The Class War

Good for the New York Daily News.
They totally nailed the MTA for giving out free EZ Passes to the millionaires who serve (or served) on its board. How pathetically cheap can these individuals, like Peter Kalikow, be for saving a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand dollars a year they can easily afford and passing the expense on to a strapped system in whose interests they agreed to altruistically act?
This is just one of the egregious perks that came to light in just a few days in the tabloid life of New York.
Look through the pages and you’d be remiss in noticing a trend:

Item in Newsday on 5-27: Doctors and other officials at the non-profit North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital system get up to a $600 monthly stipend for leasing cars, which allows them the luxury of driving in free Cadillacs and Porsches and, until recently, a Jaguar for one lucky official who paid the balance of his or her lease through payroll deduction. (The hospital dumped that car when Newsday phoned about it.) According to Newsday the cost of these leases are passed on the patient, although sloppy reporting doesn’t detail how.
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Item in the Daily News on 5-25: Disgraced public officials, even those convicted of crimes, will still collect city and/or state pensions when they hit retirement age.

In the 5-27 Daily News, a double header: The free EZ Passes for life scoop, and City Council members, who already make $112,000, racked up $277,000 in perks last fiscal year, such as Metrocards, cleaning services, photographers, travel and tchachkes like crystal apples.

These are legitimate stories, although the one about the hospital fails to disclose the most recent annual budget of the multi-billion dollar institution, so readers may judge for themselves whether the $64 million they raised privately should entitle them to such perks and how likely it is that the relatively small cost is actually passed on to patients (who, in any case, for the most part have their bills paid by insurance or Medicaid.)

Newsday has also led the field in uncovering part-time employees of public school districts, such as retained legal counsel, who manage to wangle staggering pensions for themselves through questionable accounting, now under review by the attorney general.

The zeal with which these papers are carrying out these investigations at a time when Americans are hurting economically suggests that class is beginning to divides us far more as a society than race or politics.
The rising cost of gas and its ripple effects will increasingly fuel (pun intended) more of this kind of coverage as as the empowered upper class in corporate America and in the public sector seem to be increasingly brazen.