Clearly wisdom as well as enchantment is being imparted in the Harry Potter books. One pearl in particular stands out. As a significant cross section of the Muggle world is aware, Wizards have many ways of knowing and of finding out. Books Six and Seven of the series (no endings will be divulged here) make clear that when Harry needs general information, he relies on newspapers -- the Daily or Evening Prophet --which come to him by delivery owl.
He keeps a "sizable stack of newspapers" on his desk at Privet Drive so he can study events, evaluate them and return to stories again and again to better
understand his swiftly changing world. Preparing for a life on the go, he clips articles he thinks he might refer to again and tucks them into his rucksack. He knows not to believe everything he reads -- gossip columns are manipulative and Harry sees that the subjects that are not covered (news of You Know Who) can be more significant than what is featured.
Of course, Wizards can conjure information that effects them personally (Mrs. Weasley tracks her children's well-being via her clock) but news of the personal and immediate does not suffice for the Wizard world or for Harry Potter, its most important citizen. When he needs to know what is going on in the Ministry of Magic or how Wizard opinion is being formed, he turns to newspapers. While the Muggle world sleeps on, Harry knows that nothing can beat the authoritative magic of the printed page. Harry Potter is The Boy Who Reads.
You Want Our Business? Then Give Us Jobs
Newsday, August 6, 2003
The Commerce Department's announcement last week that the U.S. unemployment rate has dropped to 6.2 percent prompted analysts to note that so many jobless Americans have given up looking for work, they are no longer computed. In New York City, where unemployment is 7.9 percent, our problems are even greater than the rest of the nation's, and it is easy to see why.
A few months ago, an East Sider switching to an AT&T telephone plan noted that only "parts" of the 516 area code were considered local calls. She asked which parts they were. After the service rep stumbled over "Coochy-who and Row-row-ko," the customer said, "Cutchogue and Ronkonkoma - where are you speaking from?" The rep was in Missouri.
About that same time, a Citibank customer went to her branch to question her statement and was told to call an 800 number for answers. Calling several times on subsequent days, she was transferred from one rep to another, none of whom claimed responsibility and all of whom tried to stonewall her. The New Yorker learned nothing about her account, but she did find out that the entire battery of Citibank phone reps was in Dallas. Interestingly, none of them had a Southern accent.
More recently, when Bloomingdale's failed to deliver a high-end mattress on the morning specified, a customer repeatedly dialed the store's delivery hotline. As the hours wore on, she received several different estimated times of arrival. The mattress arrived so late that night that building rules would not allow delivery to be accepted. The customer had devoted a day that should have gone to earning a living to being misled by customer service. Turns out the delivery coordinators were in Columbus, Ohio. No wonder they did not understand what and how things are done in New York City.
The New York metropolitan region was wounded by 9/11, the collapse of both the stock and Internet bubbles, and irresponsible tax-cutting and free spending by the Giuliani and Pataki administrations during the heyday of Wall Street and the Internet boom. Nevertheless, it remains a fertile regional market of more than 10 million people. It might be a prudent time for the corporations that profit from New Yorkers' spending to hire New Yorkers to serve the New York market.
According to the state labor board, a customer service rep in New York City earns about $16.80 per hour. Generally metropolitan area wages are 25 percent higher than wages nationwide. The corporations want to use cheap help, but in fact the non-New Yorkers cost them business.
If customer service reps in the U.S. hinterlands were providing adequate service, corporate frugality might be acceptable, but the simple fact is that corporations rip off the New York region in three ways. First, businesses that make money from us do not hire us. Secondly, they force us to rely on people who deny us the service we pay for. Thirdly, these very same companies have gotten lucrative breaks to stay in New York City.
In 1978, AT&T promised to stay in the city indefinitely in exchange for zoning changes that allowed it to build an outsized landmark headquarters. By 1984 it was already abandoning Madison Avenue for the New Jersey suburbs, breaking its agreements with the city. Federated Department Stores, owner of Bloomingdale's, has received at least $2.3 million in tax subsidies. Citicorp, parent of Citibank, has received more than $90 million worth of them.
Now we learn that jobs that left the city can leave the nation. IBM, with a huge upstate presence, plans to export hundreds of thousands of high-tech, high-wage jobs to foreign lands. A Forrester Research study says that in the next 10 years, 3 million high-tech jobs might depart the United States. As Americans we need to get angry, and as New Yorkers we need to recognize what has happened to us and start to speak out.
Recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proved that he is a typical Republican by declaring that city finances are on the upswing and that he can roll back property taxes. But that reduction means less money for hard-pressed public services. Faced with the axis of indifference that runs from Albany to Washington, and for practical purposes through City Hall, New Yorkers must get down to the business of saving ourselves by every means possible, even simple ones.
Rather than spend unaccustomed free time at the state-owned slot machines that Gov. George Pataki is so proud of, jobless city residents (and those who are just worried) should write CEOs of companies that take their money to demand that they hire New Yorkers as well. If nothing else, maybe New Yorkers can persuade the governor to let us build his slot machines.
We need to hope for jobs, because we are running out of luck even as we fall off the Commerce Department's charts.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
Newsday, April 15, 2003
Grime obscures the small sign posted at the closed exit of the N, R and W subway platform at 60th Street and Third Avenue. It is just as well that dirt makes the lettering hard to read, because the notice says that the exit will reopen in the fall of 2002. Now in spring 2003, signs upstairs on boarded-over exits inform riders that the passageways will be usable sometime next winter.
The exits are closed because the escalator has been out of service for about two years. By next winter, it will be three years. But the escalator is not the point, the exits are. So is the exit at 41st Street, west of Seventh Avenue at the cavernous Times Square subway stop, which is gated shut by day. So are exits around 34th Street in the Penn Station, Madison Square Garden area. So are other, now overlooked, examples of boarded or gated exits throughout the system that are closed completely or at rush hours only.
Exits are sealed and barred even as public officials warn that the Iraqi war will incite new terrorist attacks, particularly in New York City, particularly in the subway. Even if uniformed police and military personnel patrolling the system have keys to the gates, or axes to break down locked doors, they could not open the exits fast enough in time of crisis, even if it is "only" an accidental fire.
In happier days, closed exits were a quibble. A subway rider was like Rodney Dangerfield and took a battered survivor's pride in the fact. That was all right when never-completed repairs caused only minor inconvenience and promoted the image of New York as a city where things did not work. Before 9/11, subway riders participated in a can't-get-no-respect comedy. If they got kicked around, sooner or later laughs ensued. Now, having lived to see Saddam Hussein topple, we must live through the peace that follows, all the while wondering about the whereabouts of our avowed enemy Osama bin Laden and the possibility that we could again star in a disaster film.
In recent years, particularly as subway service improved, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority put a good face on inconvenience. It told riders that annoyance is the price of the MTA's building something better, or bringing things up to code. But charges of graft and corruption rise like plaster dust from every project site the MTA is involved with, including its own headquarters.
Subway riders may no longer be in a knock-about farce, but MTA leadership stars in one. Examples: a contractor confessed he personally overbilled the MTA $800,000 as part of a scheme to siphon $10 million from the $55-million construction of a new headquarters for the MTA. In a current Punch and Judy show, two MTA officials charged with overseeing security for riders charge that bid-rigging, multimillion-dollar cost overruns and bribes are compromising anti-terrorism measures in the transit system. MTA management promptly placed them on leave and called them liars.
In addition, the MTA is in some confusion about its own books. When Gov. George Pataki, who appoints all MTA board members, was running for re-election, MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow claimed there was a budget surplus. No sooner was Pataki re-elected than the MTA discovered a deficit, raised fares and voted to close 62 part-time ticket booths with station agents who could help evacuate riders in case of emergency. State and city Comptrollers Alan Hevesi and William Thompson Jr. are both trying to investigate MTA books, despite MTA stonewalling.
The latest charge against the MTA comes from Thompson, whose audit indicates that unsafe conditions, including exposed third rails, prevail at one Long Island Rail Road station in Queens and three Metro-North train stations in the Bronx, whereas the audit could find no unsafe conditions in Westchester. How could the subways be anything but an MTA stepchild? Only four of 17 board members come from New York City. New York City's mayor can recommend - not appoint - only four voting members. The NYC Transit Riders Council had one non-voting member. The rest are from the suburbs.
Based on experience, one can be sure that another terrorist attack on the city would be followed by loud crocodile tears from politicians who have proved in the 19 months since 9/11 that they care about New York City only as a backdrop for photo-ops. In the meantime, the MTA must spend every penny necessary to repair and open all exits immediately and keep them open at all times. It must also void contracts with outside contractors who have not been able to keep our exits safe. It the MTA fails to do this, Pataki and his board members could join those cheesy nightclub owners whose patrons died unnecessarily at locked doors that might have been portals to life, had the owners had the brains, the decency or the morality to keep their exits open and in repair.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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Newsday, December 5, 2002
Police and prosecutors told a false story to jurors in the Central Park jogger case. Unhappily the jury believed them. Tragically the press believed them, too. Happy to have things settled, the media demonized the five Harlem youths as readily as they later demonized Bill Clinton.
It seems that a heinous crime was compounded by a heinous injustice. Had we been less willing to have the matter settled, perhaps the city would not be waiting for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to announce the results of his investigation into their convictions. Because as everyone knows by now, since their imprisonment, Matias Reyes has confessed to the crime and his DNA has been matched to the evidence - whereas, contrary to the breathless reports at the time, the forensic evidence did not implicate the Harlem youths in the brutal assault of the jogger.
If the police, public and the media of New York took more rape and murder victims as seriously as they took the valiant, young, privileged, white female investment banker who was brutalized 13 years ago, then such miscarriages of justice would be less likely to occur.
The case of the Central Park jogger went wrong two days before it happened, when another young woman in the same area of Central Park near East 106th Street was raped and suffered severe head injuries on April 17, 1989. Nobody - except the police and those at St. Luke's Hospital who helped her battle back to life and health - knew about her. At the time, the media paid no attention to her case and the public never heard of her.
This Central Park unknown was another woman in her 20s. She was doing tai chi exercises, as millions of people do safely in every park in Asia. The unknown told the police that a young man had beaten her face and head, yanked off her clothes and sexually assaulted her until another man heard her screams and ran to her aid. The Manhattan Sex Crimes unit came up with one suspect, Matias Reyes, but due to the transfer of a detective to another unit, the suspect was never questioned, and so the unit had nothing to refer to the district attorney. Manhattan North Homicide handled the case of the Central Park jogger, which occurred on April 19, 1989, because she was expected to die from her head injuries. The two divisions did not work together, and the information fell through the cracks and the rapist walked free.
The jogger's case was known throughout the city. Her case was the grabber. There were 3,254 sexual assault cases in New York City in 1989, but they blurred. In this case, everyone knew that the jogger's young, productive, educated brain was battered to a pulp but cradled and protected by the mud of Central Park where she had been raped. Her name was never released, but the press revealed she was an investment banker at Salomon Brothers and she lived on E. 83rd Street, where she was thinking of buying her apartment.
What does the fact that, of all the victims, she alone was news say about us? One wants to believe that the public cared so much about the Central Park jogger because her situation became so real. One wants to believe that the public would have cared about the tai chi victim if her story had been told. But we would not have.
The evidence is in the response to the recent case of Lynette Luckett, a home-care attendant, age 51, who was only a few steps from her door on Belmont Avenue in the Bronx when a robber, beer bottle in one hand and 8-inch knife in the other, stabbed her in the back. As blood gushed from her mouth, nose and torso, Luckett collapsed. She died two hours later of her injuries. Her two nephews and a family friend, along with another man, captured a suspect who was charged. No more has been reported since the crime occurred in October. Nor has there been any outpouring of concern.
In the Central Park jogger case, Donald Trump bought $85,000 worth of newspaper ads to demand the five Harlem teens be executed. He has yet to cry out for justice for this middle-aged woman and for the sanctity of the Tremont section of the Bronx.
The media need to ask themselves why they trumpeted the tragedy of a young female investment banker jogging in Central Park near 104th Street after 9 p.m., and knew or reported nothing about a similar attack on a young woman who was doing tai chi in that same area on a Monday afternoon. Was the unknown from East Harlem? Did she have a job? Was she white? Why did the police not connect her to the Central Park Jogger case? Maybe if the media or the police had picked up on her case, Matias Reyes would have been caught before he went on to rape four more women after the jogger, in the summer of 1989, and kill one, a 24-year-old pregnant woman.
The public needs to examine its lack of reaction to the story of the late Lynette Luckett. She was Trinidadian, middle-aged and a health-care attendant who lived in the Bronx. Her murderer may have been someone of her own race. Her case made the papers - murders capture media attention more than rape does - but rather than cries of outrage, one heard silence.
Until this most caring of cities cares about all its citizens equally, the poor ones, the rich ones and the middle-aged ones struggling to stay out of poverty, we can expect shortcuts to vengeance for sad but privileged victims who capture our imagination and stimulate the levers of power.
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc
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Lucille The Life of Lucille Ball
"A beautiful portrait of someone with enormous talent as an entertainer and heart-breaking fragility as a woman. In giving Lucille Ball the serious appraisal she deserves, Kathleen Brady has really gotten behind the scenes and the cameras to provide an invaluable chronicle of several areas and ers of show business."
---Molly Haskell
Ida Tarbell Portrait of A Muckraker
"Kathleen Brady brings to life the personality of Ida Tarbell, queen of the muckrakers, who was one of the first women to break the gender gap in American journalism...[an] eminently balanced biography."
---Herbert Mitgang,
The New York Times
Forgotten Heroes -- Hazel Brannon Smith
An essay on a Mississippi segregationist turned civil rights activist and Pulitzer Prize winner
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Expert advice, answers and recommendations for everything from backaches, osteoporosis, and sprained knees to enodmetriosis, arthristis and cancer.
