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Today’s newsletter: Anti-vax nuttiness hits the State House/No landslide for Michelle Wu/More BS from General Electric/Pressley braves Biden’s wrath/Contrarian Boston seeks contributors
The mysterious seven: House boss refuses to name unvaccinated lawmakers
It’s not for nothing the Massachusetts Legislature is considered one of the least transparent in the country in how it conducts the public’s business.
Take Ron Mariano, speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
The Quincy Democrat is touting the compliance rate of the House’s Covid-19 vaccination policy, with 96 percent of members having gotten their shots.
It’s a stat that might be impressive if we were talking about the local supermarket, but markedly less so since it concerns one of the oldest, democratically-elected legislative chambers in the world.
However, Mariano won’t name the seven House members — apparently all Republicans — who have either refused to get vaccinated, or simply won’t say whether they have, and who are now effectively barred from entering the State House, according to Boston.com.
If some lawmakers, for whatever misguided reasons, have decided to jump on the anti-vaxxer bandwagon, then voters, and the public, have a right to know.
I have not heard back from the House speaker, but to his credit, Rep. Brad Jones, the Republican minority leader, returned my call.
Jones, who is fully vaccinated and just got his booster, was saddled with the unenviable task of defending this head-scratching behavior on part of his colleagues.
Jones acknowledged the legislators are from his party, but declined to identify them. Moreover, he contends the representatives in question have agreed not to come to the State House, so they should be considered in compliance by House leadership.
“I am not naming names,” Jones said.
Pressed on the civic duty issue, Jones pushed back, arguing the process under which House leadership laid down the vaccine policy was unfair, made by a small working group of lawmakers.
Others may have decided not to get vaccinated due to religious or medical concerns, Jones said.
However, from conversations with a couple of the holdouts – my term, not his – Jones deduced they were not comfortable sharing what they consider to be personal health information with House leadership.
Still, Jones acknowledged House members weren’t being asked to share their medical history, just a copy of their vaccination card.
Here’s the thing the anti-vaxxers, vaccine hesitant, or whatever you want to call them, just don’t get.
Our country is in peril from the deadliest epidemic in a century. And getting vaccinated is a basic civic duty, just like voting, paying your taxes, obeying the law, and answering your country’s call to serve in the military in times of war and crisis.
Our elected leaders, whatever their political persuasion, should be the first in line to get their shots and protect the lives of their constituents and their fellow citizens.
I don’t blame Jones for pushing back – that’s his job. But no one should be covering for the State House’s vaccine slackers.
Here’s looking at you Speaker Mariano.
New Boston mayor’s ambitious agenda rests on a slender mandate
Michelle Wu won big on Nov. 2. But a landslide? Really?
An uber progressive with a budding national profile, Wu made history Tuesday when she became the woman and first person of color to be sworn in as mayor of Boston.
The Boston Globe and Washington Post were both quick to call Wu’s clearly decisive 64-to-36 percent win over City Councilor Annissa Essaibi George a “landslide.”
Sorry, but 20 percent of the city’s electorate - Wu’s share of the vote in Boston - does not a landslide make.
By comparison, her opponent, Essaibi George, got the thumbs up from roughly 12 percent of the eligible voters.
Both numbers attest to the very modest portion of the city’s electorate that turned out.
Why care? Well, turnout matters, especially when you campaign on an agenda that includes bringing back some form rent control, free T service in Boston, and blowing up the city’s process for vetting development projects.
Winning the support of a fifth of the eligible voters in Boston is a relatively small and potentially rickety platform from which to make sweeping changes.
Kevin Cullen, the Globe metro columnist, was quick himself to call Wu’s victory “by any standard, a landslide and decisive mandate.”
But Cullen also called out the elephant in the room – the low turnout for an election whose historic nature has been talked up for months in the local and even national press.
“For all the talk of the most transformational election in the city’s history, less than a third of eligible voters turned up,” Cullen writes.
The incredible shrinking – and maddeningly disingenuous - General Electric
In the wake of its big breakup plans, GE is once again scrambling to reassure anyone who still cares that it has no plans to bail on Boston, where it famously moved its global headquarters five years ago.
Or at least no plans “in the near term,” as the Globe’s story on the iconic but struggling company’s latest comeback plans, which involve splitting into three publicly-traded firms.
“For the foreseeable future, I don’t plan to move my desk,” GE CEO Larry Culp told the Globe. “Boston has been a good home for us.”
Nice to know.
Still, somebody might want to tell the good folks out in Cincinnati about this. Apparently, they’ve read the news out of Boston and are already measuring the drapes for GE’s next big headquarters move.
Honestly, GE assurances about its future plans, especially as they relate to the company’s once grand plans to build a high-rise headquarters near the Seaport, are worth less than the paper are printed on. Or the digital space they clutter up.
Under now former CEO Jeff Immelt, GE rode into Boston five years ago on a wave of local media hype and a juicy $145 million tax incentive package, courtesy of state and city leaders.
There were excited news stories about possible construction of a helipad for GE brass and the shiny, new $200 million headquarters complex the company had pledged to build.
But a little closer examination would have revealed signs of poor corporate character, with top GE brass nursing a grudge against Connecticut’s elected leadership and bragging the Boston deal would cost the company nothing, according to a book by two Wall Street Journal reporters, “Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and The Fall of General Electric.”
GE’s headquarters deal went south fast.
A little over a year after the much-ballyhooed deal was inked in 2016, Immelt, who had orchestrated the Boston headquarters move, was out, while corporate giant’s stock price was cratering.
But GE managed to keep the fiction alive that everything was right on track in Boston, a claim that increasingly stretched credulity as it quietly delayed its headquarters plans, then downsized them, and then finally sold its would-be headquarters building off in 2019 and returned the tax incentive dollars to state coffers.
Today all that’s left is some rented space, with fewer than 200 people working there, according the Globe piece mentioned above.
GE can keep spinning this story and talking about how much it loves Boston and has no plans to go anywhere else in the “foreseeable future.”
But the time has long since come for the media to stop playing along.
With friends like these …
President Joe Biden on Monday indulged in some well-deserved chest-thumping.
The president signed into law the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill aimed at shoring up our nation’s crumbling roads, bridges, electrical grid, passenger rail service, you name it.
It may not be the “monumental step forward,” as Biden described it in his victory statement, but it’s certainly big and its definitely long overdue.
The vote came after months of brutal Democratic Party infighting over the bill and its companion measure, the $1.75 trillion “human infrastructure” bill championed by progressives.
The party’s left wing duked it out with so-called moderates U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, sending Biden’s poll numbers into the gutter.
But you know, there’s always going to be somebody who has got to rain on the parade.
And that someone was U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, with the Massachusetts Democrat joining with other members of the so-called ‘Squad’ to vote against the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill when it finally cleared the House on Nov. 5.
Pressley and other uber progressives were apparently mad House leaders had to back off on pledges to pass the much larger and more politically fraught $1.75 trillion social services bill in lockstep with the more traditional infrastructure plan Biden signed into law on Monday.
Ok, it took guts for Pressley to push back against a sitting president in her own party. But the timing wasn’t so hot.
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.