i can’t bear to actually read it today, the headlines alone meet every known minimum daily stupidity intake requirement.
“diplo debt parked at $18M” — this fight has been ongoing since the seventies. diplomats ostensibly here on United Nations business just leave their cars wherever and however and refuse to pay the tickets. (they also claim diplomatic immunity when charged with crimes such as rape, and are deported rather than tried.) here’s a headline for you: “New York to UN: Get the Fuck Out!” go build a headquarters in iowa or montana, some state that has a lot of room for you to park your cars and fewer citizens for you sons of bitches to be raping (apologies to all law-abiding UNizites, but if you can’t keep your cronies in line, then you will have to share in the consequence of their tomfoolery).
“go chasing waterfalls” talks about using art in “a call for revitalization of areas that have been underutilized”. i’ve got news for you: new york city doesn’t HAVE any underutilized areas. for chrissake, there isn’t even enough room for the ambassador of darfur to park his limo! the art project itself, a collection of four manmade waterfalls spouting away in the east river, seems interesting and beautiful … and somewhat useless. it cost millions of dollars to put this watershow together, while the city is busily cutting back on services such as sanitation and rat-population control because we’re running out of money. an overcrowded city that can’t hire enough cops because their starting wage is less than that of an administrative assistant shouldn’t be throwing this kind of money around in a misguided effort to further overutilize its underserved resources.
one article is slyly entitled “mta hands pried from E-ZPass” - and how they restrained themselves from saying “cold dead hands” i couldn’t tell you, but one of the board members fighting the loss of this illegal (and undeserved) perk dropped dead of a heart attack the other day. i’m not sure, but i think the dead guy was the one who had eight (8! count ‘em!) free E-ZPass tags assigned to him. eight tags in exchange for an allegedly unpaid board position, when the toll for the verrazzano bridge alone is nine bucks a pop. meanwhile, the MTA has the nerve to criticize the media for making much of the free passes, and (according to chairman dale hemmerdinger) (no, i didn’t not make that name up) served to take “the focus off the other issues facing the MTA, which are how we’re going to fund megaprojects and continue funding service for eight and half million new yorkers.” in other words, it’s such a relatively small amount of money (a “postage stamp on a football field,” as board member warren dolny characterized it) that the taxpayers have some nerve even mentioning it. meanwhile, just one of mr. dolny’s passes accounted for more than $3600 in tolls in one 12-month period.
there are 88 of these passes in circulation. and if dolny’s tag is any example, this sleazy under-the-table deal cost new yorkers $316,800 per year.
if that’s a postage stamp, how big is the damn field?
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I swear, I don’t know how these people get away with this kind of stuff. I was on the board of a small company for several years. We were entitled to mileage reimbursement *only for attending board meetings* on the order of forty cents a mile, IF we completed a lengthy and tedious form in justification thereof. Anyone with an expense account knows how this goes. We weren’t just handed a fistful of dollars and told to come back to the till when that ran out.
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