champagne and cried (tears of joy mostly, although the horror of hitting “mid-forty” may have had something to do with it too); the world seemed filled with hope.

A year later, another birthday, another political upheaval, but this one from the Northeast: Scott Brown’s win over Martha whatsisherface.  A triumph of fear and half-truths over…well, over not much, I guess. Martha seems to have ignored the old adage about what happens when you assume things: like assuming that because it’s “your turn” you’ll win the election; or that because Massachusetts is so liberal you can assume you’ll win.  Remember, Martha, “assume” makes an ass of u and me. 

Making fun of Martha is cold comfort, though, given that the stakes in that election seem so high. And while I don’t want to be all  “this is the end of the Obama presidency,” it does seem like the possibility of health care reform is fading faster than you can say “fifty million uninsured.”  Anthony Wiener, the always elegant New York Rep said that basically the liklihood of the Senate bill passing the House is the same as “pigs flying out your ass.”  New Yorkers – we always have just the right thing to say.

Okay, so maybe Martha is no gem, but is that any reason to put your state in the hands of someone who posed–coyly–for Cosmo in 1982? Do you really want to know what your Senator’s pubes look like? I mean, really? True, California voted for Ahnohld, whom we’ve all seen in fewer clothes than we’d like, but that’s California–it has a reputation for being completely loony, legislatively.  Massachusettians used to sneer at Californians but no longer. Get off that high horse, my Mass friends; now you’re keeping company with the Schwarzneggerians and the Venturians.

My grimmest prediction? That Scott Brown and Sarah Palin are going to create some kind of unholy but highly photogenic alliance and run together for the White House in 2012 and that the rest of the country will be so blinded by their shiny white teeth and glossy hair that the Hollow Heads will actually win. The triumph of the shallow will be complete and people like me–grumpy, lumpy, people-who-read–will be rounded up and hunted for sport.

Oh but that can’t happen, you say. To which I say, look again at the picture at the top of this post and tell me why not.

Read full story · Comments { 1 } on January 20, 2010 in Politics