GARDEN PARTY
Sometimes editors and writers must get too caught up in a moment to step back and ask themselves, “If we include the phrase ‘mass casualty’ in a headline, will readers know we’re speaking technically, and simply mean that first responder personnel is overburdened? Or will they assume a madman brutally gunned down a bunch of teens at the Garden?” Because if they had posed such self-inquiries instead of parroting and piggybacking utterly sensational reports of EMS being dispatched to Avicii last Wednesday, then all the click whores around here would have hopefully restrained themselves from shocking the entire tweeting public into a chaotic game of telephone.
If that were not the case, and the dupe was intentional, then outlets would be guilty of baiting readers – including those whose friends and loved ones may have been at the concert – with a horrifically morbid prospect only to reveal that in reality, about three dozen people were hospitalized for non-fatal issues (while about another 50 were treated on the spot). There was some irresponsible drug use, sure, but as for those casting the blame on molly, or some specific sub-genre of intoxicants or dance music – until you can produce a show-by-show breakdown of incidents involving dehydration and mayhem at Boston-area concerts over the past decade, parsed by median attendance age and performance types, please don’t further embarrass yourself by babbling more baseless conjecture.
If we reported on the number of old folks fainting from pinot, painkillers, and boredom at half of the highbrow bullshit that the Globe strokes in its arts and entertainment coverage, there would be no time left for us to kick the Herald.
SWAT, INC.
Like in a lot of other places, municipalities around Greater Boston pool their SWAT resources with neighboring cities and towns. From all-terrain tanks to the various other types of artillery displayed on Hub streets in the wake of the marathon bombing, police departments share their toys via law enforcement councils, or LECs, which we’re now learning are taxpayer-funded paramilitaries that willfully undermine basic public accountability protocol. As the Washington Post reported last week, “some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations,” and “are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations … and therefore … immune from open records requests.” We would have loved to break the news ourselves, but it’s rad that the Post led the way. The commonwealth police state needs to be reined in, and hopefully people will pay more attention now that such a powerful source of intelligence news has barked in these explicit terms:
Let’s be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they’ve incorporated, they’re immune to Massachusetts open records laws.
OUR NEW FAVORITE ZILLIONAIRE
Seattle rich guy Nick Hanauer isn’t the first person of spectacular means to come out for the little guy. Before him there was … well, never mind. Either way, he may be the most badass unlikely class warrior to date, and with help from his co-author Eric Liu, also one of the most convincing. In his latest call-to-action in Politico, “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats,” Hanauer employs legitimate historical analogies in a brilliant effort to reach his fellow Robb Report subscribers. It’s unlikely they’ll listen, but it still makes for a snappy read. Some choice zingers …
One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand.
And yes, I know there are many of you who are convinced that because you saw a poor kid with an iPhone that one time, inequality is a fiction.
These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.
The masses [are] the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys … When workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees.
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor.
We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff.
Capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term.
HURRICANE ANN
We searched high and low, mostly high, and from what we can tell, not a single person on the planet was the least bit outraged over anything Ann Coulter said last week about soccer. Not the liberals, not the occupiers, not even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. They didn’t care about her claim that there is “no accountability” in the sport, nor her silly observation that everyone “just runs up and down the field.” No one complained about her awfully generic yawner over “scoreless ties,” and lefties only laughed at her tangential scream that omnipresent forces wish for everyone to worship Beyonce and “Girls.”
We’re obviously one-quarter joking, as some people may indeed be outraged at Coulter’s blatant bigotry. She did, after all, claim that “if more ‘Americans’ are watching soccer today, it’s only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law,” and hope that, “in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.” Still, scrolling through our feeds, more folks seemed mad about people being mad about Ann Coulter’s column than were actually mad about her column. Which can only mean one thing: We just out-hipster’d the ill-fitting pants off every one of them.
SPECIAL FARCES
In case America needed more reasons to get the hell out of Iraq immediately, New York Times ace James Risen added to the pile Sunday with a mind-blowing investigative piece titled, “Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater.” Every sentence helps justify a wholesale legal lynching of the war-profiteering scumbags who used taxpayer money to transform Iraq into their perverted playground. You can start shaking your head now …
Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry
was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.
They found that Blackwater’s staffing of its security details for American diplomats had been changed without State Department approval, reducing guards on many details to eight from 10, the documents said. Blackwater guards were storing automatic weapons and ammunition in their private rooms, where they also were drinking heavily and partying with frequent female visitors. Many of the guards had failed to regularly qualify on their weapons, and were often carrying weapons on which they had never been certified and that they were not authorized to use.
The armored vehicles Blackwater used to protect American diplomats were poorly maintained and deteriorating, and the investigators found that four drunk guards had commandeered one heavily armored, $180,000 vehicle to drive to a private party, and crashed into a concrete barrier.
Blackwater was also overbilling the State Department by manipulating its personnel records, using guards assigned to the State Department contract for other work and falsifying other staffing data on the contract, the investigators concluded. A Blackwater-affiliated firm was forcing “third country nationals” — low-paid workers from Pakistan, Yemen and other countries, including some who performed guard duty at Blackwater’s compound — to live in squalid conditions, sometimes three to a cramped room with no bed, according to the report by the investigators.
[Media Farm is wrangled by DigBoston News + Features Editor Chris Faraone]
