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Register to Vote!

Register to vote! – (PIP #45)

By Louise Peloquin

Registering to vote is a duty and voting a sacred right. Nothing has changed over the years.

L’Etoile, October 5, 1924

Urgent Call from the Permanent Committee of Naturalization

May all those who are citizens by birth, by naturalization or by marriage and who have lived in Lowell for six months and in Massachusetts for a year be registered on the electoral lists. We are backward in this regard.

     With the goal of facilitating voter registration for women as well as for men who cannot present themselves at City Hall during the day, the Electoral Commission is holding several evening sessions in different city locations.

     Thus, next Monday evening, the 6th, a session will take place from 7 to 9 at the hall of the Catholic Association on Pawtucket Street. This session is for residents of precincts Six and Seven.

     In precinct Six, where our compatriots are the majority, the percentage of voters among the men and women aged 21 and over is the lowest in the city with the exception of precinct Two which counts more recent immigrants than any other precinct.

     In precinct Six, there were, during the April 1st city census, 10,988 men and women aged 21 or older and, in this number, there are only 3,900 registered voters, 2,562 men and 1,342 women, that is hardly more than a third when, for the entire city, the percentage of voters in the number of voting-aged people is almost half. Precincts Nine and Eight have the highest percentage of registered voters and are followed closely by precincts Three, Five and Seven.

     Regarding the duty which lies with all citizens to register and to exercise the right to vote, we feel it is opportune to reiterate a call which was launched a few months ago by the Permanent Committee of Naturalization further to a census carried out last Autumn by this Committee. It has been observed that approximately 1,400 of our compatriots in precincts Six and Seven merely had to register in order to have the right to vote.  Hence, the Committee decided to launch the following call to all concerned:

Compatriots –

“After careful consideration, the members of the Permanent Committee of Naturalization have decided to launch a pressing call to all of our compatriots to bring them, if possible, to get registered on the electoral lists.  According to the census which we have just taken, we observe with sadness that a great many of us do not do their duty in this respect; we observe that hundreds and hundreds, born in this country and aged over 21, do not think to register or do not want to do so.

“What is the use for the Permanent Committee to do its utmost to help naturalize our compatriots if those who are citizens from birth or who, thanks to their father’s naturalization or to their marriage, have the right to vote, but do not want to exercise their right and remain deaf to the calls of those who spend their evenings and leisure moments helping our compatriots become good citizens and voters wanting to protect their most sacred rights?

“We have said it time and time again and we repeat it, Franco-Americans are in solidarity with one other. If we want to count for something in this country, let us wake up. Let us do our duty. We will only count by the vote. A man or a woman who does not exercise the right to vote remains a stranger in this country regardless of the interests or the ties which retain them.

“We count over 5,000 voters and we are certain that if those who have the right to vote wanted to register, we would reach more than 7,000.

“We often hear: ‘What is one vote more or one vote less? There is nothing to gain for us.’ How can we reason that way! It is certainly everyone’s duty to do so and it is even a sacred duty during elections. Let us not allow others to do everything and to have everything. Let us see to the administration of our city, of our State, or our country. Let us help elect intelligent people of integrity, capable of properly administering public affairs. Let us vote. Let us defend our rights, and support the efforts of those who work in our interest. Without the vote, we can do nothing to defend our rights and our interests.

“Therefore, may all those who merely have to fulfil the simple formality of registering in order to obtain the right to vote see to it without delay. The Electoral Commission is ready to receive them every day from 9 to 12:30 and also certain evenings which are announced in the newspapers.

“As in the past, the members of the Permanent Committee of Naturalization are at the disposal of all compatriots to provide them with all of the information wanted.

“All for YOU for the ADVANCEMENT of OUR PEOPLE and the GENERAL WELL-BEING of the COUNTRY in which WE LIVE.
The Permanent Committee of Naturalization” (1)

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1) Translation by Louise Peloquin.

Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction lays bare a world of pain by Marjorie Arons Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by journalist Nathan Thrall won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction this year.  The core of the narrative is simple: in 2012 a rickety school bus carrying kindergardeners on a field trip is upended by a tractor trailer in the outskirts of Jerusalem in the West Bank.  The bus bursts into flames. A frantic Palestinian father, Abed Salama, begins a search for his 5-year-old son, Milad. No one can tell him whether and how badly his child has been injured, what hospital he has been taken to, or even if Milad is dead or alive.  Abed has an ID card that strictly limits where he can go, requiring passage through multiple check points, only on old, potholed roads that keep him out of Israeli territory. (Israeli settlers have new, faster bypass roads that relieve them of traveling through Ramallah.) And that’s just the beginning of the constraints on daily living that so many Palestinians must endure as a condition of Israeli occupation post 1967.

Thrall uses the complexity of individual stories to dive deep into the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict: failure to create a Palestinian homeland, the unfulfilled promise of a two-state solution; terror of the first and second intifadas; murderous suicide bombings by PLO terrorists; the heavily militarized response by the Israeli Defense Force; the pledges of self-governance outweighed by Israel’s needs for ever-tighter security; and the apartheid (term actually used by an Israeli expert laying out restrictive road maps) conditions in which Palestinians are forced to lead their daily lives.  Access to daily needs (health care, jobs, decent housing and adequate classrooms) is circumscribed by draconian bureaucracy and miles of 30-foot concrete separation walls hemming in major Palestinian cities.

Thrall tells all of it through the intimate lives of individuals, both Palestinians (including Abed) and Israelis, so the reader can understand more intimately what the news media often gloss over or recount using arid historical data.

What happened to the children, (Milad included) is crushingly poignant. Equally heartbreaking are the ongoing stories of people justifiably consumed by rage, trying to provide their families with safe, decent lives, and burdened by a sense that no one is listening to them. Thrall gives voice to their sorrows, while trying hard to present both sides of this enduring tragedy, not likely to see resolution in my lifetime.

After the horrific crash, some Israeli settlers raised funds and found other ways to help the grieving families. But it’s impossible to forget the hate-filled reactions to the bus crash on social media by some Israeli teenagers who cheered at the deaths of four-and-five-year-old Palestinian children, asserting, “Joyous news to start the morning” and “Great! Fewer terrorists.”

This is a well-researched but difficult book to read, not because of how it is written but the deeply compelling pictures it paints.

Lowell Politics: October 27, 2024

A joint motion by Councilors Erik Gitschier and Corey Robinson that “the law department draft necessary language to facilitate residents’ ability to select our mayor via ballot before the 2025 city council election cycle” generated some discussion at Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting. However, like so many of the motions that purport to address homelessness and its consequences, this was a feel-good effort that ignores reality to curry favor with a select audience.

Much was made of the outcome of the non-binding referendum on the 2021 city election ballot that asked residents if they would prefer directly electing a mayor to the current system in which the mayor is selected by the city councilors. That referendum passed with 7,429 voting YES and 2,411 voting NO. There was a lot of talk Tuesday about “respecting the will of the people” as demonstrated by the referendum vote.

The reality that this motion ignores is that the method of electing local officials in Lowell, including the mayor, is under the jurisdiction of the US District Court because of the lawsuit prosecuted against the city several years ago. In that case, a group of city residents sued the city on the grounds that the then existing all at large, winner take all method of electing councilors and school committee members violated the Federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of minority residents of Lowell.

After an extensive discovery period, the city council then in office concluded that the city would likely lose the case if it went to trial and so negotiated a settlement that resulted in the current hybrid mix of eight district and three at large councilors. That settlement was then adopted by the court in what is called a “consent decree” which means the agreement of the parties was formalized as the judgment of the court with the same weight and finality as a judge’s verdict after a trial. It also means that the court still has jurisdiction over the entire matter which in turn means that any change to the method of electing local officials must first be approved by the court.

There’s been a lot of talk about asking the plaintiffs in the lawsuit if they would agree to this change, but that is a misleading way of framing the issue. Certainly, if the plaintiffs concurred with the requested change, it would increase the chances of the court reopening the case and allowing the change, but in the end, it’s up to the court, not the plaintiffs.

There’s a concept in the law called “the doctrine of finality” which means once something is decided, it’s been decided. For many reasons, courts are hesitant to revisit something that’s already been decided once. I think that’s particularly true when governmental entities like the city of Lowell are involved. With a new city council potentially being elected every two years, the court faces a revolving door of efforts to change the outcome of the case based on the whims of the next set of city councilors.

The argument in this case – that “the people want it” – seems especially unpersuasive given the facts of the underlying case. By settling that case, the city council essentially said, “Yes, we violated the rights of our minority residents by allowing the wealthiest and whitest neighborhood in the city to dominate the outcome of elections that chose who would represent the entire city.” Because of that past injustice, the city council agreed to change the electoral system to one of predominantly district councilors to give greater weight to residents of other neighborhoods, particularly those with large numbers of minority residents.

Now certain councilors want to go back before that same judge and say, “We’d like to once again violate the rights of our minority residents by allowing the wealthiest and whitest neighborhood in the city to dominate the outcome of electing a mayor who would represent the entire city.” It doesn’t sound like a winning argument to me.

Finally, the whole “will of the people” pitch is a joke given the abysmal rate of participation in city elections. In that much-talked-about 2021 referendum, of the 115,000 residents of the city, 68,000 of whom were registered to vote, just 7,429 supported the direct election of a mayor.

Then in the 2023 city election, with 115,000 residents and 75,294 registered voters, just 7,516 voted in the election which is less than 10 percent of registered voters and about 6 percent of the city’s residents. That’s not “the will of the people.” It’s the will of a small, self-selected subset of the people who participate in local elections.

(Given the almost total absence of any effort by this city council to try to increase turnout in city elections, it seems that councilors are content to keep playing to that very small slice of the residents who participate in city elections.)

In the end, Councilor Wayne Jenness made a substitute motion to send this matter to the council’s election and rules subcommittee to hold hearings so that members of the public could express their thoughts on this matter. The substitute motion passed, but just barely with six voting YES and five voting NO, although I believe several of the councilors who voted not to send it to the subcommittee would have voted against the primary motion, so a vote on that would have also been close.

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The proposed ordinance to ban camping on public property was procedurally back before the council which referred the ordinance to a public hearing on November 12, 2024, so more on that in a future newsletter.

Separately, Mayor Dan Rourke alluded to the issue of homelessness in some brief but intriguing comments he made during the Announcements portion of the agenda at the end of the meeting. He explained that this past September he attended the Urban Economy Forum in Toronto, Canada, and while there, learned about a program called the Frontrunner Community Initiative. It’s a program for cities that helps fund sustainable development and urban revitalization. Lowell is eligible for the program which potentially could provide substantial funding that would assist with such things as housing development and dealing with homelessness. Rourke spoke highly of how Toronto used the program to make massive strides in dealing with substance abuse and homelessness in the inner city. It seems that Lowell is such a likely candidate for this program that the entire council has been invited to visit Toronto for a first-hand view of how the program was implemented there. The council will formally take up the opportunity for this visit at next week’s meeting with the visit potentially to occur in mid-November.

This sounds promising so hopefully we’ll hear more about it in the coming weeks and months.

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Earlier this week the Boston Globe reported that sales of single family homes in Greater Boston in September fell to the lowest number of sales in any September since 1995 which is an astounding statistic since it includes the 2008-2012 Great Recession when the real estate market (and the global economy) cratered. It also is contrary to the expectation that as soon as interest rates started downward, real estate activity would pick up.

A couple of things might be contributing to this slowdown. The first is supply and demand. There are more home buyers than there are homes for sale, so prices remain high. Building more housing of any type would help with that, but as we’ve seen with the fight against the MBTA Communities housing bill elsewhere and past opposition to ADUs in Lowell, the people who currently own houses aren’t disposed to allow more housing which might devalue the property they are living in.

Also, even though interest rates have started to go down, they still are high compared to what they had been. A few percentage points of interest on a home mortgage makes a huge difference in the price you can afford to pay for a house. For example, if you were to obtain a $400,000 mortgage to purchase a home, if the interest rate was 3%, your monthly payment would be $1,686; if the interest rate was 6%, your monthly payment would be $2,398, a difference of $710. Looking at that another way, if you could afford a monthly payment of $2,400, if the interest rate was 3%, you could get a mortgage of $569,255; but if the interest rate was 6%, you could only afford to borrow $400,000.

Finally, I suspect many people are holding off on major financial commitments – and major commitments overall – until the results of the Presidential election are known. Given the policy paralysis that’s so often the case in Washington, I’m not sure the outcome of the Presidential election will have a huge impact on the housing market, one way or another. But I think the outcome of the race will have a big impact on the trajectory of the county, so it’s likely that people are taking a wait and see approach to major decisions such as whether to buy a house.

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Early voting continues through this coming Friday. The city of Lowell schedule is on the city website.

Thanks to Lowell Telecommunications Corp (LTC) for inviting me to talk about the various offices and referendums on this year’s ballot. The 28-minute episode is on now LTC’s YouTube channel.

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Baseball playoffs and the start of the World Series caused me to reminisce about a couple of classics from my youth. Last week on richardhowe.com I wrote about the 1975 World Series (Red Sox v Reds) and the week before on the 1967 World Series (Red Sox v Cardinals).

Bezos’ business interests trump WaPo journalism by Marjorie Arons Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

Hiding out from election coverage isn’t working all that well for me. Half my recent blogs have been non-political book reviews, but that hasn’t diluted the tension leading up to November 5th. Now I feel compelled to express my outrage and disappointment at how once-leading American newspapers have been too fearful of Donald Trump to endorse in the Presidential race.

I was disappointed and annoyed when the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times earlier this week blocked a draft editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, prompting two editors to resign in protest. I didn’t post anything then because I understood that the L.A. Times’ glory  days are long past.  I also knew that many lesser publications and national newspaper chains like McClatchy and Alden Global Capital have abandoned the practice of endorsements.

But when the storied Washington Post  announced it wouldn’t endorse, that was too much for me. Taking responsibility for the decision  was CEO and publisher William Lewis, (hired not long ago from the Murdochs’  UK  operation where  he had developed  a sketchy reputation for unethical news media behavior.)  The language he used to explain the Post’s decision was laughably disingenuous.

Reaction from inside the paper was swift, with leading columnists calling the decision “a terrible mistake” representing “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned in protest.

The move is a posthumous slap at the late Post publisher Katherine Graham who, under threat by Richard Nixon to take away licenses for the cable stations the paper owned, still went ahead with the Post’s groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate story, coverage that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation. But today, Richard Nixon’s threats and behavior look tame compared to the transgressions past and promised by Donald Trump.

Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor who led the paper’s unflinching coverage of the Trump Administration and its Pulitzer Prize winning-reporting of the January 6, 2021, attack posted on social media: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. Donald Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner Bezos (and others),”

This is likely true. Trump has promised, if re-elected, to weaponize the government , especially “his” Justice Department, and seek vengeance against all his perceived enemies, not just  opposing politicians and critics in the news media. He’s compiling an enemies list far more extensive and pernicious than Nixon’s.  And it seems already to be working.

The man behind the Post’s decision (which upended a draft editorial board endorsement of Harris) was billionaire Jeff Bezos himself, the same person who helped create the paper’s guiding motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Earlier this month Columbia Journalism Review published an article warning about the “anticipatory obedience “and self-censorship of the media, fearing a Trump second term. It reminded us how Trump had tried to block the merger between ATT-Warner (CNN’s parent company) and jack postal rates and taxes for Amazon because he was furious about their respective coverage.  (Amazon doesn’t own the Post; Bezos owns it personally through a holding company.) The CJR article likens Trump’s attempts to chill the First Amendment to actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban.

Last year, perhaps fearing a Trump return, Jeff Bezos installed a publisher with a right-wing history (and a confidant of Trump acolyte Boris Johnson).  CNN meanwhile dropped Trump-critical executives and staff. And, to make matters worse, last January CNN produced the most obsequious non-Fox town hall with Trump, hosted by Kaitlin Collins, presumably to pose as fair and balanced.

On the surface, The Post’s craven announcement might reflect Jeff Bezos’s palpable concerns of what Donald Trump has pledged to do to news media and journalists who have been critical of him. But even more salient threats are those to his bottom line – canceling or blocking Amazon’s billions of dollars in government contracts.  Trump had done that before, blocking the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract with Amazon.

I assume – wink, wink – there was no coincidence to the news, reported by AP, that shortly after the Post’s decision yesterday executives from Bezos’s space exploration company, Blue Origin, met with Trump in Texas. The company has a $3.4 billion federal contract to develop and deliver a lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis program. (Meanwhile, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission is engaged in a major antitrust suit against Amazon for monopolistic practices.)

The Post’s cowardice is not unique. Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg, sensitive to possible restrictions on social media and artificial intelligence, backed down from blocking Trump’s Facebook account in the wake of January 6th and has pledged not to fund further support of fair election practices.  He now refers to Trump as a “badass” and “inspiring.”

The timidity extends to business giants like JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who are cowering before those threats. Dimon has reportedly been privately supportive of Kamala Harris and even has indicated he would accept a position as Treasury Secretary in a Harris administration. Microsoft multi-billionaire Bill Gates has donated $50 million to PAC supporting Harris but refuses to speak out publicly. In this campaign, Trump has promised a Justice Department that will prosecute and jail lawyers, campaign operatives and donors who have aligned with Harris. But it is certainly not reassuring when such powerful corporate titans bow down before this despicable person declared by so many who worked with him before to be “unfit to be President again.”

To its credit, the NY Times, whose news department has been shamefully sane-washing Trump in its euphemistic campaign coverage of his dangerous behavior, did endorse Kamala Harris, as it has endorsed in every Presidential election since Eisenhower in 1956. I was disappointed, however, by the paper’s puzzling announcement that it would no longer endorse down-ballot candidates. Those are candidates far less well-known to the public than those at the top, where editorial guidance can be even more useful.

As a former broadcast editorialist, I’ve always believed it was our civic duty to evaluate candidates and inform voters and readers of our assessments, borne of the jobs we did every day. But I understand when television stations do not make endorsements. In my early years at WCVB-TV (Channel 5), we would endorse candidates from President right down to the Boston School Committee, but we had to contend with the draconian implications of the Equal Time Law.  Those requirements remain in place today. At this time in today’s dispiriting broadcasting environment, I’d be encouraged if local stations would just return to more active engagement in editorializing on public policy issues, even if that would fall short of endorsing candidates.

Do news media endorsements have an impact on the outcome of elections? It’s debatable.  I suppose that months ago, the Post could have debated it robustly as a proposed policy change.  But doing so at the last minute, after a draft endorsement was already prepared, has an odious stench and reeks of cowardice.

In the end, this isn’t a journalism story. It’s a business story. As Jonathan V. Last wrote in Bulwark, the situation is analogous to Russia in the early 2000s when the business community there surrendered to Putin. “What’s remarkable is that Trump didn’t have to arrest Bezos to secure his compliance. Trump didn’t even have to win the election. Just the fact that he has an even-money chance to become President was threat enough.”

Democracy does indeed die in darkness. To paraphrase Last, the guardrails for democracy aren’t the protective steel reinforcements on highways; they’re simply people. And, sadly, people at the highest levels are crumbling.

Our only choice is to fight as best we can, forge ahead with phone banks and other get-out-the-vote activities in battleground states, and pray that November 5 produces the desired outcome.