Dear Editor:
This written piece of political satire is a work of fiction hopefully found to be humorous by the reader. Any similarity to real crooks, thieves, cronies, and the like (living or dead), places, events or other material is coincidental and unintentional. No animals were harmed in the writing of this submission.
I’d like to tell you a story about a little city called Hoboken, New Jersey. It’s a nice place with good people, living near a blighted redevelopment zone with rapidly appreciating property values in need of more transportation hubs surrounded by overpriced yuppie-filled condominiums.
Somewhere around here, there is probably an approved city contractor who sought a variance during a closed-door session for the use of an increase of flooding around his mid-rise while maximizing his PILOT. And all the while, an interim director of tax abatements [okay, so no such position exists] was suspended on paid leave because of an embarrassing public scandal. You see, he is currently being investigated for offering the sub-committee of a committee the name of a preferred vendor to become the designated authority on favoritism, whose sole responsibility is to root out nepotism. In the course of his duties, he improperly eliminated what would have been an increase in the ratables for a long-winded son of a corrupt grandstanding Gold Coast gold miner. Don’t worry, he will most likely get away with everything since City Hall can’t find the file, and the last time they checked, no one seems to remember there even being a procedure in place for that sort of thing. You’ll find the basic services to be overstaffed while underserved and operating way beyond their respective capacities. In a related matter, a sister-in-law of a cousin of a political crony, went head to head with a newcomer over a second look at a budget line item. Her castigation of him through patronizing indignation, demonstrated that you just don’t mess with the born and raised or you’re liable to see things get as hot as any critical mass situation you’ve ever seen.
Of course not nearly as hot as a group of taxpayers who have to fork over a near 50 percent increase in one single year to make up for the absence of the alleged intelligence and information that those ceaseless campaigners pictured from left to right have claimed that they all possess or are trying to repossess through condemnation from their neighbors. While profligate spending of one of the highest per-capita local tax rates per relative habitable geographic occupied land mass areas appears to be what is squandered the most, there happens to be abundance in the following with an apparent never-ending supply of more where that came from.
We are fully stocked up in divisiveness, entitlement, ego, greed, false benevolence, mock-pride, stagnant ideologies of dominion, hollow promises, and shortsighted ignorance. However, there are a few things that we are in need of, accountability has been quite scarce, as well as transparency in government, most of all though what we lack is real leadership. It is a lot easier to say what most want to hear rather than actually do what must be done.
Joseph Cassese