The Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump, or “Why They Put Rich People’s Heads on Sharpened Pikes During the French Revolution” (Chapter the Twentieth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)

Allow me to say

at the outset today that I’m not

advocating putting anyone’s head on a pike;

I’m not in favor of that, though some who read what follows

may feel a dark desire. But also allow me to encourage you to put a bucket

at your feet before you read any further, because you are going to hear

about extreme violence toward people — The Baroness Pamela

“No limits on love” von Omidyar’s extreme violence toward

people — and the sorrow of it all may just

make you puke blood.

I first learned of

Her Royal Hiney in 2004, reading

an article about her and her husband The Baron

Pierre von Omidyar and how they established a very cool website

so that people could approach them with good ideas that needed funding and

help them channel their tens of billions of Ebay dollars to help and heal the world.

Admirable, hip, cool, awesome!  I began to talk to them about my idea for

EarthNationLive, which, like Ebay, makes use of the internet to bring

people all over the world together for a purpose.  Right up

their alley, I reckoned, and the concept is

viable in the extreme.

I thought the idea

would appeal to them especially

because they seemed to really feel for people

in disaster situations, and one of the features of EarthNationLive

is that it could close the ridiculous amount of time it takes to get medical,

food, shelter, and other disaster aid moving down to a few hours, like so. It needs

a few million bucks to build up front, because it requires a huge piece of software,

but hey, Pierre von Omidyar is a software engineer par excellence, and the

few million I needed to borrow for a few months wasn’t even a drop

in the bucket to Pam and Pierre.  It was a molecule in

one of the drops.  An atom in one

of the molecules.

This was a polite conversation,

not at all like what you’ve been reading here

since January 12.  I could copy a bunch of polite emails

and videos and ENL website writing for you, but never mind —

it was polite.  But after watching the disasters-after-the-disasters in

Katrina, the tsunami in Banda Aceh, the tsunami in Thailand, Cyclone Nargis

in Myanmar — where in each the disaster event itself killed thousands, and

in each the disaster-after-the-disaster (that two week period it still takes

to get aid moving while people die of standing in raw sewage with

a cut or broken bone, no water to drink, and no food) killed

vastly more people — I got tired of being

patient and polite.

Because these Omidyar folks,

richer than God, versed in the internet,

insanely enriched by it, knew of a way to cut the lag

time for aid down to a matter of hours: EarthNationLive, or

something like it.  And rather than bothering with it, they had shut

down that noble website and set about accumulating the enormous luxuries

of billionairehood.  Hypocrisy, theirs, led me to write about Pam Omidyar as the

Biggest Hypocrite on Earth after the earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince on

January 12 of this year and once again hundreds of thousands of

people died in sewage, lost limbs to hacksaw amputations,

and stabbed one another trying to get

to a molded loaf of bread.

One of the people who

lost a limb in Haiti was Fabienne Jean,

the proud owner for six months now of The Pam Omidyar

Memorial Stump. Here’s Fabienne

pre-gift-o’-the-Omidyars:

Beautiful, no?

Talented, too, a dancer with the

Haitian National Theater.  Her leg was broken

in the quake — not crushed to bits, just broken.  According

to Dennis Acton, who has been helping her ever since, “Fabienne could

have easily recovered from her injury.  It was simply a broken leg at the time.

She laid among the living and the dead at the University Hospital for three

days without food, water or medical care.  When she finally received

care, she was fully infected and on the verge of dying.

The surgeons saved her life but

had to take her leg.”

That happened to

thousands of people, tens of thousands

of people, in Port-au-Prince. They were the lucky ones,

the ones who lay without food, water, or medicine, in agonizing pain,

listening to the death rattles of people around them for days,

feeling the suck of death as their own simply broken

bones became infected and the infection

coursed through their bodies.

As Dennis wrote to me,

“Horror stories abound of people cutting

their own legs and arms off to get out of collapsed buildings

while the rescue teams circled overhead waiting to land at the airport.

Funny enough Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell had no problem flying in to pick

up a load of orphans at this time which forced a commercial jet full of surgical

supplies and doctors to divert to the Dominican and get trucked in

which took at least an extra 24 hours.  This was at the point

where 20 thousand a day were dying from

infection and lack of care.”

Because the aid network

was like it always is in the disaster-after-the-disaster,

Fabienne Jean lost her leg. The beautiful young Baroness Pam Omidyar surfed,

and the beautiful young Fabienne the dancer lost her leg.

Pam Omidyar tweeted and skated –

and tens of thousands

had hacksaw amputations

to save their lives.

Because the aid wheels turn

as ponderously as they ever did, in spite of the fact

that Pam and Pierre Omidyar know how to dramatically change that,

have the money to do it, have the skill sets and friends and

employees to get it done with little more effort

than changing a baby’s diaper.

Instead, Pam Omidyar visited

in her private jet for a few hours, tweeted,

and flew back to building her collection of resorts.

Mirtha, trafficked into slavery as a child and owned by a wealthy

Haitian couple, lost her leg — and her usefulness as a slave,

so “she has nothing to her name now except

a beautiful smile and a nice

new prosthesis”.

There are too many of these

“Thank you for my stump, Mr. & Mrs. Omidyar!”

stories to even begin to tell:

But I told Fabienne’s on April 16,

and Pam Omidyar and her husband Pierre and

many of their employees and lawyer/goons and manservants

and maidservants read it within hours:

And then they went

back to collecting luxury resorts,

palling around with the Dalai Lama, and

pretending to give a cat’s ass about

“the small people”.

Pam Omidyar has known

about Fabienne Jean for over three months.

During that time, Fabienne lived in her father’s yard,

amid rubble, after losing her leg, with little food, no clean water, and

in danger of kidnapping because she’d been written about in the New York Times

and might be worth some ransom money to someone. Then Dennis, operating

on a shoestring budget, helped her move back into her old apartment on the

outskirts of Citie Soleil, the most dangerous slum in Port-au-Prince,

“complete with no locking door and the same rubble that

that broke her leg lying in the street.”  This because

that was a move up, and the presently affordable

one (this in the middle of a fundraising field

day for the provenly corrupt Red Cross,

who have so far disbursed about

12% of their ginormous

Katrina haul).

Pam Omidyar has spent

more money on flowers in her homes

and resorts since January 12 than on Fabienne Jean

or anyone in a similar boat who’s hopping around in raw sewage

with little or nothing to eat, waiting on a cheap prosthesis and a sweaty wool

pad for the end of their stump. She’s done that knowing about them all the while,

controlling billions upon billions of dollars all the while, posing as a pal of the

Dalai Lama and a do-gooder-extraordinaire all the while. Having known

all along about a way to prevent virtually every bit of it

before it ever happened. Likes she knows how to

save the whales, and is shining that on, too,

while the baubles pile up.

Hope you have some

really good spiritual advisors, Pam,

hope you have the excellent access to the Dalai Lama

you and your husband tout, hope he’s as serious a guy as he seems

to be, I don’t know if he is or not, I just don’t know, never met him. I hope

on high that he was ordained by God Herself, whatever She is,

wherever She is, and I hope he knows he answers

to Her when he counsels people

like you.

Because you need counseling.

You’re in a position of enormous power on

this planet, just like your friend Barack Obama is,

the guy to whom you’ve given over ten million dollars so

you could sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. And just like Barry Magic,

you sit day and night at a panel with a green button and a red button, and

over and over again you keep pushing the little red button that says “Death

and Greed” instead of the little green one that says “Life and Hope”.  He pushes

the “drone strike some Pakistani kids” button, and you push the “broken leg / no

aid / sewage infection / hacksaw amputation / live in hunger and fear” button.

Over and over and over again.  For Fabienne, for the hundreds of thousands

before her in the last five years, for the hundreds of thousands or

millions that will follow her while you fart through silk in the

ostrich skin chairs at your jillion dollar resorts, in your

fabulous homes hither and yon, in the private

jets that take you between them.

No wonder you’re

willing to break the law to try to use

unethical cops 3,000 miles from your home to try

to shut me up. To censor a writer in the United States of America

in which you yourself live! Amazing, appalling, but at the same

time, little wonder. I’d want this story crushed to earth,

too, before the film got made and released,

before “the small people” got wind of it

and put my head on a pike.

Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

 

Tomorrow, a fresh visit to The Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump! Today, the thuggish lengths to which she’ll go to quell this conversation. (Chapter the Nineteenth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)

friend

Time for a brief roundup

and a preview of a gory conversation.

As regular readers here will recall, a few months ago

I told the story of The Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump. That’s a photo

of it above.  It’s carried in this photo, and every minute for every day for the rest

of her life, by the beautiful Fabienne Jean.  Fabienne was a dancer with

the Haitian National Theater before the earthquake in

Port-au-Prince on January 12.  She would

like to dance again, but she

lives in Haiti.

According to my new friend

Dennis Acton, whose NEBCO Foundation

put one of the first prosthetic teams on the ground

in Haiti after the earthquake, and is at work there still, and could

use your financial assistance — hey Pam, they take Paypal, which you own! —

the realities of life there require the fitting of “technology that is no longer used in

developed countries. For instance, a new amputee in the US would most likely recieve

a prosthesis that uses a silicon liner and pin suspension system for securing

the fiberglass or carbon fiber socket to the residual limb. The problem is

that the liners cost over $300 each and only last for about 6 months.

That is far too expensive for for most patients in Haiti to afford.

Secondly, it is difficult to keep the liners clean. They must

be washed often and this is difficult living in

a tent city or amongst the ruins where

clean water is difficult

to obtain.”

So what you get in Haiti,

and what Fabienne Jean will get if the skin graft

at her amputation site ever heals,

is something like this:

Cheap, crude,  heavy,

and hot as hell.  In the States, the foot

you’d get could cost north of $5,000 (just the foot,

mind you, not the entire prosthesis, which could cost over

$50,000) and be made to look like your own.  That one’s about

a hundred bucks.  But the whole clunky thing is very low maintenance,

if you can get the sensitive skin on your stump to accommodate itself

to the scratchy wool pad that lies between it and what’s left of

your leg.  And you don’t have to wash it much, which is

handy for someone living in

a place like this —

– and doing her

personal bathing and laundry in

conditions like these:

So tomorrow I’ll tell

you quite a bit more about Fabienne’s

Pam Omidyar Memorial Stump, and about that hunk

of junk she’s going to have strap onto it every day for the rest of her

life, and we’ll try to figure out how she’s going to dance with it.  I’ll tell you

about sending one like it to Pam Omidyar, and asking her to carry it

around for a while to see what it’s like to live with — not on

the end of her chopped-off leg, mind you, just

under her arm or something.

But to close today,

I want to bring you up to date on

my conversations with Mark Beckner,

Chief of the Boulder Police Department.  As I

related at length in my post of June 30th, our hypocritical

billionaire would like for me stop talking about her.  Understandable,

I suppose, if you’re trading on your reputation as a greenie and a do-gooder

while quietly piling up tens of billions as artfully as any hedge fund manager.

But it isn’t illegal to call someone a hypocrite, so she can’t have me thrown

in jail.  And in America, you can’t sue someone into silence for telling

others about what sort of person you are, which her incredibly

pricey and very numerous lawyers

have explained to her.

So her options for

shutting me up were limited.

The one she chose was to persuade some

plainclothes detectives from my own local police

department to make a threatening visit to my home.

While not incapable of appreciating the humor in how lame

and bush this was, I’m also not fond of people with guns pounding

on my door, and I complained to Chief Mark Beckner.

Mark took a few minutes off of solving the JonBenet

Ramsey murder that he’s been working on

for nearly fourteen years to explain

to me that they had done

nothing wrong.

I took, and take,

issue with that.  Strongarming

people on behalf of billionaires isn’t the

business of the police.  I don’t know Chief Beckner

and don’t have any reason to dislike him or question his

professionalism, but I asked him if he’d be willing to run a similar

errand for me:  ”My neighbor Alex downstairs was a real terror in the noise

department for months, as you know. Your guys were here a bunch in the middle

of the night. That seems to be resolved, and we’re friendly to one another, but his

brother always gives me the stinkeye when we see each other in the parking lot.

Send a couple of dudes with guns in plainclothes by his house one evening

and tell him I don’t want him to look at me askance anymore, that I don’t

want him doing it anymore. You know, just a courtesy knock, ‘Proactive

policing’ (a term Chief Beckner used to describe the door-pounding

visit on behalf of the Omidyars) so nothing heats

up between us (he lives right here in town,

unlike Pierre Omidyar, who lives 3,300

miles away in Honolulu). Cool?”

He wouldn’t answer that,

no matter how many times I posed that

or similar questions.  Nor would he, for most of the

day and many emails exchanged over weeks, answer the direct

question, “To whom do I complain about your approval of Boulder PD officers

making threatening visits to my home on behalf of Pierre and Pam Omidyar?”

He tried to tell me that he was the person to receive the complaint.

I declined to accept that and after repeated prodding

finally got him to tell me that he answers to

City Manager Jane Brautigam,

whom I’m contacting.

In the same exchange

of emails, Chief Beckner declined to appear

in the documentary film of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”

and explain how he came to be using public funds and

public employees to run intimidation schemes

on behalf of the wealthy:

People live in all kinds

of prisons.  The prison that a great many

police officers live in is called, “I can do no wrong and

you do not question what I say or do.”  The prison that a hypocritical

billionaire who used be the helpful smiling girl in the information booth at the

student union lives in is called, “You shall not speak my name unpraisingly

and when you do I will use all the powers of my mighty billions

to discipline you, including making illegal use of police

officers more than 3,000 miles from

my own home.”

And the prison

Fabienne Jean lives in is called

“tending the Pam Omidyar Memorial

Stump”. More about that on

the morrow.

Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth,

Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18