Contrarian Boston/Dec. 22, 2021

Masterpiece of minutia | Home price shockers | Diehl’s army of clowns | Healey playing chicken | Manchin maligned? | Holocaust education |What is Contrarian Boston? | Seeking contributors/writers

Contrarian Boston is taking a break for the holidays. Our next issue will come out Dec. 29.  We will return to our regular Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule on Monday, Jan. 3.

Happy holidays!

The legislature’s spending of relief funds: A masterpiece of minutia

That would be plans drawn up at the State House for spending nearly $4 billion in federal relief money, which lawmakers dawdled over for months.

With the bill finally on the governor’s desk, it’s clear from reading the 165-page bill what took so long, with pages upon pages of local earmarks for all sorts of penny ante projects.

There’s $100,000 for “tree planting and stump removal” in Medford, $125,000 to restore the Lakeside cemetery chapel in Wakefield, $60,000 for upkeep for a park at Barnstable high school, and $100,000 so Newton can hire consultants to design a new bathhouse, and on and on and on.

These all sound like routine projects the fine taxpayers in Medford, Wakefield, Barnstable and Newton could easily pick up the tab for themselves.

Meanwhile, housing advocates, who were competing for the same pot of money, got $600 million, a third of what they asked for, as Contrarian Boston reported here. Not to mention pandemic front-line workers, who have been promised bonuses of $500 to $2,000 each.

Baker had wanted to get the Covid relief funds out quickly, filing legislation in June for divvying out the $4 billion in federal cash.

Now we know what they were up to on Beacon Hill over the past six months: Divvying up the pork.

More shocking numbers for local home buyers

Home prices, already crazy before the pandemic, have gone into overdrive, rising 30 percent across Massachusetts over the past two years, reports The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

The median sale price statewide hit $510,000 in November, up from $391,000 from the same month two years ago.

But here are some even crazier numbers:

·      Arlington home prices are headed towards the $1 million mark, hitting $940,000 in November, up another 8 percent.

·      Dorchester’s median price is nearly $700,000, after a 15 percent jump.

·      Suburban Boxboro saw its median price also jump 30 percent, and is now closing on $900,000.

Diehl and the rabble rousing at City Hall

The anti-vax circus arrived Monday at Boston City Hall, and wouldn’t you know it, Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl was there leading the clowns.

With boos and chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!," the “protesters” attempted to drown out Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who had called a press conference to announce a vaccine mandate for restaurants and other indoor spaces.  

If the protest was meant to embarrass, it backfired. Wu proved her mettle, coolly responding to the anti-vaxxers outside with a memorable line, “Welcome to the people’s house.”

Coupled with his endorsement by Trump, Diehl’s little performance at City Hall might help him in the increasingly weird state GOP and its gubernatorial primary. But he obviously doesn’t care about winning the general election.

Maura Healey: Playing chicken in Mass. governor’s race?

Speaking of the gubernatorial race, Attorney General Maura Healey’s silence on whether she will throw her hat in the ring has spawned a new line of speculation among local pols.

Apparently, Healey, a Democrat, is now waiting to see whether former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh jumps into the race before taking the leap herself. Or so goes the speculation.

Walsh, now federal labor secretary, has been doing all sorts of noncandidate candidate things, with his role in what appears to be a tentative resolution of the bitter, long nurses strike at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester.

That’s certainly a feather in Walsh’s cap -- and it follows his appearance in Springfield to tout western Mass rail plans and his subsequent night out, detailed by Contrarian Boston, at the Back Bay’s Quin House, a hotspot for the local political glitterati.

Maybe Manchin has a point

As the dust settles in the wake of the Build Back Never fiasco, the nature of Sen. Joe Manchin’s objections to the $2 trillion spending plan are coming into clearer view.

No thanks, though, to the MSM, which has given short shrift to one of Manchin’s key demands -- that work requirements be attached to child tax credit. Oh yes, and that the credit be phased out for higher earners making more than $200,000.

Would it be ideal? Not really. But work requirements are hardly anything new – many of the most famous New Deal relief programs all very consciously tied relief to work, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA, to name two.

Are we looking at yet another case of Democrats letting progressive ideology get in the way of good sense and winning elections?

It’s easy to dump on Manchin. But given the difficultly Democrats have in winning elections in red states, maybe it’s time to stop trashing the guy and listen.

A big step forward on Holocaust education

Below is a short piece by former state Rep. Brian Wallace on a landmark piece of legislation signed today at the State House. Wallace and Glenn Frank co-authored Holocaust survivor Steve Ross’ memoir, “From Broken Glass: My Story of Finding Hope in Hitler’s Death Camps to Inspire a New Generation.”

Ross, who died recently, settled in Boston after the war, becoming a youth worker and helping hundreds of teens, among them Wallace, when he was growing up in South Boston.

                              By Brian P. Wallace

A two-year struggle ended today as Gov. Baker signed the Genocide/Holocaust education mandate into law in front of the bill’s supporters.

The bill’s passage couldn’t come fast enough, as Holocaust survivors succumb to age and one history’s darkest chapters slowly moves out of the realm of living memory.

A recent survey by the Associated Press showed that 63 percent of high school students in the U.S. did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Over 50 percent did not know anything about the Nazi concentration camps.

 The bill will require both middle and high schools in Massachusetts to teach the history of genocide, including the Holocaust, to all students.  The state does not have any educational requirements for the Holocaust in its current curriculum.

A Genocide Educational Trust Fund will be set up to help create teaching materials and give training to educators.  School districts will have to send a description of lesson plans and programs on genocide and Holocaust instruction to the state Department of Education each year.

More than a dozen other states in the U.S require Holocaust education, a number that now includes Massachusetts.

What is Contrarian Boston?

I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks asking what Contrarian Boston is about.

Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.

For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.

An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.

Our focus is:

·      Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;

·      Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;

·      The media and why it does what it does;

·      Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;

·      And whatever else catches our fancy.

Contrarian Boston seeks contributors

Have a news tip? Is there an issue you would like to see explored? Interested in writing up a news item or short opinion piece? As Contrarian Boston gets on its feet, I would like to add more news and a wider range of commentary as well.

Intrigued? Drop me a line at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.

Thanks for reading and see you next Wednesday.