Everyone Knows
By Josh Resnek
Nearly every Wednesday I make the rounds of Everett City Hall delivering the Leader Herald to each and every office on all the floors.
City Hall is a special place for our readers – as nearly everyone who takes an interest in what is going on with the city they work for needs to take a look to remain informed.
I don’t exactly represent the party line. What I write and report on is always refreshing to the rank and file inside their offices behind their desks at Everett City Hall.
Unless taking part in off-campus meetings, department heads, assistant department heads, senior employees of every kind down to the rank and file custodians are always at their jobs.
To do otherwise, would be to accept their pay for doing nothing. It would be to pay lip service to what they do if they were there in a hit and miss fashion.
I am told by those who claim to know that the mayor delivered newspapers as a younger man. He had a special style. He was not your average newspaper delivery boy because he always delivered a bit more than the newspaper. Many local people who came to know his newspaper delivery exploits were left to wonder what might come of such a bold and inventive young newspaper delivery boy when he got a bit older.
I learn a lot from delivering the paper.
I get some respect for being a newspaper delivery boy from the folks at city hall.
I learn what state of mind various people are in the many and various offices throughout the hall.
Every office receives the Leader Herald. No one throws it back at me.
Many people wink after looking at the paper’s headline or they give me a thumbs up.
Or they say things like: “Keep doing what you’re doing,” or “I love what you are writing about.”
I like to think there is something satisfying seeing the publisher of the local weekly delivering his own paper from office to office.
People who are working like watching other people work. Bottom line, we all work…except for the guy who runs city hall, the mayor.
He receives about $189,000 a year, more than the mayor of Boston and more than every city mayor around us.
He is nowhere to be seen.
No doubt he’s out doing special business for the city?
But everyday? Doubtful. Impossible, actually.
I wrote it last week and I am repeating the mantra here – the mayor of the City of Everett doesn’t come into work.
He is paid to lead the city but he doesn’t come to work. Everyone inside city hall knows he doesn’t come to work. He is either doing private business, or sitting and watching his at screen tv inside his mansion, or driving about the haunts and places he frequents not too far from here.
Whatever he is doing, he is absent from his corner office at city hall.
I’ve never worked a job that didn’t require me to do the job.
Everett is a very tight, close place where everyone seems to know everyone’s business.
Everyone coming to work everyday to Everett City Hall knows the mayor is not there.
The leader is not there.
He gets paid, and handsomely but he’s missing in action.
This is to say, nearly every office at city hall, save for one, has a boss that is available should a resident or a vendor come in to have their questions answered.
The one office entirely empty, day to day, week to week, month to month is the mayor’s private office.
I get the strong feeling he doesn’t want to be there anymore.
He’s had enough. He’s bored. He wants to make donuts?
Doubtful.
He likes taking endless vacations. He is paid $189,000 a year but he doesn’t show up.
The mayor gets paid and he doesn’t show his face. Everyone knows this at city hall.
Everyone at city hall knows they must show up or they are disciplined and likely red.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
The mayor needs to be made to show up or his pay should be suspended.
Cuts Are Coming
The mayor said so before the Chamber of Commerce Board meeting last week.
“People need to be cut to generate added funds,” he said, according to a local publication.
Does this mean layoffs will soon be occurring here?
Yes it does.
Aside from being absent, where has his mind gone?
He has upbuilt the city’s infrastructure and its various departments but he’s wasted a lot of tax dollars getting there.
The city is now reaping what it has sewn.
Yup.
It gets biblical even at Everett City Hall.
The mayor can stay away but not forever.
Voters who care nothing today about whether or not he shows up to earn his pay are the same folks who will go out and vote against him next time around – if there is a next time around.
As for cutting bodies out of the hall, this is another way for the mayor to Lowe his base.
Each person he cuts has a family, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, and grandparents.
Each cut that he makes causes all the above to vote against him the next time out, that’s if there is a next time out for the city’s elected leader.
The Shutdown
It has been longer than a month that about 800,000 US government employees have been paid.
I know. I know. This isn’t an Everett story but it is.
This isn’t just a matter of hating the president. We need to hate everyone in our government and make them come to their senses.
This is unprecedented.
Who has a right to mistreat the work force like this?
The Republicans and the Democrats, President Trump and Speaker Pelosi are stuck in a pathetic, destructive, one-dimensional, ruinous political impasse.
It is ruinous, not for Trump, Pelosi, all her colleagues and everyone in the Senate.
They are all rich, or growing richer off their salaries, pensions and benefits or are about to get rich as newly elected congressmen and women.
How long do you think it would take for the impasse to end if the Congress and the Senate stopped receiving their salaries and those for their staff?
About two hours, is my estimate.
The senators are all millionaires.
Take it from me, 9 out of ten millionaires are cheaper than you and I could ever hope to be. To those rich, effete Senators and Congressmen and women living in another universe, their pay is more important to them than it is to the 800,000 working people now out of their jobs.
Suspend the pay to Congress and the Senate, suspend their health insurance, and watch how long it would take to settle the government closure.
There is nothing quite so satisfying as watching someone very rich squirming as he struggles to take some of his own money out of his pocket.
Many of the millionaires I know are among the cheapest, small-minded, egocentric people I have known.
Instead of thanking their maker for their good fortune and sharing some of their dough with those who don’t have any, they hoard their money. They treat it like pieces of gold instead of pieces of paper. To these folks in Washington playing this sick political game, the 800,000 are pawns – and no one seems to care enough about them to do something to open the government again.
This is no profile in courage.
It is a profile in poor behavior of our government, which is clueless about the suffering of the masses.
Does it right now matter whose fault the shutdown is – and by the way – President Trump serves for $1.00 a year. He refused to take his pay. Only two other presidents in history have done so – Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
If I am like you, our readers and thinkers out there, who have your point of view about this government closure, then we agree: shut off the pay and health insurance to the Congress and the Senate and the situation will be solved in about two hours.
And a last thought on the national conundrums we face… how about the Speaker of the House telling the president he should put off his State of the Union Speech, and then the Speaker complaining loudly when the president stops the Air Force from supplying a jet aircraft to junket a bunch of Congressmen, and the speaker, for a tour of the Afghan front?
I’d say cancelling that trip saved taxpayers about $4 to $6 million dollars.
Then the Speaker complained that the president was playing 5th grade politics.
Whether you like Trump, hate Trump, find him vile and sophomoric, misogynistic, racist, a failure, whatever, he is the president.
If the Speaker is going to slap him in the face, he’s going to respond.
This doesn’t make him a 5th grader.
What was the Speaker going to find in Afghanistan with her colleagues on their secret trip?
What was she going to suggest after we’ve been there for 20 years in a losing effort that has killed and wounded thousands of Americans?
What rubbish we are fed.
She complained that the president was playing with everyone’s well being by suggesting to her that she take a commercial plane to Kabul, which is a war zone.
I haven’t served in the military but I can tell you this from talking with a few military guys I know who served over there, and recently, flying into Kabul Airport is about as safe as it gets. It’s a bit like flying into Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. There are more guns and missiles and airplanes overhead and drones patrolling that it is almost unimaginable.
If I had my way, I’d get Bill Belichick to run for president and to take care of business.
We need to win again, not to be straddled by useless political strategy and inertia that wastes the nation’s wealth.
He’d be better than Dwayne Johnson. The Rock has said he might be running.
Right.
And just to make sure we got that count right, there are not 800,000 people absent from their jobs.
That number is 800,001 except that our mayor is getting paid.