Seemingly… well unrelated

This sign hangs at the entrance to a subway station, inside after one has proceeded through the ticket turn style.  It appears comical, how does someone stealing your purse or lifting your wallet, set off the light to begin flashing? The mezzanine, referred to in the sign, just happens to be around a long corner and down a flight of stairs.  Does anyone even know what a mezzanine is anymore?  And if the light is flashing, are you going to proceed further?  Check it out?  Get the facts?  I don’t think so.  Run like hell would be more like it. Who thought up this one?

 

Surreal

Boarded the bus at 7:20 pm on a weekend night.  The bus had been travelling for a few miles by the time it reached me, but there were no other passengers on it when I entered the front door.  Felt like a movie: either I was about to fly away, just the driver and I, or I was about to be kidnapped.

Walmart In case you missed this:

How taxpayers subsidize Walmart:  Walmart is the largest private employer in the US – and  has the most workers on public assistance.

Since 2007, the company shifted from regular shifts to flexible shifts, a change labor activists said was designed to force full-time workers to downgrade their status to part-time, so they would not qualify for health insurance or other benefits.

The result is that hundreds of thousands of Walmart employees rely on state benefits or Medicaid.  Most of the company’s waredhouses are contracted out to temp agencies, so even if a warehouse loader works full-time in a Walmart warehouse for years, he gets no benefits.

 

Walmart has also spent at least $1 billion since 2005 settling lawsuits over unpaid wages or  illegal working conditions.  One study estimated that Walmart workers cost taxpayers more than $1billion every year.  [taken word-for-word from the week]

 

…Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Insitute points out, the six Walmart heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, up from 30 percent in 2007. Between 2007 and 2010, the collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion, while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000 (13 million Americans have negative net worth). [from mother jones.com]

 

Six members of the Walton family appear on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. Christy Walton, widow of the late John Walton, leads the clan at No. 6 with a net worth of $25.3 billion as of March 2012. She is also the richest woman in the world for the seventh year in a row, according toForbes. Here are the other five:

No. 9: Jim Walton, $23.7 billion
No. 10: Alice Walton, $23.3 billion
No. 11: S. Robson Walton, oldest son of Sam Walton, $23.1 billion
No. 103: Ann Walton Kroenke, $3.9 billion
No. 139: Nancy Walton Laurie, $3.4 billion

That’s a grand total of $102.7 billion for the whole family.

Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California-Berkeley, compared the Waltons’ cumulative net worth with that of the overall population, as cited in the Survey of Consumer Finances. (She used the Waltons’ wealth from 2010, which was valued at $89.5 billion.)

Allegretto found that in 2007, the wealth held by the six Waltons was equal to that of the bottom 30.5 percent of families in the U.S. In 2010, the Waltons’ share equaled the entire bottom 41.5 percent of families.

That 41.5 percent represents nearly 49 million families, notes Josh Bivens at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. While median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, Bivens wrote, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion in 2007 to $89.5 billion in 2010, or about 22 percent growth.

The Price

of having one’s small apartment painted.  Chaos for a week.  Can’t find a thing, the bed is covered, but decided to spare you that visual.  However, good news, have come out the other side happy to report, and the new interior is well worth the week of agony.

Columbia

Was again at Columbia.  This time at night.  A stately college campus is a beautiful sight to behold.  It is always clear to me to see how persons become hooked on being in such an atmosphere, it breathes, it somehow is alive.This campus, right in the City.  Passed a coed wearing a sweatshirt with the greek letters of my university affiliation emblazoned across the front.  I easily resisted stopping her and showing her the future.  I didn’t want to know at her age either, nor would I have believed it.

Signs of Spring

Seemingly against all odds, the trees and bulbs come out of the ground in response to the warmer weather, the sun and the nourishing rain.  Every year they do it again. It is amazing to see, against the background of stone, and city and hardscape.  Hope springs with spring.

Every Time Catches My Breath

Walking toward 42nd Street last night, after my performance, thinking about my need for picture hanging materials when to my left between the curb and the traffic, I first saw the police car; following along, to the three policemen in a semi-circle around one man.  He was standing with his hands behind his back, and as casual as he attempted to make it appear, which at first it did, one realizes no one stands to chat with hands behind their back. The first thing that comes to mind, well, a number of first things, but always: that was not how he planned his evening to end.  The three cops were white, the man was african-american. That dynamic has an effect on the situation. The prisoner was stationed at the side of his black suv.  These suv’s I see not infrequently on the weekends, and have wondered about them.  At one of the bus stops I frequent on performance nights, in a ‘sketchier’ part of town, I’ve seen them pull up to the bus stop and a seemingly random man or two step out. Always in a sort of daze or haze and the driver looks at me, more with a question of ‘you interested?’ than ‘oh, you’ve seen something you shouldn’t.  I have formed an opinion of what I think is being trafficked. This was one of those cars.  To my right there was a drug store; I entered with the vain hope of finding hardware supplies.  When I again came out, the policemen were ‘helping’ the prisoner into a van.  His car left behind, the caution lights blinking.  I think about the follow up to this scene.  The loved ones of the incarcerated getting the call. The ‘boss’ getting the call, the car being impounded, the lives disrupted and ‘crime’ taken off the streets, but the ones for whom the ‘crime’ is being made available, most likely being not affected at all.  Makes me wonder over and over what this life-experience is all about for so many ‘trying to make it work’.