Restaurant closures | Anti-vaxxer bandwagon | Inflated housing | Pressley’s intriguing hint | Ideologues vs science | Biden not done yet | What is Contrarian Boston? | Seeking writers/contributors
Another wave of restaurant closures in Massachusetts?
Incredibly, as Democrats spent months on a so-far fruitless effort to get the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan through Congress, they neglected to replenish a key fund used to keep struggling restaurants afloat.
Now dozens if not hundreds of restaurants across Massachusetts are in danger of closing amid the disruptions caused by the one-two punch of Delta followed by the new Omicron variant.
Many are in Boston, where office buildings and towers remain mostly empty as companies delay once again return to work plans, says Steve Clark, government affairs chief for the Massachusetts Restaurant Association.
Adding insult to injury, the amount of money, $49 billion for restaurants across the country, isn’t particularly huge, at least on the scale of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed Congress, or the even bigger Build Back Better.
“This seemed like a pretty easy one they could have done when they were spending all that money down in Washington,” Clark told Contrarian Boston.
More than 6,800 Massachusetts restaurants applied for the last round of relief funding, with more than two-thirds, or 4,311, getting nothing.
That represents $1.4 billion in unfilled requests of assistance.
Still, one bright spot has been the local Congressional delegation, with U.S. Reps. Pressley, Neal, Moulton and McGovern, among others, all pressing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to take action.
“The threat of closings is not over yet,” Clark said.
Herald joins the anti-vaxxer bandwagon
Well, that’s how it looks here after the tabloid’s Monday story playing up complaints by pregnant Boston police officers about Boston’s new vaccine mandate, while omitting one very crucial and central fact.
The Herald fails to mention that not only are Covid vaccines safe for pregnant women, but that unvaccinated mothers are exposed to a much higher risk of complications. They also have 70 percent greater chance of dying as well, according to the CDC.
Instead, the Herald piece plays up anger on part of some expectant officers against Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and their claim the city’s new vaccine mandate is “forcing them to choose between their jobs and their unborn children’s health.”
Quite a claim, especially since there is not a shred of scientific evidence to back it up.
Inflation threatens to derail badly needed multifamily projects
Developers across Massachusetts are putting some apartment projects on hold as surging inflation jacks up construction costs and wreaks havoc with their financing, Jay Fitzgerald reports at Banker & Tradesman.
Construction costs have jumped 10 to 20 percent in the last few months alone. The big culprits are rising land, labor and material costs.
And don’t look now, for the Fed is preparing to raise interest rates in the coming year in what be “a double whammy” for housing developers, Clark Ziegler, executive director of the quasi-public Massachusetts Housing Partnership, tells the paper.
For a state with a chronic shortage of all types of housing, that’s particularly bad news.
Pressley drops intriguing hint of Marathon bomber’s fate
President Biden has taken heat for the Justice Department’s push to reinstate the death penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of helping carry out the horrific 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
But if the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court reinstates Tsarnaev’s death sentence, will Biden go along?
Maybe not, according to Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who represents the 7th district.
In a letter to constituents, Pressley noted that “President Biden himself gave me his word that no one would be executed by the federal government under his watch.”
Fyi: In her letter, Pressley also took credit for helping push Biden to extend the student loan repayment pause to May 1, while pledging to continue her campaign to convince him “to use his executive authority to cancel student debt to help close the racial wealth gap.”
Remembering E.O. Wilson’s battle against ideologues
The late Harvard zoologist E.O. Wilson is now being hailed as the heir to Darwin.
But at a time when radical ignoramuses on the right are wreaking havoc with their rejection of pandemic science, it worth noting that fanaticism can come in many stripes.
Wilson’s publication in 1975 of ““Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” sparked protests by left-wing activists in the streets of Cambridge demanding his immediate dismissal, and condemnation by colleagues at Harvard.
In one infamous episode, activists stormed a podium at a scientific conference where Wilson was speaking, and dumped ice water on his head, proclaiming him to be “all wet.”
Wilson’s offense? Arguing there just might be a genetic link behind some human behaviors, a notion that some opponents, including a prominent member of the Harvard faculty, conflated with eugenics and even Nazi race theories.
Wilson estimated maybe 10 percent of the average human might be genetically determined. And to be clear, Wilson was talking about human evolution as it played out over the past two million years.
Given what we know now, that’s seems relatively modest.
Dumbest of all political moves – writing off Biden
Not even a year in, declaring Biden’s presidency a failure has become a pernicious parlor game in the MSM and an obsession in right-wing media outlets like Fox.
We’ve always found it odd the confidence with which pundits in the media dismiss Biden, when he has demonstrated time and again that he is the political equivalent of the cat with nine lives.
Remember the New Hampshire primary? Stupid comments about Obama during the 2008 primary? Plagiarizing – of all people, British labor leader and incredible bore Neil Kinnock – during his ill-fated 1988 campaign for president?
Now along comes David Axelrod to argue in The New York Times that Biden is far from done, and will likely work with Sen. Joe Manchin to salvage some key pieces from the Build Back Never debacle.
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 Monday.