Red Sox want to make permanent a sweetheart tax break for the use of Lansdowne Street and Yawkey Way. The BRA should get more for the city.
Today’s Globe story that a deal is near for developer John Rosenthal’s Fenway Center is good news for all concerned. The idea that this project would have a 99-year lease on air rights over the Turnpike between Beacon Street and Brookline Avenue near Kenmore must have Red Sox owners lusting even more to lock in the current low cost street lease they have with Boston over Landsdowne Street (site of Green Monster seats) and Yawkey Way (site of souvenir and sausage vendors.)
I stand second to no one in my lifelong love for the Red Sox, my pride in their performance out of the gate this spring, and my hope that they’ll regain that April momentum. But a recent Boston Globe story about the team’s move to make permanent its favorable street lease deal, at the expense of the city and its taxpayers, is a whole other take on the otherwise beloved home team.
You know those Yawkey Way sausages that smell so good but send your arteries closing? I get indigestion when I realize that for the past decade the Sox have had a sweetheart deal to use Yawkey Way, owned by the city, for the sale of concessions and Landsdowne Street air rights for the Green Monster seats. Over the past ten years, the Red Sox have paid only an average of $186,000 annually to use these streets, while generating from that license an estimated $5 million a year. They’ve also tripled the price of Green Monster seats, but the license is capped at five percent a year. Surely these profits are not being passed on to fans, who pay top-of-the-majors ticket prices.
Locking in that low rate for life would significantly increase the team’s net worth should it decide to sell, but I don’t see a commensurate benefit for the city or for us fans. Someone I love dearly dismisses Red Sox Nation as a clever marketing cover for essentially a private real estate play with a publicly seductive entertainment hook. I refuse to be so cynical.
I understand this is not the community-owned Green Bay Packers, and I acknowledge that team ownership has an obligation to try to get all it can for its business partners. But the city is under no obligation to acquiesce. And it clearly should not give in to this demand.
BRA Director Peter Meade’s reported earlier insistence that “the fee be increased and tied to income earned on the streets, rather than the consumer price index” makes sense… even for die-hard Red Sox fans.
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Congress has done little more than posturing and pontificating, Cong. Michael Capuano told the New England Council. Hints at preference for hands-on governing he executed as mayor. Could run an energetic race for governor in 2014 if he chooses to run.
The House has passed a budget. The Senate has passed a budget. But we’re not likely to get a budget, Congressman Michael Capuano told Monday’s New England Council breakfast meeting, because Congress is still kicking the can down the road, drifting toward the next crisis, probably this fall. The only difference between the majority party and the minority party, he asserts, is that, when the Democrats were in control, “at least we had serious debates about serious issues.” Now, he sees only pontificating and posturing.
Regarding the deficit, he told the business crowd, everyone got a little greedy. People wanted that $20 tax cut in their pockets, instead of having it go to Social Security. If you want Social Security, the WIC program, interstate highways, you have to pay for it. Too many people are afraid to tell the truth. If you want these things, you have to pay for them.
“I am a liberal Democrat,” he said. “I want to pay our bills. As Mayor, you have to balance the budget. It’s the law. The federal government doesn’t have to. But I don’t support excess debt.”
Capuano’s frustration becomes more evident each time he speaks to the Council. The former Somerville mayor reflects on how, when he ran in a 9-person race in 1998, he was viewed as a moderate to conservative. These days, and certainly in a national context, he’s introduced as an unabashed liberal. But, he says, “to have a good liberal society, you need a strong business climate.” The lesson any mayor can tell you is “there’s no liberal way to collect the trash.”
Positions like mayor or governor have their own challenges, but Capuano seems to miss his executive days when he could roll up his sleeves and not be dragged down by endless, highly partisan debates about non-issues, generating little more than hot air. Small wonder then that the Taunton Daily Gazette reported today, in a story filed by the State House News Service, that Capuano is mulling a run for governor. A decision could come soon.
The scrappy Democrat is passionate, liberal, and practical. He is informed by social justice and animated by the art of the practical. His years in Congress, living the big picture, and his years as mayor, handling the nuts and bolts of government, would make him a strong contender. He ran a primary race for U.S. Senate but lost to Martha Coakley, who, in the general election, well, you know. If Capuano had been the party’s nominee more than two years ago, he would, at a minimum, have run a more energetic race. He certainly has the capacity to run that kind of race for governor in 2014.
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IRS has to apologize for targeting Tea Party and other right wing groups. Liberals should be as outraged as conservatives. While Presidents going back to Roosevelt may have used the IRS to punish political opponents, Richard Nixon carried it the farthest. It is an abuse of power that undermines democracy. Now we need to know if it was truly lower-level overzealous employees or done at the direction of someone at a higher level.
A civic or social welfare organization is not allowed to support political candidates of any stripe. Partisan activities are a no-no if a non-profit wants to preserve its federal tax exemption. But the law has to be applied evenly.
The Internal Revenue Service has apparently targeted the Tea Party and other right-wing groups to make sure that they weren’t violating their non-profit status by supporting and opposing political candidates. According to the Wall St. Journal, the excess targeting took place during the 2012 election when the IRS noticed that applications for 501(c) (4) status more than doubled. The agency based its greater scrutiny on whether the group had “tea party” or “patriots” in its name. The IRS even asked at least one group to disclose its donors, which isn’t supposed to happen.
The IRS has apologized, but it’s important to know whether this happened due to over-zealous lower level employees in Cincinnati (as claimed) or at a higher, policy level. Liberals should be as concerned as conservatives about the IRS handling of the inquiries. Can you say Richard Nixon? As Reuters reported, secretly recorded White House tapes revealed that the paranoid and anti-Semitic president had ordered Richard Haldemann to direct IRS audits of wealthy Jewish donors giving to the Democratic Party. Nixon also had the IRS lean on people and organizations on his “enemies list,” including the Fund for Investigative Journalism (which funded Sy Hersh’s reporting on the My Lai massacre) and the Center for Corporate Responsibility.
While there are also stories of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson trying to use the IRS politically,( according to Joe Klein writing in Time, even Franklin Roosevelt did it), no one ever did it like Richard Nixon, who reportedly created a special unit within the IRS for just that purpose. It was closed by the late IRS Commissioner Donald Alexander in 1977.
Using the force of government, especially the much feared and loathed IRS, as a way of punishing one’s political opponents strikes at the heart of our democracy. We need to find out how and why this happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
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Tamarlan Tsarnaev had provided clues of his radicalization that were apparent to members of his mosque, which on at least one occasion had ejected him from a religious service. Moderate Muslims need to have closer relationship to authorities, including the FBI, which dropped Tsarnaev from its watch list when there seemed to be no further reason to keep him there. The disruptive behavior would have provided that reason had the FBI known about it. Al Qaeda propagandists reported by NY Times to be encouraging more homegrown terrorism, reinforcing the need for better cooperation among official agencies, and between community and security entities.
It wasn’t enough to decimate the core of what was Al Qaeda in 2001. The landscape in certain hospitable countries like Yemen and Syria is now dotted with Al Qaeda offshoots and affiliates. And, for the last eight years, the home-grown variety has been particularly vexing. The Sunday morning talk shows were full of attempts to learn from the Boston bombings: how to deal with self-radicalized individuals like the Tsarnaevs.
Nidal Malik Hasan seems a case in point. He was the shooter in the mass murder at Ft. Hood in Texas in 2009, a psychiatrist, of all things, who had been in touch with Anwar al-Awlaki, based in Yemen. Apparently Hasan’s colleagues were aware of his increasingly radical thinking and isolated behavior but did nothing.
A recent article in The National Journal documents how clues were missed in the case of the Tsarnaevs. Starting in 2012, Tamarlan Tsarnaev was reportedly given to angry outbursts during his imam’s sermons and, on at least one occasion, was asked to leave the mosque because of his disruption. This report was confirmed by Reuters. By contrast, a press release from the Islamic Society of Boston says that, “In their visits they never exhibited any violent sentiments or behaviour. Otherwise, they would have been immediately reported to the FBI.”
FBI monitoring can’t do the job alone. Clearly the moderate Muslim community has a role to play, and, according to a study quoted in the same National Journal article, more than a quarter of disrupted plots by would-be Muslim terrorists were exposed by members of Muslim-American communities. This is a hard time for the Muslim community, and the interfaith community in Boston has reached out to the concerned Muslims who make up the majority.
Calls have increased for better cooperation between federal authorities and Muslim-Americans, some of whom have asked for training in dealing with these situations. There a lot we must learn from Britain’s Prevent program, developed in the wake of the London bombings in July 2005. To be sure, there have been questions raised about violations of civil liberties, but designing and implementing multilayered community programs, which include concerns about ideological violence as a component but are not the exclusive focus, could ameliorate allegations of profiling, strengthen community ties and foster proactive protection.
Over the weekend, we began to learn about an Obama administration program developed two years ago to strength relationships among federal agencies and community organizations, a plan that to this day still apparently exists largely on paper and is virtually unfunded.
The challenge is to resist the temptation to generalize and stereotype and, on the other hand, to be careful of the political correctness that would prevent an early warning system from becoming effective. This time around, our early warning systems failed at the federal agency level, which failed to monitor Tamerlan Tsarnaev and dropped him from its watch list, and at the community level, where no one spoke out about the increasingly radical behavior of this dangerous terrorist in our midst.
Today’s New York Times reports that Al Qaeda propagandists are encouraging more “homemade” terrorists. What will be the reason next time for our failure to intercept the plot?
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Foreign policy has to be about more than drones, seals and troop deployment. John Kerry lays out approach that spends up front to combat disenfranchisement, radicalization and terrorism. Congress not know for taking long-term view.
“Our credibility in one place affects our credibility in another,” Secretary of State John Kerry told about 20 members of the Association of Opinion Journalists in a briefing Monday at the State Department.
Syria’s use of sarin gas “is a red line for the President,” but we’re “not talking about boots on the ground.” We must work with others whose interests align with ours. So, too, with North Korea. China, which provides North Korea food, fuel and banking services, is the key to confronting Kim Jong-un’s saber rattling. (It’s a more nuanced response, not the reflexive muscle urged by Senators McCain and Graham, and it’s what appears to be happening with Iran.)
State Dept. photo
In a 25-minute presentation, Kerry laid out an integrated view of American foreign policy, premised on the idea that “We can’t protect America with seal teams, drones and deployment alone. We need to offer a more kinetic component of combating terrorism.” Besides, he later noted, “it is much cheaper to invest in diplomats than in troops.”
Building new democracy is difficult, but, to avoid extremism, a “minor” level of investment is essential.The budget of the State Department is a scant one percent of the federal budget, for all initiatives, foreign aid, embassies, everything they do. Yet, Kerry contends, it yields a significant return on investment.
Stimulating American international trade is part of this mix. Every $200,000 in product that we export represents a job created in the United States, Kerry said. Eleven of our 15 largest trading partners in the world used to receive foreign aid from us. Now Japan and Europe are giving aid to others. Seen that way, “foreign policy really isn’t foreign policy at all but domestic policy carried into a connected world.”
How connected? The varied events of the Arab Spring, he said, were set off by a Tunisian fruit vendor seeking fair placement of his fruit cart without being hassled by local police. Initially, the events had nothing to do with Islamism or ideology. Tunisia was just the first of several eruptions against governments failing to meet citizens’ needs, eruptions magnified by tensions between modernity and the status quo.
So, too, with Egypt, a generational revolution, fueled by tweets and text messages. When an election occurred, the oldest organization -the Muslim Brotherhood – stepped in, appealing to young people without jobs, seeing no future. Leaders around the world rightly worry about the “tsunami of the disenfranchised.”
If we don’t want extremists exporting violence to various part of the world, we need to work with our allies to help transformation occur. If we don’t offer a better vision, he warns, extremism will move faster than democracy.
Despite many serious worldwide challenges, Kerry is largely optimisitic. ”With winding down in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, we are less at risk with our forces than we’ve been in many years, ” he said. The scores of agencies working with our embassies have blunted plots from abroad that the American people never did see.
“Our nation is the indispensible country. We are looked to for leadership everywhere,” he said. The challenge, as always, is to get Congress and the American people to be willing to pay up front for foreign initiatives and to see them as related to our long-term domestic well-being.
I come away thinking Kerry’s views are not original. He’s well versed in the issues, knows the Obama priorities and is an able advocate. But his task is daunting. In the old days, even in the face of public hostility and indifference, there were leaders in the Congress capable of shaping bipartisan foreign policies. But most of them are gone, and those remaining are unwilling to spend their capital educating voters. We’re a nation , not known for taking the long view. Failure to do so today has higher costs than ever.
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