War profiteering | Luxury towers rake it in | News killer strikes again | No-fly zone confusion | 1 million deaths | About Contrarian Boston |
How did the Globe miss warning signs on fraudster activist?
The Globe's treatment of Monica Cannon-Grant, the anti-violence activist now facing fraud charges for pocketing charitable contributions, raises some troubling questions.
Looking back at the clips, the Globe named Cannon-Grant, who led local protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, a Bostonian of the Year in December 2020. That was five months after she was caught on tape belittling a Black Republican congressional candidate with a vile, racist rant “questioning the woman’s Blackness and making crude references to her sex with her white husband,” the Herald reported at the time. It wasn't even mentioned in the Globe piece on the award.
So, here are some questions: Shouldn't Cannon-Grant’s very public rant have made naming her a Bostonian of the Year a nonstarter? And second, shouldn’t her despicable tirade have at least triggered greater scrutiny by the Globe of her charity and her activities?
It’s hard to believe there weren’t any rumblings out there that something was amiss with the founder of Violence in Boston, now charged with, among other things, siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars of charitable contributions for personal use.
In one incident, Cannon-Grant and her husband pocketed $6,000 that was supposed to pay for a retreat for young, at-risk men, and instead blew it on a vacation in Maryland.
Sadly, people steal from charities all the time and nonprofits can be tempting targets. And the Globe was hardly the only publication or institution to be taken in by Cannon-Grant.
But given the Globe’s mission and far-superior journalistic firepower, it is certainly fair to ask what in the world happened here.
Stunning rebound for Boston apartment rents
That’s the verdict from Cushman & Wakefield research guru Brendan Carroll.
Apartment rents on a per square foot basis have jumped nearly 20 percent since the end of 2020, when they bottomed out amid the pandemic.
Rents in luxury towers in Boston now average $4.23 a square foot, or $3,384 dollars for an 800 square foot apartment.
That’s good news for the giant real estate investment trusts that own many of the bigger apartment addresses in Boston, though not so good news for everyone else.
The high rents, and dearth of available listings, have also made it absolutely miserable for apartment hunters, the Globe reports.
Guess who’s profiting off the Ukraine war?
Well, you probably guessed it. Several members of Congress and their spouses, including at least two cases involving the New England delegation, are making out quite nicely thanks to their investments in Raytheon and other big defense contractors.
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, holds tens of thousands of dollars in shares in defense contractors that include United Technologies, now owned by Waltham-based Raytheon, according to Business Insider.
Ditto for the husband of Sen. Susan Collins, the moderate Republican from Maine, though a spokesperson noted her husband had held the United Technologies stock for years.
That’s definitely not the case, though, for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the nutty Georgia Republican. Just two days before Putin’s attack, Greene forked over thousands of dollars to buy up Lockheed Martin shares.
"War is big business to our leaders," Greene wrote on Twitter the day war broke out.
Sure is.
We don’t begrudge Raytheon, whose stock has jumped more than 10 percent in recent weeks and which, along with Lockheed Martin, makes Javelin anti-tank missiles. If it weren’t for those missiles and other weaponry supplied by the West, the Ukrainian military, despite all its valor, would probably have already lost Kyiv to Putin.
But it should be a matter of honor for a public servant to go to any lengths necessary to avoid the appearance of a conflict, especially one as ghoulish as this.
Local news bloodbath
Gannett is at it again, shutting down 19 weekly newspapers across Eastern Massachusetts, per Dan Kennedy at Media Nation.
It comes just a few weeks after the national investor-owned chain announced a dubious plan to have reporters at its Massachusetts weeklies cover regional stories at the expense of local news in their communities.
Gannett’s regional news shift struck us at the time as a rather disingenuous move to create more filler content that can be stretched out across multiple papers and require fewer reporters to churn out.
Lo and behold, here we are, with another round of local newspaper closures.
Gannett’s hit list includes the old Newton, Brookline and Watertown Tab newspapers, the Billerica Minuteman, the Burlington Union, and the Waltham News Tribune, among many others.
Many Americans think a no-fly zone over Ukraine sounds good, but don’t know what it is
By Stat Man, aka David Van Voorhis, a high school senior and stats fanatic.
Ten percent: That’s the net margin of Americans who support a U.S.-backed "no-fly zone" according to a recent poll from YouGov, with 40 percent in favor, 30 percent against and 30 percent undecided.
However, experts have posited that many of these respondents, while liking the sound of it, don't know exactly what a no-fly zone actually is. That is, the respondents don’t understand that it would involve the American military denying the use of Ukrainian airspace by Russian jets, potentially leading to a direct conflict and full-blown war.
A follow-up question in the same poll is revealing. When directly asked whether the U.S. military should shoot down Russian military planes flying over Ukraine, the answers of the respondents more than flipped.
With the stakes now clear, only 30 percent said yes, with 46 percent opposed and 24 percent undecided.
U.S. Covid deaths already at 1 million – and counting
That’s the verdict from the esteemed the British medical journal, The Lancet, which contends deaths from the pandemic have been significantly undercounted.
By the end of 2021, as many as 1,180,000 people in the U.S. may have lost their lives to Covid, the journal reports. That’s compared to the official tally of 824,000 Covid deaths over the same time period.
And that was before the Omicron surge of early 2022 that we are just coming out of, so who knows what that number is today.
Globally, the undercounting of Covid deaths has been ever more dramatic – more than 18 million lives likely lost to the pandemic, compared to the just under 6 million deaths officially reported, according to The Lancet study.
How many of these deaths could have been prevented, especially here in the U.S., but for Trump’s erratic leadership during the first 10 months of the crisis? And what about the many other mistakes made at all levels of government?
We may never know all the answers to these questions, but may we never stop asking.
Quick hits:
Fox’s fans in the Kremlin: “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Praises Fox News for 'Alternative Points of View'” (The Wrap)
Principal a pioneer in profanity: “Email comment from Northampton High School principal Lori Vaillancourt referring to students as ‘asshats’ sparks student walkout, call for resignation” (Masslive)
Please, please say it isn’t so: “A covid surge in Western Europe has U.S. bracing for another wave” (Washington Post)