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”)

July 21st, 2010

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