When I read the Sunday Times, I take great pains to avoid the front section, business pages, Week in Review — in short, the news that typically stirs bile when I’m so comfortably nestled in bed with my coffee. I like to start with Fashion & Style, because it’s mostly about parties and gamine gals in tall boots; in fact, there’s little reading involved for all of the ads. Unfortunately, what little I read this week made me reach for the mimosa.
“Blowing Smoke at a Ban” starts out with, “a 30-something man with a tight T-shirt, a gold watch and a gym membership, slyly obscur[ing] his cigarette behind the knee-high table that held his $400 bottle of Belvedere, assorted mixers and a pack of Parliaments.” Continuing:
“Everyone looks the other way,” said Billy Gray, 25, a reporter for Guest of a Guest, who says that he knows precisely which high-end bars and lounges will let him smoke inside…At the opening of the Libertine, a Todd English restaurant in the financial district, cigarette girls handed out free smokes that guests consumed liberally…Kirsten Dunst could be found almost nightly perched on the counter behind the D.J. booth, smoking cigarettes.”
More than 900 words later (words that will tell you where you’ll find nightclubs that look the other way, words that tell you what celebrities are smoking, words that reinforce the “illicit thrill”), Quenqua quotes an associate commissioner of the health department: “It’s these high-end places for people who think that the rules don’t apply to them.”
Like everything else in this capital-driven “democracy,” we’ve set a price on everything: rules, governance, morality. It’s not that “people think the rules don’t apply to them” so much as the rules don’t apply when people with money throw money around.
Moments ago, I received a news alert that “Seven lawsuits concerning alleged illegal activities that led to deaths in Iraq filed against the firm formerly known as Blackwater have been settled out of court in the US.” (The Nisour Square massacre was the single deadliest incident involving private US forces in Iraq. Seventeen civilians were killed and more than 20 wounded by Blackwater forces; among the dead were women and children and some victims were shot in the back as they fled Blackwater’s gunfire.)
Jeremy Scahill writes on his blog:
Two sources with inside knowledge of Blackwater’s settlement with Iraqi victims of a string of shootings, including the Nisour Square massacre, have confirmed to me that Blackwater is paying $100,000 for each of the Iraqis killed by its forces and between $20-30,000 to each Iraqi wounded. One source said it was “an absolute bargain” for Blackwater. Based on the number of dead and injured named in the civil lawsuits, the total amount paid by Blackwater is likely in the range of $5 million. Blackwater has made more than $1.5 billion in “security” contracts in Iraq alone since 2003. Blackwater’s owner, Erik Prince, recently said his company is spending $2 million a month in legal fees to battle civil and criminal cases and investigations.
I’ll say it again: we’ve set a price on everything: rules, governance, morality…humanity.
Tomorrow, Bradley Birkenfeld goes to jail to serve out a 40 month federal sentence. Mr. Birkenfeld, a former banker for the Swiss giant UBS, blew the whistle on the biggest tax-evasion scheme in US history. He first came forward to US authorities in 2007 and began providing inside information on how UBS was helping thousands of Americans hide billions of dollars worth of assets in secret Swiss accounts. Daily News reporter, Juan Gonzalez writes:
What about his former bosses and fellow bankers at UBS and thousands of rich American clients who for decades stashed billions of dollars in secret UBS accounts to evade paying federal taxes?
Well, the government let them buy their way out of jail.
UBS pleaded guilty and paid a $780 million fine in February, while thousands of Americans with unreported offshore accounts have been allowed to belatedly disclose them and pay civil penalties.
Not one of the 19,000 individuals — who each year commit a felony on their tax returns by denying the existence of off-shore bank holdings — are going to jail. Just the whistle blower.
For the rest of us who don’t have money (or don’t feel like dropping $400 for a bottle of vodka), watch your step. However you feel about rules (and I, as a rule, disdain the often willy-nilly ways they creep into our lives), many are there to protect the rights of others — perhaps those who rely on social services or children attending public schools funded by tax revenues, or those non-smokers who work in nightclubs or women and children looking for safe passage home. When you think the rules don’t apply to you (whether you pay for the privilege or skirt the system), remember that it costs someone, somewhere.
