rude, crude, and nasty: secular nonprofit executive director struts her stuff

There’s a certain tacky, money-grubbing desperation pervasive in the secular nonprofit arena in Ohio, and Marcie Bergman’s conduct representing us as executive director of The Cleveland Arts Prize (CAP) points that up. The Prize has too distinguished a history and is too good a concept to have to endure this sort of hired representation; it’s time for a more gracious face for the organization.

It appears from a cursory examination of the CAP’s forms 990 over at Guidestar (register and sign in for yourself, membership is free) that they certainly could have afforded to provide native son and enfant terrible Harlan Ellison a plane ticket and lodging. It also appears that Marcelle Bergman’s compensation was equal to 1/10th of the endowment amount in 2007; hereafter to be known as Madame Shekelgruber, she had a part-time job of 20 hours a week and received $44,997 for that in 2007. In 2006 and 2005, the compensation for executive-director leadership was significantly less, but that actually misses the point: Paying anything at all for this type of representation is just too, too expensive.

Let’s see if Harlan showcases a new character based on his recent experience with Madame Shekelgruber. Go, Harlan; if anybody can do it, it’s you. And as I’ve been fond of saying lately, “Welcome to Cleveland; now go home.”

Harlan Ellison turns down Cleveland Arts Prize - Cleveland.com

beginning to understand what it all meant

AWEARNESS: The Kenneth Cole Blog: After 40 Years Of Olympic History, Tommie Smith and John Carlos Are Vindicated -- At the link is a double YouTube play, about 12-13 minutes in all, taking us back 40 years to turbulent times, showing the beginnings of making amends four decades later. These guys created quite an uproar, were judged as being out of line and traitorous, and paid a terrible price over the years for doing what they thought was the right thing. We're now understand better what they were trying to communicate, what they were adding into the cultural dialogue.

From the perspective of now, we can only begin to listen better, to be non-judgmental, to take words and gestures at face value and not load them up with our own baggage. We cannot ostracize a whole segment of our society any longer; we cannot afford to hold each other apart. We cannot afford to waste time any longer.

Blogging in Tongues Against HB 477, in French

Jill Zimon et Gloria Ferris ont demandé que je parle à l'encontre de HB 477, dénommé "English-Only projet de loi." J'ai suivi le lien Jill HB 477 pour savoir ce dont j'avais besoin pour obtenir toutes les auto-pensants et coudés en place. J'ai trouvé un stupide projet de loi qui émasculé droit lui-même après avoir obtenu de roulement. C'est un tas de rien. Je ne comprends pas pourquoi nos législateurs le font à tous. Il donne l'impression de son cours de restreindre, puis ascenseurs toutes les restrictions. C'est une grosse trame, suivie par une whimper et un vinaigre et une journée de réflexion collective avec la queue entre les jambes. Je me rappelle de ce truc de Shakespeare, nous avons dû mémoriser au lycée, quelque chose au sujet de "une histoire racontée par un idiot, pleine de bruit et de fureur, signifie rien."

Folks, dans un non-événement. Il donne une mauvaise impression du Zeitgeist de l'Ohio. Il ne fait rien de manière efficace, et nous payons pour elle.

And, here is the English translation:

Jill Zimon and Gloria Ferris have requested I speak out against HB 477, referred to as the "English-Only Bill." I followed Jill's link to HB 477 to find out what I needed to get all self-righteous and cranked up about. I found a silly bill that emasculated itself right after it got rolling. It's a heap of nothing. I don't understand why our legislators are doing this at all. It gives the impression its going to be restrictive, and then lifts all the restrictions. It's a big woof, followed by a whimper and a whine and a retreat with the collective tail between the legs. I reminds me of that thing from Shakespeare we had to memorize in high school, something about "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Folks, this in a non-event. It gives a bad impression of the Zeitgeist in Ohio. It effectively does nothing, and we're paying for it.

Stone Mad just opened Monday

The Cleveland Free Times :: Dining :: Dining Lead :: Detroit Nosh City -- Midday yesterday I was passing through the Detroit-Shoreway area with our friend Rudy, and we stopped by Stone Mad, which has been open for business since this past Monday, 11-4 for lunch and 11-2:30 AM for drinks. It's an awesome place. Talking to Paul, the bartender, we found that they had just wrapped up a 3-year rehab; the attention to detail is incredible. The one thing I admired especially was the roof, done with those recycled rubber-tire slate look-alikes. The application of the shingle material to the ridge vent is the best I've seen, and the handling of the air intake in the soffit is very well done, too. But then, too, there are the cobblestones in the yard, the stone benches and tables on the patio, the outdoor fireplace, the paneling inside, the tilework on the floors and the walls throughout, the handpainted ceiling in the dining area, and the list goes on. There was a certain reverence shown for the building, for the craftsman's materials, for the old neighborhood itself, and the overall effect is extremely refreshing. It gives you hope for the future of older structures in a city bent on replacing the old with the new and conferring tax credits to the destructive, the wasteful, and the foolish. Here's a snippet from the Freetimes a year ago:

Around the corner, "Irish Pete" Leneghan is putting the finishing touches on what close friends are calling his "legacy bar." Stone Mad is a two-and-a-half-year labor of love that often found Leneghan, owner of Tremont's Treehouse bar, on his hands and knees laying acres of gorgeous stone pavers. Inside, skilled craftsmen have constructed two magnificent barrooms, one featuring black walnut, the other floor-to-ceiling oak. A dining room in the rear will serve upscale pub fare.

To encourage conversation, Stone Mad will have no televisions or jukebox, but it will have a sprawling stone patio with water and fire features. An intricate tile mosaic of Leneghan's ancestral town, Ballycroy in County Mayo, brightens up the pub's lower level.

Meanwhile, back here in Brooklyn Centre, as a counterpoint to the good things going on with Pete Leneghan, the board of Art House has passed its third year of stone-walling the neighborhood on the restoration of Wirth House at 3119 Denison. I hear that they have rejected and dismissed, quite recently and arbitrarily, the councilman's offer of help in the restoration of the property and want to proceed with the irresponsible demolition of an historic structure, overriding the objections of the neighbors who gave them the money to be in the restoration business in the first place.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the board members come from the neighborhood, and they have refused for three years to let the neighbors inspect the Wirth House itself. I happen to be one of the "interested parties" of the section 106 historic-property review process, and I can attest to the fact that we have not been allowed to see if the property is as bad as they make it out to be, nor will they stabilize the property so that it's not further wasted. This board seems to think it can't live up to their original compact with the neighborhood, and they also refuse to give back the property or the money we fronted them for it.

Please revisit Craig Bobby's "Where Art Lives...and History Dies" takeoff on the yellow Art House motto to see the building I'm talking about. This inexperienced board is the last tired remnant of the tattered, spotty, sad legacy of former councilwoman Merle Gordon. Merle, I understand, just finished another short job stint, this one at the Cleveland Clinic. Her style no longer plays well (never did, come to think of it), nor does that of this Art House board, and financial power plays using other peoples' government and nonprofit money need to get the closer scrutiny they deserve. We can't afford to let them use our money against us any longer, and to continue to steal our productive time now, as well. I think we need to revisit looking at the books and questioning their stewardship. Things just haven't worked out as advertised originally, and there ought to be some adjustments made for that, before this costs us all still more.

eWeek: Financial Fact and Friction

Financial Fact and Friction -- In line with the recent furor over slipshod mortgage-lending practices and the careless administration of what is for most people their largest single financial asset, their personal residence, here is a reminder from Eric Lundquist over at eWeek that nobody is held to a fiduciary standard in the confiscatory lending business, and nobody really knows where the money goes. If you weren't aware already, this will be an eye-opener, and from a technical as opposed to a financial perspective. Here's a sampling from Opinion: Skip the frictionless-economy ideas and stick with the customer:

Financial organizations have always been big computer purchasers. They are usually among the first to install the latest supercomputers and big storage servers to process and track the millions and millions of shares traded each day. In the last couple of years, computing attention has turned to "quants": quantitative analysts who contend they can model the entire financial market and would love to talk to you for hours about stochastic calculus.

Yet, despite all those quants and all that computing horsepower on Wall Street and elsewhere in the financial world, it is increasingly evident that no one really knows where the money goes, how it moves and how much the leveraged buyout firms really have in their wallets at the end of the day. Why is that? Wasn't all this computing purchasing supposed to result in a frictionless economy where the movement of money and other financial instruments slides seamlessly through the world's economy and everyone can sleep well at night knowing how much money is in the bank?

When I add up all those CNN tidbits and wild swings on Wall Street as quant-driven computer trading tries to track the untrackable, I have to conclude that all the computing horsepower has been aimed at making money move faster with little regard for trying to settle accounts at day's end.

A computer is an obedient device that will do exactly what you program. If your goal is to track the flow of money after it gets splintered into the world's financial markets, then that is what the computer will do. If your goal is to accelerate that money movement and not really be concerned about where the funds go after they leave your company, then you will get what we have: a lot of panicked investors and corporate managers unable to say where the money has gone.

Forget about the frictionless economy and let's count on building some friction based on accountability and concern for customers who want to know where the money went.

homie David Pogue explains why AT&T is running scared

Are U.S. Cellphone Carriers Calcified? - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog -- David Pogue, son of Dick, or Richard Pogue, and now also home-boy expatriate in the NYC area, explains why AT&T was so frantic to jam SB117 up our nether parts, and all with the mindless cooperation of our elected lightweights at the state level: They're losing ARPU:

The cellular industry is going through insanely rapid change. Almost everyone there—800 attendees from 200 phone companies in 65 countries—was running scared of VOIP. That’s voice over I.P., better known as Internet phone. VOIP includes cheapo unlimited home-phone service like Vonage, as well as absolutely free computer-to-computer calling with programs like Skype. It’s all growing like crazy, which is making a huge dent in these companies’ ARPU.

Oh, yeah—that’s Average Revenue Per User. Telecom companies live and breathe ARPU. The talks at this conference were all about “Improving Your ARPU.” (They *love* acronyms in this business. Typical seminar description: “Learn how ISM and FSM can decrease your OPEX and CAPEX and boost your ARPU!”)

Most of these carriers intend to fight off VOIP by growing into a Double Play, Triple Play, or even Quad Play.

What, you don’t know those terms either!?

If you’re a single-play company, you just provide landline service. Add cellphone coverage, and you’re a double play. Add Internet service and TV, and you’re a quad play. You can see the same syndrome here in the U.S., too, as cellphone companies try to deliver TV service, cable companies roll out phone service, and so on.

Gloria Ferris on the Breuer Tower: nailing down the dialogue

Gloria Ferris begins to nail the smarmy dynamics of the Breuer Tower deal and throws some light on self-serving motives, and our recourse. What's important here is that she touches on the perilous tactical position in which the City Planning Commission finds itself.

clutter & noise on the internet

MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed - Columns by PC Magazine -- Good to hear near-brilliant predictions that run parallel with mine. I fled screaming (virtually) from Second Life and MySpace, then forsook Twitter when I decided I was too weird to report, religiously and meticulously, what I did hour by hour--somebody would have me committed way before my time.

the "skyline impact" and the economics of the Breuer Tower

Meet the Bloggers » Cuy Co Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones and Sustainability Director Joyce Burke-Jones re: Breuer Tower -- I see that our May 23rd session at Webtego about Breuer Brouhaha is posted, and I wanted to acknowledge all the fine community discussion this misstep by Jimmy DiMora and Tim Hagan has engendered.

Yesterday, I got my first glimpse of Thomas Mulready's podcast with PLJ (Peter Lawson Jones), and it's worth spending 20 minutes to see an interview done with tough questions done right; because he is a good friend to Peter and to the community, Thomas stayed on task with the issues, especially the gonzo economics, and stood in the place of many of us who are wondering why something so financially counterintuitive is going forward at all. Two of the three county commissioners are draining our collective community power by wasting our time and our energy, as well as our money. Listen to how the proposal process was compromised and manipulated from the get-go, with the consulting firms being told to address only new construction, not adaptive reuse.

George over at BFD took a unique tack on the Breuer session and broke it down into five snippets, for quick consumption. George is making it easy to do business with Meet.The.Bloggers.

Susan rallies the troops over at RealNEO. She advises us to be there early to sign in and also talks about room 501. I guess we'll just have to sort that out when we get there. Norm in the comments invites us over for lunch afterward.

Gloria over at Save Our Land reminds us to show up tomorrow for the planning commission meeting, Friday, June 1st, at 9 AM, room 514, City Hall, even though I don't see it as a topic on the draft CPC agenda. Let's hope they all pay attention to detail tomorrow and show up on time, or show up at all. Cimperman, I have observed personally, has a habit of staying away when the chips are down.

Marc over at GCBL reminds us as well, gives sage advice and agglomeration, and publishes a letter from Daryl Davis while he shows links to YouTube. The Cuyahoga County Planning Commission reports on the arrival of Davis Brody Bond, the out-of-town experts, to present their analysis at the CPC confab tomorrow. There's a lot of energy swirling around this issue--embodied energy, embedded energy, whatever you want to call it, but it's stirred up a storm.

If you can, be there. Take the time to listen to the entire MTB session, especially the comments I brought in from Bob Gaede about "the skyline impact." This is something that had hitherto been absent from the Breuer community dialogue. Also, hear architect David Ellison on Breuer and LEED standards. There's a ton of great material in the full session.

real-estate blinders

As Condos Rise in South Florida, Nervous Investors Try to Flee - New York Times -- There's a parallel here to Cleveland -- in both places, they keep building new, regardless of what the markets are telling them.

In Cleveland, they add the extra incentive of tax abatement. City Council recently voted 20 to 1 in favor of continuation of tax abatement, even though since 1997, the tax-abated properties have been directly offset by the number of unsold, vacant, abandoned, and foreclosed existing properties--the number is in the 10,000 to 12,000 range, and nobody has yet done a study that mentions this fact. It seems that the big picture is what we should focus on first but, hey, around here we ignore the numbers and focus on the hype, the feel-good proposition.

Our Ward 15 councilman Brian Cummins was the lone holdout, and we're proud of him for speaking out against an unfair imposition on long-time residents. But, to put him on notice, some sneaky little scuttling bureaucratic creep allowed a typically Cleveland+ "oops!" to happen, and a house Brian had lined up for renovation on Riverside Avenue was demolished, in a snafu, on a Saturday.

Anyway, here's the after-action report on the insanity in South Florida:

“I get two or three of these calls a day,” said James Ryan, a lawyer in Boca Raton who said he had 40 clients looking to get out of condo contracts. One, Mr. Ryan said, abandoned a $340,000 deposit rather than close on a $1.6 million unit that lost its appeal as the market faltered. The numbers suggest that it will only get worse. In Miami-Dade County alone, 8,000 new condo units will be completed this year and nearly 12,000 more in 2008. But demand has dropped markedly, and people who thought they could “flip” condos — buying, then selling for a steep profit before construction is done — are parting with that fantasy. After years of stunning price increases — 25 percent in the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton area, for example, from March 2005 to March 2006 — condo prices have started dropping.

here's another reason for the SB117 full frontal assault

DirecTV May Test Broadband over Powerline - News and Analysis by PC Magazine -- It seems that AT&T may be outflanked here, by just about everybody--the cable companies, the VoIP providers, the cellphone companies, the satellite providers, and now, to add insult to injury, our friend the electric company, and that more than likely accounts for AT&T's haste and desperation in ramming through the bad-for-everybody-but-them legislation known here in Ohio as SB117, sponsored by Lance Mason and Bob Spada.

If we can get broadband over our electrical power lines or through the air or over cable, and we can get VoIP over broadband, we don't really need all that legacy POTS that AT&T has held onto for years without improving, all the while charging premium prices for it. It seems that this is reckoning day for AT&T, and they're trying to dodge their demise by cozying up to our state legislators and trying to put their signature tin boxes on every treelawn between here and Cincinnati.

In the process, they're making us a technological laughingstock and pointing up our technological illiteracy and innumeracy as a community.

Remember, we don't owe AT&T anything. Let the market forces prevail. Let them fail. Do not let AT&T prove the sad old theorem we last heard from the open-source man, Bruce Perens: "If you can't innovate, legislate."

hungry government turns eyes to nonprofits

WebCPA Redesign for Form 990 on the Way -- Lately, for at least the past year, the IRS has been setting up guidance for the nonprofit sector, which is sort of fat and juicy and wild and wooly these days. Guidance precedes audits and fishing expeditions. There are all sorts of things coming up addressing fiduciary issues, conflict-of-interest policies, and whistleblower policies. Now, the 990 form is getting a makeover to control shifting from regular operational expenses to programs to make it look as though the nonprofit is doing more good for the public than it actually is. Keep on an eye on these developments. They will have a huge impact.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the IRS is planning to solicit public comment on the current state of the 15-page, 100-question form for a three-month period beginning in June.

The report said that IRS officials are planning to create a form that is more logically organized, containing a main section with questions about an organization’s revenues, liabilities and programs. Beyond that, additional schedules will provide information on certain charitable activities such as lobbying. Still in its early stages, the information requested as part of the revamped form will still fall short of the kind of details required from public companies.

they're doin' it in Knoxville, too

Free Press : Is Tennessee Ready for AT&T to Enter Cable Market? Here's an intelligent piece from The Knoxville News Sentinel about AT&T trying to pull off the same full-court-press offensive in Tennessee that it is in Ohio, regarding delivery of cable services.

There are so few positives and so many negatives to the legislation that I cannot really see why it's still alive and kicking, unless the money's talking just too, too loud to our elected and appointed employees.

The AT$T cable-delivery behemoths we've seen--across from the car barns off Pearl Road and up and down poor Clifton Boulevard--seem to be especially vulnerable to all sorts of disruption. They're hastily contrived and cheaply installed. I think they ought to be put below grade, first of all, for security purposes, then second, for shielding, and then third, for appearance.

The nasty evidence we see of AT$T's late-stage attempt at entry into the cable market, when they're losing telephone market share to VOIP providers, is sort of sad. They've been outflanked and now are lumbering around trying to respond with the quickest-but-not-the-best maneuver to gain a toehold--the technology seems not to be too well thought through, the design is barely sustainable. They are desparate. They want to stay alive, they want to stay in the game, they want to do it on our backs. We've found these past few years, with VOIP telephone delivery, that they've overcharged us for years. They've taken our discretionary savings dollars to themselves and back to Wall Street.

We don't owe them anything. And they don't really owe us customers anything, either, besides whatever service we contract to pay for. Remember that their first duty is to the shareholders, not the customers. And they're not good neighbors.

plus-size me, please

Cleveland+ chosen as 'brand' for region -- Well, I guess that says it all. Let's get back to work.

"an extra helping of attitude and entitlement..."

Maybe we should call it Cleveland Shopkins -- I loved the letters to the editor in yesterday's Sunday PD, the letters about the Ricky Smith article on Tuesday, in which Ricky inadvertently shows his true stripe: He really doesn't want to serve the public as much as he wants to use the public.

When we had the MTB interview with Fred Krum down at CAK, the message was service, service, service, resulting in a pleasant travel experience that a passenger would willingly replicate or repeat. CAK is prospering and seems to be on an advertising offensive all over the region--their yellow signs are everywhere, at least in the more expensive advertising media. CAK apparently has the financial means to advertise, and now Ricky, saddled with one billion of debt, wants to go still further into debt to counter their blitz:

Smith said he is putting together a strategic plan for Hopkins. He said he
wants to bring in new airlines and launch an aggressive marketing campaign,
partly to compete with the recent advertising blitz by Akron-Canton Airport.
Smith said he also wants to improve the looks of the airport's terminal and
customer services, including taxi service.

"It's crucial that the airport runs well, has strong customer service programs and that it's aesthetically pleasing," he said. "All I've done is put paint on the walls. I haven't done anything yet."

desperately seeking wisdom

OpinionJournal - Featured Article: While we're talking about Mike Dovilla, here's a fairly balanced piece he sent me a few weeks back, from Joe Lieberman in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal on February 26th. Read the whole thing. It speaks to the political environment and the war environment under which Mike and everybody else we've required to serve over there must endure, and we must not jeopardize their safety or compromise the mission at this point based on knee-jerk reactions of the lightweights in the rear; most of them are not leaders, they're merely politicians; many of them don't serve our interests first. One of the worst feelings we all had during the RVN era was having our fate being decided by the politicians--thinking first of their safety, some of them, and then of ours--and by the irate public who weren't there, some of whom had opted not to serve. Here's Joe, who's beginning to show wisdom.

"I understand the frustration, anger and exhaustion so many Americans feel about Iraq, the desire to throw up our hands and simply say, 'Enough.' And I am painfully aware of the enormous toll of this war in human life, and of the infuriating mistakes that have been made in the war's conduct.

But we must not make another terrible mistake now. Many of the worst errors in Iraq arose precisely because the Bush administration best-cased what would happen after Saddam was overthrown. Now many opponents of the war are making the very same best-case mistake--assuming we can pull back in the midst of a critical battle with impunity, even arguing that our retreat will reduce the terrorism and sectarian violence in Iraq."

connecting the dots, doing simple math, just noticing, just wondering

Taxing balance Abatement reviewed: From the SunNEWS on March 15th, with my emphasis added. The SunNEWS quote is italicized:

"Cleveland's existing citywide residential property tax abatement law was renewed in 1999 and is set to expire June 15. A separate abatement law for downtown won't expire until 2010. Cleveland began offering residential tax abatement, at 100 percent for seven years, for new downtown construction in 1987.
In the decade prior, new housing construction in Cleveland was almost non-existent. In some years, fewer than 20 homes were built. After 1987, the pace quickened. It accelerated in 1991 when the use of tax abatement was expanded citywide, offering a 100 percent abatement over 15 years. The abatement applies only to structures, not land.
Since then, 11,259 residential units were built, according to a 2007 study by Cleveland State University's College of Urban Affairs. The study also showed 60 percent of people buying tax-abated housing are coming from outside Cleveland. "

The forecast for 2007 is that Cleveland will have between 10,000 and 12,000 vacant or abandoned properties, which can be accounted for nearly directly by the 11,259 tax-abated new properties. The overall Cleveland population is less now than what it was in 1991. Where is the benefit? Where exactly is the gain? What is the loss?

Nobody's doing the simple math. Nobody's talking straight talk.

lots of statistics, for the record

Mortgage Trouble Clouds Homeownership Dream - New York Times -- Now, nearly two years after we gave testimony for the Cuyahoga County commissioners and five years since Cleveland-Marshall law professor Kathleen Engel began writing her papers warning of the impending debacle, the numbers begin to appear in the popular press, and the evidence of greed is incontrovertible.

In the same edition, the NYT tells in "Buying With Help From Mom and Dad" about how the high price of residential real estate is spawning new specialties among lawyers, third-party administrators, psychiatrists, and counselors, as parents and children cope with the imbalanced behavior of committing more money to the children's housing than the children can afford. I wonder what the upshot of all this will be if ever the prices in the housing markets recede, and they find themselves in the uncomfortable condition called "upside down."

Finally, Gloria tells me that in the PD Friday, someone with insight into the mortgage and real-estate industries talked of "mortgages that are designed to strip wealth rather than allow homeowners to build up equity in their properties." It's good that all this is coming out now, while the huge intergenerational transfer of wealth from the post-WWI crowd to the post-WWII crowd is still under way.

Do you think that, if we paid cash for our housing and our cars, that the prices would moderate and approach true value?

private transit catching on

Google’s Buses Help Its Workers Beat the Rush - New York Times -- Here, Google offers as a perk what we in Cleveland, East Cleveland, Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, and Lakewood take for granted--mass transit. Private, customized transit systems seem to be catching on. In addition to Google, Ebay is trying private systems. Around here, The Cleveland Clinic runs its own bus system despite the presence of RTA, and yesterday, we noticed the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority also has its own little private transit system.

Google and Ebay do business in the open market of for-profit corporations and contract their transit service through an outside provider. The Cleveland Clinic finances its transit, and its real estate, using dollars gleaned in the nonprofit market for health-care services, and the CMHA exists because of the tax dollar. The more I think about it, the more I come to the realization that the Clinic and the CMHA transit services may be redundant and need to be looked at very closely.

We don't have much choice about paying the "taxes" levied either by the health-care system or by the entities that finance the CMHA as well as the RTA. Bear in mind, too, that the Clinic does not pay into the tax pool that the rest of us do. What I'm getting to is that we are probably paying for way more transit than we need, and not maximizing the usage of what we pay for. We ought to consider having CMHA use the RTA for its needs, and we ought to ask the Clinic to contribute to the tax pool before it goes starting up its own bus system. Then, we ought to ask the Clinic to cut back on health-care costs by having its employees use what the rest of us use--unless of course, the employees are so special and hard to recruit that they need the same livery service perquisite that Google employees have on that other coast. Am I making sense?

Final thought: Do you suppose the perk, the shuttle-bus service, that the Clinic employees now receive is listed as such, as additional compensation, on their wage and earnings statements submitted to the IRS?

we talked about this with Jim Rokakis

Lender Stops Accepting Mortgage Applications - New York Times--We talked about this subprime mortgage-lender meltdown situation with Jim Rokakis a few weeks ago in a MeetTheBloggers session at Gypsy Beans, and how our county and our state may proceed in the matter. Gloria tells me that our governor has little more sympathy than Rokakis for the people who have created this sloppy subprime mess. Here's an excerpt from the NYT March 9th article about this New Century, "at the center of the subprime storm:"

Like other subprime lenders, New Century’s problems can be traced to a sharp spike in defaults among mortgages written last year, when lending standards eased across the industry and companies sought to increase loan volume. More borrowers with extremely poor credit were given mortgages without being required to make down payments or to prove the income they stated on mortgage applications.

As more recent borrowers began falling behind on payments, New Century’s financial backers on Wall Street demanded the company buy back nonperforming loans under terms of its securitization agreement with the company. It appears that New Century compounded that problem by incorrectly accounting for loans that it had to buy back and by not setting aside adequate reserves to deal with the problem.

The company said yesterday that it had significantly tightened its lending standards in the last few months and was no longer allowing borrowers to take out loans without putting any money down. The new policies, it says, have reduced the number of borrowers who are defaulting on their first mortgage payment to 1.9 percent in February, from 2.5 percent in 2006.