democracy

BOSTON: IT SUCKS LESS THAN DETROIT

A look at the Hub’s points of relative pride

BOSTONIANS NEED TO STEP UP

As the old saying goes, democracy is not a spectator sport

DON’T FALL FOR PROPAGANDA, VOTE BASED ON FACTS

In the 2020 election, working voters need to focus on candidates’ platforms… and actions

THANKSGIVING FICTION: WE LIVE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE THE BAD GUYS WON

“Americans today live in a very real universe where the functional equivalent of Nazis—European colonists—committed genocide against Native American peoples…”

PASSENGERS AT RISK ON GREYHOUND, OTHER BUS LINES

*Ex-Greyhound Bus by Omar Omar is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Modified by Jason Pramas.*

No way to contact management in the event of driver medical or psychiatric emergency

My wife had a meeting in New York City over the weekend, as is sometimes the case, and decided to take a bus back to Boston on Sunday evening. Over our many years together, we have found that buses are generally the best—and certainly most economical—way to get between the two cities. We are aware of the prejudices that many people have against this mode of transportation, but we agree that they are wrong. Yes, buses can be cramped. Yes, you can’t really walk around on a bus once it’s on the road. Yes, there are no snacks or other amenities on board—beyond bathrooms that it’s usually best to avoid using for some obvious reasons.

But buses get you from A to B with a minimum of fuss. And in the case of the Boston-NYC route, they usually get you there in four to four and a half hours—depending on traffic. Roughly the same time (when all factors are considered) as taking the train or flying. At a fraction of the price.

Which is not to say we have not had many adventures and inconveniences traveling in this fashion. And those inconveniences virtually all happen upon trying to get from NYC to Boston on a Sunday evening. When masses of students return to the Hub after a weekend in the Big Apple. Huge lines at Port Authority are the order of those days, and bus companies press any vehicle that rolls into service to meet the demand. Your ticket may say your bus is leaving at a particular time. But the staff in charge of boarding buses and the dispatchers in charge of getting them out of the labyrinthine structure that is Port Authority play fast and loose with rules and schedules.

These days it’s no longer necessary to choose a bus company that stops at NYC’s main bus terminal at all. There are other lower cost options like MegaBus and BoltBus. And the “Chinatown buses” which wink in and out of existence—based as they are on exploiting immigrant labor… with maintenance records so poor that some of their buses have had major issues like literally catching fire while in motion over the years. But my wife and I avoid the cheaper buses on labor grounds and concerns about cost-cutting measures that could affect safety. Although MegaBus and the Greyhound-owned BoltBus apparently do have unionized drivers in the northeast.

So most of the time, we stick with ailing bus giant Greyhound. It’s been through multiple bankruptcies and various owners over the decades we’ve used it. But it’s still the most heavily unionized bus line—and union drivers and mechanics are typically far more likely to run a decent service then most nonunion shops. And we feel it’s worth paying an extra $10-20 each way to arrive safely at our destination. While departing from and arriving at (more or less) climate-controlled bus stations. Rather than having to wait outside in whatever weather for buses in NYC as with the cheaper bus lines. Even if we occasionally have a Sunday night trip that lasts hours longer than it should normally take—as it just did last week to my partner Chris Faraone. And even if I once had to help a driver that got lost on a foggy night years before GPS became ubiquitous—guiding him out of downtown Worcester to Boston’s South Station Bus Terminal several hours after we left NYC.

Wonky as that latter predicament was, I have only rarely felt unsafe on a Greyhound bus—and usually only for a brief moment or two due to traffic or road conditions outside my driver’s control.

But this Sunday, something happened to my wife on a Greyhound bus that severely shook our confidence in the company and left us worried about a problem we had never considered before. One which I think is worth sharing with the general public, Greyhound management, other bus company management, transportation union leadership, and government regulators—weak though they often are in this era of ever-diminishing government oversight of corporations.

My wife’s bus left Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City early at 5:50 pm on a scheduled 6:30 pm departure bound for Boston. We were in touch by text throughout what transpired next.

She had told me that passengers were instructed to board about 20 minutes prior to that early departure time then had to wait for Greyhound to find a driver. A young woman driver was found, and the bus left just after that staffer boarded.

As the bus exited Port Authority, the driver announced that passengers should be patient with her because she was from New Orleans and had never driven from NYC to Boston before. The bus proceeded uptown as is generally the case when going to Boston—although Greyhound buses take any of several routes out of the city depending on traffic.

However, my wife stated that the driver started getting confused about where to go fairly quickly. And the bus ended up circling around Harlem and the Upper West Side without proceeding east to bridges that would take it to highways going north. Instead driving west past the City University of New York’s main campus and onto Riverside Drive at one point, and then as far south as 80th and Broadway. At which time the driver started talking to someone on a phone.

The bus had been on the road about an hour and a half at that point. The driver made no attempt to communicate with the passengers and let them know what was going on. Or to ask passengers—many of whom, like my wife, know Manhattan and any of various routes to Boston well—for help navigating. Which is much more difficult to do these days anyway because Greyhound drivers now have a door between them and passengers. The easy communication between drivers and passengers of the pre-9/11 and -weekly mass shooting days is now gone. And that’s likely why no passengers—including my wife—tried to engage the driver as things went from bad to worse.

So my wife, and other passengers, became concerned early into the journey. And then scared, as the driver ran at least two red lights, drove into two blind alleys and had to back the bus out, and almost hit a van. Punctuated by stopping the bus a few times on busy streets in evident attempts to figure out where to go on her own.

Finally, the person on the phone gave the driver correct directions to the Madison Ave Bridge and thence to Routes 87, 278, and 95. After which the trip proceeded as normal, and arrived about an hour late.

While the incident was going on, I posted a note about my concern with the threat to the safety of my wife, passengers, other vehicles and pedestrians to my personal Twitter account—and then shared it to my newspaper’s account—notifying both the @GreyhoundBus and @GHoundBusHelp accounts in the process. Help desk people on both accounts ultimately just told me to have my wife call Greyhound’s regular customer service lines.

Fortunately, my wife and her fellow passengers got home safely. It seems like her inexperienced driver started driving erratically after getting lost in uptown Manhattan, and then got some kind of assistance from another driver or a dispatcher. She apparently had GPS, as one would expect in this day and age. But it either wasn’t working properly or she was in no state to make proper use of it to get her bus out of the city and on the road to Boston.

All of which leads me to my main reason for writing this column: While Greyhound has taken steps to protect drivers from attacks by dangerous passengers by placing doors next to the driver’s seat on its buses, what can passengers do if a driver has a medical or psychiatric emergency that puts them in danger?

All communication channels that passengers like my wife could avail themselves of during Sunday evening’s incident seem to lead to Greyhound’s main customer service phone lines. And upon contacting said lines, my wife and other passengers’ concerns for their safety were not addressed in any way by Greyhound customer service representatives. They were simply told to call back in 24 hours and maybe get a credit or a refund or nothing at all, one supposes. Although the reps did confirm that their drivers have GPS and that the company had a tracker on each bus—and, critically, that they couldn’t talk to my wife’s bus’s driver while the bus was en route.

It was a situation that wasn’t quite bad enough to call the police to interdict the bus, but could have become one after it was too late to affect the outcome. A situation when a call from company management to tell the driver to stop the bus where she was and let the passengers off while they sent another bus and driver to relieve her of duty could have stopped things from escalating to a tragic conclusion where people on or off the bus could end up being hurt or killed.

I asked Greyhound media relations spokesperson Crystal Booker to comment on the record on these matters in time for my deadline, and she told me that Greyhound management might not be able to complete an investigation of the incident involving my wife in time for publication this week. So I will plan to write a second installment with the company’s response as soon as I receive it.

But for now, I must say that Greyhound, other bus companies, drivers unions (where they exist), and government regulators need to address this problem. In another transportation industry, so-called ridesharing, both Uber and Lyft—under pressure—have introduced “panic buttons” to their apps that connect passengers who feel in danger for any reason, including a driver’s actions, to local 911 services with a single touch.

It seems like it’s past time for Greyhound and other bus companies to do something similar. Maybe some kind of panic button app that gives passengers a choice to either get in touch with a corporate office prepared to bring a problem driver to heel or contact local 911 depending on the severity of the situation.

Readers with opinions on this matter, or Greyhound or other bus company employees with information germaine to this discussion, should contact me at execeditor@digboston.com. Because this seems like a problem that needs all hands on deck until a workable solution is found. And my wife and her fellow passengers are hardly the first people to experience this problem. As a quick internet search of bus driver arrests for DUIs and the like—or avoidable accidents causing injuries and deaths—will inform even a casual researcher.

Apparent Horizon—recipient of 2018 and 2019 Association of Alternative Newsmedia Political Column Awards—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s executive director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2019 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.

DEESCALATING THE HARVARD CRIMSON BOYCOTT

Alternatives for feuding student immigrant advocates and journalists

As someone who has been both a journalist and a left-wing political activist for a long time, I suppose it’s inevitable that I would feel the need to weigh in on a debate currently raging between Harvard immigrant advocates and the independent Harvard student newspaper, the Crimson.

At issue is that paper’s coverage of a Harvard rally calling for the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement held by a coalition of campus activist groups led by Act on a Dream—“the premier immigrants’ rights advocacy group” at the elite university, according to its website.

The action took place on Thursday, Sept 12, and drew about 100 attendees. The Crimson wrote a very straightforward news piece about it the next day. Just like I did dozens of times covering all kinds of left-wing protests over the years. The two student reporters quoted the protesters at length, as I would have. They then asked ICE for a quote, as I myself did for literally every story I ever wrote—and there were many—on protests against the federal agency. ICE didn’t reply. Like its press liaisons refused to reply any of the times I asked them for a quote. Like they refuse to reply to many news outlets that ask them for quotes. Which is disgusting practice for a government agency in a democracy, full stop.

The immigrant activists and their allies immediately got angry at the Crimson. Not because of any error of fact. Or because they thought they had been slighted in some way. But because the reporters contacted ICE for comment.

They demanded that the Crimson agree to stop calling ICE for comment going forward.

The activists met with Crimson editors about the matter, and the editors refused to back down. Unsatisfied, the activists organized a petition on change.org entitled “Harvard Crimson: Stop Calling ICE for Comment.”

In the petition text, the activists said, “We are extremely disappointed in the cultural insensitivity displayed by The Crimson’s policy to reach out to ICE, a government agency with a long history of surveilling and retaliating against those who speak out against them.” Following a link to examples of such retaliation, the activists continued, “In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping them off, regardless of how they are contacted.”

The activists concluded: “We demand that The Crimson: 1. Apologize for the harm they inflicted on the undocumented community. 2. Critically engage with and change their policies that require calling ICE for comment. 3. Declare their commitment to protecting undocumented students on campus.”

Over 900 people, and a number of Harvard student groups, signed the petition. The activists called for Harvard students “to boycott the paper by refusing to return requests for comment,” according to the Washington Post—one of several major news organizations that have covered the dustup.

Two top Crimson editors responded with “A Note To Readers” in which they stated “Let us be clear: In The Crimson’s communication with ICE’s media office, the reporters did not provide the names or immigration statuses of any individual at the protest. We did not give ICE forewarning of the protest, nor did we seek to interfere with the protest as it was occurring. Indeed, it is The Crimson’s practice to wait until a protest concludes before asking for comment from the target of the protest—a rule which was followed here. The Crimson’s outreach to ICE only consisted of public information and a broad summary of protestors’ criticisms. As noted in the story, ICE did not respond to a request for comment.”

The editors concluded, “We understand that some readers may disagree with The Crimson’s policies. But our mission is facts, truth, narrative, and understanding. In our view, consistent application of a commonly accepted set of journalistic standards is the best way to fairly report on the campus in a sensitive and thorough manner.”

That statement was published on Oct 22. Since then, the activists have not relented. They have essentially made their campaign against the Crimson a major focus of their activism for this school year.

On Sunday, the Harvard student government, the Undergraduate Council, narrowly passed a somewhat vaguely worded statement calling on the Crimson to change its policy: “We condemn actions or policies that endanger undocumented and immigrant students on campus, and we encourage the Harvard Crimson to revisit their policies and make adequate changes. It is imperative for the Harvard Crimson to commit to journalistic practices that do not put students at risk. With this stated, we understand that upholding journalistic standards within the Crimson is vital; however, we do not believe that upholding such standards and ensuring the wellbeing of students are mutually exclusive.”

The statement concluded: “The Undergraduate Council commits to exploring methods for continued safety for undocumented students and other student activists in interacting with the Crimson; such methods include but are not limited to reviewing and publicizing Harvard Public Affairs and Communications Crimson trainings, and working to make reporting policies more accessible and public.”

In the student newspaper’s article on the council statement, Crimson President Kristine E. Guillaume responded: “Fundamental journalistic values obligate The Crimson to allow all subjects of a story a chance to comment. … This policy demonstrates a commitment to ensuring that the individuals and institutions we write about have an opportunity to respond to criticisms in order to ensure a fair and unbiased story.”

And that’s where things stand as of this writing.

Having looked over the positions of the parties to this dispute at some length, I’m sympathetic to both. As a journalist, I have to agree that the Crimson not only did nothing wrong in its protest coverage, but also produced a well-written and eminently fair piece of journalism that I’d happily run in DigBoston. Far better than the articles the Daily Free Press—a student newspaper I once worked for—wrote about my fellow Boston University activists and me during the campus anti-apartheid movement in the mid-1980s. Mocking us at every turn… even as its editors threw me off the staff for being too sympathetic to political movements they disagreed with (and, as I was told on the quiet, because the BU administration under John Silber threatened to pull university ads in the paper if I wasn’t removed).

As a longtime advocate for undocumented immigrants, and immigrant communities in general, I understand implicitly why the Act on a Dream activists want to protect undocumented students involved in calling for the abolition of ICE—a position that I support—from harm.

However, I think that the activists have chosen the wrong target in their just effort to make America safe from a reactionary law enforcement agency created in the wake of the tragic 9/11 attack. An agency whose leaders—that fraction of its employees who do their jobs with unmatched racist and nativist zeal, and the politicians who give it marching orders—I dearly hope to one day see up in the dock on charges of crimes against humanity for its baby concentration camps on our southern border.

The Crimson journalists have literally nothing to do with making undocumented students at Harvard—or anywhere in the US—unsafe. If anything they are helping them with fair coverage of student activist actions in defense of undocumented students.

So I think the best course for the activists would be to drop their petition drive and boycott, and focus on the real enemy, ICE… and the politicians and nativist movements that make its existence possible.

Though I also think that the Crimson could help diffuse the situation by agreeing to publicly list some ways it is willing to alter its reporting practices to avoid harming article subjects like undocumented immigrants. Practices that I typically list under the rubric of the “compassionate journalism” that we try to follow at Dig when dealing with individuals and communities we adjudge to be oppressed by powerful forces like ICE. Or the Republican Party. Or Democratic Party leadership. Or multinational corporations. Or any of the various mafia organizations.

Like only publishing photos of designated activist spokespeople at political actions in support of undocumented immigrants. And not publishing photos—purposely blurred or otherwise—that show the faces of rally attendees.

Or not posting updates about political actions involving undocumented immigrants to the social media accounts of the Crimson or any of its staffers while they are still going on.

Or allowing undocumented immigrants to be quoted using a nom de plume or nom de guerre, as long as the Crimson editors know their real names.

Or delaying publication of certain stories if early publication is highly likely to result in harm to undocumented immigrants.

Those are reasonable accommodations that violate neither the Crimson staffers’ First Amendment rights nor their audience’s right to know about important Harvard developments in a timely fashion.

What is not reasonable is telling the Crimson—or any news outlet—that its staffers cannot contact ICE or any party to any story being reported for comment.

Ultimately, if immigrant activists and their allies remain unhappy with the Crimson—for whatever reason—there is one alternative course they can pursue entirely on their own. Perhaps the best option of all. Like my fellow BU left activists and I did over 30 years back with our bu exposure, they can start their own student news outlet. And they can run it however they want. And they can go head to head with the Crimson in covering issues of the day at Harvard and beyond. And readers can decide which publication does a better job of covering one of the most important social movements of our age on that campus.

Which would be great outcome to an unfortunate fracas. In an age when this nation is losing newspapers every week, rather than gaining them.

SOMERVILLE NEWS GARDEN HOLDS FIRST PUBLIC EVENT

*Lynne Doncaster addresses crowd at Somerville News Garden event. Photo by Derek Kouyoumjian.*

Seeks more participation from Somerville residents

It has been nine months since DigBoston and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism partnered with the Somerville Media Center to organize an event asking Somervillians what kind of coverage was missing from their city’s remaining news media. The February 2019 Somerville Community Summit ultimately attracted 115 locals—many of whom were members or staff of 22 co-sponsoring civic organizations—to give powerful testimony to 15 professional journalists about six topic areas that they thought were getting short shrift. In an age when the consolidation of news media by a handful of giant corporations and the rise of digital media owned by another handful of big companies have done tremendous damage to local news production… in Somerville, and around the nation. Turning municipalities into what media researchers call “news deserts”—areas that no longer have professionally produced news outlets.

That first event was the result of the lived experience of my Dig and BINJ colleagues—Chris Faraone and John Loftus—and me over the nearly four years to that point during which we tried (with some success) to provide Boston-area communities with reportage that would otherwise be absent from the regional news ecology. We noticed local cities and towns having their newspapers of record (some of them over 100 years old) gobbled up by the huge media conglomerates, squeezed for profit, and then—often as not—discarded like so much refuse. Leaving Mass municipalities without the news that is the lifeblood of our democracy.

And we believed, as we still believe, that the more community news organizations that were forcibly shrunk to a fraction of their former capacity or shut down outright, the more that democracy is in danger.

So, we decided that it was important that we initiate a community organizing effort in the wake of the February summit to help Somerville rebuild its news infrastructure—strengthening the independent news outlets that remained, and possibly creating new news media to replace what was lost. All with the goal of helping a community talk to itself about issues of the day. In the way that it and communities around the nation had done for over two centuries since the founding of our republic.

As I said in my Dig editorial on the first event, Somerville Community Summit: Convening a City to Improve Its News Media, such a grassroots effort could not be primarily led by paid organizers from an organization like the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. The effort could be sparked by a group like BINJ, but its success or failure would lie with local volunteers who would either step forward to help improve news production in Somerville in their own interest… or not.

Which is why it has been great to see the positive response we’ve gotten to the community organizing campaign—the Somerville News Garden—that we launched via BINJ in late June. Twenty-five Somerville residents stepped up at the first meeting, and about 15 of those folks have become very active with the garden in the intervening months. With the result that the role of BINJ staff has started getting less central to the endeavor.

All to the good given that the news garden already has four projects in progress: the Somerville PR Wire that is almost ready to launch a volunteer-curated website that will put a feed of pitches and event listings from community members in front of all the area journalists interested in covering Somerville on a regular basis, a quarterly volunteer-run PR Clinic that will train Somervillians on how to talk to local journalists about issues and happenings they’d like to see covered, a Research Group that has just begun deploying its first survey instrument to Somerville residents to find out what kind of news they consume about the city and where they get it from, and a Neighborhood Media School that has already recruited educators to teach our first batch of inexpensive courses on journalism and news analysis starting this winter.

Everything the Somerville News Garden does is meant to be transparent and replicable. So whether our experiments succeed or fail, communities around the country will be able to follow our roadmap and create their own news gardens wherever a news desert is threatening democracy.

In that spirit, I am pleased to give a quick report about the news garden’s first public event—held last Saturday at the ever-fabulous and community-spirited club ONCE Somerville—Real News, Fake News, No News: Reviving Local Journalism in Somerville. But I’d like to set a precedent for truth-telling from the get-go. Because as both a journalist and a longtime labor and community activist, I have noted a tendency for otherwise well-meaning nonprofit community organizing efforts to ever and always “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative” when discussing their progress.

And I’ve stated previously that I don’t think it helps anyone—least of all people interested in duplicating our effort elsewhere—to hear nothing about the news garden but happy-talk of the the type too many nonprofits often aim at major funders. Due, in the main, to the fear of losing big donations by failing to succeed at every turn. An unrealistic expectation at the best of times.

As such, I will start by saying that I thought Real News, Fake News, No News was a qualified success. The main aims of the event were—having already solidified the commitment of the first group of Somerville News Garden volunteers—to attract more Somerville residents to become active with the effort, to provide some public education on the crisis in journalism at the national and local levels, to have a good discussion with community members about specific issues and happenings that they think need more coverage in area news media, and to let attendees be the first people to take our survey.

I think news garden volunteers had varying turnout targets on their minds as they put posters up around the city and activated various social networks, but I was hoping for 40-60 people—given that we knew in advance that some community activists would be working on the Nov 5 municipal elections and that Real News was happening on a nice sunny Saturday, Nov 2.

We ended up with 42 participants. About 25 of whom were new. So that was good. Though not as good as we were hoping. We had enough people to have an acceptably large audience for the excellent presentations by Professor Gino Canella of Emerson College and lifelong Somerville resident and sometime journalist Lynne Doncaster (followed by some great comments by audience members who had worked with the Somerville Journal, Somerville News, and Somerville Times back in the day), and two breakout groups with nice conversations—led by Jane Regan of the newly revived Somerville Neighborhood News at Somerville Media Center—about “Headlines We’ve Never Seen” (resulting in several new article ideas for local journalists to cover). Which then ensured that a reasonable number of participants (led by our Research Group convener Leanne Fan) took our new Somerville Media Consumption Survey (which has already given us some great data and inspired us to start to disseminate the survey instrument widely around the city).

My concerns about the event, however, are twofold. First, although we did direct outreach to the same civic groups that turned out for the Somerville Community Summit, most of them did not respond to our call to attend the Real News event. Which makes sense. Because, a) we were reaching out to staff and active members of those groups who are already busy with their own work, and b) we did not have an audience of journalists on hand this time for those groups to pitch article ideas to. Lessening their desire to attend. But it’s going to be difficult to solve Somerville’s accelerating news crisis without active community groups involved. So the Somerville News Garden needs to find ways to partner with them going forward that are more obviously and directly beneficial to all sides.

Second, it’s hard to expect volunteers (no matter how committed) to handle community organizing campaigns—or serious public events like Real News—while going to school, holding down jobs, and taking care of kids and grandkids. The news garden has one paid staff person, me, attached to it from the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Yet, again, staff can never substitute for a growing number of engaged volunteers when it comes to organizing a community like Somerville to better talk to itself. Fortunately, news garden volunteers did indeed conceive of the Real News event basically from soup to nuts, and did much of the work to put it together. But I still had to step in and nudge things along from time to time. Something else we need to work on.

Now that the event is over and we have interest from over a dozen of the new attendees in starting to work with the news garden, everyone has to try hard to shore up the commitment of the initial volunteers, integrate the new volunteers, and make sure that all those folks can handle work on our four projects without everything devolving into a staff-driven endeavor. Which I think would be the end of the news garden initiative. Because staff-driven campaigns are all too often “astroturf” efforts (fake grassroots) rather than the actual grassroots efforts that are needed to effect long-lasting positive change at the community level.

Genuine community commitment will be critical if we’re going to do more public events in all of Somerville’s neighborhoods and get more buy-in from all the different populations that make up the city. Right now, the news garden is primarily reaching white, educated homeowners with a habit of reading newspapers—most of whom are older and have lived in Somerville for a long time. We need to reach younger people, immigrants, and a variety of other folks if the news garden is going to truly represent the community it’s aiming to assist. Each of those groups has different interests and consumes different kinds of news in different media. One solution on the journalism front will decidedly not fit all.

These are the challenges the Somerville News Garden currently faces. And at the end of the proverbial day, our new organization will only succeed if significant numbers of Somervillians think that local news is important enough to put volunteer time into saving. We’re getting a fine response in our first few months of organizing. But 42 people at a well-advertised public event is not 60 people. Or the 115 we got at the last February’s community summit.

All of which is to say that Somerville residents reading this are cordially invited to join the Somerville News Garden and work with us to strengthen local journalism in the interest of democracy. Interested? Our email is somervillenewsgarden@binjonline.org. Let’s talk.

Click here to sign up for Community Journalism Crash Course workshop sessions with journalist and educator Jane Regan at Somerville Media Center, Nov 12 or Nov 14.

Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston—and executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

A LOCAL VOTING PRIMER FOR WORKING PEOPLE

*Courtesy of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Photo by Shannon McGee.*

Democracy is for everybody, not just the rich. So get to the polls!

Local elections are far more important than Mass voters seem to think, given the historically low turnouts for most of them in recent decades. Especially during off-year contests like this year’s. So, for starters, I just want to encourage everyone who is reading this in a municipality that is holding elections to get out and vote on November 5. Particularly working people—who are the focus of this epistle.

Because politics in a democracy is not supposed to be solely the province of millionaires and billionaires. It’s supposed to be for all of us. However, if working people don’t use our franchise to vote for candidates who will fight on our behalf, then democracy itself is in danger.

Not sure if you’re a working person? Well, if you’re an adult and you don’t own a big business or a huge amount of voting stock, then you are probably a working person. If you’re unemployed, but need to find another job to survive, then you are probably a working person. If you consider yourself poor, working class, or middle class, then you are probably a working person. And if politicians don’t snap to attention when you drop them a line, then you are almost certainly a working person.

I understand that working people are busy by default and that many of us are already focused on the 2020 presidential election—which is as high stakes as it gets in the American political system. But much of what happens in our daily lives is determined in no small part by municipal governments. Important decisions about housing, commercial development, transportation, K-12 education, local taxes, public health, and our lived environment are made every day by Bay State mayors, city councilors, selectpeople, town meetings, and school committees.

Failing to cast your ballot in local elections ensures that lots of important decisions that affect your life get made by politicians you had no hand in choosing. Pols who all too often end up doing the bidding of rich and powerful interests. Rather than fighting for justice for working people in an era when it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to make ends meet.

Changing that situation not only requires that more working people vote in local elections, but also that we actually take the time to inform ourselves about different candidates running for local offices. The problem is that many of the few people who cast votes in local elections don’t really pay attention to who they’re voting for. They go by which college degrees candidates hold. Or which neighborhood they grew up in. Or who their friends tell them to vote for. Or worse still, they vote for the candidates who have held their offices the longest.

None of these are inappropriate reasons to back a politician—taken together with an even cursory understanding of that candidate’s political views and closely held beliefs. The problem is that most voters don’t have that understanding when they go to the voting booth. As trustworthy candidate information can be thin on the ground.

Traditionally, working people turned to local news media to learn more about all the municipal candidates—and read debates between their supporters—as well as synopses of campaign debates. But with local news outlets in decline, and regional and national news organizations having little time to cover local politics, it can be hard to find enough good journalism to be able to make a truly informed decision. Even in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, the main cities that my DigBoston colleagues and I cover.

So, I’d like to offer a few suggestions for how working people can become informed local voters. Ideas which, as luck would have it, also hold true in larger elections.

1) Read candidate questionnaires

Most cities and towns have at least a few civic and political organizations that put together lists of questions on key issues that they ask all the candidates in all the local races. Find them and read them over—trying your best to get your hands on questionnaires organized both by groups you like and groups don’t like. To ensure that you get candidates’ answers to broad array of questions. This alone will give you an excellent idea of which politicians are interested in standing up for working people’s interests.

2) Find out who each candidate takes money from

It’s important to know how campaigns are financed. If your locale has at least one functioning news outlet, you may find articles by professional journalists that cover this ground. But failing that, Commonwealth voters can go to the Mass Office of Campaign and Political Finance website at ocpf.us and see who donates money to the campaigns of every candidate you’re considering voting for—and which candidates have the most money. Pay special attention to big donors who happen to run or own large corporations and banks. Because that will usually correlate to the candidates toiling on behalf of the local establishment, and against the interests of working people. Which is why it’s often good to support candidates who focus on raising lots of small donations from lots of regular folks. If their politics seem solid.

3) Ignore attack ads

Advertising by candidates, if done with a light touch, can be helpful and informative for voters. Unfortunately, many campaign ads are just rank propaganda—and filled with questionable assertions about the opponents of the candidates who buy them. So they are best ignored. Instead, as above, search out information about candidates’ actual positions. Preferably by buttonholing them at public events and asking them for their positions on key issues.

4) Attend candidate forums and debates

The events may be called candidate forums or debates, but whatever they’re called working people should always try to attend at least one for every significant local race. They are the best places to hear candidates’ ideas from their own mouths—plus watch how they engage with other candidates’ ideas and handle themselves under duress. A candidate that can’t take a bit of sparring with an opponent will probably not be the best person to represent working people’s interests.

5) Find the accessible candidates

Any candidate running for local office—especially one who purports to represent the interests of working people—should be easy for any constituent to contact on short notice. As the election approaches, try emailing or calling the campaign offices of candidates you like and ask to speak to them about any question you have about their policy proposals. They should get back to you quickly. If they do, it’s likely they will continue to be easy to reach once in office. For those candidates already in office, you can contact them with a constituent services request. Or contact their campaign office as with other candidates. Same drill. If they get back to you—a typical working person—quickly then they probably aren’t just catering to corporate supporters.

6) Vote for your interests, not the interests of the rich and powerful

The preamble of the constitution of the storied militant labor union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) began with the following statement: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” There was much truth in the sentiment then, and there is much truth in it now. So when you, a working person, go to the polls, keep that statement in mind. Don’t vote for candidates who work in the interest of the real estate industry. Don’t vote for candidates who say they are pro-housing when they are really pro-commercial development. Don’t vote for candidates who say they are for “smart growth” when they are really for “letting real estate developers do whatever they want wherever they want” in the interest of fatter profits. Don’t vote for candidates who feign concern about global warming, then support policies that increase the number of cars on the road. Don’t vote for candidates who say “no new taxes”—when what they mean is “no new taxes on the rich.” Et cetera, et cetera.

Vote for candidates who talk about shifting the tax burden back on the rich and corporations. Get enough of those candidates into office to control local governments, and start doing just that. Raise property and commercial taxes. Increase the pathetically small payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) that nominally nonprofit private colleges like Harvard, MIT, and Tufts University currently pay cities like Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. Then use the funds to bankroll an expansion of social programs that benefit working families. At the local level this would include—for example—building more social housing (a European term connoting public housing better than most American public housing), making public schools around the Commonwealth as good in poor towns are they are in rich ones, building more public health clinics, and rebuilding streets to favor public transportation, bikes, and pedestrians over cars.

But none of this can happen without working people getting more involved in our political process at the local level. So go forth, put some real effort into learning about the candidates for local office, and then get to the polls. Every time there’s a local election. Onward…

MARCHING SEASON: JOIN THE RALLY FOR RENT CONTROL

Throwback screenshot via WBZ from the '90s. When TV reporters like Liz Walker still covered housing justice. — *Throwback screenshot via WBZ from the ’90s. When TV reporters like Liz Walker still covered housing justice.*

Mass State House, Oct 29, noon-1:30 pm

Twenty-five years after the real estate industry destroyed rent control in Massachusetts, marching season is upon us. A call to arms has been raised by tenant organizations across the land and real estate interests are being pushed back for the first time in decades. So, it’s past time that renters around the Bay State join the fight for housing justice in great numbers.

As we do, we will be in good company. In New York, according to the New York Times, a new Democratic majority in the state legislature recently expanded existing rent control protections that “would allow cities and towns statewide to fashion their own regulations, which are meant to keep apartments affordable by limiting rent increases.” And would also “make the changes permanent—a major victory for tenant activists who have had to lobby Albany every few years when the old laws expired.”

In California, the Times reports that its lawmakers approved a bill in September that “limits annual rent increases to 5 percent after inflation and offers new barriers to eviction.” Following Oregon, which “became the first [state] to pass statewide rent control, limiting increases to 7 percent annually plus inflation.”

And on the presidential campaign trail, Bernie Sanders is calling for a national rent control standard.

Now political support is growing for a bill (H.3924, the Tenant Protection Act) introduced by State Reps. Mike Connolly and Nika Elugardo and aimed at effectively reversing the real estate industry-funded referendum of 1994—Question 9—that banned rent control statewide. Providing “municipalities with the authority to implement rent-stabilizing regulations, just cause eviction protections, stronger condominium conversion and foreclosure protections, anti-displacement zones, and options to help tenants manage the upfront costs of leasing an apartment,” according to a post on Connolly’s blog.

This in a period when Democrats are starting to see renters as an important voting bloc in the upcoming 2020 presidential election, and real estate industry propaganda about the virtues of ever-skyrocketing rents are sounding increasingly hollow to tens of millions of beleaguered renters nationwide. Many of whom are hemmed in economically—stuck in unstable, low-paying contingent jobs without benefits, slammed by credit card debt accrued in a desperate attempt to make ends meet, and terribly burdened with student loan debt. Seemingly as punishment for attempting to better themselves with the advanced education society has traditionally said is the path to a better life. While being only one significant accident or illness away from crushing debt for health care—including debt for dental care that is rarely properly covered by public or private health plans.

So, many candidates for local office in Bay State cities that had rent control between 1970 and 1994 are going on record in support of its reinstitution this year. Including a majority of at-large city council candidates in Boston—in a hotly contested race. A majority of city council candidates in Cambridge… notably democratic socialist Ben Simon, whose family lost rent control and got evicted when he was a child, according to the Cambridge Day. Both mayoral candidates and a majority of sitting city councilors in Somerville (which had rent control until 1979, when it was eliminated by fiat of the old Board of Aldermen).

But, in a sign of the times, they are being joined by politicians in municipalities that never had rent control… most recently Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera—who is talking publicly about the need to stabilize rents and has just appointed a rent control task force in his city. Even as legislators from across the Commonwealth have signed onto Connolly’s and Elugardo’s bill.

None of this groundswell is powerful enough to push such a bill—and several other renter-friendly housing bills Connolly, Elugardo, and their allies have filed—to passage while real estate industry friendly pols like House Speaker Robert DeLeo and Gov. Charlie Baker run state government. But the mere fact of the suite of pro-tenant housing bills reaching their first committees as the zeitgeist waxes populist marks the start of what looks to be one of the toughest political battles in recent memory hereabouts.

The perspicacious pair of legislators clearly know this and have worked with tenant-friendly organizations and select local politicians to call a Rally for Rent Control and Tenant Protections, next Tuesday, Oct 29, noon-1:30 pm at the Massachusetts State House. As of this writing, the action is co-sponsored by City Life/Vida Urbana, Chinese Progressive Association, Lynn United for Change, Mass Coalition for the Homeless, Boston Democratic Socialists of America, Socialist Alternative, Cambridge Residents Alliance, A Better Cambridge, Our Revolution Cambridge, Right to the City—Boston, Our Revolution Somerville, and Progressive Massachusetts. Elected officials confirmed to attend include Brookline Select Board Member Raul Fernandez (representing a town that also had rent control until 1994); Cambridge City Councilor Quinton Zondervan; Chelsea City Council President Damali Vidot; Somerville City Councilors Matt McLaughlin, JT Scott, and Ben Ewen-Campen; and Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone.

Yes, it’s just one rally. The first of many, to be sure. And naturally, any bill calling for rent control faces a steep uphill slog through a still-hostile legislature. But every tenant who knows that the rent is “too damn high”—to quote a famously zany New York political candidate who won eternal fame thanks to a Saturday Night Live sketch based on his timely slogan—needs to go to this rally. And bring all your friends. If you do, this can be the start of the [M]ass movement that will change everything.

I will be there. Earlier this year, I wrote about how I lost my rent-controlled apartment after Question 9 passed by a thin margin in 1994—and how that loss made my life, and the lives of thousands of fellow working people who also got screwed by the real estate industry across in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge, much more difficult economically and politically over the years that followed than they would have otherwise been.

A quarter century later, I am still struggling with stratospherically high rent that burns through about 50% of my income monthly.

Even though I get a better deal as an older long-term tenant than younger people in my building get. In the same Cambridge neighborhood where I once paid under 20% of my income for rent. And even though I co-own a metro newspaper.

I’m supposed to have finally made it to the middle class—my six-figure higher education debt and other very standard debt taken as given in this era of runaway capitalism. But I haven’t. I have no savings. My marriage to a person with a somewhat better job doesn’t save me and doesn’t make it any more possible for the two of us to buy even a small condo anywhere near where either of us work. Nor can we afford extra rent for a less miniature apartment.

So I’m going to the Rally for Rent Control and Tenant Protections. And I’m telling all my friends—including all of you, my reading audience—to join me there.

It won’t be an easy fight. But it’s marching season. And as I fought against the destruction of rent control a quarter century back, I’m damned well going to join with renters all over the state to force its reinstatement—together with a host of new housing reforms—this time. And we’re going to win. Because we have to win. More homelessness, economic insecurity, and deepening human misery is simply not an option. Not if this nation is going to remain a democracy.

SIDDIQUI TAKES A DIVE: JOINS MAYOR MCGOVERN, OTHER CAMBRIDGE COUNCILORS IN GREENLIGHTING BACKROOM COURTHOUSE DEAL

*Cambridge City Hall by Vitor Pamplona CC-BY-2.0. Modified by Jason Pramas.*

The fix was in.

While the world was gearing up for the global climate strike last week, the years-long fight over the future of the Sullivan Courthouse in East Cambridge ended in a fast flurry of political maneuvers. Whose outcome surprised no one. Only the manner of the violation of the public trust remained in question until the last moment.

The matter up for debate in the Cambridge city council chamber was not really the matter up for debate. Officially the second of what had become a two-part council session was meeting to decide whether or not developer Leggat McCall Properties was going to get the 420 parking spaces required by the special permit which would allow it to convert the state-owned courthouse into a lucrative commercial office tower—with 24 affordable housing units and enough minor amenities thrown in to get the votes it needed to prevail.

In reality, the session was determining whether Leggat would be able to move forward with its plans or be stopped cold by failing to get the required six council votes for the necessary parking. At which time, anti-Leggat community activists hoped that the Commonwealth’s deal with the developer would collapse and the state would be forced to make a new deal with the city of Cambridge and other parties for a courthouse development that would mainly provide desperately needed affordable housing.

Leggat already had five votes locked down going into the session—councilors Craig Kelley, Alanna Mallon, Tim Toomey, and Denise Simmons plus Mayor Marc McGovern (who is still a councilor under Cambridge’s Plan E form of government). All exactly the kind of corporate-friendly pols whose support was never in doubt.

Facing off with them were three councilors solidly against the idea of a deal with Leggat—Dennis Carlone, Quinton Zondervan, and Vice Mayor Jan Devereux. Leaving one vote still in play. The deciding vote. Which was held by Sumbul Siddiqui, a councilor elected in 2017 with endorsements from several labor unions and, notably, two left-wing organizations that put boots on the ground in electoral contests: Our Revolution Cambridge and Boston Democratic Socialists of America. She had campaigned as a former resident of Cambridge public housing and a strong advocate for expanding affordable housing in the city. Those groups, and the public that elected her, took her at her word.

What happened next was described by Vice Mayor Devereux in the Cambridge Day article “Last-minute deal for courthouse squandered council power—to developer’s financial gain”:

“After months of authentic grassroots advocacy led by state Rep. Mike Connolly with rallies, a door-knocking campaign and a petition that gathered more than 1,250 signatures to reject the parking disposition outright to give the city leverage with the state to negotiate an inclusive, community-driven alternative plan with affordable housing as its centerpiece, councillor Siddiqui went to the brink and then folded our hard-won winning hand too quickly, even depriving the three councillors who had always demanded much more from the courthouse redevelopment of any opportunity to improve her deal’s terms. It was the momentum built through the grassroots campaign to stand up to the expensive, professional public relations campaign waged by Leggat McCall that put councillor Siddiqui in the position to even make these demands. She could have stated them as the opening bid on what she would need to get to ‘yes’ without rushing us to a final vote last night. Seizing her own bird in the hand deprived everyone else of a voice, which sadly is pretty much the opposite of a collaborative and transparent community-driven process.”

Under pressure from city leadership and Leggat, Siddiqui had clearly made a deal for her vote in advance. She announced the deal by laying out what she wanted for that vote toward the end of the hearing—basically doubling the number of affordable housing units from 24 to 48 and throwing another $3.5 million at Cambridge’s Affordable Housing Trust. To which the Leggat lawyer, former mayor and disgraced former State Sen. Anthony Galluccio, agreed shortly after asking Mayor McGovern for “30 seconds to a minute” to discuss the new deal. But not before McGovern literally called his old pal “Gooch” in open session—having also called Galluccio “councilor” at another point. As the ex-con’s mayoral portrait looked down on the highly unusual scene from the wall.

After that the vote was merely a matter of codifying a fait accompli. Which the council then did 6-3 in favor along the expected lines—with the added insult of blocking any future reconsideration of the vote.

Puzzlingly, one of Siddiqui’s asks according to Devereux was “Reducing parking leased in the city garage by 125 spaces (from 420 to 295) and to seek a further reduction of up to 25 spaces in the total parking requirement (from 510 to 360 total for the project).”

The vice mayor explained that “the reduction in the required parking, which it seems possible the Planning Board could approve without even requiring a traffic and parking study to update data that are now six years old, will save Leggat McCall a substantial amount of money. By subtracting 150 spaces from its lease in the First Street Garage, Leggat McCall would save about $17.5 million over 30 years (that’s about half of its reported acquisition cost for the courthouse). The approximately $49 million in guaranteed revenue to the city from the parking lease had been touted as a significant community benefit; councillor Siddiqui’s bargain will reduce the value of that benefit by about 35 percent. And in a little less than six years, the additional $3.5 million payment to the Affordable Housing Trust will have been recouped through these windfall savings on the parking lease.”

So the new deal is essentially undoing one of its own key planks by allowing Leggat to develop the courthouse while using fewer public parking spaces. A move likely aimed at reducing remaining community opposition to the project on grounds that it would have been leasing too many of said spaces to the developer—with the unhappy side effect of reducing the money the city will make by now leasing less spaces. Excelsior.

As I mentioned in my Apparent Horizon column of two weeks ago “The Political Movement to Come: How Cambridge Can Put Public Need Before Private Greed,” Leggat and city government will still likely have to fight at least one lawsuit over the way the disposition of parking spaces in a public garage was handled. But that probably won’t be enough to stop the project.

Not with Siddiqui having failed to remain true to her previous campaign promises to be a champion for affordable housing—by backing 48 units instead of fighting for a better courthouse development with many more affordable apartments. In a city with thousands of people on public housing waiting lists.

As Devereux made clear, if Siddiqui had held firm to her supposed principles and voted against leasing the parking spaces, a much better deal could have been negotiated. If Leggat was willing to suddenly double the number of housing units in its courthouse plan—something its bosses had always refused to offer in previous negotiations—in exchange for her vote, then the company surely would have managed to come up with much bigger givebacks to ensure that it would be allowed to make the huge profits it is undoubtedly expecting from the commercial office space it’ll build out in the (currently) 22-story tower.

But Siddiqui took a dive at the moment the city’s remaining working families needed her most. She didn’t stand with Carlone, Devereaux, and Zondervan for even an extra hour. She buckled under pressure from the developer and its allies on the council when they did not, and she made the kind of deal that my labor movement mentor Tim Costello called “bargaining against yourself.” The worst possible kind of deal.

The question now is what to do with her. And with Kelley, Mallon, Simmons, Toomey, and most especially with the council’s chief corporate quisling—the person primarily responsible for this outcome—Mayor McGovern.

Yet here we arrive at the problem I outlined in my last article. There is no popular movement on the (actual) political left in Cambridge currently large enough to easily “throw the bums out.” Which is definitely the right thing to do in this situation.

Worse still, Cambridge residents—many of them transient students at local universities—turn out in pitifully low numbers for local elections. And most know literally nothing about city politics. Which absolutely works to preserve the neoliberal status quo that I outlined in my earlier column, “Don’t Buy What Mayor McGovern Is Selling.” Explaining that McGovern—and, by default, his allies Kelley, Mallon, Simmons, Toomey, and now Siddiqui—believe “that the way to run a city in 21st-century America is to attract as much big development as possible, get whatever funds collected from the generally small and inoffensive taxes and fees that developers will accept, and then use that money to keep the city attractive enough to hold onto to the developments that are here and entice more developers to build here. While, secondarily, providing public services to residents that are somewhat better than the services cities without big developments have.”

Meaning that I can shout that Cantabrigians should purge the pro-Leggat council until I’m blue in the face, and it won’t make much difference. Certainly not in this year’s swift-approaching elections.

So all I can do is encourage voters to support the seven council candidates backed by Our Revolution Cambridge: incumbents Dennis Carlone and Quinton Zondervan, and newcomers Charles Franklin, Patty Nolan, Ben Simon, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, and Nicola Williams. Simon and Sobrinho-Wheeler also being endorsed by Boston DSA.

Given the anticipated super-low voter turnout in this midterm election year and the fact of Cambridge’s ranked-choice voting system, I hesitate to even do that. Because the seven candidates are effectively running against each other in a race where each of them (speaking in basic terms about a complex process) needs to pass a specific threshold of #1 votes based on the number of people that ultimately vote—and voters can only assign one #1 vote each.

Since it’s fairly unlikely that a majority of those candidates will be able to win, we’re probably not going to see a significant change in the council’s attitude toward big real estate developers like Leggat. Yet.

I would suggest then that readers take a look at my “Political Movement” column and consider my prescriptions for those seeking to make Cambridge more (“small d”) democratic. Briefly, I’m saying that a city like the so-called “People’s Republic” can only improve if residents build a strong social force capable of freeing city politics of the malign influence of developers and other major corporations. And aim for electoral reform once they’ve built strength in every neighborhood. To succeed, activists may first need to run the major campaign required to change the city from a Plan E government to something else.

But one thing is for sure: If such a movement arises, any push to throw out politicians that real estate interests and other major corporations have in their back pockets will have a much better chance of success.