Yada yada yada....

The Boston Globe decides to be part of the cover-up

Sun, 5 Feb 2012 18:39:12 -0500

While the Boston Herald exposes the Greenway Conservancy boondoggle, the Boston Globe is doubling down on its long-standing support of this private group of corporate lobbyists, which has taken over the Central Artery open space and turned it into a profitable featherbedding operation.
A few years ago, figuring that the Globe was a big cheerleader for the Conservancy because it just didn't know the facts, I told a senior Globe editor all about the Conservancy, all the stuff the Herald is exposing now. The editor listened to everything; then two days later, another glowing Globe puff piece came out about the Conservancy. In frustration, I called the editor and asked how such a piece could have been written after all I had revealed. The answer was something like, "We've had this position on the Conservancy for years. The Globe is like the Vatican, we can't turn on a dime just because someone tells us something...." So I guess this newspaper is never going to turn against the Conservancy, no matter what the truth is; it's not about information, but about faith. Or cronyism, or politics.

The “neighborhood schools” hoax rears its ugly head

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:48:08 -0500

City Councilor John Connolly, who lives in West Roxbury, is taking the lead in reviewing the Boston Public Schools student assignment plan. Craftily obfuscating his position on this crucially important topic, Connolly says: "We need to accept a plan that will create quality schools in every neighborhood, and part of doing that is going to schools closer to home and investing resources in community-based learning. In other words you can’t create quality schools unless you’re building strong neighborhoods. A lot of that starts with going kids to schools close to home where schools are a central part of the community."

So -- he's not saying we have to start by building high-quality schools in every neighborhood that local parents would want to choose, but that we first have to trap the kids in their near-by schools, even if they are horrible, because we can't start to build good schools until they are all corralled. I’m wondering how long he had to spend wordsmithing this statement to properly encode his intent. It certainly shows his political morals.

Mayor Menino, the white majority on the City Council, the powerful corporations (aka the Boston Municipal Research Bureau) and the Boston Globe have decided to go back to the days of good old Boston racism - and this city (and country) have reached a point in our right-wing cultural regression where this is totally acceptable.

Menino is going to "create" neighborhood schools -- not with bricks and mortar but by the flick of a pen. "Here, you black kids all have to go to these few lousy schools we've left in your neighborhood, and you white kids all get to go to the good schools we've made for you in your neighborhood." Sure, that makes sense -- to white parents like John Connolly, comfortably ensconced in the privileged West Roxbury neighborhood. If you were a black parent, would you think this is an improvement over your kid being on a bus for hours so s/he could get to a school that shared at least a little of the "white-kid" benefits?

Menino's shining legacy: Separate and Unequal. Just like before.

"Judge me harshly on education," he said. And that's exactly what he deserves.

Rally against MBTA cuts in service and fair increases

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:25:54 -0500

There will be a rally at the State House on Monday, Jan. 23, at noon to 1:00 pm to protest the destructive and short-sighted T proposals for saving money by radical fair increases and massive service cuts, especially burdening the poor and transit-dependent populations of the region. These proposals will harm T riders, car drivers, the environment, and the region’s economic. And they are only temporary band-aids, because the Governor refuses to establish a long-term plan to deal with transit funding.

See the Occupy Boston website for details of the rally and the public hearings that follow at the Transportation Building, 10 Park Plaza.
http://www.occupyboston.org/

Occupy the Courts: Corporations are not people!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:43:55 -0500

New England Alliance for Democracy www.newenglandalliance.org
Occupy the Courts—Boston Action!

"We hold these truths to be self-evident:
A corporation is not a person AND money is not speech."

Agree? Then join

Greater Boston Move to Amend
at a Protest at the Court

Friday, January 20, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.
John J. Moakley United States Courthouse
Northern Avenue at Courthouse Way, Boston

Join with us for inspiring speeches, street theater, and a rousing thumbs down to the Citizens United decision on its second anniversary.

We'll be demonstrating in Boston as part of the national Occupy the Courts day of action, with over 100 cities taking part at federal courthouses, including at the US Supreme Court.

For information or to volunteer, contact
Greater Boston Move to Amend
bostonmta@gmail.com or 617-894-6279

Cosponsors include: Alliance for Democracy, Clean Water Action of Massachusetts, Coffee Party USA, Common Cause Massachusetts, Community Labor United, Corporate Accountability International, Greater Boston Coffee Party, The LEAH Advocacy Group, MassVOTE, Progressive Democrats of America, Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover.

Occupy Boston stands in solidarity with this event.

Then, after the Friday action at the Courthouse, check out the
Rally and Summit to Unite Citizens for Democracy

Rally: Friday, January 20, 4-8:15 p.m.
St. Paul's Cathedral, 138 Tremont St, Boston
Speakers include:
Rep. Cory Atkins, Szelena Grey, Sen. Jamie Eldridge, John Bonifaz, Donna Palermino, and Melia Lazu
Breakout sessions on the finance industry, healthcare, agri-business and more!

Summit: Saturday, January 21 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Suffolk University, Donahue Hall, 41 Temple St., Boston
Presentations by:
Lawrence Lessig, Patrick Frank, Grace Morris and more,
with workshops on citizen lobbying, ballot initiatives, local resolutions, and local elections.

For the most up-to-date information, see the event wiki page here.

Organized by the
Citizens United to End Political Bribery
Working Group of Occupy Boston.

Note: Alliance for Democracy and Move to Amend can use volunteers to staff an information table at the Rally and Summit. Please email bclancy122@earthlink.net if you can help out!

So Menino and the BRA were wooing Sears...

Fri, 6 Jan 2012 12:36:46 -0500

Just this summer, Mayor Menino and new BRA Director Peter Meade made the headlines for trying to lure Sears to Boston. I wonder what kind of “incentive package” (read: tax breaks, land deals, cash grants, tax-free loans, etc.) they offered Sears, which had put out the word that they were looking to relocate their headquarters. They were “thrilled” that Sears would even consider moving to little ole’ decrepit Boston! But many people warned that Sears is teetering on the edge of survival and was just shopping for offers it could use to threaten their own Illinois legislators that it might leave town if it didn’t get a nice tax break. As all politicians do, the Illinois pols showered Sears with money -- again -- to “retain” jobs or whatever they thunk up as their excuse for corporate welfare.

As Good Jobs First writes, “The deal, valued at up to $275 million in property and income tax breaks, was signed into law on December 16. Yet on December 27, the company announced that it would close between 100 and 120 Kmart and Sears stores....when a company is ailing and it asks for a tax break, the wisdom of the plant-closings movement tells us: tax avoidance can be one form of disinvestment, another early warning sign of job loss. Put another way: if a company doesn’t see a future in the community or the state, why should it keep investing in the schools or roads or universities?”

Well, we “missed out” on this bargain, but with Deval Patrick, Tom Menino and Peter Meade at the helm, we can be sure that they won’t let too many other corporate-welfare “opportunities” slip through their fingers. They’re throwing away our money as fast as they can.

Greenway Conservancy asks for police to oust “Occupy Boston”!

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:48:28 -0500

Apparently, the Greenway Conservancy has had enough democracy! That was nice for a while, and only on the one parcel of the park where the Conservancy thought democracy should be allowed. When Occupy tried to expand, the Conservancy (together with Mayor Tom Menino and Governor Deval Patrick, probably feeling that the Occupy corporate/political corruption message was hitting a little too close to home) unleashed the state, county and city police on the protesters, destroying their tents, laptops and other belongings and arresting 141 of them.

Now, the Conservancy is taking off the gloves. Occupy Raus! The lawn, rather than the economy, needs saving!

But it is the Greenway Conservancy, which is not an environmental or park-advocacy group but simply a corporate lobby for downtown real estate developers and other business interest, that has "occupied" our public space. It did not create the park, nor does it own or control it. It has also wangled millions of public dollars while pretending to be a "non-profit" (paying its Executive Director a quarter million dollars a year) steward of the park. I've been trying to oust the Conservancy ever since it formed, knowing that it is absorbing millions of taxpayer dollars while it privatizes this state land for the benefit of its corporate members. They want a suburban wonderland outside their valuable property, not a real public space where political activity (especially when it’s about THEM) is at home.

The Occupy movement, exercising its Constitutional rights of free speech and free assembly, is a rightful user of this space. Occupy, unlike the Conservancy, welcomes all, and keeps no one out. In fact, this manicured but largely deserted prairie, dependent on laborious event staging to attract a living soul, is finally getting some use.

This is truly an example of the unfair society Occupy is exposing: the 1% takes the assets of the rest of us – and then takes our rights to protest.

Yet more proof: Tax breaks do not create jobs!

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:00:43 -0500

How many more times will politicians have to hear this before they stop giving away our money to businesses?

More, how many times will we, the voters, let them get away with doing so at our expense?

Don’t vote for politicians who give subsidies so they can make false claims of “job creation” and “economic development”!

http://www.ctj.org/taxjusticedigest/archive/2011/11/the_verdict_is_in_business_tax.php

The Verdict Is In: Business Tax Breaks Do Not Create Jobs
November 18, 2011 4:01 PM

A slew of tax credit programs in Iowa that have failed to live up to their job-creation promises is further evidence that while companies will happily take taxpayer money when it’s offered, no amount of corporate pork can make a company hire people when there’s no demand for its products.

An excellent piece of journalism from The Des Moines Register reveals that 15 companies enjoying tax credit dollars given to them by the state have defaulted on the job-creation requirements tied to those credits. All together, those companies created one-third fewer jobs than they promised when they took the money. (This story echoes a recent report from Texas showing that just 26 percent of projects receiving funding from the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) fully complied with their 2010 job creation requirements.)

The reasons for these failures should be obvious. When the economy is weak, businesses generally can’t sell as much of their product as they used to. You can throw money at them and ask them to hire more people, but ultimately it doesn’t make sense for a company to bring on more employees unless there’s some new, unmet demand that needs to be filled. In good economic times, companies simply rake in tax credit dollars and create jobs they would have created anyway. But in bad economic times, companies rake in tax credit dollars, the façade collapses, and you end up with exactly the situation we see in Iowa.

Iowa State University economist David Swenson provided some valuable insight to The Des Moines Register on this issue: “Tax credits in Iowa are used very injudiciously. Everybody qualifies for something. It makes no sense from a business or government point of view. … But government officials can’t take credit for job creation if they don’t hand out some sort of subsidy.”

He goes on to provide an important recommendation to legislators currently reviewing 35 of Iowa’s tax credits: “Everybody is living with a lot less,” due to the down economy. “That really does mean businesses should be living with a lot less public subsidy.”

Menino shows us how it works!

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:55:20 -0500

Well, I never! Here it is, right on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNbEAAMW0c

The only thing that’s not faithful to reality is the cat. It is to laugh...and to lament.

It reminds me of the City Council hearing where then-Acting Director and Always-Eminence-Gris Paul McCann responded to a Councilor’s question about why the BRA had been created: “To drive poor people off the land and do all the dirty things and keep the politicians’ hands clean.”

I guess being omnipotent means never having to be afraid that the truth will get out.

Save us from City Councilors who want to save us....

Sun, 6 Nov 2011 14:28:11 -0500

Steve Murphy is terribly worried that the City of Boston, with its $2.4 billion budget, will be driven to bankruptcy by Occupy Boston’s massive police deployment; he’s made up a number that Occupy is costing us -- $2 million a month -- which is totally wrong. BPD numbers are about 7% of that. And remember -- Occupy didn’t ask for site policing; that’s the Mayor’s decision, Menino, the poster child of the corporate-political axis of corruption (along with his evil brother from another mother, Deval Patrick, corporate flack extraordinaire).

Felix Arroyo is one of the few politicians who managed to wangle speaking rights at an Occupy microphone, as he pretends to be a champion of the 99%. Think, he says, how costly it will be if the City doesn’t reform its financial ways!

It’s all hypocrisy.

Both Arroyo and Murphy and a majority of their colleagues recently voted for two huge corporate welfare packages: Liberty Mutual ($24 million City money, with City approval triggering $22.5 million state money) and Vertex Pharma + Fallon Development ($12 million City money, triggering $110 million state money). There was absolutely no public benefit from these give-aways; no one will be hired that wouldn't have been hired anyway if the corporations needed more employees; no one would have taken their marbles and left town; no one would have decided they couldn't build their project. It was just gravy for the corporations, and for Mayor Tom Menino and Gov. Deval Patrick, who got some fat campaign donations out of it. The Councilors voted for it to please Menino (who can withhold services from their districts or get them trounced by an M-hack in the next election) and the state Democratic establishment -- not for "job creation," not for "economic development," not for a few bucks for "youth summer jobs" (how many youths could have been hired for $165 million dollars??) -- although this is what they will brag they got “for us.” It's pure demagoguery.

I hope the Boston voters rip away the curtain of babble hiding all these pols and hold them accountable -- by replacement.

And I hope that Occupiers will look at the voting records of any pols they allow to address them and thus to share in Occupy's legitimacy. Corporate welfare is a keystone of the empire of corporate greed, political corruption and economic inequality that Occupy is there to topple.

Occupy Boston

Sat, 8 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

My heart leaped when I first heard about Occupy Wall Street. This is it, the moment I have been waiting for, for years. I knew it had to come. I knew it would spread like wildfire. The country is a tinderbox of anger, and I was waiting for the spark. There was a growing tide of reporting and editorializing about the income inequality (I was writing about it too, in my South End News column) and about the Wall Street plunder of America, but...where were the street demonstrations? Where was the act-out? People of my generation had taken to the streets for civil rights and the Vietnam war; where were the youths of today as their future was being destroyed? Well, it has come, and it’s just beginning.

I’ve been visiting quite a bit since.

It’s so moving and exhilarating and wonderful to see this gathering across the nation, after all my years of writing and speaking about corporate welfare and corrupt politicians and social injustice.

Critics keep saying Occupy has no demands. This is simply disingenuous. The demands are very clear: we need to run a decent society and a fair economy, but we can’ the people we elect to make this happen have been bought and are serving their moneyed masters. In truth, everyone in Washington, in every state capital and every city hall, knows exactly what that means and what it would take. We used to have more economic fairness, if not social justice, for a couple of what turn out to be extra-ordinary decades, after WWII, so we know how it’s done. They just don’t want to do it, because they’d lose all their dirty campaign money.

So, the whole site is a big cauldron of dialogue and education. People talk to each other about the issues of economic and social justice, war, education, civil rights, and all the other concerns that are tearing the country apart. They just set up a “Free School University,” with lecturers and teach-ins; the first day featured Kevin Gallagher from BU and Mark Blyth from Brown University, explaining the mechanics by which the world economy was broken -- for example, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the credit rating agencies, etc. You can learn more about their work at triplecrisis.com. Yesterday, there were speakers about America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and about morbidity rates among sugar-cane workers.

Many marches are led from the Dewey Square site around the financial district and other areas. Yesterday, a huge group or Ironworkers’ Union members and supporters marched around the financial district, and ended up at the Federal Reserve, a major target for reform/elimination.

The Occupy Boston encampment is expanding as more people come to stay; they may soon meet some limitations by the state (or the Greenway Conservancy, I’m not sure who’s setting the rules) for their occupation of Greenway land.

More to come, as I plan to visit Occupy Boston as long as it stays here.

The corporate gravy train hits a Bump

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 09:28:27 -0400

The state corporate welfare dole every year is actually greater than the budget shortfall. In other words: our government doesn’t really have to be slashing and burning public services; politicians are knowingly creating a deficit and balancing it on our backs. The same thing is happening at the federal, state and city levels.

This is no coincidence. Despite decades of documentation that public subsidies do not sway business decisions and do not “create jobs.” politicians continue to give away public resources, so they can claim bragging rights for any jobs the market creates (and so they can rake in hefty corporate campaign donations).

And the pols keep the information from us, so that we can’t even find out who’s getting all this money, and what they’re doing with it.

Finally, the Evergreen Solar, Fidelity Investment, film tax credit, and other subsidy debacles have poked awake our sleepy state legislature, and a few bills have been filed -- not to reduce corporate welfare, but just to disclose where it is going! There is no public reporting on this subsidy empire, and no accountability.

There was a hearing on these bills on April 7, 2011. The new state Auditor, Suzanne Bump, presented a summary of her report: we have 91 corporate subsidy programs, and virtually no accountability.

Here is my testimony on the major one, H 2565. I supported it, with some suggested improvements.

If you want sunshine, speak up now! Contact the Committee Chair, Jay Kaufman. It may be years before there is a big enough catastrophe to prod our legislators into action again.

Re: House 2565 An Act To Promote Efficiency and Transparency in Economic Development

I am an urban design professional and a long-time citizen advocate for government transparency and accountability, particularly on the issue of public business incentives. I am very pleased to support this legislation, which is long overdue. The taxpayers and legislators of the Commonwealth must be able to track in detail all public assets granted to private businesses and to evaluate the benefits of these expenditures. Billions of dollars are given away for “job creation,” but often jobs are not created, or are even cut, while corporations enjoy unjust enrichment at the expense of your hard-working constituents.

I offer the following suggestions.

1. Line 185: Applicants should detail their business plans before and during the award period so as to distinguish between hiring that would have occurred in the recipients’ normal course of business and that which results from the award. The taxpayers should not be handing out subsidies but providing targeted INCENTIVES that change behavior and enable additional employment. These additional jobs should be the basis for evaluation of performance and clawback enforcement.

2. Line 388: Publicly noticed meetings should be HEARINGS, where citizens can bring information and comments to the granting bodies prior to votes. Currently, proponents can speak without limitation about the merits of their applications, but citizens may not speak at all; I have been threatened with physical ejection by state troopers when I attempted to testify on a TIF application (see attached State House News report).

3. No “executive sessions” should be allowed at these hearings; granting bodies’ deliberations must be public, and never exempted from public scrutiny as secret “negotiations of deals to lure companies,” as some agencies (e.g., MassDevelopment) have argued.

4. Line 452: Public policy goals other than employment should not include such vague items as “blight remediation” or “revitalization.” Acceptable goals might include historic preservation or environmental protection.

5. Line 367: Clarify that the first line of enforcement is the state Attorney General. Citizens should indeed be allowed to sue, but should not have to be the ones undertaking enforcement.
6. Line 315: Fines should be scaled to corporation size; $500 or $1000 a day is not enough to change the behavior of a Raytheon or a Fidelity. A percentage of the subsidy might be a more effective deterrent.
7. Line 39: Construction jobs should be excluded from all job creation counts.
8. Line 53: “Subsidy value” should be clarified to include both the value to the recipient and the loss to the taxpayer, which may be different. For example:
a. The dollar amount of a low-interest loan to the recipient may be the “face value,” but the loss to the taxpayers must be calculated based on the tax lost due to reduced interest.
b. The value of a public property given or leased must be calculated based on current and projected market values, as certified by the DOR; often, public land is greatly under-appraised by government assessing departments because it is not taxed.
c. The actual calculated value should be reported, not a manipulation that reduce the amount of the subsidy, like “net present value.” (E.g., Liberty Mutual TIF: City property tax loss will be $24 million, not the announced “net present value” of $16 million.)
9. Line 208: Clarify that other granting bodies include local, state and federal sources.
10. Line 234: Include specifically Chapter 121A agreements, which are handed out quite freely in Boston to large developers of non-affordable-housing project and cost the City tens of millions of dollars every year.

I thank you for your consideration of my comments, and I urge you to pass this bill.

The case against Chuck Turner

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:06:04 -0400

Before joining in the universal chorus cheering the harsh sentence meted to former City Councilor Chuck Turner for “attempted extortion” in a liquor-license case, journalists should take time to read the court documents, including FBI affidavits and trial transcripts. In them, I found that:

1) The FBI had absolutely no evidentiary basis for suspecting Turner of past corrupt behavior, but simply decided to turn their focus onto him, for no apparent reason, to see if he’d accept money if offered.

2) Turner did no special favors for the license applicant (who is black), but merely called for a hearing on possible racial discrimination in his community, which includes Empowerment Zone neighborhoods needing economic development assistance. When he was told that state legislation was being proposed to increase the number of permits as a solution, he postponed the hearing, assuming no further action was needed. He and Representative Gloria Fox also signed letters of support for the application, a common and public gesture for constituents.

The judge instructed the jury that “the Government must prove that Mr. Turner knowingly and willfully obtained cash…. obtained or attempted to obtain a payment to which he is not entitled knowing that the payment was offered to him in return for taking or withholding or influencing official acts.” But all that really happened was that the FBI sent their paid informant, Ron Wilburn, to put money in Turner’s hand after Turner took action on behalf of his community. Here are the words, at the trial, of the FBI agent who sent the informant to give him money:

Q. [by prosecution attorney] And what were the instructions that you gave Mr. Wilburn before you sent him out with this video camera that day?
A. To have this conversation with Mr. Turner, to have, as I describe it in one report, a carefully worded conversation. I want Mr. Wilburn to say words to the effect that Mr. Turner is going to understand and know that he's accepting this -- he's being offered money for official acts that he took as a Boston City Councillor.
Q. And other than telling him to have this conversation, what else did you tell Mr. Wilburn to do?
A. Pay him the thousand dollars.

In other words, the agent was constructing a “crime” retroactively by having Wilburn give Turner unbidden money and saying words to him that would not reveal the exact nature of the set-up but would insinuate enough that the FBI could later claim they showed that Turner knew he was taking money in return for things he did as a Councilor. But in fact, Turner neither asked for any payback for calling that hearing, nor expected any, nor understood what was handed to him to be a payoff for calling a public hearing on a district problem. As Wilburn put it, it could have been a gift or a campaign contribution. Since there was no quid pro quo, there was no bribery or extortion involved; accepting a bribe is a matter of intent, a deliberate sale of public powers, and extortion further implies a threat to coerce a payback. Note that Mayor Tom Menino’s aide, Michael Kineavy, deleted thousands of official emails (including emails about the Mayor’s role, which both Wilburn and Wilkerson mentioned, in getting Wilburn this license) violating the Public Record Law; AG Martha Coakley absolved him and everyone else in the Mayor’s office because she concluded they had no “criminal intent” and therefore had committed no crime. When newspapers confront Mayor Menino or Governor Patrick with records of campaign contributions by corporations that have received favorable official treatment, they simply say, “oh, that didn’t influence me” – and that’s enough; no investigation is ever done, even when huge amounts are contributed right at the time of these favors. Millions of dollars are contributed and dealt out under these rules of legalized graft; therefore, if Turner had recorded the amount in his hand in his campaign ledger, he would have had no problem, even if it had, in fact, been a bribe.

3) The FBI could not prove how much money was actually given to Turner by the informant. The money was not, as required per FBI protocol, counted out before a camera prior to delivery by the informant, and the informant (who was having big financial problems) was not searched afterward. He didn’t announce the amount as he handed it to Turner, as he always did with Sen. Dianne Wilkerson (“Here’s a thousand dollars, Dianne”); he said, “Here, take your wife to dinner.” So it’s entirely possible that the informant, who showed up at Turner’s district office without an appointment and sat around waiting to be seen for forty minutes while staff and other visitors milled around near-by (an unlikely scenario for Turner to set up if he was expecting a bribe!), helped himself to most of whatever the FBI had stashed, unseen, into his hidden-camera bag, and handed Turner a sum of money that was, in fact, a “dinner” amount, and thus, when uncrumpled later, unmemorable for Turner, who, in fact, had barely met this man before and had done nothing particularly on his behalf, much less at his behest. If the amount was $50 or less, it was totally legal. If it was more, it was either an excessive gift (an ethics violation if no disclosure form is filed) or an unrecorded campaign contribution (although $1000 would be legal for the informant and his wife to contribute). This is hardly three-years-in-federal-prison material.

Councilor Mike Ross abused his office to fix 35 of his own parking tickets worth $1000 over the course of four years; he got a $2000 fine, in a settlement. As I recall, the Beacon Hill Times editor lamented that if the young, handsome Ross had a wife to take care of these little things, he wouldn’t have had this silly problem.

4) The other public officials, besides Wilkerson, who were named in the documents as involved somehow in the license imbroglio, (Mayor Menino, City Council president Maureen Feeney, Senate President Terese Murray, Senator Michael Morrissey, and the License Board chair, Daniel Pokaski (who got a substantial pay raise at the time of this license issue and just left, three years later, with a nice pension boost), and board members Michael Connolly and Suzanne Ianella, who awarded the license without a public hearing and thus broke, at very least, the Open Meeting Law, a violation the DA’s office has acknowledged but not prosecuted) have all gone, to my knowledge, without even a look-over by the FBI. As it turns out, a well-connected lawyer paid by Arthur Winn, whose development subsidy Wilkerson was pushing, finally simply went backstage at the License Board and said, give this guy a permit, and voila! they did. Turner was not even peripherally involved in the meetings and shenanigans around this matter and had no idea he was the star of the show. He was, as the informant told the Boston Globe, “naïve, and a victim of circumstances, not a thief.”

5) This classic case of “no good deed goes unpunished” was not even eligible for FBI investigation, as no interstate commerce was involved. So the FBI got someone to testify that liquor sold in Massachusetts is manufactured out of the state, and thus the award of an existing license to this applicant was a matter of interstate commerce. By that kind of logic, every action taken by every human being falls within FBI jurisdiction. This is jurisdiction gerrymandering. Turner was gerrymandered in, and Menino and the others were apparently gerrymandered out. If it’s not racially or politically motivated, I for one, would be interested in knowing exactly why it happened.

I have been a watchdog over city corruption for over fifteen years, and if I could detect a shred of evidence of corruption on Turner’s part, I’d be fully willing to expose and criticize it. I can’t. And my reliable sources in Roxbury can’t, either. I can say from my experience that, after Felix Arroyo, Sr., left, Turner was the only Councilor to whom I could turn for help – to call for a hearing, to get documents that should have been public but weren’t, to ask questions at scheduled hearings, to speak against the tax giveaways and boondoggles and corruption that are bleeding our city. He helped me and others, and he never cared about protecting himself and didn’t expect anything in return. He was against developer tax breaks, against the bio-terror lab, against a pay raise firefighters extorted for sobriety testing and against a City Council raise when it was enacted without a proper public hearing. He helped get CORI reforms so prisoners could re-enter society with gainful employment. He provided an affidavit to support the citizens’ suit against the City Council for its twelve Open Meeting Law violations, which intensified the guilty Councilors’ hatred of him and his independent ways, and made his expulsion from the Council a moment of gleeful revenge for them.

Dianne Wilkerson was heard on the tapes saying, "He [Turner] would be good, if you needed somebody… to go pick up a ruckus and just protest for you. You want to get something done . . . that’s not what he does." She also said, “Chuck is crazy, he lives in the 1960’s.” He was the one stickler for principle on our deeply flawed City Council – and that was indeed a crazy thing to do. This is his punishment.

It’s easy to hide smugly behind the jury’s verdict as an indisputable truth (remember the O. J. Simpson’s jury verdict?) and to scapegoat Turner for all the corruption that angers and frustrates us all. But without a context, that widely disseminated picture of the money in the handshake doesn’t say more than a thousand words; it tells a misleading story, and I’ve seen no journalist trying to get it right. If his appeal is unsuccessful, Turner will go to prison, but it won’t serve justice, and we’ll lose a real public servant.

Published in The Back Bay Sun, February 15, 2011.

Public vs Private: Kressel vs. Stossel on Fox Business News

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:42:23 -0500

I was recently invited to be on John Stossel’s TV show, opposite Dan Biederman, the man who privatized New York’s Bryant Park and also heads two Business Improvement Districts. Stossel is a very staunch advocate of privatization, and plays up the “tragedy of the commons” to argue that public parks, (indeed any public assets) are doomed to despoliation by greedy individuals.

He also subscribes to the “cash-strapped cities and states” myth to justify privatization of public services -- “well, the government has no money for these things!” he says.

I was invited for this particular discussion because Biederman has been hired by the Friends of the Public Garden and Boston Common to guide them in soliciting corporate sponsorships for the Boston Common. This is a sobering thought: after 400 years as a public space in public hands, through wars and depressions and famines and drought, it seems our Towne Greene has become a frill we cannot afford. It will now be a charity ward of not only the Friends philanthropists, but also airlines, banks, and other business interests who will ask for only small tribute plaques in the Common ...but who knows what else they’ll want in the “back room deal” department -- and what tunes they will call when they pay the piper. What’s if BP becomes a sponsor, and one day we want to hold a rally against BP?? Anyway, the corporations understand that they have to protect each other qua corporations, regardless of the name; political demonstrations as an activity are not a comfy fit for them.

In the taping session, I informed Stossel and Biederman that all this privatization panic was a manufactured crisis -- that Boston had ended last year with a $9 million surplus, after several years of surpluses and an estimated $400 million in cash stashes withheld from the public; and New York ended last year with a $3.6 billion dollar surplus, the end of a decade of billion-dollar surpluses. And this, even after monumental amounts were squandered in waste, fraud and abuse, and in tax breaks and land deals for developers and corporations. This part, alas, never made it to the televised program segment.

My segment of the hour-long program also never made it to his website, where the other three segments have been posted (so I must have said something right!). But it is now on hulu, for your entertainment:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/200512/stossel-thu-nov-25-2010#s-p1-so-i0

Menino freezes out the students, in more ways than one

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:26:38 -0500

If you go into a Boston Public School classroom these chilly days, you’ll see the kids and staff all bundled up in their coats. Why? Mayor Tom Menino has required all the schools to turn down the thermostat to 65 degrees, to save money on heat. This Dickensian scene is all drama and no reality. He can’t afford to heat the school buildings, but he can afford to give away tens of millions in property tax breaks to developers? A few months ago, he gave Liberty Mutual $24 million in tax waivers (which triggered a state tax break of an additional $23 million). He gives away tens of millions of dollars every year in bogus “blight” tax breaks to two dozen of the biggest developments in the city. The waste, fraud and abuse in the city is legion. There are hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, hundreds of millions uncollected. And -- he has decided that this is where he’s going to economize, on the backs of our children.

But he’s freezing out our students in a more literal way. He’s going to close a dozen schools. Why? Well, I bet it has nothing to do with the so-called “gap” of $63 million that he suddenly has to fill. Where did this number come from?? I’m sure this is another politically motivated ploy to get more of that accursed “Race to the Top” money from the feds; to get it, he has to show he’s being a “reformer” -- like, closing “underperforming” schools (and packing them into existing schools, a move sure to improve the educational experience), firing teachers (which he threatens to do if he can’t close the schools, just as retaliation), and letting a thousand charters grow. He is already planning the give-away of the school buildings to charters, whose major reason for being is to bust the teachers’ union.

Judge him on education, Menino said seventeen long years ago. A whole generation has gone through schools under his reign, with nothing better to show for it than what was happening before he ascended to the throne. Students’ parents are trying to flee his burning ship, lining up for charters -- even when studies show they aren’t better than regular schools. We are truly on the brink of destruction for public education; and Menino is leading the way.

Chuck Turner faces City Council ouster

Tue, 2 Nov 2010 12:56:04 -0400

Like some Greek tragedy, the Boston City Council is about to vote to oust Chuck Turner, who was found guilty of accepting a $1,000 bribe for helping someone get a liquor license. The Councilors are apparently awed by their situation.

I’m sure they are. They know how lucky they are that they aren't the ones who were entrapped -- because most of them have committed far worse transgressions against the public interest.

From Michael Ross's unlawful "administrative dismissal" of 35 City parking tickets worth, coincidentally, $1000, to Maureen Feeney's hiring (in collusion with her Council colleagues) of Jimmy Kelly's former staffer for hundreds of thousands of dollars to write a report on why the City Council should be exempt from the Open Meeting Law, to the Council's years of Open Meeting Law violations and waste of hundreds of thousands of public dollars in legal fees while they lied about it to the courts before finally admitting to all charges, to their almost unanimous votes (Turner and Yancey being the only dissenters) to give away millions of our tax dollars to huge over-rich corporations like Liberty Mutual and JPMorganChase to please Mayor Menino, pretend they too, “created jobs,” and become big-money "playahs" themselves, to letting their staffers write themselves bonus checks, to perpetuating the eminent domain powers of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (another racket no one will prosecute) (and another vote on which Turner dissented) and so much, much more, this group of elected officials has been a disgrace to the cradle of democracy. They've gotten away with horrible things, and helped the mayor get away with horrible things. And they know it.

The bitter irony, that they should now sit in judgment over Chuck Turner, who -- whatever it was that he did here -- has been less corrupt than most of them have been in far more important ways, must give them pause.

And there is more than a hint of racism in this ridiculous outcome of the FBI investigation. Does anyone think no white politicians had anything to do with this, that only two black politicians happened to be involved? We can’t get the Ethics Commission to prosecute the City Council staff bonuses, which the Commission confirmed were illegal. We can’t get the state Attorney General to investigate years of email deletions by Boston City Hall employees, or to enforce its own injunction against Boston City Council Open Meeting Law violations. We can't get the District Attorney (a former Boston City Councilor) to do his job and prosecute the liquor licensing board for violating the Open Meeting Law in this very case. We can’t get the FBI to investigate mayoral shakedowns of real estate buyers for millions of dollars in return for tax breaks of tens of millions of dollars. The Turner verdict is hardly a victory for justice, in view of the over-all collapse of our ethics and law enforcement structure.

Justice, unfortunately, is not blind...but those who administer it certainly, and willfully, are.

The charter school movement shows its true colors

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:48:15 -0400

I attended a Pioneer Institute forum last week on school choice. Kerry Healey, the Republican candidate who lost the gubernatorial race to Deval Patrick in 2006, was the first speaker, and she got right down to brass tacks: choice means not only charters, but vouchers for private schools and religious schools. The next speaker, Anthony Williams, former mayor of St. Louis, sent the same message: the taxpayers should send each child’s tuition where the parents want to sent him/her. When I asked if he meant that every public school must then be compelled to accept all applicants, he had no answer. Since private schools control their performance records (and prestige) by exclusivity (much like charters), the vast majority of the urban minority students for whom the “choice” movement purportedly is the salvation would never be able to use their tuition voucher; vouchers would merely subsidize the upper-income families already using these exclusive institutions. From the audience, a Catholic school representative offered that those schools will happily accept anyone. I didn’t get a chance to ask him if they’d KEEP anyone, regardless of school competence, behavior, disabilities, English-language difficulties, etc., the way that public schools must.

The truth is peeking out from behind the school-choice/ed-reform zealots’ masks: poor children, mostly black and other minority kids, have been used as a decoy to get what the conservatives have always wanted: diverting the vast public school budget of America into private hands, either through charter school corporate operators, or through vouchers to private and parochial schools. Subsidized “choice” for those who already have it, or are willing to fill the many parochial school vacancies; profiteering on holding pens for the school-to-prison pipeline crowd.

Rosaria Salerno, Boston City Clerk: law-abiding at last

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:18:09 -0400

Congratulations and thanks to Colman Herman for exposing and finally stopping Ms. Salerno's cheating of the taxpayers for all these years (and we can be sure her boss, Mayor Tom Menino, ok'd it for her). Ms. Salerno, for a City Clerk, former City Councilor, one-time Mayoral candidate, and sentient human being, has little credibility in her claim that she didn't know state law trumps city ordinance. In fact, she was told so by the state in 2003.

Now, let's turn our attention to Ms. Salerno's abuse of her office as Justice of the Peace. She performs weddings during her City Clerk work hours, at her Clerk's office, and pockets the money, about $68000 a year on top of her generous $100,000/yr salary (in other words, she's getting the mayoral salary she missed out on by failing in her campaign). Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether this money is a City service fee and should go to the City, we should note that the time she spends on marriage ceremonies, at, say, a half hour each, comes to over 14 weeks, during which time she collects pay as a Clerk. We lose 14 weeks of her critically essential Clerk services, while she double-dips. This has been going on for many years. Think about it! That's a quarter of the year. She's working part-time as a City Clerk, and collecting a full salary and soon, a full pension. I wonder if her wedding pay will bump up the calculations for her pension. This City Clerk may not know which laws to obey, but she sure knows which side her bread is buttered on. Both!

Greenway Conservancy: The Big Pig

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:18:20 -0400

The Greenway Conservancy has created a “Green and Grow” program, hiring a handful of public school kids to help with the landscape work at $8 an hour, with some fun projects thrown in to make it an educational program. But the Boston Herald reported the cost of this program: $285,000 this year for 9 kids; it was $245,000 last year for 6 kids. Over half a million dollars to hire a dozen kids for part-time yard work? Where is the money going?

So the Conservancy Executive Director, Nancy Brennan, wrote a defense of the program and of herself:

Real growth here
Thursday, October 14, 2010
“We are disheartened by the Herald’s critique of the Green & Grow program (“Where’s the money going?” Oct. 8). At a time when many of us worry that promising teens are short-changed when it comes to career opportunities, Green & Grow is showing measurable results. Graduates have already earned seasonal positions with the Greenway Conservancy, while others earned full-time employment or further job training from the National Park Service or have gone on to college.
To clarify: The cost of the program’s first year to the Conservancy was $254,000. The salary and benefit costs quoted in the article included the kids’ stipends. My salary is not $225,000, it is $165,000. The Green & Grow program lasts an entire year.”
I posted this comment after her letter:
Green and Grow cost $285,000 this year. The stipends for the 9 kids totaled $53,000. That leaves $232,000 -- over 80% -- in administration. If all that money were given to the kids, they'd each have $32,000 toward a college education. Or it could be spent on improving their community, which would have helped thousands of kids. Instead, it supports the high salaries of the Conservancy bureaucracy; glorifies Raytheon, John Hancock, and National Grid, which donated the money (thus taxpayers picked up almost 40% of the cost after the corporations' tax deduction) and got lots of good advertising for it; and pays a few kids minimum wage to do landscaping, saving the Conservancy the cost of regular workers.

Ms. Brennan has been paid about $225,000 each year since 2005, three years before the Conservancy took responsibility for the park in February 2009. Her "base pay" was $165,000, and is now, according to the Form 990 recently posted on the Conservancy website, $190,000; $33,000 in benefits and $25,000 bonus incentive pay bring it to $223,000. The bonus incentive, she informed me several years ago, is for fundraising. The Conservancy has also paid a separate fundraiser $160,000-$185,000 annually.

Although the Conservancy was formed by a Memo of Agreement requiring that it perform all its park work using solely private funding, this requirement was eliminated when it actually took over the park work. To date, most of the Conservancy's money has come from the taxpayers. A special law was enacted requiring the state to pay half of whatever budget the Conservancy presents. Since it is a private group, it is exempt from the public record and open meeting laws; thus, it receives public funding and controls public land but has no public accountability. Our governor and legislators seem to have no trouble giving this organization millions of dollars while essential services are slashed across the state.

We can't afford this "private philanthropy." The law enabling it should be repealed and the park returned to public management. Competitive bidding should be sought for any maintenance desired that cannot be provided as part of the standard state park work. The Greenway will then cost the taxpayers a fraction of what we are currently paying.

Menino’s deal still scars the city

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 09:36:11 -0400

I see in the Boston Globe today that the Kensington Investment Company is coming to life again; it has filed a Notice of Project Change, applying for permits to develop the site of the Gaiety Theatre, which Tom Menino allowed them to destroy in 2004. This was one of Menino’s lowest moments as mayor, and that’s saying something.

Mayor Tom Menino gave (forced his building commissioner to give) the developers an unlawful demolition permit to tear down the Gaiety Theatre, a wonderful century-old music hall by renowned architect Clarence Blackall, a building that was protected by zoning. He let them demolish it before there was a construction plan, violating both city and state orders that demoition was only to be done as construction began -- and therefore CANNOT GET ANY STATE PERMITS IT MAY NEED TO PROCEED WITH DEVELOPMENT NOW. He (wearing his BRA "glove") approved a building that violates zoning code height limits. He approved a building that doesn't include a replacement theater, as the law requires.

Menino refused to consider an alternative project proposed by the Asian Community Development Corporation, which would have bought the theater from the developers at market price, restored it (employing many people) and operated it (employing many people), and built housing above on the as-of-right (zoning-compliant) air rights.

He let them tear the Gaiety down when we citizens pointed out that the developer had no money to build the project. The site sat, a vacant pit of rubble, for several years before the crash; it's not a victim of the "crisis" in the economy. It's a victim of Tom Menino.

We are all victims of the Mayor, and of the BRA that packages his unlawful personal closed-door agreements with developers into court-proof bombs that tear apart the city.

We should be figuring out how to get rid of the BRA and create a genuine city planning department, and we should be working on getting better political leadership into City Hall.

To see what we lost, visit the Friends of the Gaiety Theatre website.

Read my South End News columns, here and here.

Democracy beyond Republicrat-ocracy

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 13:13:54 -0400

I am not one of those people who argues that Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same. But I do think that their spectrum of policy does not provide all the options we need for our society to thrive. My shorthand: The Democrats have become Republicans, and the Republicans have become Fascists. Of course -- not every Dem, not every Repub (some of my best friends are Republicans, and I've actually been called, though only once, a right wing nut), but on the macro scale, that's about it. Some people describe it by saying "the country has taken a shift to the right."

Anyway, most Americans are distraught about where the country, their state, and their city is, and is headed. We got into this mess under these two parties, who have each played good guy and bad guy at various times. This is it. It's all this range of politics has to offer. But how can we get beyond it, to deal in some new ways with our environment, our education, our employment, our Brazilified wealth stratification?

Unless we enact some form of ranked-choice voting , we will never be able to break out of the political Republicrat trap, and never have a chance at getting the real "change" that people desperately want. Third-party candidates are marginalized by the media (who increasingly see their job as picking winners rather than conveying information). People are afraid to "waste" their vote on a candidate who they (with media influence) gauge is "unlikely" to win (a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course) -- as if the ballot process is about predicting the winning horse rather than expressing what you want from government. And even more constraining is the fear of the "spoiler effect," also called the "Nader effect" -- the fear that voting for the outsider they like best will hurt the mainstream candidate they could live with and tip the election to the candidate they like least.

This discourages runs even by candidates that have been in office and have name recognition, campaign funding and a record to run on. It's almost impossible for a real outsider -- other than show-business celebrities and self-funded billionaires -- to be taken seriously. We can’t even benefit from their ideas, or use them to hold the insiders accountable.

There are several forms of ranked-choice voting, so we don't have to get hung up in the relative merits. Yes, it may have some hitches. But it's done in many American cities, and in many other countries. And it’s better than having no choice but to ricochet between the same two parties, who can hold us hostage to a closed system. Since the insiders won’t pass legislation to create ranked-choice voting, we’d better gear up for a ballot initiative.