What did a bunch of Globies do? What did they know and when did they know it?
This is like the Catholic Church pedophile horror. The collapse of the legitimacy of most news media starting with the Globe.
Here’s what happened. Former FBI John Morris testifying in the Whitey Bulger case (he’s back on the satnd Monday) said that he and the Globe’s Gerry O’Neill conspired to have it appear William Bulger was corrupt.
Morris stated on direct that the 75 State Street investigation was the result of undue pressure from O’Neil. (You know who I mean; BlackMass O’neill) In fact, according to Morris, when the case was closed and went nowhere Morris re-opened only because O’Neill pressured him to.
So basically folks, Boston has been sold bullshit by the Globe regarding Bill Bulger. They used us all. Made us look foolish because most of us bought it. Why wouldn’t we? We have our own problems, no need to look further. Bill Bulger is corrupt. Like paris is for lovers. Never been there but that’s what everyone says.
Now we all know Morris is one big lie and willing to use threats and intimidation to get what he wants. (He’s testified to this) so I highly doubt it went down the exact way he says it did. An FBI supervisor pressured by a reporter? But if it did the pressure had to be from threat of publication of something the Globe had on him.
More likely Morris blackmailed the Globe via some writers? editors? publishers?
And if John Morris was blackmailing the Globe I suggest it was standard operation procedure for FBI agents to finds ways to and control media people. How else to explain it? I mean face it Folks. It’s still J. Edgar’s FBI.
The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. If one were to do a forensic review of FBI related news and follow up of negative reports the conclusions I suggest would be unavoidable. The 150 out of 150 justifiable shooting police? The pump a dozen bullets in a guy being interrogated and not have to answer for it police?
So, like the pedophile priest, how many at the Globe were journalistically raping The Bulgers and others while knowing it was based on a lie. Now if Morris was blackmailing you I’ll give you some points. But what about the others. At what point did they agree to look the other way? Like Cardinal Law.
And the Globies who continue to make money and promote themselves as all things Bulger. Cullen, Shelley.
We should find out more Monday when Morris is cross-examined on this. Then we can wait for O’Neill to take the stand later this summer.
But make no mistake about what’s happening. Thirty years of provincial lore is imploding and The Boston Globe is being exposed as the corrupt money making entity that illegally and immorally attempts to influence government actions, elections, and leadership positions by conspring with the FBI to manufacture criminal investigations and write about them.
Sound familiar? Probation scandal? The taxi thing going? Its mutual. The Globe writes and the feds investigate. The fes do something and the Globe praises. They do something bad, like Caswell Hotel, and they ignore best they can.
And Carmen Ortiz their “Woman of the Year”.
A corrupt government cannot be successful without a corrupt press.
You think the Globe bidders are following this and discussing its implications? Ya think?
….at the trial. Agent Morris said he fully investigated the Bill Bulger in the 75 State Street matter and said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by Bill Bulger “on the merits”. But the evidence uncovered by the FBI’s investigation contradicted the Globe’s Spotlight Series which painted Bulger as corrupt. Morris’s investigation almost killed O’Neil’s chances of getting a bullshit journalism award that year. So instead of printing a retraction, the Glibe doubled down. They called Morris over to Morrisey Blvd and told him to reopen the investigation and interview Bulger. Contrary to what you’re taught in law school, Bulger agrees to be interviewed by the Feds. Even Bulger’s lawyer Bob Popeo agreed to let Bulger be interviewed because he was innocent in fact. So Morris sent two agents over to interrogate Bulger. They too concluded there was no case against Bulger. Morris immediately leaked the agents’ reports to the Globe. There they twisted and took out of context Bulger’s interrogation reports.
The Globe should be ashamed of itself for publishing information scumbags like Morris without some indices of reliability and accuracy. Instead the Globe remains proud of its efforts to kill James Bulger and ruin his brother Bill’s career. The Globe’s attacks on the Bulgers was illegal, immoral, unethical, and ironically corrupt.
In the spirit of tolerance, the Globe owes a very public apology to the Bulger family.
IMOORTANT QUESTIONS:
What did the Globe have on Morris to make him work for them and break the law by leaking?
Does the Globe have any evidence that contradicts Morris’s testimony and don’t they have a moral and civic obligation to disclose anything showing Morris lied on the witness stand? To hide such information would be a fraud on the court.
It’s time for the Globe to make amends for their crimes and unsubstantiated attacks on Bulgers.
The question is, provided his constitutional rights as a defendant are upheld, did he murder people or not, nothing more, nothing less. Are you saying he didn’t kill anyone? Other than that:
I didn’t mean to promote this by the way, my mouse must have slipped.
Not about the crap EB3 is putting out, but why Judy Meredith keeps recommending it. She has had a long and valuable career representing progressive causes to legislators. Her technique has always been to build credibility with legislators by publicly defending them from the accusations of goo-goos and liberals like me.
EB3 must be someone who can do a lot of good for us at the state house. Because she was around in 1989 and she must know that what EB3 is posting is garbage.
I just hope it’s worth it.
Actually I started as volunteer lobbyist with an adoptive parent group in 1968 when Bill Bulger was the new chair of the Judiciary Committee. I didn’t ever agree with him about some social issues, but when it came to economic justice for the low income people I worked with, he was a champ. And I have defended him on those grounds. And I think EB3 ‘s post on the Bulger trial are solid information we have never seen anywhere else.
I would like to refute your statement that I “build credibility with legislators by publicly defending them from the accusations of goo-goos and liberals like me.”
My theory of change in the public policy arena is based on building positive and productive relationships with elected and appointed policy makers by creating “hero opportunities” for them by helping my clients develop a compelling sympathetic message and fashion an effective achievable solution that can create 200 “hero opportunities” for a local legislators to champion a solution that creates a positive change in the lives of a critical mass of constituents. Public officials are starved for public hero opportunities organized by local grassroots activist that vote. Guess why?
There are three very simple observations or rules that govern decision making by public officials at every level of government.
Public officials make different decisions when watched by the affected constituents. That;’s why I organize grassroots by legislative district.
My practice of Lobbying is simply getting the right information to the right policy maker at the right time in concert with the grassroots network. (Before the bill is filed, before the public hearing, before the Ways and Means committee, before the floor vote, before it gets toi the governor’s desk.) That’s the only way to pass a bill, there are a thousand ways to kill it.)
Public officials weigh opinion equal to facts. Scientists hate that one, but the State House is a human place where pretty ordinary human beings who share most of our standard Jewish/Christian/Buddhist/Muslim/Unitarian values of being kind and treating others well are often confronted with highly charged, polarized public issuers like abortion, capital punishment, gay marriage, racial profiling, gun control, voting rights, immigration policy.and yes raising taxes in support of our government.
In short, I have never seen any profit, as a card carrying liberal advocate, in publicly accusing Public Officials of lying or of being corrupt — especially on BMG a public blog frequented by anonymous pundits in the progressive community.
have a good day.
I feel compelled to mention another area where more than “scientists” hate the way public officials “weigh opinion equal to facts”: climate change. There are certain issues, some of them of crucial importance, where facts matter and public opinion is simply wrong. Another hot-button issue right now involves the near-death of our New England fisheries. In both of these (climate change and fisheries), science compellingly leads anyone who is paying attention to unpopular conclusions. Do you really propose that good governance means ignoring that science in favor of the “popular” view?
I’m struck by your next-to-last paragraph. It motivates me to ask whether you’ve ever known of or seen a corrupt public official.
Perhaps we can agree the Spiro Agnew was corrupt as Governor of Maryland — he arranged to personally profit from kickbacks received from contractors that he directed state work towards.
Would you agree that society would “profit” from such corruption being exposed?
Do you think that no “profit” was served by the exposure of any of the three previous Speakers of the Massachusetts House? Was no profit served by, for example, revealing the Cognos episode? Would it have been better if that scandal had been handled “privately” (since you seem to focus on “public” accusations)?
I’m disappointed that you so strongly suggest that BMG and blogs like it avoid addressing the appearance, if not the substance, of public corruption — especially when it appears to be as pervasive as it now is in Massachusetts. I don’t mean just the kind of venal corruption typified by Spiro Agnew and Michael McLaughlin — I mean the kind of private back-scratching that leads to the Probation Department scandal, the abuses of the pension and disability systems, and a host of similar phenomena.
The fact is that the public infrastructure of Massachusetts is crumbling. The fact is that we have refused to collect the taxes necessary to maintain that infrastructure for decades. The fact is that our legislature has just given a big middle finger to a Governor willing to speak the truth about this reality. The fact is that our legislature has, as we speak, again refused to fund the needed investment in public infrastructure.
Increased taxes are unpopular. They almost always are. Subway cars whose doors don’t close and highway bridges that collapse are also unpopular. The unfortunate and unpopular fact is that increased taxes are needed, right now.
Public blogs like BMG tend to reflect the public’s heightened awareness of perceived corruption when unpopular tax increases are nevertheless required.
You seem to be advocating continued denial of the need for increased taxes (motivated by its unpopularity) and steadfast stonewalling about the appearance of pervasive corruption (based on the “profit” that you haven’t seen).
Is that really what you intend?
But please let me clarify my thoughts on that next to last paragraph.
As a card carrying liberal progressive lobbyist I have always advised my clients to focus on educating their own public officials on the facts of their issue, thereby affecting the Legislators opinion and then persuade them to publicly champion their campaign on the facts and their opinion. And then be prepared to publicly thank them for it. Even if they disagree with them on other issues and even if they have heard nasty things about their character or their personal or professional behavior.
And sometimes we fail to persuade them on the facts, and while we tell them we are very disappointed, we hope they remain open to listening to use because we’ll be back and try again.
Until we can organize and mobilize a strong majority of progressive/liberal VOTERS in a district it is simply counter productive for a handful of bloggers to attack a pubic official in the name of the progressive community – who ever that is and wherever it is based.
Remember the smart political advice from the gentleman from Concord Ralph Waldo Emerson. “If you strike at the King, strike to kill.
Enough.
I’m a big fan of your work, not only having read and studied your book (which should be required reading at BMG), but having seen your work first hand.
I think you got it exactly right in your reply to Tom. Don’t strike at the king. But I would add, don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel. Why would anyone endorse EB3 in his personal attack on Globe reporters, when his facts are all wrong, his theories absurd and self-contradictory, and he has recently veered into undisguised anti-semitism?
It doesn’t make sense on its face. My guess is that you know who EB3 is, But it’s just a guess and if I’m wrong I apologize.
I suspect we agree on far more than we differ about.
The dilemma I face when coming to terms with a Martha Coakley candidacy is that she, in the role of Queen (in your Emerson analogy), has enormous influence over what facts and what — if any — court of law hears those facts. She also wields similarly enormous influence over the Globe.
Similarly, I view BMG and blogs like it as key components of the kind of grass-roots energy that we all agree is crucial to long-term sustainable good government.
We therefore run a significant risk of getting snared by a catch-22 where the information needed by the grassroots to effectively recruit progressive voters and candidates is hobbled by the unwillingness of media outlets like the Globe to discover and reveal the facts needed to demonstrate the dissonance between the public officials that hold office and the progressive men and women whom some of us prefer.
I see little or no evidence that Tim Murray was anything but a good progressive leader done in by a political establishment that wanted him out of the way. The chorus of innuendo, selective leaks, stories published and then recanted, and so on had the effect of destroying his career — whether intentional or not. The immediate beneficiary of that chorus was Martha Coakley — whether intentional or not.
The resulting hurt, anger, frustration, and cynicism is real and is shared by at least some us (especially some of us who live in the western part of the state). I therefore feel that your suggestion that we should avoid discussing that on BMG is counterproductive to the vision and goals of BMG. I grant that such discussions are perhaps uncomfortable for Ms. Coakley, her supporters, and those who work for campaign.
The dissonance between Mr. DeLeo’s actions as Speaker and the opinion of an overwhelming majority of Massachusetts Democratic voters is, in my view, similarly appropriate for discussion and debate here.
In my view, the advancement of the progressive agenda is more important than the careers of specific party officials. It may even be more important than the election of certain Democratic legislators.
I find myself wondering if a Massachusetts legislature with a 60/40 split of genuinely progressive legislators versus conservative Democrats and the GOP might not be far more effective at advancing a progressive agenda than the current 80/20 Democrat/Republican split.
I submit that Massachusetts Democratic voters are more progressive — perhaps by far — than the legislature that currently purports to represent them. It seems to me that this dissonance lies at the heart of our differences on this matter.
I would like to see the Massachusetts Democratic Party be far more progressive than the current legislative record indicates that it is. If that means that today’s Kings and Queens must be unseated, so be it.
Perhaps Judy M. has just been around long enough to know that much of what EB3 writes is actually on the mark. People who remember the history behind today’s headlines can attest. If EB3’s observations are too upsetting to you, switch to former prosecutor Matt Connolly’s fact driven blog: http://www.thetrialofwhiteybulger.com for a real eye opening look at the Globe, the US Atty’s office, the FBI, the State Police and Boston Police (not to forget the murderer Matarano’s business partner Howie Carr!)…there is plenty of shame to go around!…The Globe has been playing footsie with the feds for decades…tit for tat…and it still goes on today.
This notion of the Globe persecuting Bill Bulger over the years is a load of crap, quite frankly. As for 75 State St, then Senate President Bulger got hundreds of thousands of dollars via a real estate deal for no apparent reason. It was totally newsworthy and should have been investigated.
If anything the Globe was shamefully soft on both Bulgers, they even kept pushing the shameful & absurd notion of Whitey as a Robing Hood of Southie who kept out the drugs and only stole from those who deserved it well into the 1990’s.
I moved to Massachusetts immediately after graduating from college, in 1974. I grew up in a MD suburb of Washington DC.
When I arrived in Boston, the city (and state) was being roiled by court-ordered school busing. I thought I had experienced racism in Maryland/Virginia/Washington region of my childhood. My mother’s family was all from the deep South (Louisiana), and I made the rash assumption as a graduating senior that some sort of “racism gradient” existed, making racism most pronounced in the deep South, present but restrained in the area where I grew up, and mostly absent in New England.
I was wrong.
The vicious and vile racism I saw every day in 1974 was both revolting and eye-opening. Angry mobs of white parents pelted fearful and crying children with epithets, rocks, and signs seemingly every day. A Black man assaulted with an American flag on the plaza of Boston City Hall.
One striking aspect to me were the many white Democrats who flagrantly pandered to worst aspects of the bigotry and racism of the angry mobs. Pixie Palladino, Louise Day Hicks, and a host of others made only token efforts to disguise or moderate their hate-speech. By 1978, Senate President William Bulger was among that anti-busing crowd. More restrained, certainly, but his loyalties were clear.
Even more striking to me was the friendly treatment given these officials by the allegedly-liberal Boston Globe. Yes, there were occasional cluck-cluck-racism stories. Nevertheless, I grew up reading the Washington Post during the Katherine Graham years, and my family took the then-reputable “Evening Star”. Both papers would have eviscerated any public figure who so openly espoused racism. The Globe was careful to preserve its ties to political power.
I remember the Globe building the mythology around Billy and Whitey Bulger. It was obvious patent horse manure. For example, I remember the Globe patiently explaining Whitey Bulgers lottery win — “everybody has the same chance of winning, he just got lucky”. Yeah, right.
I join scout in rejecting the idea that Globe “persecuted” William Bulger. To the contrary, the Globe created Bill Bulger. The “good brother/bad brother” meme was just to delicious for the Globe pass up. It’s true that his respect from the Globe declined as his political career (and therefore his power) waned, but surely that is how the politics of power works.
I am, frankly, glad to be rid of both Bulgers. I do wish we could somehow get a real newspaper in this town.
Really tom, so u ride up ere in the 70s, read the globe and say how racist it was here. Realy tom, fuck you! You knew and know nothing. The narrative played out by the Globe is your bible it seems. But only when it fits your purposes.
So you pick and choose when the Globe is right and when is wrong.
BTW the guy swinging the flag in the picture you posted isnthe brother of Steve Rakes, a piece of shit thug who the feds have testifying that Whitey stole his business.
Tom, if you want to be lazy in life and diivide everything up in to nice easy to understand stories with heroes and villiansns than continue what you r doing.
Sorry you lost the civil war dude, but don’t come up here and tell us you phony sweet southerners have it over us. You don’t
And your the worse kind. A suburban southerner. Like living in a closet. No wonder you have zero street smarts and comprehension.
Sorry the working class Irish and Italian Americans are all scumbags in your book Tom.
but never mind ………………
I have no patience with the racism that I saw, first-hand, here in Boston in the late 1970s. Like it or not, it was more explicit, more violent, more crude than anything I experienced in either Rockville, MD or Washington DC.
I don’t care whether the racism is from Irish Americans, Italian Americans, or any other demographic you want to name — it was despicable then and it’s despicable now.
I’m sorry that you’re so eager to defend those racist actions. I’m also sorry that you demean the majority of the working class, including working-class Irish and Italian Americans, who were and are as disgusted by the racism of that period as I was.
Man I wish i could be you. Just a perfect thinking person. Don’t bother me with details. Right tom. Morons can’t process details.
Just black and white.
Why the hate tom? You, bob, and rain man mike cote have venom when when it’s all things ernie.
Tell me mike. There were over 40,000 people living in South Boston during busing. Is it your opinion that everyone of them was a racist? Or, were just those that opposed forced busing racists.
I am curious as to how you cast this racism net of yours.
I want to take advantage of the worldly perspective you graced our city with when you moved up from the south.
I was thinking of the maroons surrounding schoolbuses filled with terrified children. The ones yelling racial epithets at six year olds.
Those are the ones I was talking about — and the politicians who pandered to them.
Words hurt tom and you whipped up a whole lot of hurt. You backtracking doesn’t make sense. You said irish and Italian working class. Not knuckleheads throwing rocks. I’m not sure they are the same thing. Hold on, lemme check a thesaurus.
This may take a few minutes, so smoke em if ya gottem tom.
Nope, don’t see no “kuckleheads throwing rocks” as another term for working class Irish or Italian.
Hmm, try again Tom
You named the ethnic groups, not me.
I think I was clear enough about the focus of my disgust. Perhaps in your distress you confused me with someone else — I don’t think any “Mike” has commented in this exchange.
“Backtracking”? Nope. You wrote:
You asked a question, and I answered it.
White students hit and kick a black student who is on the ground between parked cars outside Boston’s racially troubled Hyde Park High School, Feb. 11, 1975, as police move in to break up the fight. Several students were arrested. The fighting broke out as black students were boarding buses.
Metropolitan District Police take an unidentified youth into custody following stoning of school busses on Sept. 14, 1974. Nine people were arrested in the incident.
Some 5,000 people march on Friday, Oct. 4 1974 through South Boston to protest school busing. The neighborhood was a focal point of opposition to the desegregation plan ordered by Judge W. Arthur Garrity.
All the bluster in the world isn’t going to change the shame and suffering these racists brought about. You named the ethic groups, not me. In spite of your best efforts to distort them, I think my words were clear enough:
Regarding “knuckleheads throwing rocks”, here’s another vintage shot of who the agitators against busing were:
I don’t see anything in that image to say anything about the demographics of the all-white crowd. I don’t even know that anyone in that crowd threw any rocks. I do know that the energy of those mobs was fueled by bigotry and racism, and pandered to by the politicians like Ms. Hicks, Ms. Paladino, and Mr. Bulger — and was fanned by the Boston Globe.
Really dude, you’re back tracking.
All that work and cutting and pasting to hide your statement. You remember the statement?
No
and you don’t even know my ethnicity but your hate for irish and italian American blinds you.
Not sure what your pics prove. Except, I think you believe anyone from South Boston who opposed busing is a racist. Can we agree that that is your position Tom?
Please stop deflecting your hateful speech on me. This is not about me. I am just an observer and commentator on your obvious hate. Your words don’t lie.
Too much hate i the world man. Too much hate.
Maybe that’s your mug in one of those pix.
Yes, busing in Boston highlighted that racism wasn’t only in the South, it was only full display for the entire country to see right here in Boston.
But Ernie’s original response was to your comment that Boston was worse than the South.
That is absurd.
Maybe a history lesson is in order.
Perhaps you should ask some of them about Boston’s racial climate.
We Don’t Feel Welcome Here:
African Americans and Hispanics
in Metro Boston
Also:
Is it worse here than other places? I can’t find any studies to validate that view, but Tom is not the only transplant from the South I’ve heard say it, and the others were African-Americans.
Guess which MLB team was the very last to integrate. Yes, it was the Sox, 12 years after the first two teams did it. More recent history includes a lot of minority Sox players complaining about racism in the city. Here’s David Ortiz in May, talking about a Dan Shaughnessy column in the Globe.
You may find the assertion that racism is worse here than in parts of the South surprising, but it is not absurd.
I said that a “racism gradient” I expected to find didn’t exist. I meant that Boston was worse than where I grew up. Washington DC and Maryland are not “the South” in the way that Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi are “the South”. I needed to remind EB3 that Maryland did NOT join the secessionist states.
I tried to be more explicit in my follow-up comment:
Boston was, in fact, far worse than Washington DC and Maryland. I don’t remember seeing anything, even in Virginia, that compared — I only knew Northern Virginia, though.
South Boston was a place where people of color were routinely beaten up just for being there. So was Charlestown. Rumor has it that the North End was the same. There were no similar white enclaves in the Washington DC area where I grew up. None.
I’m not, at all, saying that ALL the residents of those neighborhoods were racist. I am saying that those episodes happened in those neighborhoods, and they did not happen in the area where I grew up.
Frankly, I view your perception to be an oversimplification favored by suburban liberals, designed to emphasize the sins of working class voters in Boston and ignore the failings of the suburban liberals.
No one can deny that that racism was rampant and ugly in those Boston neighborhoods at that time. What is generally forgotten is that the people in those neighborhoods were justifiably angry because they got shafted by the suburban liberals. Kids of families in those neighborhoods were compelled by force to leave nearby functioning schools and attend faraway, failing schools.
We must move your children to this other school that is plagued by violence and failure in order to redress manifest racial injustice. In time, we hope that inegration improves the quality of this other school. Sure, that may mean that YOUR child’s education doesn’t happen, but that is a sacrafice that we are willing to make. Now excuse me, I must go pick up Junior at BB&N.
The suburban liberals were happy to support busing because they bore exactly none of the cost. Rather, they took a handful of kids through METCO and congratulated themselves for being so high-minded. Meanwhile, no kids from Newton North got frog-marched to Roxbury High.
The hateful tactics of ROAR and the like pretty much resulted in a complete moral victory for the suburban set. The photo above is regularly deployed to be sure that all recall how evil were the “conservative” Democrats from Boston and how noble were the “liberal” Democrats from the burbs. But underneath that facade is the reality that the liberal bloc shivved those working class voters inn Boston. That hasn’t been forgotten, even by those who are embarassed by how things played out.
It was not the suburban liberals who created Boston’s segregated and unequal school system; it was the city’s political structure – elected by the citizens – who did that. It was also not suburban liberals who decreed that kids be bused to schools in other neighborhoods; it was a federal court reacting to years of inaction by the city that did that. Accusing suburban liberals for the pain of white kids is a total red herring.
The segregated school system was an expression of the racism inherent in the political power structure. Those politicians believed, and said, that they were acting in accordance with their constituents’ wishes. The protesting parents were the beneficiaries of the inequality; their kids had been going to well-maintained schools staffed by the best teachers in the system. Black kids had been going to decrepit schools staffed by less capable teachers. The federal judge found that the School Committee of the city of Boston had “knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city’s students, teachers and school facilities.” This had already been illegal for twenty years, since Brown v. Board of Education. The Boston School Committee did everything it could to avoid complying with the law. Had they taken reasonable steps to comply, there need not have been forced busing, so it is them you should blame, them and their racist supporters.
get it?
The solution was geography-based – the same basis the School Committee used to create the segregated system in the first place.
It’s really twisting reality to claim that the court’s intent was to fulfill a perception of racism. The racism was there, as the protesters amply demonstrated.
Which one of those school districts is famous for racist violence in response? Not Richmond VA, nor Prince Georges County MD, nor Wilmington DE, nor Nashville TN, nor Springfield MA. Do you seriously think that’s due to some judicial plot to make Boston look bad, or what?
Suburban liberals could and did wash their hands of the problems of urban poverty because they could afford to and did move to a suburb from whence they could dispense preachy condemnation without actually sacraficing anything themselves.
We preach, you pay. Why is it, do you suppose, that the working class towns across the Commonwealth seem pink or red on fenway’s maps, even though liberal Democrats are in their economic interests? Is it because they know from experience that liberal Democrats are in their corner, except when it costs something, in which case they aren’t? Oh, no, it is because they are ignorant and racist.
This is generally incoherent, but I wonder to whom you’re ascribing the attitude in your last sentence.
I share your assessment of the actions of the suburban liberals of the time. They had money and power, and the working-class neighborhoods they left behind did not. Both groups suffered from pervasive racism. One group was able to use its money and power to express that racism in ways that:
1. Kept their own children in lily-white schools.
2. Kept their own neighborhoods largely free of “undesirables”.
3. Made sure that the “awful racism” of the poor neighborhoods in Boston was harshly punished (in ways that didn’t affect them).
One fact that remains that both groups were racist. A second fact that remains is that, as kirth points out, the actions of the Boston school committee really were egregious violations of settled law. A third fact that remains is that the GOP offered no effective counterbalance.
I’m therefore not sure I accept the connection you seem to be attempting between suburban liberals of the late 1970s and suburban Republicans of today. Let offer — purely as a speculation for discussion, not as a claim — perhaps those “red” suburbs of today reflect on a local scale the same shift that happened to the national parties after the 1968 Democratic convention. The national Democratic Party purged the southern racists from its ranks. The national GOP eagerly embraced them. At the national level, it seems that racism trumped other ideology as that transition occurred. The national GOP did NOT get more “liberal” or more “Democratic” — those southern racists simply embraced the GOP dogma (let’s not forget that Strom Thurmond began his Senate career as a Democrat).
Perhaps we see our local map acting the same — perhaps those racist “suburban liberals” of the 1970s found themselves more at home in today’s Massachusetts GOP — or as “unenrolled” — than in today’s Massachusetts Democratic Party.
Perhaps they weren’t so “liberal” after all.
Or perhaps you let nothing stand between you and an in-character rant.
A few things…
– If you read my post, you would see that my complaint was that the Globe underplayed the very real racism I saw all around me.
– I don’t care who the guy in the photo is, he is symbolic of the explicit and intense racism you apparently strive to excuse
– Seems like there are plenty of “heroes” and “villains” in your screeds here.
– Maryland fought on the side of the North in the Civil War.
– I’m sorry that my nearly forty years here doesn’t count for anything among townies like you. I guess you know the real score — at least you think you do. No doubt those working-class Irish and Italian American neighborhoods gave you all kinds of “street-smarts” — I’m perfectly happy to be without at least some of that baggage. I appreciate the feedback about my “comprehension”, I’ll try to bear that in mind while reading your always insightful commentary.
Baggae tom? baggage? That’s what you said.
Here, I’ll remind you.
You’re in trouble Tom. Big Trouble. I’m calling for a BMG investigation and a permanent suspension.
I have never show such racist hate. You my friend are a bigot! There os no place on BMG for such a person.
Good Day Sir
I guess you’re showing us more of your “street-smarts” and “comprehension”.
I think you know precisely the “baggage” I’m talking about — it seems to be central to the persona you have so carefully crafted here. I wonder where “Ginger” fits into your “street-smarts” and “comprehension”.
What exactly do you mean by baggage. I sincerely don’t know what you mean by it.
You said it not me and it has the definite tone of racist and ethnocentric hate speech.
Please explain because frankly I always thought it was me that annoyed you but apparently what annoys is whatever ethnic group you think I am a member.
let it out tom. What happened to cause this hate. Let it out. Tell us. It will eel good.
… is that EBIII is giving it away.