"We’re sort of like partners in this"
The grievance machine and other symptoms of the larger collapse
What’s up what’s up what’s up!! Need to keep it very brief today. Way overbooked this weekend: House band for Sort of Late Show tonight. Sitting on a labor panel with Kim Kelly (the best!) tomorrow morning. Punk rock flea market tomorrow afternoon (1-7 p.m., Hotel Vernon) with a siiiiick new shirt design in tow. (More on that later.)
Earlier this week I put a call-out on social media for stories about Isaac Pineau, a true Worcester rock and roller who left us last week. I got a bunch of great stories and the tribute I’m working on will be special. If anyone reading this has an Isaac story of their own, please feel free to email me at billshaner@substack.com, or leave it as a voicemail on our tip line, 508-556-1017. The more stories, the better. So many people have one. Rest in power, brother.
Also there’s a bunch of AI slop accounts, particularly on Twitter but also on Facebook, “reporting” that Isaac died by suicide.
If you can take the time to run a name search for “Isaac Pineau” and report these as spam, that would be great. For the record: Isaac Pineau, 36, died of natural causes on Saturday, March 22. A website called Newslink360 appears to be the source article for all of it. The post is 1,000 percent written by AI. The site appears to only feature AI-generated obituary posts—all, I’m sure, getting key details wrong.
I hate this world.
Week-in-one-graf:
On Sunday Clark student-workers ended their 10-day strike. ICE operations throughout the state yield one Worcester deportation. The city council held their long-promised meeting on the DOJ report Tuesday. It was the chief’s first time publicly answering questions about police misconduct; two of 11 councilors asked real ones. We learned no one in city hall has met with DOJ staffers since December. The next morning on the radio Petty was iffy on the idea of a civilian review board, setting up a possible 6-5 vote against such a proposal whenever Batista puts it on the table. An organizing event for progressive candidates/birthday party for Councilor Thu Nguyen Wednesday night at Mint was well attended and heartening. On the same night Moe Bergman’s subcommittee advanced a proposal to withhold Nguyen’s pay. A new food pantry opened at Doherty High School. The Boston Market on Gold Star Boulevard1 was seized by the state Department of Revenue Thursday. A DOGE cut to federal office space in Worcester was rolled back from four building closures to two. Charter Communications (boooooo) announced it’s going to “relocate” its Worcester call center; 170 layoffs expected. Worcester child-actor Angelo Gray was cast in a Paramount Studios retelling of Stephen King’s The Running Man.
Substack rolled out a new leaderboard feature and apparently this newsletter is #57 worldwide in the “news” category in terms of gross annual income. While that’s cool in a way it also means only 56 Substack newsletters doing primarily news take in more than ~$51,000 a year before taxes. Grim.
A paid subscription to this outlet allows me to treat this as a full time job. And that job is a lot more than writing these weekly posts. I also edit our other columnists (today’s WPS In Brief is fantastic), record and produce a podcast (new episode up last night), do a weekly Twitch stream of the council meetings, and chase down many many many leads that only sometimes make it into these digital pages.
If you can swing $5 a month and you like seeing this outlet continue to build into the real alt weekly the city needs and deserves, consider a paid subscription!
It makes you a part-owner of this publication with a few hundred other people and I’d be happy to have you aboard.
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There’s a quote from Jon Schwarz in Eoin Higgins’ new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires Bought The Loudest Voices On The Left, that’s sat heavy since reading it. Funding from image-obsessed tech oligarchs and the obvious attendant grifters and the online flame wars make up much of what we might call the Current Media Landscape. To Schwarz, it’s all a symptom of a larger collapse—the rot that sets in when newspapers, unions, and political parties no longer serve as the “mediating institutions” that give the public an outlet to actually do something about the horrors that good journalism exposes.
“This is a dead end,” Schwarz said. “You shouldn’t expect too much from journalism and journalists by themselves. In the past, the mediating institutions that existed could take reporting and use it to agitate for genuine government change. But since those institutions have evaporated, journalism is like a button that doesn’t do anything anymore when you press it. Everybody should be focused on recreating the wiring behind it, rather than getting emotionally invested in loving or hating the button.”
I want so badly to be a part of recreating that wiring for Worcester. Just look around: People are getting disappeared for expressing their views. We need a button that works, and fast. And once we have a working button we need to draw up the schematics and share it with every city in the country.
It happened again—docking pay proposal—DOJ meeting notes—Hands Off!—odds and ends
It happened again
Just like Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD candidate, was cornered by federal agents at her home. Just like Khalil she was whisked away in an unmarked car. Just like Khalil, she was transferred to Louisiana, where the judges are sympathetic. Just like Khalil, the “crime” was reasoned and informed critique of the state of Israel.
Ozturk is a student in Tufts’ doctoral program for child study and human development, and had previously been publicly critical of the university’s approach to pro-Palestinian protests.
In March of last year, Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the school newspaper The Tufts Daily that called on Kumar to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.
Free Rumeysa Ozturk.
In the most recent Outdoor Cats Chris opened the show with some prepared remarks that were moving and necessary I think. Re-posting this part because it can’t be said enough:
If you have been hesitant to speak up on this issue, I would encourage you to consider that it’s now-or-never time, because it’s not going to stop with Rumeysa Ozturk and it’s not going to stop with student visa holders either: These cretins have already said they intend to target naturalized citizens, imminently. The time is right fucking now to tell your friends and your neighbors and definitely your representatives in Congress that this cannot stand, and that you do not intend to let it stand, and that Congress needs to pull all support from this or any other state committing a genocide. Get in the streets. Make noise. Do whatever you can.
My mind awash with the news I headed to Mint on Wednesday night to Thu Nguyen’s birthday party / organizing event for progressive council and school committee candidates. One speaker, Allie Cislo, spoke about the importance of intersectionality between different causes. She made the great point that the Gaza ceasefire work was the inciting incident for Candy Mero-Carlson hurling slurs about Nguyen, and that, then, was the inciting incident for the trans sanctuary resolution. Then she brought that on home to Rumeysa. Sanctuary, she said, sometimes means “saying that they can’t just fucking disappear people off the street.”
“What is sanctuary? Who is it for? How do we make it? It’s a resolution that we have passed through the work that we did together. But it’s also a material condition that we build together. And that, in order for that to be a reality in an ongoing way and not just a moment we celebrate, it has to be something we are building anew every day.”
The focus on movement work, from mayoral candidate Khrystian King on down, was heartening and needed in that moment. There was a lot of praise for Nguyen as a councilor who’s used the role in a unique way, explicitly toward building a movement. Few, if any, councilors have done more in that regard.
Perhaps that’s why, as Etel Haxhiaj put it in her address, “the knives are out.” School Committee member Vanessa Alvarez, who’s really coming into her own lately, put it this way: “People are just scared to be held accountable and it is what it is.”
So now we turn to that other side of the coin—the crank side, where it’s all personality, all ego, and nothing coming close to a movement cohering around a shared set of cohesive politics. The pure grievance machine. Where no one is talking about what it takes to stop people from getting disappeared on our fucking streets. Where some may well celebrate such a thing happening.
“Partners in this”
On the same night as Thu’s party, Moe Bergman’s municipal operations subcommittee advanced a proposal he wrote to withhold pay for councilors after missing three council meetings in a row without some form of “excuse.” Joining him and Donna Colorio in this effort was Johanna Hampton-Dance.
“We’re sort of like partners in this,” said Bergman to Hampton-Dance, who filed a petition some weeks back about implementing a recall process. Hampton-Dance, campaign manager for council candidate Charles Luster, agreed. She said she was amenable to holding the recall for now while going forward with the rule change Bergman proposed. Bergman and Hampton-Dance both said they want to implement something that could happen quickly, the fact that Nguyen is not seeking re-election hanging in the subtext.
No one used Nguyen’s name but the intent was obvious. Bergman, fellow committee member Donna Colorio, and Hampton-Dance clearly want to punish Nguyen for their decision to abstain from meetings indefinitely—a protest over the lack of accountability for Candy Mero-Carlson’s use of a transphobic slur.
Of course, the protest element never got mentioned at Bergman’s meeting. Instead, it was framed as failing to show up “without a good reason.”
Luis Ojeda, the third committee member, pushed for eight consecutive meetings, as opposed to Bergman’s initial three. Ojeda, who arrived a little late, was obviously uncomfortable with the discussion. “I wish there were more people here,” he said.
Bergman’s proposal, filed as a chairman’s order, was not on the agenda. But he brought print outs for the three committee members and Hampton-Dance! Hampton-Dance’s items were the only things on the meeting’s agenda. There are 55 pending items for the committee. Bergman sets the agenda for these meetings. This is what he found most pressing to tackle.
Despite Ojeda’s initial hesitation, the vote was unanimous. The proposed rule change goes now to the full city council, where it needs a two-thirds majority (eight votes) to pass. While the agenda isn’t public yet as of my writing this, it may well be on for next Tuesday. Bergman emphasized he wanted the order on the next council meeting.
DOJ Meeting Notes
The fate of the DOJ report now rests in the hands of... Kate Toomey. A fittingly miserable end, if you ask me. To match the miserable times. The city of Worcester and the prospect of real police reform had a good run for a couple months there.
The council voted on Tuesday to send the report to the public safety subcommittee that Kate Toomey chairs. They also voted, by a 6-4 split, to send a petition from the police union heads to doxx the victims of sexual assault described therein. That it’s both illegal and nonsensical made no difference.
Toomey, who has not heard or introduced one item on police accountability in her nine years running the public safety subcommittee, will now have near unilateral power to decide what happens to the DOJ’s report.
On Tuesday night, Toomey said multiple times she did not support the idea of a civilian review board, the key measure proposed by Eric Batista in response to the DOJ’s report. George Russell similarly indicated he wouldn’t support it. This suggests the classic split will emerge if and when Batista turns his proposal over to the council: five cranks against, five more progressive councilors for, Joe Petty the tie breaker.
On the radio Wednesday morning, Petty, who voted against a review board in the past, was cagey. Per MassLive:
“I’m going to see all the evidence,” Petty said. “I’m in opposition prior to this, so we will see what happens in the future.”
So not a complete no, but leaning no. This basically spells doom for an effective civilian review board. Examples abound across the country of civilian review boards that are so ineffectual in their design they are counter-productive forces. Like body cameras and other well-meaning ideas, they can run cover for police abuses as surely as they can hold to account.
It’s unlikely the already hesitant Petty would support a civilian review board that rises above the common traps: too easy for police unions to obstruct, too easy for police brass to ignore, too cozy with and/or staffed by the general “law enforcement community,” or simply understaffed and underfunded by the municipality. Very easy to see Worcester falling into every single one of those traps, actually. Welp.
Silver lining: the chief said a lot of interesting things in response to questions from councilors—particularly those from King and Haxhiaj. It’s rare to get this kind of public scrutiny of the ins and outs of the department. One thing I can’t get out of my head is the chief said he met recently with the state’s new U.S. Attorney Leah Foley and they did not talk about the report. Like not even a little?
In the most recent Outdoor Cats, Chris and I talked to Tom Marino and John Keough, two reporters with This Week In Worcester who’ve followed the DOJ report very closely. The conversation is chock full of good leads for future investigation.
For instance, 32 minutes in, Keough explains that the chief let it slip that there are actually multiple officers on an internal “no-testify list” due to a pattern of lying in official reports so severe that their testimony could get a case thrown out.
“We have to read into things to really kind of understand what's going on behind closed doors because they're so non-transparent that you have to – every time they pull their vest up, you've got to be like, whoa, what did I see in there? But when the chief is exchanging that, the thing about the lies, and he then admits that there's actually the prosecution list. By the way, this is one of the great secrets in Massachusetts history is the cops that are not allowed to testify. (...)
“He admitted that! This is the first time. Any chief. Chief Gary (Gemme) and Steve (Sargent) have both been asked this question before. ‘Are there any officers that are on the non-testify list?’ And they both said, ‘I'm not sure. I don't know about that list. It's not provided to me. You have to ask DA Early.’ Chief Saucier, to me, that was a stunning moment. (...) He admitted that there are officers on that list. Now, he didn't tell you who they are, and he's not going to give access to that list. But now, if you're a defense attorney in the city of Worcester that's involved in some of these cases, like, it's a reference. Go after that list. He's saying—I think he's saying, ‘I'm not protecting these guys anymore.’”
Listen to the rest here.
Hands off!
There’s a big rally planned for outside city hall on April 5. Jim McGovern will be speaking, as I’m sure many others. Here’s the Facebook event page and Mobilize page.
Spread the word!
And I’ll see you there.
Odds and Ends
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Don’t forget! Sorta Late Show tonight! Fuck I really have to get going.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be speaking on a “media and strikes” panel with Kim Kelly and Dusty Christensen at the Strike Conference out at UMass Amherst. Then I’ll be at the Worcester Punk Rock Flea Market in the afternoon where I’ll have this new banger. (Available there before I list it on the merch store.)
Also paid subscribers who bought one as part of my little perk offering a few months ago can pick yours up there too. I have yours set aside! Going in the mail Monday otherwise.
I’d like to write a whole essay about the indignity we’re made to suffer by those parking lot surveillance towers.
I had a quote in a recent story about the 016 in New Public. It’s a nice piece and I was tickled by Ashira Morris’ description of the newsletter.
The 016 has been a convener of those new outlets. That includes Bill Shaner, the founding writer of the Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter, which reads like a punk show organizer covering City Hall.
“The current state of news in a city like Worcester, with its paper of record being continually stripped for parts by a hedge fund, means a lot of small and emerging outlets staffed by one or two people,” Shaner told me over email. “There are more outlets than ever and less local journalists than ever.”
Lastly, this little feature spot on Egg Roll Lady is the most wholesome thing I’ve seen in quite some time.
Ok I do really gotta run. Talk soon!
One of my formative Worcester memories was seeing then-City Manager Ed Augustus walk out of this Boston Market at 6:30 p.m. on a dreary weekday with take-out for one. Whom among us? A somewhat grim reminder that the elites in Worcester are not that elite.
Good piece 👏