^^ University ca,puses become battlefields of Jew hate. How did we as a nation allow this blasphemy to happen ?

The vicious pogrom unleashed on October 7th by Islamic terrorists on the citizens of southern Israel unleashed an equally barbaric wave of Jew hate at some of America’s elite universities. We all saw it: the hate shouts, the torchy marches, the sit-downs, the mob violence, the vandalism. Much of it recalled, painfully, similar mob criminality seen at summer 2020’s BLM riots. Yet this was different. The BLM riots arose in response to a grave injustice. These Jew hate riots arose in support of a grave injustice.

What happened, one may well ask ? How could the campuses of prized universities — sites of learning, of education, of the search for wisdom — incubate riots of hate celebrating a pogrom ?

I wish I did not have an answer to this question. I wish it were inexplicable.

But it isn’t.

A brief look back at how it came to be will suffice before I post suggestions for reforming our tainted universities:

The Jew hate riots at universities — later to include many less than elite institutions as well — grew out of what appears to be decades of conscious decisions by those universities to hire and promote purveyors of unhinged anti-semitic theories about Israel, and by extension, about all Jews. It was said that because millions of European Jews fled to Israel after World war 2, that Israel was a “colonial” state, and, worse in the view of the anti-semitic theorists, a white persons’ colonial state. To these theorists, many of them marxist, all the evil in the political world is the fault of white European people, who, in the theorists’ minds, “colonized’ black and brown people, exploited them, made them second class citizens, stole their resources, etc. European Jews, however persecuted they had been, were white and now were colonizers and exploiters of brown people : the Palestinians, who, according to the theorists, were the rightful inhabitants of the Holy land and were dark skinned and thus very much a part of the populations and lands overtaken and brutalized by white Europeans.

That every assertion in this theory could be easily shown false — the Arabic Conquest, which continues, was the actual colonization; most Israeli immigrants come from North Africa and the Middle East and are decidedly not “white” — did not dissuade the universities from hiring its spokespeople and giving them room to propagate and mis-educate students. At the same time, universities made special effort to recruit and admit Palestinian students, who were, of course, happy to be cadres for the Palestinian-as-victim theory. Eventually, two organizations were established, first at one university, later spreading to very many, advocating the Palestinains-as-marxist-heroes theory : Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and American Muslim for Palestine.

Of these, the SJP seems by far the most lethal. Based in the universities’ Palestinian students, but eventually attracting many non-Palestinian students persuaded by its speakers and by faculty promoting the “white colonizer” marxist theory embedded in university curricula, the SJP appears to be the main campus organizer of current Jew hate.

I suppose that the SJP’s campus battles would be of interest chiefly to alumni of the affected universities, were it not injecting itself into street thuggery, vandalism, and bullying. Indeed, many alumni have reacted against the present campus Jew hate by cancelling donations, calling for university deans to resign, and by themselves resigning from university oversight boards. Some have even filed civil rights lawsuits against universities that have not acted to protect, much less defend, their Jewish students and faculty. Yet the SJP”s campus anti-semitism is not the chiefest Jew hate afoot. Its anti-Jew protests have been picked up by organized socialist politicals (such as the Democratic Socalist Alliance, or DSA, here in the US). It is these actors who have raised campus Jew hate from a college thing to a public threat.

That’s a story for another day, however. Today’s story is the reformation of our universities. Alumni and donors have already made their disgust plain, their severance of ties a fact. Negation, though, cannot be the last word. So here are my suggestions for active eform :

( 1 ) expel from campus all organizations promoting hatred of Jews and/or the abolition of Israel and all students or faculty advocating the same in any manner beyond mere speech.

( 2 ) condemn calls for the genocide of Jews., and expel any student or faculty who speaks thus. There is no First Amendment protection for incitement to mass murder.

( 3 ) tie in to community police forces and the FBI for reporting acts of anti-Semitism and requesting, if advisable, their immediate response including arrests and prosecution; and where the subject is not a citizen, revocation of their student visa.

( 4 ) cancellation of all university offices based on, or promoting any sort of identity rules, prohibitions, or institutions or any other devices which would classify students and faculty in any other way than competence (one sole exception : geographic diversity).

( 5 ) irrevocable commitment to the values, ethics, and ideals of the Enlightenment and Western civilisation. Said commitment to encompass admissions — any student seeking admission must pledge, in writing, to embrace and promote the values, ethics, and ideals of Western civilisation — and faculty and administrative hires. No one has a personal right to attend our universities, which are quite free to make the commitments I call for.

( 6 ) curriculum requirements to include courses in Western civilisation philosophy, American and European history, American civics, and the American Constitution.

( 7 ) cancellation of all foreign money donations tied to nations or individuals that espouse and/or facilitate Jew hate or terrorism.

Students or faculty not wishing to embrace these commitments and these values are free to apply tio otherr universities elsewhere.

I am sure that many of you will have other reformative suggestions to make. Nor do I cnsider my own list written in stone, although its basic principles are inviolable for me.

Let us educate, not falsify; encourage ideals, not undermine them;, and let us pursue character and principle, because facts are not enough and theories are ephemeral.

— Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

^^ Erin Murphy and Ed Flynn : two of the Council’s remaining common sense members. More isolated than ever on a Council hell bent on deconstructing a City that used to get along well on its own citizen customs.

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It seems peevish of me, I suppose, to suggest that the incoming City Council elected on Tuesday will be worse than the one we now have. After all, the present Council has been seriously disfigured by all sorts of no-no: unlicensed driving, back room election scheming, racist accusation, name calling, a ton of avoidance of major City services. How can the incoming Council possibly be worse ?

It will be worse because Michael Flaherty and Frank Baker will not be part of the incoming. Instead we get these guys :

( 1 ) John Fitzgerald, who will probably vote for common sense but is no way the fighter that Baker has been. By his pssion and intransigence — his street fight nose — Baker, by himself rescued the latest redistricting map from a racist gerrymander attempt by the present Council’s majority. For that alone the City owes Baker as much thanks as it has it in its heart to give. Do I think that John Fitzgerald — the son of revered, late Mission Hill State Representative Kevin Fitzgerald — will confront the Council’s majority alone, in their faces, when it attempts one of its wish list absurdities ? Don’t bet on it.

( 2 ) we get Henry Santana, a veteran of Mayor Wu’s office, who will almost certaibly be a yes vote for anything Mayor Wu wants. Whereas Mike Flaherty, with his superb knowledge of the City budget and practices, and his voting strength city-wide, could stand up to the Council’s bike lane frenzies and race-based view of everything, Santana will surely be a guaranteed “yes” vote for all of that.

The current Council has four stalwarts : Mike Flaherty, Frank Baker, Erin Murphy, Ed Flynn. Now it will have only three : Erin Murphy, Ed Flynn, John Fitzgerald (maybe).

Whereas the current Council’s four were enough to occasionally persuade a fifth vote (District One’s Gigi Coletta) to vote against the majority’s anti-police views — to the left even of Mayor Wu — the incoming Council’s mere three will be ever more isolated. I doubt that three will be able to force anything that the majority doesn’t agree to.

Boston has governmental problems up the ying-yang. To name only the most talked-about : streets that never get repaired; school system scandalously mismanaged with tons of unnecessary money in its shaky hands; an unsolved drug addiction crisis; crime sprees through South Bay mall and sometimes Downtown; gang wars; an understaffed police force; development and zoning plans that make no sense at all and are grounded in economic conditions no longer the case; and a 1974 Federal Court school busing order no longer relevant but that costs us $ 130 milion a year to comply with.

Families continue to leave the City because they have no confidence in a school system that cowers to students — seems to allow students to assault teachers with scanty consquence — instead of imposing its requirements on them. (Not to mention the diminution of Boston Latin school’s admissions into zip code quotas.) Meanwhile, the City approves housing proposals for one and two bedroom units far too small to house new families. Yes, Boston is now a city for high-paid singles who can expensively cavort, shop, and dine, and work 70 hour weeks in those wonderful biotech labs that have replaced manufacturing as the City’s economic base.. But what if the biotech boom fizzles, as it now appears to ? Office space in Downtown is emptying out faster than an arena after a hockey game. (City tax revenues are hurting, we’re told.) Can all the crap housing being approved by a Zoning Board drunk with illusion ever be rented or sold ? I doubt it.

Yet none of the above — much less the City’s insistence on imposing bike lanes on major roadways, abolishing parking spaces, and development “corridors” on otherwise well-accustomed neighborhoods — eludes the new Council’s majority. The media calls them “progressive.” They call themsleves that too. Never was an adjective worse abused. The Council’s policies absurdly misperceive the actual life of Boston residents. They are a kind of home invasion, a breaking and entering, if you will, as well as a carjacking — disrupting how we live our lives according to how we think best to live it.

Talk to ordinary neighbors someday. Most say they don’t vote — because “no one listens.” Or because “the politicians only care about themselves.”

These neighbors aren’t wrong. It’s why the turnout on Tuesday was barely 14 percent of all voters in my own neighborhood (East Boston) and scarcely 18 percent city-wide. 50 years ago a Counci;l election would see 35 percent turnout — and 20 to 30 Council candidates. This year, in the city-wide race, there were barely eight, and only five candidates with a serious base of support. Not only have the voters stopped voting, they’ve also stopped running for office.

Two of our nine Districts’ voters actually had options. In Districts 5 and 6, candidates of common sense did run. The common sense choice in District 5 (Roslindale, Mattapan and Hyde Park) actually mounted a strong effort. As a retired Boston policeman, Jose Ruiz would have been a crucial voice on the Council for reviving the City’s crime-stopper force (badly neutered since William Gross retired as Commissioner). But Ruiz lost — 52 to 48, a close race — to a candidate supported aggressively by Mayor Wu, who lives in District Five and thus gave her candidate a neighbor’s endorsement as well as a Mayor’s..

To sum up ; all of the above is why the Council grows ever more out of touch, ever more devoured by sharks with crazy policy meals in their mouths, and why we accommodate a Mayor who cares more about creationg a “21st Century City” =– whatever that means — rather than attending to basic municipal services and letting housing markets take care of themselves.

No wonder that 80-plus percent of our voters didn’t vote. I can’t blame them at all.

—-Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

^^ homes in Eagle Hill, a neighborhood with a character all its own and beloved by those who live in it

It’s not enough just to oppose the plan presented by the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA). We in East Boston all oppose it, vigorously, even angrily. But anger and vigor are not enough. Those of us in opposition must propose a plan of our own.

This is mine.

My comprehensive plan would do the following :

1. Apply Historic District designation (which we are readily entitled to) to almost all residential areas of East Boston. This would make it impossible to violate our character without a long and difficult process that puts the burden of alteration on the proponent (It works for Beacon Hill and Back Bay. Just try to make an alteration — much less a demolition etc — in a building there. No way !)

2. No “corridors.” Localize the various segments of Bennington, Saratoga, Meridian, Condor and Chelsea Streets to favor the residences and small businesses there, not the through traffic Enhance opportunity for small groceries, etc. generally, throughout our big streets.

3. Build the Haul Road to get major through traffic off our streets and to encourage commercial and industrial use of the Chelsea Creek shore, which is, where built upon, already commercial and industrial.

4. Demolish or sunset the huge, cheaply made, overpriced tenement blocks (such as on Marginal, Bremen, Maverick, Border, Murray Court at Orleans, and 917 Bennington) that have disfigured our neighborhood with stuff that people either cannot use or can’t afford. Replace them with height-restricted single family homes, twos and three’s.

Four and five story dwellings must never be allowed, except on parts of Meridian and Border Streets, unless approved by a two-thirds or greater vote of abutters.

5. Favor three and four bedroom apartments so that actual families can find housing here. Also favor single-family row houses such as on lower Bennington Street and the beginning of Everett Street, for ownership if feasible.

Protect and expand the single-family character of upper Orient Heights.

Discourage and disfavor the creation of so-called “ADU’s”

6. Support families staying here by giving us local control of the schools in East Boston via an East Boston PTA — elected by us, by school district within East Boston — with staffing and budget powers.

7. Plant trees along every street that can take them.

8. Create more green space — especially pocket parks — within residential areas.

9. Enable more parking, not less. Examples : the lot on London St at Porter St and the lot on lower Bennington near El Penol. Require every development that we do accept to have parking on site within the building. Example : the Rinaldi family’s two-family with garage, on upper Trenton Street. In short, enable and accommodate personal cars, not public transit, which can never be anything other than a default system for those who cannot drive or cannot afford to put a car on the road.

10. Do not publish a map — as the City plan does — of East Boston that pretends we are just adjuncts of the T. McClellan Highway and its tributaries are a much, much more important transportation mechanism for us than the Blue Line. Same for its access roads. And the tunnels, as we have learned. Buiid our neighborhood around our roads, not the

11. Leave climate matters to citizen organizations like Harborkeepers and Boston Harbor Now, who take a humble and shrewd approach and are more flexible, and less dogmatic about climate challenges than city planners.

12. Leave our large streets as is. Never narrow the road traffic lanes to favor bicycles. If a bicycle path is to be created, keep it narrow so that it does not encroach upon traffic lanes.

———— These are a start. I am sure the rest if you can add to it ! The basic principle here is that a neighborhood should be empowered to create its own zoning and land use plan, and the City’s role must be to help the neighborhood’s own plan succeed.

>> I know some who would require a more radical provision : a full moratorium on all development in East Boston until already approved units get rented or sold. These folks assert that there are still hundreds of units presently vacant.

Our plan might not have to take such a drastic step, but it’s interesting to know that moratorium is being talked about.

In any case, in the full spirit of local self-governance, let us here in East Boston create a plan that actually supports the neighborhood and helps it to be its best self.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

Looking at the vast crowds gathering to hear the thrice-indicted, insurrectionist Donald J. Trump, a former President,. observers say they can’t understand how people can still support him.

Yet there’s no great mystery in it. The above photo was taken in South Carolina, the State where Secession in 1860 began; and where, after crushing defeat by the Union and our armies, generations of residents continued to honpor Jeff Davis, who had led Secession, and even to name places and counties (!!) after him; and not only Davis. For 100 years and more after defeat, most of the South honored Davis’s Oath-keeper generals, his Proud Boy cavalry, and his ordinary soldiers — the Civil War equivalent of the January 6th mob that wreaked war upon the Capitol of our nation and Congress.

Indeed, the cause is almost the same. The men of 1860 did Secesh for the sake of slavery. Today;s Trump mob wars upon the Constitution in the name of “:our way of life” — a never world, almost completely white, in which “diversity” — the idea that everyone, no matter his skin color or her sexual orientation or gender, is a fully righted citizen — must never be allowed. The folks gathering in South Carolina may or may not admit it, but they have choices; they are free to NOT follow Trump, and, indeed, some are now following Governor Ron DeSantis instead; and DeSantis is running the most blatantly racist, bigoted campaign since the days of George Wallace or even long before that. Yet if many opponents of “diversity” have gone to the DeSantis lane,. far more continue to support Trump, because even though it’s hard to identfy much in Trump’s rants that’s specific, his entire game is to oppose, insult, attack the Constitution and the “deep State” — i.e., the men and women of our Federal government, who all take an oath to defend an oath to support and defend said Constitution.

The above analysis, however, is not my main point. The theme of this essay. is the persistence, over 100 years and more, of political racism in America — in the South primariuy but by no means only there. This persistence is unique to the United States. There’s scarcely any remnant, in Europe, of the poliotics of 1850, or even of 1940. Monarchists there are fewer than few; fascists more numerous but in most cases far, far from power. (Such footing as present European fascism has is fueled by Russian money and espionage and serves Russian interests, often a feature (“ost-politik”) of mainland European oppositionists.) Yet here in America the piolitics of 1850, even of 1780, continue central to our arrangements. I’ve noted many times already how the current division into urban politics and rural mirrors almost exactly the divisions in the 1787 Ratification conventions that debated whether or not to adopt the Cionstitution. Slavery cut across that division : the rural North became agggressively abolitionist when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act was adopted; farnmers in New England and points west wanted nothing to do with being slave hunters. But today much of the rural North has reverted to its ancestral anti-Constitution position.

Here, evangelical religion seems the chief cause. Religion hadn’t mjuch to do with the 1787 division, or with Secession, but the evangelicals who today form the most virulent cadres of Trump Secession have in many cases atken up the political racism argument, giving it a Jesus covering and stoking its fury. After all, if “diversioty” is the devil’;s work and :our way of life; is Biblically ordained, a true believer goes all in.

Yet ket us not carelessly accept the religious veneer of the Trump phenomenon. His supporters may talk a lot about Jesus, etc., but they have choices. They can oppose full voting rights for Black Americans and health care for LGBT people, or they can grant these. They can oppose legislative interference with women’s bodies, or they can leave women alone. And they can choose to accept the urban world, its vast numbers of people, its multiplex culture, its hurly-burly of innovation, controversy, trade and debate: or they can oppose them as works of Satan. It is a choice.

The religion comes afterward. It makes them a useful excuse ; “well, the Bible says…” I think most know that this is horse effluent, but it soundzs sweet to say it.

The Trump folks can choose to enter the urban, diverse, hurly-burly lists. No one is stopping them. Yet they don’t. They choose to be offended by city ways. They choose not to join a union and earn better money. Or they choose not to abide by Federal laws that impose standards on “muh freedom.” Thus they oppose the same urban economic powerhouse, with its free laborers and anything-goes capitalists, and yes, its vaccinations against disease, that their political forebears have opposed sincebefore the United States was fully constituted.

In America, the beat goes on. It is never quashed. Nothing is ever finally adjudicated, no mattrer how evil.

Trump will surely be efeated, but it won’t make a difference to our bedrock political division, its racism included.

It’s our blessing and also our shame, our paradoxical destiny.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

I

^^ diversity of skin colors does not make for actual diversity, says Nataly Leycid, senior at Phillips Exeter Academy

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In this long analysis, Melissa Trask Davy responds to an article written in the Washington Post by Nataly Leycid, a senior at Phillips Exeter Acaemy.

You might want to read Leycid’s article before opining about Trask-Davy’s analysis. Here is the link : https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/12/supreme-court-income-based-affirmative-action-phillips-exeter/

Trask Davy :

I don’t know if having the formula she describes is really the answer to getting to the needed admissions process, but it’s a start,  This is a very insightful article,

We are always talking about wanting people who “look like us” in order to succeed , and as a result we fixate on external, visible “identity” characteristics. These are deeply misleading, as she discovered at Exeter.  

First of all, having a certain skin color does not determine as much about you as we have been presuming — there are white people with black parents, black people with white parents, Latino people with Asian-American parents, etc etc. This country is a mix.  Having skin that might be considered black does not mean you are directly descended from American slaves.  Neither does having white skin automatically give you all the biases generally attributed to white people these days.  “White privilege” is real, but so is economic privilege and so is the privilege that goes with other kinds of status.  We presume that skin color dominates everything, and that is leading us down the wrong path, both in terms of prejudice and in terms of privilege.

The other error in thinking that goes with all this identity judgement is that we presume all people think the same way because of how they look on the outside. That is just simply not true. All women, all LGBTQ people do not think the same way.  All Asian-Americans do not think, vote, speak or spend money for the same reasons.  The “Asian” origin is one of the most ridiculous presumptions because it lumps in people, say, from the Philippines, from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Korea, etc as if they were a single bloc.  But so is thinking all black Americans think the same way, and/or will vote the same way.  Sometimes there are trends in a certain community, but if you break it down it is as likely to be community of origin as skin color.  The same problem is there when you lump in all so-called “Latino” voters, including Spain,Mexico, Central  and South America — I mean, really! or Middle Easterners.  It creates a false opposition of all of these identity groups to so-called white people — when really, most of us are a mix,

It is brilliant to read this student’s experience of coming to Exeter and seeing students who really look just like her class in Rhode Island, only to find out they are totally different because of the way they think, and the way they’ve been brought up.  She finds diversity of skin color at her school but homogeneity of thought. The students are better prepared, but they all think the same way.   Of course, Exeter should try to give more advantages to students who have lacked economic privilege, and become good students anyway.  But the point she makes shows us other things, too.  To do education right, Exeter (and other elite institutions, especially colleges) would really benefit by introducing diversity of experience and points of view.  This should not mean a lowering of standards, though they may have to provide extra support for people who come from backgrounds with fewer resources.  They should keep up their high standards, but make their choices based on knowing about their experience and what is inside their heads, not just by looking at the color of their skin.

Melissa Trask-Davy / special to Here and Sphere

^^ Dylan Muvaney, transgender / gender fluid pioneer recently attacked by those who think they know her better than she knows herself

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We humans think we know what human nature is about but we don’t know it at all.

As the poet e e cummings wrote, almost 100 years ago, “when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man.”

Thus we come to transgender, or “gender fluidity” if you will, unprepared as always for new revelations, new aspects of the single secret. What are we to think about transgender people, assuming we think at all ?

I would suppose that we might start by asking a transgender person what he or she is about. Because a gender fluid person has had to think a lot about what he or she is or is not. It is just as much a surprise to a trans person to be “trans” as it is to us to merely observe. He or she the gender fluid human confronts his or her fluidity every minute in a society that assumes that gender is written in the DNA. So why not ask a gender fluid person what fluidity is about and how it is to be lived in ?

The responses might shock you.

Acceptance is not a snap, it is worked toward, as the gender fluid human samples, discards, then accepts all the explanations that culminate in the actual.

Gender fluidity, the gendered human will tell you, is NOT a choice. It is a revelation. It is in you whether you accept it or not. It comes to grips with you, not the other way around.

Is that hard for us to accept ? If hard, why ? Why would we reject what a person tells us about herself ? By what basis do we know a person better than the person knows herself ?

I read people – including legislators in “red” States – who insist that a multi-gendered person is wrong about himself, that “gender is” this and not that. I don’t see how such assertion differs from insisting that the Earth is flat. Or that it was created 6000 years ago, as my ancestors’ writings (book of Genesis) told my ancestors. It is well and good to make such assertions, but like most assertions, they are likely mistaken. Same is true about gender. Those who insist they know tell us that biological sex is gender. Yet it isn’t. This we see in the lives of gendered humans.

Biology is not the soul, the self. Biology is the mechanics of the body, but human beings are more than body and system. Human beings perceive; we have feelings, sentiments, insights; we learn stuff. Gender is one of the attributes that we learn more and more about. (There isw nothing new about gender fluidity. Gendered people have existed in all times and all societies.)

This is so no matter what gender learning we get to. For those who figure out that their gender is the same as their biology, no more than for those who perceive their gender to be different from their biology. It’s THE SAME PROCESS ! One figures out who one is.

No one can do it for you.

No one can tell you who you are or how to figure it out. Being a fully created human being, as we all are, each of us has direct, empirical knowledge of only our own self. All that anyone else can say about us is assumption.

Thus we see that some of us are not what we are, even as they are as human as we are.

Many who feel they have a right to impose their assumptions upon us cite my ancestors’ commandments and laws of Torah, as found in “the Bible,” all of which they assert are immutable words of God not vulnerable to emendation because what God declares is permanent. Thereby denying to us who live today equal status, as created beings, with my ancestors of 3000 years ago.

Somehow I do not accept that we today are confined like slaves to the orders of 3000 years old masters. Why are we not just as entitled to make discovery as were they of old ? And so we see that we are as entitled, because gendered people among us are making discovery even as I write.

Thus I embrace gender fluid humans. I welcome their witness, their testimony about their lives.

I welcome whaat they might teach us tomorrow as well.

I welcome revelation, new knowledge, new perception, just as I welcome my own readiness to perceive anew every day.

We learn that humans are discoverers in an infinity of the unknown, the as yet unnoticed. I say, cherish the discoverers and incorporate their discoveries into your book of learning.

Thank goodness for transgendered people. They are our vanguard, our pioneers exploring what e e cummings so well prophesied :

“…the single secret will still be man.”

— Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

^^ so many unused manufacturing buildings in a City now on the verge of bringing manufacturing back — thank goodness !

No one can know the future, but quite often it offers a few clues to what is coming.

In Boston as of today — late February 2023 — there are some: first, the bio-technology boom has ended. Fewer discoveries are in process. Second, more people are leaving Massachusetts than coming. Third, there is now significant, and growing, push back against the Boston envisioned by the City’s planners (and many nonprofit groups) these past several years. More about this later.

Perhaps the most impactful clue is that our grossly over-invested real estate market has turned its corner and is falling. Both rents and asking prices for sales are giving ground. There’s also much more apartment availability today than at this time last year.

This slide has enabled quite a few renters and buyers to qualify who last year were told “no dice.”

At the same time, the City is moving to purchase quite a chunk of traditional three-decker buildings in which people of modest incomes live until recently under threat of displacement. In East Bostonl, 144 tenancies will now be protected, by a land trust agreement, from investor eviction. (It’s another question engtirely what happens to those units when and if their current occupants move out, and this is an issue for another day.)

Mayor Wu is also moving to have the legislature approve her limited rent control measure, which would affect chiefly the sorts of obese-size, overpriced density boxes that have gone up all over Boston’s close-in neighbo0rhoods and which have made developers and their servants rich as Croesus. Any form of rent control leads to seriously negative consequences (we who lived through Boston’s rent control 1970s know them all), but the first consequence seems good : developers can no longer arbitrage our neighborhoods out of existence by converting them to profit cash.

Personally, I think Mayor Wu’s rent control move is unnecessry. I think the changed market will accomplish everything she hopes for and more. As acquisition and construction costs will not decrease, a 20 percent haircut in the rent price and sale price markets will make developer profits impossible or almost — most real estate ventures relly on 65 to 75 percent bank financing.. If a denveloper / speculator neds a ten percent profit margin to be sure of cashing out, a 75 percent loan in a 20 percent price cut market shaves him to the skin. Even a 65 percent financing cuts seriously close.

Yet a changed real estate market is hardly the only reversal at hand in Boston. Just as significant are (1l) changed sentiment about the bike lane movement that wants to limit access by moorists to major streets (2) serious — and justified — opposition to planned cut backs on available on street parking ( 3 ) folks who understand full well that they and their freedoms are the target of locked and loaded climate activists.

On twitter you find these motorists’ rights groups as well as “critical urbanists” who do NOT favor “skippable streets” (as one kooky no-cars City Councillor in another city put it); These groups make a very compelling argument. After all, we who drive cars are at least 80 percent, if not 90, of everybody who lives and/or works in Boston. It takes a lot of chutzpah for a planner, or an activist, to push us out of their plan picture. Yet until recently, articulate opposition was hard to find to the planners’ transit-uber-alles density vision. (I have supplied some here in this blog, but it’s been a lonely slog.) Not so today. Organized motorist groups have formulateed a counter much more comprehensive than my ad hoc complaints.

What they call for is a return to prioritizing highways and de-emphazing public transportation, citing the figures : far, far more of us drive than require public transportation. As I hav ebeen saying : publicly financed transit is our obligation as a society, to those who cannot drive or cannot afford to put a car legally on the road, BUT THAT IS ALL that our obligation is. The bulk of our transportation tax dollars must go to maintaining and even renewing our highways, bridges, and streets.

And at last, Federal policy is on our side. President Biden’s call for bringing back manufacturing (and manufacturing jobs) to America envisions an entirely different economy than the small shop, high tech beehives we have lived by these past twenty years or more. And the bipartisan infrastructure law that Biden helped shepherd to passage brings huge swaths of Federal dollars to renewing our bridges, streets, and highways and thus to the jobs that perform this work.

This is a significant change of direction in favor of the vast majority away from a very lucky very few.

Our economy since the late 1990s has been geared almost entirely to the very lucky very few : the financiers, real estate boomers, high tech shops, colleges, and investment managers who have drawn Midas level salaries and voluminous stock option windfalls in an economy in which basic manufacturing and skilled trades have seen jobs whisk away overseas. We in Boston have witnessed this transformation. A city which in 1980 was locally-born working class has become a city of incoming technology whizzes. (I have nothing aginst whizzes, but their whiz craft cannot be the only path to a neighborhood or city life.) Now that phase may be ending as Biden’s manufacturing and infrastructure economy digs deep.

The new Biden economy is also generating — finally — a serious push for revitalizing trades education and union membership. It was only ten years ago that a Tea party Republican assured me that unions were obsolete. Not now, they aren’t ! As for trades education, people have talked about it for decades, without denting the college ideal much. But people see, at last, that skilled trade folks earn a dam good paycheck, where college kids often find burdensome loan debt. Wherever you stand on forgiving student loans, it is clear that they are musts for many to avoid, especially when trades folks earn big pay without tapping a dollar of college finance.

The salaries of higher education administrators have ballooned just as illogically as those of fianciers. Some college adminitrators now take million dollar incomes. Why ? To what end ? If college is for many, a waste of time, what is the vast salary structure of it but insupportable institutional welfare ?

Look : I’m a Princeton grad and proud of my university. But when I went, in 1958 to 1962, tuition was $ 10,000. Today it is over $ 70,000, At some colleges it’s more than $ 100,000. Why ?

To sum up : big economic changes are coming to Boston — and to America as a whole. It’s long overdue. Whatever you may think of Trump voters, they are making one super loud protest against things as they are. Their social views may be anathema, but their economic arguments make much sense.

I am glad that President Biden is focused on bringing back jobs and production to our forgotten cities — and maybe even to Boston, which 50 years ago had a ton of manufacturing in place — you can see the boarded up or repurposed factory buildings all over Hyde Park, lower Roxbury, an d sea side Dorchester, Charlestown, and East Boston. It is way past time to give these factories new manufactures, new jobs — as well as the roadways that bring driver workers to work five days a week and the parking lots that host them.

— Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

^^ Meridian Street. Planners see too many cars and not enough bus lanes. I see a neighborhood that works and knows itself well.

— — — — — — —

Boston’s Planning and Development agency is currently publicizing its plan for future East Boston. The outreach has aroused anger from many — from more people of the neighborhood than I have seen step forward on any land use issue since the days of Logan Airport exspansion 40 years ago and longer.

Nor is the anger misplaced. The “plan” imposes ITS priorities on people of entirely opposite priorities. For a neighborhood already dense with dwellings, it wants even more density. To a neighborhood scarce of parking spaces it demands FEWER parking spaces. On a neighborhood of streets narrow to negotiate, it would carve out dedicated bus and bike laness, making car traffic a nightmare’s nightmare.

The plan is not merely a mistake. It is intended as a mistake. Or rather, should I say, it treats East Boston as a mistake.

So when 200 people gathered recenty, at Don Orione Home atop Orient Heights, to shout a very loud and long “NO !” to being run over by briefcased, cubicled managers who view the neighborhood as a mistake, those cubicle folks should have understood in advance that their “plan” is — to us — more COVID than vaccine.

A harsh simile, perhas, but not inapt.

The “plan” cannot work. Perhaps if East Boston were uninhabited, as it was in 1629, highly paid city-crats could conct a fantasy of density and bike lanes aand all would be just ducky. But East Boston IS inhabited. It is a neighborhood that works; that has worked for more than 150 years, as an immigrant destination with a working class economy.

The problem today is that Boston neither has a working class economy nor wants one. It wants biolabs and research boutiquess. It wants financial, educational, and health care institutions where imported employees work for $ 125,000 salaries and up.

It wants these because these folks can afford the “luxury condos” that the City’s developers demand to construct.

The City wants developers to build what they, the developers, want because it’s the developers — and their asssociated consultants, architects, lawyers, accountants, and building trades workers — whose $$$$ donations finance the City’s political campaigns. Even campaigns for City Councillor from our District cost $ 100,000. As for we the ordinary people, who work hard for $ 45,000 to $ 65,000 paychyecks, we cannot afford to donate even a little, which means that we literally DO NOT COUNT.

But I digress. My main point is that a plan which calls for wiping out the customs and structures of a neighborhood that works well, and has worked well for 150 years, is no plan at all, it is dictatorship.

Most of us dislike Donald Trump because he would be a dictator. I get that and I despise him for that, too. But how can we despise Trump dictator and not equally dislike Boston planning as dictator ?

Neighborhoods should be respected to work out THEIR OWN customs and structures, when those workouts accommodate what the neighbors who live in them adjust to. The East Boston of my youth was just such a place. Even today, with the neighborhood’s visage pockmarked with hives of luxury, for the most part the neighborhood carves its own ruts in the ground, plots its own paths through the clutter of traffic and the mazes of parking luck.

I do not see ANY reason why the neighborhood should not continue to whittle its own wood and grind its own stone.

Which means more parking, not less, and plenty of road space for the 80 percent of us who use cars — autonomous transporation, because personal freedom matters. It’s why our ancestors came here. For that and for jobs and a good enough life.

Yes, I digressed again…

As one neighborhood voice puts it, “we’ve done our share for the City’s housing goals. Let other neighborhoods contribute.”

we are told that the City’s Plan results, at least in part,, from neighborhood input gleaned from several meetings at which City planners hosted the public. Such meetings do take place. Neighbors speak up at them. From what. I can see, however, nothing that we speak up about changes at all.

Set aside the City’s “plan.” Let “Stand Up For Eastie’ and the new Orient Heights Neighborhood Council encourage and preserbe what we have.

We aren’t opposed to renovation, not even to new dwellings. But there are zoning laws in place, fir a reason — to safeguard neighborhood — and we can build lawfully if we want to. We just can’t buy a property on spec, pay tuday’s artificial prices, and gouge a profit.

There has to be more than biolabs and hi tech start ups There has, somehow and somewhere, to be manufacturing work that supports $ 45,000 to $ 65,000 wahes and thosw ho earn them. President Biden has worked hard to get his bipartisan Infrastructure bill enacted. He constantly touts the return of manufacturing jobs, jobs, jobs to America. I agree completrely.

Let’s do this. Which means, also, let’s do it right here in Boston and the cities to our north, where manufacturing once ruled. Give us the jobs that enable our neighborhood tgo be what it evolved to be. So that those of us who are not biolab whiz kids and institutional cubiclars can continue to have a life in our City.

— Mike Freedberg / Here nad Sphere

^^ Question 4 is the big controversial issue on tomorrow’s ballot

Tomorrow voters in our State will find four bllot questions requesting our yes or no.

Every voter has received the Secretary of State’s information sheet explaining these questions, plus arguments pro and con concerning each. I found this information made the matters more confusing, not less. Nonetheless, the questions are on the ballot. I now offer Here and Sphers’s take:

Question One would, if approved, increase the State tax on very high incomes. Fair Share is pushing this question. On many fronts I like Fair Share’s work. This time, however, it seems out of synch. The State is about to refund to taxpayers billions of dollars of EXCESS colleected revenue (pursuant to a 1986 law requir ing such refund). Why, with the State collecting much revenue MORE than budgeted, would we want, or need, to raise taxes further ? If anything, we should probably be cutting State taxes back.

Vote NO.

Question Two would change the State law on dental insurance charges to require that dentistry insurers apply to costs at least 83 percent of what they charge us — which, says the question, would put dental insurance on the same footing as other medical insurance. The State information does not explain why dental insurance allocations should be the same as other medical allocations. I am thus not convinced that dental insurance operates in the same cost lane as other medicals. Possibly the two insurance categories do incur the same cost but if so, the information does not show us that. I would like to vote yes, but without further information that seems necesary, the case here is “not proved.”

Vote NO

Question 3 would allow for more liquor licenses to be issued than are allowe euner current State and local regulations. i see no reason why not.

Vote YES.

Question 4 asks voters whether or not to approve the law passsed by the legislature, over Governor Baker’s veto, to allow undocumentd immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. Governor Baker’s objection is well founded : the Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV), he says, doesn’t have a means for verifying that an undocumented applicant is who they say they are. Yet there’s a solid respons to his objection : 17 States have already made undocumented people’s driver licenses legal. Why can’t our RMV adopt similar verification procedures to those already being utilized in these 17 States ? I fund no reason why the Governor’s office cannot require the RMV to implement these procedures — problem solved.

As for the law itself, I agree that it is in everybody’s interest to not have unlicensed, uninsured drvers on the road.

Vote YES.

What do I think will the voters do ? It would not surpris eme one bit to see all four questions fail. uestion 3 is the most likely to pass. The others have a harder road. Voters in our State have become skeptical of ballot questions, usually with solid reason.

— Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere