Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Sophie Lewis, a scholar at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a frequent speaker at American universities, wrote an article suggesting that the coronavirus pandemic should push Americans to abolish the family.

In an opinion editorial published by Open Democracy in late March, Lewis argues that the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are individuals'..."

"We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it."

"We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it," she adds.

As feminists for decades have excavated, the nuclear family functions as a kind of technology for producing and reproducing human beings along the lines of binary sex, national identity, racial loyalty, and heterosexual subjecthood, Lewis told Campus Reform.

[RELATED: White nuclear family perpetuates racism, CUNY prof argues]

She goes on to say in the opinion piece that "social distancing" and "sheltering in place" orders are "an abuser's dream," pointing to the spike in domestic violence reports since the mass quarantine began. She suggested this is one more reason to "abolish" the family.

"The pandemic is no time to forget about family abolition. In the words of feminist theorist and mother Madeline Lane-McKinley; 'Households are capitalisms pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in housework cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse, molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more.' Far from a time to acquiesce to family values ideology, then, the pandemic is an acutely important time to provision, evacuate and generally empower survivors of and refugees from the nuclear household," she adds.

Glenn Stanton, director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family, disagrees.

Academic and government research over the last couple of decades consistently show that married women and children living with their married biological fathers are the least likely to suffer sexual, physical, or verbal abuse compared with other domestic configurations, Stanton told Campus Reform.

The author talks about the unfortunate homeless. Ask most of these people if living in a home with a nuclear family was attractive to them. Few would take the authors dim view of that opportunity, Stanton added.

Lewis concludes the piece by writing, "we do not know yet if we will be able to wrench something better than capitalism from the wreckage of this Plague and the coming Depression. I would only posit with some certainty that, in 2020, the dialectic of families against the family, of real homes against the home, shall intensify."

[RELATED: Prof to students: Block Fox News from family members TVs when theyre not looking]

However, Daniel Darling, vice president of communications for the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told Campus Reform that the opposite is true.

"The coronavirus pandemic is actually reinforcing to us the vital importance of family as an essential ingredient for a society's flourishing. We are sheltering in place with our loved ones so that the most vulnerable among us--the aging, the sick--can avoid catching COVID 19," he said.

"Throughout human history, movements have sought to squash the nuclear family, but yet it endures because, as Christians, we believe it is a creational idea, something designed by a Creator for the flourishing of humankind. So as we stay inside and slow the spread of the virus, let's double down on the relationships closest to us, that help us nurture and grow, not attack the nuclear family at a time when it is most important for social cohesion," Darling added.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter:@_EverettKatie

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Feminist says coronavirus shows 'it's time to abolish the family' - Campus Reform

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Celebrating the 129th birth anniversary of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the father of Indian Constitution and civil rights leader who for the rights of the Dalits and other socially backward castes in India, on April 14, Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) introduced a resolution to celebrate the icons birth anniversary. Congressman Khanna represents the 17th District of California, which covers communities in Silicon Valley

Championing the cause of ensuring rights to the marginalized people of the Indian society who were deprived of education and were subjected to humiliation and untouchability, he gave them their rights as well as respect in the society that was long overdue.

The resolution celebrated Ambedkars historic labor reforms, a codification of gender equality, and the successful inclusion of Article 17 in the Constitution of India, which abolished untouchability and its practice in any form.

In a press note released by Rep. Khannas office, the resolution acknowledges the profound impact of Americas own discriminatory practices on Ambedkar, specifically pointing to the systematic discrimination of African Americans and women in the United States as influential in his pursuit to guarantee equal rights for every human being in the Indian constitution.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was a pioneer in the movement to make India a free, fair, and just society for everyone in it, said Rep. Ro Khanna. He mobilized a generation to push back against discrimination and to instead celebrate equality, human rights, and universal tolerance. Today, we stand at a moment in world history when we could all use more of that compassionate spirit. Im proud to work with Equality Labs and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) to make this landmark resolution a reality.

This Dalit history month, even in this dark time of COVID, it is inspirational to know that we can find the light of hope in our history.That is why Equality Labswas thrilled to work withRep. Ro Khannas office on the first congressional resolution celebrating Dr. Ambedkar and his life and legacy. We hope all Americans will join us in celebrating this towering historical figure who was a fearless feminist and caste abolitionist, and whose contributions to the fields of economics, philosophy, religious, jurisprudence, and democracy remain unparalleled, even today.

It is a great honor to work with Congressman Khanna on this resolution to commemorate the powerful life of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a man who laid a critical foundation for justice and equality in the Indian constitution through his work on caste abolition, said South Asian Americans Leading Together. As a fearless Dalit leader, his legacy should remind us that the notion that anyone human life is inherently more valuable than another is at the root of all forms of discrimination.

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Rep Khanna introduces resolution to celebrate the birth anniversary Dr B R Ambedkar - indica News

President Trump's aversion to the World Health Organization has been obvious for some time, so it was no surprise when he announced that the US would stop funding it. His decision has prompted a predictable chorus of complaints and howls of despair from all the usual suspects, but for multiple reasons these must be ignored.

First, let's consider the track record of the WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a man who has behaved appallingly during the Covid-19 crisis. While a microbiologist and a malaria researcher, he has no known professional medical trainingand yet he is in charge of the United Nations agency which is responsible for global public health. Even if the world had not been struck by coronavirus many would, on this evidence alone, question his fitness for this particular post. But his lack of appropriate credentials are not the half of it.

Formerly, Tedros served as a minister under Ethiopia's prime minister and president, Meles Zenawi, whose repressive regime had close links to Beijing. Tedros was also on good terms with another China apologist, Zimbabwe's tyrannical president Robert Mugabe, and in 2017 he even installed Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador (a decision that was reversed after protests from human rights groups). His political background therefore raises legitimate questions about his objectivity in the current pandemic. His actions in recent weeks have merely confirmed his strong admiration for China.

In January, he visited China and met with President Xi Jinping. On his return, he praised the Communist state for its "transparency", despite it having covered up the true extent of Covid-19 by silencing doctors who wanted to alert the public to the outbreak. Chillingly, it has been reported that three journalist whistleblowersnamed as Chen Qiushi, Fang Bing and Li Zehuaremain missing two months after trying to inform the world of the true scale of the outbreak in Wuhan. Although senior figures from the WHO, including Australia's Professor John Mackenzie, have called China "reprehensible", Tedros has continued to heap praise on Xi and on his country, saying it should be "congratulated" for protecting "the people of the world". He even told colleagues he was "very impressed and encouraged by the president's detailed knowledge of the outbreak."

Time after time, Tedros has made statements urging other countries not to close their borders to Chinese visitors and has glorified China for setting "a new standard on outbreak control". Yet it now seems to me that the WHO has, through such sheer imbecilic irresponsibility, actively helped to spread this disease around the world.

Trump is rightneither Tedros nor the WHO is fit for purpose. It's just a shame that Trump didn't go further by calling for the abolition of the WHO. It cannot convincingly claim to be politically neutral and its policy platform appears to be up for sale to the highest bidder. For a global health outfit, it has some terribly unhealthy habits.

Disturbingly, in the very week that Trump has challenged the WHO, the British government has decided to signal its virtue to the world by giving it a further 75m. Naturally, this has earned high praise from Tedros himself. As far as I am concerned it simply shows that the influence of China's money and its relentless propaganda war have taken in not only the WHO, but also most Western governments.

At the same time, the Chinese technology firm Huawei has been having a busy week in Britain. Despite mounting opposition from politicians and campaigners, it is poised to help build the U.K.'s 5G data network. Having received criticism recently, its U.K. boss, Victor Zhang, wrote an open letter emphasising the key role Huawei already plays in the U.K.'s data network and in a sickeningly condescending move reassuring people that it is "focused on keeping Britain connected" during the "unprecedented" coronavirus pandemic.

Zhang said that data usage has increased by at least 50 percent since Covid-19 first reached the U.K., placing "significant pressure" on telecoms systems. He stated: "During this pandemic our engineers designated 'essential' workers are striving around the clock to keep Britain connected". He then launched into a lecture whose central message was that excluding his company in our 5G network would do a "disservice" to U.K. consumers.

While I and many others feel angry at the sheer arrogance of Zhang's statement (and fearful of the consequences of Huawei's presence in the U.K.'s infrastructure) I am sure it was met with nods of approval in Downing Street. Also this week, the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, successfully satisfied Beijing that Britain will not politicize the coronavirus crisis in a way that would have an adverse effect on China.

Huawei's other big announcement of the week in the U.K. has been the unveiling of its newest board member, Sir Mike Rake, a former President of the Confederation of British Industry and such an enthusiast for the European Union that he once advocated Britain joining its single currency, the Euro. As I reflect on this, I am convinced that the same group of people who sold Britain out to Brussels now appear intent on allowing this country to be taken over by Beijing.

The only crumb of comfort I can find at present is that when Boris Johnson recovers from his own brush with coronavirus, and is back at work full-time, he will still have to face the 36 Conservative MPs who last month used a parliamentary vote to voice their belief that Huawei's involvement in the U.K.'s 5G expansion should cease. Indeed, as this row brews over the summer, I suspect the number of rebels in Johnson's own party will increase. With this in mind it is significant that the former Conservative Foreign Secretary, William Hague, this week expressed his concerns that the U.K. has become too dependent on China. It seems that for ventilators, face masks and many other products, we are almost entirely reliant on this Communist regime.

Donald Trump apart, the extent to which China has already infiltrated the West's political systems and ruling classes means that real reversals of policy after this crisis are less than likely. However, there is still one group of people who can decide whether China attains the global dominance it clearly craves: consumers. In the final analysis, it is not governments that do business, but individuals making their own choices with their money.

With this in mind, I pledge today that as far as is humanly possible, I will not knowingly buy a product that is made in China from now oncertainly not while this barbaric regime is in place. If tens of millions of people have the same view, then we will win. If not, then China will rule the world, and no doubt our politicians will applaud from the sidelines.

Nigel Farage is senior editor-at-large of Newsweek's "The Debate" platform.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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Nigel Farage: Trump's Right. The WHO Is Not Fit for Purpose | Opinion - Newsweek

What do you do when you cant get the move you want?

Raheem Sterling, Neymar even talkSPORTs Darren Bent have tried various tricks to get their way.

They have been heavily criticised as a result, but this kind of player power isnt unprecedented.

Getty Images - Getty

Sixty years ago Newcastle midfielder George Eastham staged a strike to get away from the north east and in doing so, brought an archaic transfer system crashing down and bettered the lives of his fellow professionals.

It was 1959 when Easthams Newcastle contract expired. He wanted to go and earn more money elsewhere, but bound by the retain and transfer system, which allowed clubs to keep a players registration and refuse to pay them if they had requested a move, he was stuck.

Essentially, chairmen had their players by the balls and were not ready to let go.

Easthams career as a footballer was on hold and he took a job selling corks, which as a result of his situation actually earned him more money.

Everywhere I went was an open door, Eastham told author Jon Henderson in the book, When Footballers were Skint.

Nobody said they didnt want to see me because I was in the newspapers. So I sold a bit of cork and I was getting more money selling it than I was playing football.

He hadnt given the game up entirely and he maintained fitness by playing charity matches for celebrity XIs where team-mates included James Bond himself, Sean Connery. That career lasted for eight months before Newcastle relented and let him join Arsenal in October 1960.

Hulton Archive - Getty

And despite being glad he was once again doing what he loved most, he wasnt finished with the bigwigs.

Players had tried to take a stand against their paymasters before. Wilf Mannion one of the most famous players of his era attempted to wrangle over his Middlesbrough contract in 1948 before backing down and returning to work to earn his money care for his ill wife.

Here, though, Eastham went one step further and embarked on the type of revenge mission that would make The Punisher proud, proving not all heroes wear capes.

Newcastle were probably hoping that after I eventually signed for Arsenal the dispute over the retain-and-transfer system would fall away, he continued.

But the PFA were looking to me to be the man to take the fight forward, to bring an end to the system.

They were coming to the end of their resources they werent a big PFA in those days, they were a small PFA, the money wasnt coming in like it does now but they offered to pay my expenses if I carried on.

And so began the gradual shift of power between club and player.

AFP - Getty

I said, Yes, lets do it. Lets go the whole hog. I wasnt happy with the way things had gone with my transfer. So the case went to High Court and that broke the retain-and-transfer system.

Mr Justice Wilberforce, whose great, great grandfather, William Wilberforce, led the movement that resulted in the abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, heard the case in 1963 and ruled the FAs retain-and-transfer system was an unreasonable restraint of trade.

Two years earlier, footballers saw the maximum wage of 20 abolished and the tide was slowly beginning to turn.

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For Arsenal, it was worth the wait and in six years he played 221 times and scored 41 goals, earning a place at no.41 on their list of 50 Greatest Gunners.

He scored twice on his debut against Bolton in December 1960 and, in response to Newcastle fans giving him a hard time on his return to the club, used his left foot to create two and score one on his return to his former club.

He was also among Englands non-playing 1966 World Cup winners who received a medal in 2007 following a rule change adopted by FIFA.

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Ex-Arsenal midfielder George Eastham is the man who revolutionised football transfers when he went on strike - talkSPORT.com

It was bats. Or pangolins. To hear common narratives about the origins of Covid-19, there is a simple causal relationship between Chinas consumption of wild animals and the coronavirus ravaging the globe.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the United States top epidemiologist, told Fox: It boggles my mind how when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we dont just shut it down. His opinion echoes a growing chorus across the political spectrum that singles out Chinas so-called wet markets as the culprit for the pandemic. The Republican senator Lindsey Graham has called the Chinese exotic animal trade disgusting and conservationist Jane Goodall has called for a global ban.

Science and political economy, however, tell a more complex story. The principal driver of zoonotic diseases (such as the virus Sars-Cov-2, which spread from animals to humans) is industrial animal agriculture. When food production encroaches on wild habitats, it creates opportunities for pathogens to jump to livestock and humans. Industrial agriculture also breeds its own diseases, like swine flu and avian flu, on hellish factory farms. And it contributes to antibiotic resistance and climate change, both of which exacerbate the problem.

We need to have an honest public discussion on how to produce our food. Individually, we must stop eating animal products. Collectively, we must transform the global food system and work toward ending animal agriculture and rewilding much of the world. Oddly, many people who would never challenge the reality of climate change refuse to acknowledge the role meat-eating plays in endangering public health. Eating meat, it seems, is a socially acceptable form of science denial.

Researchers have long issued warnings about the consequences of our livestock-dominated food system. After the Sars outbreak in 2003, an essay in the American Journal of Public Health lamented that changing the way humans treat animals most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure. In 2016, the UN Environment Program warned that the livestock revolution was a zoonotic disaster waiting to happen.

Yet meat consumption continues to rise. Now, just as experts predicted, eating animals is coming back to bite us.

Xenophobes call Covid-19 the Wuhan virus, but in reality zoonoses emerge worldwide, and do so with increasing regularity. The 1918 Spanish flu probably came from a midwestern pig farm. In the 1990s, ecological destabilization in the US south-west led to the Four Corners hantavirus outbreak. The Hendra and Menangle viruses are named after Australian towns. The Reston virus is an Ebola strain named after a DC suburb. Marburg virus emerged in Germany. These last two diseases sprang from monkeys imported for laboratory use the Chinese are not the only ones with a large and dangerous wildlife trade. Sars, Mers and Zika are only three of many novel zoonoses to strike in the new millennium.

Fauci, Graham and Goodalls call for a clampdown on the exotic animal trade is a valid demand, but ignores how that industry is inextricably intertwined with conventional food production. The Chinese government has encouraged smallholders to breed and procure wild game to compensate for losing market-share to large livestock firms. Similarly, reliance on bush meat in west Africa increased after local fishers were pushed out of coastal waters by foreign trawlers in the 1970s, leading to the outbreaks of HIV and Ebola. The problem isnt some peoples taste for seemingly strange delicacies, but rather our global, profit-driven, meat-centered food system.

Just as zoonotic threats are multiplying, combating them is becoming harder. Antibiotics are increasingly ineffective in part because commercial livestock farmers abuse them, hoping to speed up growth rates or as a prophylactic measure against the spread of disease on overcrowded factory farms. Overuse of antibiotics spurs the evolution of super-bugs like MRSA, a flesh-eating bacterium now found at hospitals worldwide. Modern solutions, like viral cures and vaccines, are elusive. The World Health Organization reported that the most important techniques for controlling the 2003 Sars outbreak were not cutting-edge medicines so much as 19th-century public health strategies of contact tracing, quarantine, and isolation. This has also been the case with Covid-19.

Our short-term priority is the development of a vaccine for Covid-19. But we must also start thinking about more radical measures to address the roots of this crisis. We need a more resilient food system that puts less stress on the planet and on public health.

This requires three interventions. The first is ending subsidies to industrial animal agriculture and taxing animal products to incorporate the cost of environmental and public health externalities, with the aim of the industrys eventual abolition.

The second is support for local, sustainable plant farming to replace the monocrop-focused status quo. We must relieve pressure on soil and wildlife while creating better, safer agricultural jobs. (We should also remember that meatpacking workers, like their peers in wet markets, tend to be the first exposed to new pathogens.)

The third is large-scale, public-directed investment in both plant-based meat alternatives and cellular agriculture (ie, growing animal tissue from stem cells), which would expand scientific research and employment while spurring a transition to animal-free protein.

The post-meat age will be a healthier one. Between farming, ranching and feed crops, the livestock industry gobbles up 40% of the worlds habitable surface. A vegan food system would require a tenth as much land. Restoring the natural environment could also create jobs through a public works program akin to the New Deals Civilian Conservation Corps. And it would reduce the outbreak of new epidemics by reducing contact between humans and wild animals and by restoring biodiversity.

Old habits can change. In the last few weeks, as the coronavirus has spread and millions shelter in place, bean sales have surged. People, it seems, are willing to eat legumes if its part of a public health effort. When this pandemic ends theyll need to keep doing just that, lest a more lethal disaster comes to pass.

Jan Dutkiewicz is the Connie Caplan postdoctoral fellow in the department of political science at Johns Hopkins University

Astra Taylor is the author, most recently, of Democracy May Not Exist, but Well Miss It When Its Gone

Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a William Lyon Mackenzie King research fellow at Harvard University

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The Covid-19 pandemic shows we must transform the global food system - The Guardian

NewsEducationAt some point, schools will reopen but many people think education in the UK may never be the same again

Saturday, 18th April 2020, 7:00 am

At some point, schools will reopen but many people think education in the UK may never be the same again.

i's education newsletter: latest schooling news

i's education newsletter: latest schooling news

Some people are already predicting the demise of high-stakes exams such as the GCSE. Others think coronavirus will lead to classrooms being revolutionised by technology. With exams not taking place, a new way of awarding grades using teacher assessment has been invented from scratch.

In England, teachers have been asked to predict GCSE and A-level grades, which will be moderated by the exam boards. It is a remarkable volte-face. Under reforms introduced when Michael Gove was education secretary, the majority of teacher-assessed coursework was scrapped, with grades awarded almost purely on the basis of exam performance.

School's out for ever

Many teachers have been critical of this system, arguing that it puts too much pressure on teenagers.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, believes the crisis could be a transformational moment for education, proving that putting children through 30-plus exam papers was a whole paraphernalia of assessment that we really didnt need, he says.

Magnus Bashaarat, the head of independent Hampshire school Bedales, agrees. His school became so dissatisfied with GCSEs that it created its own alternative qualification, the Bedales Assessed Course. Mr Bashaarat thinks the Gove reforms were motivated by mistrust. The reason why Conservative ministers moved away from coursework towards terminal assessment is because they havent really trusted teachers, he says. Covid-19 has forced them to place their trust in the profession again whether they like it or not.

'If Covid-19 leads to the demise of GCSE... that would be a positive thing'

GCSEs are seen as more vulnerable to change or even abolition because they were designed in an age when many left school at 16. With young people now obliged to stay in education or training until 18, people have questioned whether they are still relevant.

Mr Bashaarat would not mourn their passing. If [Covid-19] leads to the demise of GCSEs and a much fairer assessment criteria emerging from it, that would be a really positive thing, he says.

Changes to assessment

It will certainly be difficult for the Government to put the teacher assessment genie back in the bottle. The Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, has repeatedly said that grades will be as valid this year as any other.

Dr Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, thinks the Government will struggle to return to its exams only mantra. Now theyve admitted that teacher assessment is valid and reliable, how are they going to get out of that?

She thinks that, at the very least, exams taking place in 2021 including primary-school Sats will have to be slimmed down to reflect the teaching time that has been lost. Any idea that GCSEs and A-levels in 2021 canjust be the same as they were in 2019 is profoundly wrong, she says.

However, some people think that reports of the death of exams have been greatly exaggerated. Tom Bennett, who advises Westminster on pupil behaviour, argues that claims that the lockdown will usher in an education revolution have been overcooked.

The solutions weve come up with to cope with the current crisis are absolutely necessary, but theyre not optimal, he says. Teacher assessment is bedevilled by enormous levels of bias, he contends, and testing is important for student motivation. He does not accept that GCSEs are irrelevant, because they help inform admissions to sixth forms.

'Opportunity' to change education

Technology is another area of education where change is predicted. As with other professions, teachers have had to adapt to remote working. Mr Bashaarat has been marking his students work using an online platform. I can help them edit their work and make comments in real time I wont be going back to bits of A4 with differing levels of legibility.

As well as video conferencing and online collaboration, some schools have been experimenting with artificial intelligence. Robert Halfon, the Tory chair of the Education Select Committee, believes that lockdown provides an incredible opportunity to evaluate these approaches.

Century Tech is one of the firms providing AI. Its platform gives a lesson that constantly changes to match the students ability and sends an analysis of their work to the teacher. Century has offered free access to the platform during lockdown, and Priya Lakhani, the firms chief executive, says several hundred schools have come on board.

But Mr Bennett is sceptical about technology, too: The experience of distance learning has entrenched what we already know that it is not superior to face-to-face classroom learning. When we put students in front of a screen, we massively dislocate the impact that teacher can have because so much more of what the student does relies on the students own desires, motivation and opportunities to work.

He is not alone in predicting that attainment gaps between rich and poor students will grow during lockdown.

Perhaps the most profound legacy of coronavirus will be how we view schools. Teachers have come in over their Easter holiday to look after the children of key workers. Others have walked miles to deliver free meals. In a crisis, schools have carried on doing what theyve always done, which is being a major support hub, Dr Bousted says. The idea that we can go back to Government ministers saying schools are about academic excellence and nothing else, thats really been shown for the lie it is.

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Coronavirus lockdown: From the demise of GCSEs to technology and AI, how the crisis has changed education - inews

In my last column, I discussed how total grain production and total grain exports have not increased dramatically over the last five years. So why are grain companies building new facilities over this same time period?

Grain handling is a volume and numbers business. If grain companies dont handle the volume, they need to change the numbers so they net out profitable in the end. But how do they do that if someone else is controlling the sales and handling fees?

It started back in 2012 with legislation that gave the grain companies control of their own destinies in the world of grain handling on the Prairies with the abolition of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) Act.

Before 2012, the CWB would sell the grain and determine what to pay the grain companies to handle your grain, and the balance after costs went back through the pools to producers.

Now the grain companies sell the grain and can set and flex their own handling fees up to government/industry set maximums. This means the grain companies take any profit or losses made on the sale plus they get their self-determined handling fees and keep it all and offer you a fair market value for your grain.

Now this is where basis comes into play. Having been in the grain-buying industry for 20 years and then work for the CWB for five years and now as an independent marketing consultant for the past 14 years, I can tell you that basis levels have changed somewhat since 2012 to today and not in favour of you, the producer.

Back in 2006 when I started my consulting business, I can remember doing marketing strategies with producers and setting canola basis targets and hitting them constantly at levels under -$10 per tonne. In todays world, what I would call a good basis would be a number under -$20 per tonne, and that is not near as easy to hit now as was a -$10 back then.

It is similar with wheat basis. Back then a good basis was in the +$50 to +$60 per tonne range and now a good wheat basis ranges in the +$30 to +$45 per tonne range.

Production on the Prairies is not going to increase dramatically enough to enable all of these facilities to be able to turn their facilities eight or 10 times a year. In order for them to make money, they need to make a little bit more on every tonne they handle so at the end of the year they make the same or more profit.

If total deliverable volumes on the Prairies dont increase over time, you can expect the cost of doing business will, as shareholder and corporate profit expectations will demand it. If we have years of lower production, you may see some better basis levels as grain companies compete harder to get their hands on the fewer tonnes that are available, otherwise expect basis levels to remain static.

Before committing to a contract, ask about handling and cleaning charges as they can vary widely between companies. If you know what different companies charge, you can use that as leverage to try to negotiate a better price.

If only these grain companies were producer-owned co-ops that would pay dividends back to producers on the profits they are going to make. Wait a minute some of them used to be, what happened?

Find out in my next column.

Excerpt from:

How grain companies are changing the numbers: Part 2 - Grainews

On the same mid-March night that Bernie Sanders' presidential ambitions were snuffed out, the movement for which he is an icon also happened to enjoy perhaps its most significant triumph. The voters in Chicago's suburbs who backed former Vice President Joe Biden by more than 20 points over the Vermont senator for the top of the Democratic ticket also traded in their eight-term congressman, Rep. Dan Lipinski, for 55-year-old abortion-rights activist Marie Newman.

Newman ran on a campaign of Sanders' greatest hitsMedicare For All, a $15 minimum wage, the Green New Deal, free college, the abolition of ICEand is a shoo-in to win in November.Her victory, more even than other prominent Sanders disciples who have attained federal office since Sanders' unexpectedly competitive 2016 primary run, represents a substantial leftward shift for the Democratic caucus. She replaces a significantly more conservative Democrat who voted against the Affordable Care Act, and now she's poised to occupy a safe seat for a long time.

Many observers point to Sanders' inability to crack 35 percent among Democrats in most of the 27 states and territories that voted in 2020 (before the COVID-19 pandemic short-circuited the process) as proof that his ideas are not as popular as he proclaims. But that's not the whole story. It's true that most of Sanders' proposals remain light years from the sort of popularity required to get them through Congress, even if Democrats retake the Senate and White House, and doubters make a strong argument that the failure to become law means Sanders wasted everyone's time and attention with unworkable solutions to serious problems.

But there are other signslike Newman's victory and some recent policy shifts by the now-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidenthat suggest the Sanders movement is simply outgrowing its need for Sanders himself and his purist approach.

Sanders all but acknowledged as much after Newman's victory and his shellacking in the Illinois, Arizona and Florida primaries on March 17, emailing supporters the next day to say, "While our campaign has won the battle of ideas, we are losing the battle over electability to Joe Biden." He hammered the point even harder Wednesday as he announced he was suspending his campaign: "It was not long ago that people considered these ideas radical and fringe. Today these are mainstream ideas and many of them have already being implemented in cities and states across the country. ... The future of this country is with our ideas."

The 78-year-old Democratic Socialist will almost certainly never become president of the United Statesbut that's largely irrelevant. It many ways it is Bernie Sanders' Democratic Party nowan irony, given that he has never joined the partywith all of the major presidential contenders in the 2020 cycle supporting some form of expanded or universal health insurance coverage, efforts to make college affordable and aggressive new actions to slow or reverse climate change. "Bernie Sanders might not end up being the nominee, but he has pushed almost every major candidate this cycle, including Joe Biden, to adopt his policies and vision for what the president should do," says Stephen O'Hanlon, the 24-year-old spokesman for the Sunrise Movement, an environmentalist group that helped Sanders and Sanders acolyte Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez write the Green New Deal. O'Hanlon says he became interested in politics through the 2016 Sanders campaign.

Biden echoed this notion himself in a Medium post appealing to Sanders fans to support his effort to unseat President Donald Trump: "Senator Sanders and his supporters have changed the dialogue in America. Issues which had been given little attentionor little hope of ever passingare now at the center of the political debate. Income inequality, universal health care, climate change, free college, relieving students from the crushing debt of student loans. These are just a few of the issues Bernie and his supporters have given life to." Even before Sanders quit the race, the former vice president had softened his opposition to universal free college, a signature Sanders proposal, by coming out in mid-March for eliminating tuition at public universities for students from families making less than $125,000 a year. Biden had previously supported only free community college.

"Sometimes getting elected is beside the point," says Gordon Weil, former press secretary to Democratic Sen. George McGovern, who was demolished by Richard Nixon in the 1972 election. "The movement, to the degree it was concerned about getting Bernie elected? Sure, it's hurt. He's not going to be elected president. I don't think he was ever likely to win the election. And I don't think that undermines the success or the influence of his ideas. He's very influential. He doesn't need to go back to the Senate feeling, 'Well, I didn't do anything for having run twice.' He did do something."

There are, of course, many Sanders skeptics who believe, as Bill Scher wrote in POLITICO Magazine on Wednesday, "It's hard to see Sanders' presidential campaign as anything other than a defeat." Democratic primary voters, in choosing Biden, were rejecting several specific Sanders proposals, from Medicare For All to certain elements of the Green New Deal, even as they were broadly supportive of both universal health coverage and aggressive action to combat climate change, Scher argued. And even Biden, while offering respect and admiration for Sanders' movement, stopped short of endorsing any of its dogma. "While Bernie and I may not agree on how we might get there, we agree on the ultimate goal for these issues and many more," wrote Biden, avoiding explicit commitment to a Sanders solution.

Sanders progressives have plenty of work left to do before they can really declare victory, and some of what happens next for them depends on which historical precedent the Sanders movement follows. Will it be that of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the aggressively small-government Republican crushed in the 1964 election, or McGovern, who loomed large for young voters as an icon of the anti-Vietnam War effort? Both men, like Sanders, drew legions of young intellectuals into their political campsbut Goldwater partisans built a durable infrastructure of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and publications like National Review, and seeded the Republican Party with devotees. Eventually, those low-level party functionaries took control and helped another charismatic leader, Ronald Reagan, make the Goldwater creed broadly popular with the mainstream.

McGovernism, however, faded into the background after the war ended. Many former McGovernites did remain in politicsBill Clinton was his campaign manager in Texasbut the party itself moved to the center and consigned the failed candidate to a past it needed to overcome, Weil says. University of Virginia post-doctoral fellow Joshua Mound, a Sanders supporter and frequent writer for the democratic-socialist journal Jacobin, sees the Goldwater model at work in the Sanders legacy.

"If you listen to or read about the personal narratives of people like Karl Rove, they were teenagers who really became engaged by the Goldwater movement and became true Goldwater believers, and that's what got them involved in politics and wanting to take over things like the College Republicans," Mound says. "You're seeing that with Sanders because it's gone beyond just being about Sanders: it's about him and the young people who were pretty disenchanted with politics and who now see a model of politics and a set of idea that they believe in. That has pushed some of them to run for offices and get involved in grassroots politics in a way that's hard to see them doing absent Sanders' 2016 run."

Several organizations and media outlets have been founded or boosted by veterans of Sanders' 2016 effort. Besides Jacobin and the Sunrise Movement, there's also the activist group Indivisible as well as progressive political action committees Our Revolution, Democracy for America and Justice Democrats. "There was not an organized Socialist movement before Bernie's campaigns," says Meagan Day, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, which grew from 6,000 members in 2016 to about 60,000 now. "It really was Bernie's willingness to say, 'I am a Democratic socialist' in 2016 and to run on a platform of Medicare For All, environmental justicewhat we now called the Green New Dealcollege for all and so many other demands that center people over profit, that showed people that there was another political tradition that did really value people and workers."

But even some liberal activists warn that the notion that Sanders' policies are now mainstreamas he declared in his statement Wednesdaymay not yet be true. Sean McElwee of Data For Progress, a think tank aiming to provide the intellectual underpinnings for progressive arguments and generating polling data to aid with electoral strategies, says Sanders misunderstood his own 2016 popularity as an endorsement for "very liberal economic and social policies" when it appears to have been largely a reaction to Hillary Clinton's personal unpopularity. Polls show Medicare For All is only narrowly popular and loses support when some details, such as the loss of private health insurance, become known to voters.

"You had a sea change between the 2018 Congress and the 2010 Congress. I think every Democrat elected last cycle with very few exceptions supported a public option for health insurance at minimum, and some would say their goal ultimately is to eventually get to a Medicare For All plan," McElwee says. "It would be unfair to say Bernie gets no credit for that. But Sanders has too expansive an agenda to ever be fully passed. The question is, who actually makes the deals to get some of that across the finish line and where will Sanders be when those deals are made."

That Sanders managed to attain this level of prominence in the first place was a surprise in and of itself. For most of his career, he was seen as an eccentric, fringe player, a peculiarity with his antipathy for capitalism, whose Bernifesto about the ills of the nation barely changed from the talking points that he used to get elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. His campaign in 2016 seemed to exist to shove Hillary Clinton to the left but found real traction with a generation of new adults drowning in student debt and struggling in careers stunted by the Great Recession. To them, this cranky, unvarnished, wild-haired messenger's long history of espousing his ideas felt authentic and appealing where Clinton's more cautious approach felt focus-group-tested and insincere.

"Bernie is singular in America political history in his consistency and history," says Abdul El-Sayed, 35, who ran unsuccessfully for Michigan's Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2018 as a Sanders-endorsed candidate. "He's been on this page since before I was born. He's been able to cut through a lot of the noise to talk consistently, forthrightly and loudly to a generation for whom the private sector has failed over and over and over again. He comes through that with his integrity intact, with a clairvoyance of moral perception of this moment and what's required. You're going to follow that person."

This is where victories like those of Newman, Ocasio-Cortez or Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts come in. Sanders skeptics within the Democratic Party argue that the party retook the House in the 2018 midterm elections by putting forth palatable centrist candidates in competitive Republican-leaning districts who would never have won on a Medicare For All message. But Mound says that's a short-term view: it's those Sanders-esque leaders who can count on winning easily over and over who will eventually come to rule the party itself.

"Taking over the party in terms of progressivism really isn't a contest of winning swing districts with left-leaning people or even the presidency," Mound says. "It's really about winning over safe districts with the Sanders platform and building a durable party infrastructure of elected officials who are always going to win their election and always going to in leadership."

Eventually, though, the Sanders movement will need a Reagan, a figure so personally popular and politically effective as to persuade nervous moderates of the righteousness of these ideas, McElwee says. Ocasio-Cortez seems poised to be a long-term presence, although she upset purists in February by suggesting compromises may have to be made on the road to Medicare For All; two other below-the-radar Sanders disciples include New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and Virginia state Delegate Lee Carter, both avowed Democratic Socialists who surprised many by winning office in recent years.

"There are a lot of young leaders in the progressive movement," O'Hanlon says. "Our generation is running for office thanks to Bernie, they're taking politics seriously and they're ready to fight for the soul of this country. I don't think we have any shortage of new people to carry this fight forward."

Read more:

How the Bernie Sanders Movement Reshaped the Democratic Party Forever - Newsweek

By the time President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor, her credentials for that role were impeccable, but critics still doubted if she could do the job because of her gender. As Downey documents in her book, some Labor Department staffers even threatened to resign rather than report to a woman.

But Perkins had learned to press on in spite of sexism. Even as a much younger woman, she had adopted a matronly wardrobe and worn tricorn hats, thinking that if she reminded men of their mothers, they would take her more seriously.

Perkins told FDR she would take the job only if he would commit to pursuing seven key policies: a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker's compensation, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized federal employment service and universal health insurance.

Perkins became the longest-serving labor secretary in history, holding the role from 1933 to 1945. During that time, she accomplished all but one of her original goals: universal health care.

Speaking in a radio address in 1935, Perkins explained "It has taken the rapid industrialization of the last few decades, with its mass-production methods, to teach us that a man might become a victim of circumstances far beyond his control."

Read the rest here:

She came to the rescue during the Great Depression. Now her work is still aiding jobless Americans - Mason City Globe Gazette

Policy

Snarled traffic. Sky-high rents. And entire neighborhoods that soon may be underwater. Our city planners have steamrolled over communities and failed to build a city that is livable for us all. Is there still a chance to get it right?

Like a scene out of The Departed, a pinched old white man in a black jacket leans across the passenger seat of a car to collect a fan of fresh $100 bills from the driver. Its such a blatant setup. Theres no envelope. The Benjamins are in full view. The whole choreography of the handoff seems designed to get him in front of a dash caminstead of a quick drop through the drivers window, the briber forces the man to reach into the car, his pink face nicely centered in the frame. But John Lynch, the assistant director of real estate at the Boston Planning & Development Agency, doesnt notice. He is wholly focused on taking whats his, lips drawn in a taut smile, the crisp new bills within his grasp. In fact, if you look closely at the surveillance photo, he seems relaxedat ease, even, like hes done this before.

Across Boston, critics of the citys billion-dollar real estate bonanza viewed that single 2018 photo of a bribe given and received as indisputable proof that the city still runs by J.M. Curleystyle rules. But for those who know how city planning happens here, it was merely the tip of an iceberg of troubles at the BPDA, arguably Bostons most powerful agency.

Whether or not cash is changing hands, Bostonians should be outraged at how the BPDA functionsor doesnt. If you think, for instance, that Boston is unaffordable, mired in traffic, and chronically unprepared for climate change, you can mostly blame the BPDA. The citys entire development process, from zoning to planning to project approval, is controlled by this single agency on the ninth floor of City Hall. In fact, it holds a concentration of power not seen in any other American city, shaping every square inch of our town, yet it is not accountable to the elected members of the city council. Its operations, meanwhile, are plagued by shortsightedness, ineptitude, and misplaced priorities.

This is nothing new. In fact, seven years ago I argued in this magazine that the BPDA (then known as the Boston Redevelopment Authority) had a mission that was so riddled with conflicts of interest that it should be abolished. So why am I at it again? Because despite Mayor Marty Walshs promises to reform the agency after audits in 2014 and 2015 revealed that it was a hot mess, not much has changed on the ninth floor since he took office. Worse still, this agency has overseen a larger building boom since 2014 than has ever occurred in a six-year period in Boston since the city was founded in 1630. Over the past decade, the citys planning agency has systematically squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to steer well-planned, equitable, and climate-change-ready growth, and has instead focused on a single goal: approving as many projects as quickly as possible.

This build-more, build-fast mindset has had grave consequences. Thousands of high-margin luxury condos have been approved and completed, many of which, bought by entities hidden behind LLCs and shell corporations, sit in unoccupied splendor while driving up the regions real estate values and costs. The BPDAs failure to plan, and its deep faith in market forces, has helped balloon the cost of living to the breaking point because everythingfrom food to payrolls to servicesis in one way or another linked to our inflated housing prices. Thousands of Bostonians have been displaced through eviction or aggressive rent increases, and middle-class families are getting pushed farther and farther out of the city, in some cases all the way to New Hampshire. The agency has lost the trust of the community to carry out the planning process with competence and integrity, wrote City Councilor at Large Michelle Wu in a recent report demanding the BPDAs abolition.

Never before has the need to break up the BPDA been more urgent. Right now, the agency is poised to approve the largest private development in its historymillions of square feet at the former Suffolk Downs racetrack. The agency has barreled ahead as if this were just another downtown office tower, aligning with the developer at the expense of the community, and repeating every unforced error that got us to where we are today. Unless the BPDA is abolished before the project breaks ground, Boston will likely lose its last big chance to do development right.

The BPDAs John Lynch (left) leaves federal court in Boston with his lawyer after pleading guilty to accepting a $50,000 bribe, allegedly from a real estate developer. / Photo courtesy of the Boston Globe via Getty Images

Cranes in full swing over the foundation of 115 Winthrop Square. / Photo courtesy of the Boston Globe via Getty Images

The BPDA announced its arrival in Boston 63 years ago with the roar of an army of bulldozers. Founded to funnel federal money toward urban renewal efforts, the agency, known back then as the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), evicted thousands of minority and immigrant families and razed neighborhoods, including the West End, to make way for office buildings and luxury high-rises.

A seemingly minor tweak in 1987 created the all-powerful BPDA we have today. That year, Mayor Ray Flynn removed the agency from the city budget, arguing it could sustain itself financially using the fees it collects from real estate developers. After that, the agency no longer had to answer to the city council, and ever since then, it has been servile not only to the whims of the mayor, but to the people who keep its lights on: developers.

Walshs predecessor, Tom Menino, used the freshly off-the-books agency as the base of his power. To Menino, everything was personal; he made sure that all development decisions went through him, rendering the BRA as little more than a rubber-stamping agency where he could park his political supporters who needed jobs. Not much got built under Menino, but everything that did had his fingerprints all over it.

Walsh ran for mayor in 2013 as a BRA reformer. As a former trade union leader, he also wanted to keep those cranes busy. Once in office, he commissioned an audit that revealed the agency was in shambles. Few staffers, it showed, had any idea what their actual duties were. Records were so shoddy that the BRA didnt even know what land it owned or what fees and rents were due. Consequently, the city may have failed to collect millions of dollars on leases and linkage fees from developers to fund affordable housing.

Despite grand promises made in the heat of the mayoral campaign, as well as a $675,000 rebranding initiative that included a name change from the BRA to the BPDA, Walsh has done little more than replace the drapes and repaint the house. On the positive side, BPDA head Brian Golden says that 60 percent of staff members are new, and the planning department has grown from 32 to more than 54 employees. Hes hired some multilingual staffers, and employees are learning how to work within Bostons many different communities. The agencys overhauled website is easy to navigate and loaded with helpful documents available to the public. The press office is very responsive.

Still, the BPDAs most problematic featuresthat its beyond city council control and was designed to be developer-responsive rather than planning-orientedremain locked in place. Most egregiously, unlike many other major American citieswhich have laws mandating implementation of a master planBoston hasnt drawn one up since 1965. By law, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver systematically update their master plans and have clear protocols for incorporating those plans into urban development. In California, by law, master-plan updates must be codified into zoning. The city of Boston doesnt have a master plan because the BPDA isnt designed to do that kind of work, and also, possibly, because it would undercut the BPDAs power. According to BPDA director Golden, Mayor Walshs Imagine Boston 2030 initiativewhich provides a roadmap for 21st-century growthis the citys master plan. Still, the plan lacks teeth because the BPDA has neither the mandate nor the protocols to make it anything more than a wish list.

The BPDA says nearly one-third of the citys land is covered either by active or relatively recent planning efforts. Indeed, the agencys staffers have conducted community-based planning sessions in nearly every neighborhood over the decades. But when a developer brings a project proposal to the ninth floor, theres no formal mechanism for incorporating what was learned in those planning sessions into the approval process. There are no standardized metrics board members can use to evaluate a projects value or impact. Instead, the BPDA merely serves as an adviser to the developer, escorting a project through the process while keeping an eye on the clock.

The fact that the agency is partly funded by developers is the fundamental problem, says City Councilor Lydia Edwards. You shouldnt be incentivized to develop because your paycheck depends on it, she says. You should be incentivized to develop because the city, and the future, and equity depend on it.

Supporters of the BPDA say Bostons vocal communitieslabeled as NIMBYsare the single biggest obstacle to progress in the city and that we need an all-powerful planning agency because it is the only way to get anything done in the face of their opposition. In fact, I would argue the opposite is true: Bostons planning and approval process is so inverted that the BPDA has created the NIMBYs.

By the time a development team arrives in a neighborhood, the BPDA already has skin in the game. The agencys staff has spent considerable time working with the developer to prep for community meetings, and during this period, the BPDAs and developers interests often align. Armed with inside knowledge, legal expertise, and the mayors backing, they make a formidable team. Once the public process begins, communities dont have much time to react and often feel blindsided by the proposals. They have to scramble to understand their rights, determine what negotiating power they have, and figure out which tools they can use to steer the impact of a project. Lacking the background and unity to negotiate concessions with a powerful developer and the BPDA, many communities resort to outright opposition.

They have good reason to be wary, given that any amenities won by neighbors have historically had a bad habit of disappearing once a project is approved. Case in point: When Millennium Partners bid for the privilege of building 115 Winthrop Square, a $1.3 billion multi-use tower now going up downtown, the developer promised Bostonians a three-story Great Halla glorious, multifunctional civic space sold as Bostons living room, as well as a space for startups that would be as large as 8,000 square feet. Just three years into the complex process of approving such a large project, Millennium submitted its notice of project change. Among the revisions, 100,000 gross square feet of residential space had evaporated. The initial 500 housing unit count had shrunk to 387. Gone were about seven affordable units. Public conference space seemed to disappear. Two grand staircases designed to elevate the look of the Great Hall were obscured by walls. Bostons living room became a hallway. The startup space was no longer mentioned.

Even the Boston Civic Design Commission (BCDC)a voluntary board run by some of the citys finest architects that has the ability to review all large projects in Bostonlacks any statutory power to rein in poorly designed, unwieldy development. As a result, it has scored only a very few small victories in the way of improving projects.

Theres a better way: Plan for growth in a neighborhood before the developer arrives on the scene. Then incorporate that arduous community work into law by updating zoning. Establish which amenities the neighborhood needs and tie those projects to land use. Break planning out of the BPDA and fund it with city money so that its accountable to voters. Its how Americas finest cities handle demand and growth. Why does Boston deserve anything less?

A birds-eye view of construction in the Seaport District. / Photo courtesy of the Boston Globe via Getty Images

Activists protest to demand that developers make half of the units at Suffolk Downs affordable housing. / Photo courtesy of the Boston Globe via Getty Images

When Steven Turner allegedly handed all of that cash to Lynch, he owned a one-story South Boston warehouse on a 10th of an acre. Turner knew he could make a pile of dough if he could get a permit extension allowing construction of multifamily housing on that site. So, in exchange for $50,000, Lynch agreed to convince a Boston zoning board member to extend the permit to redevelop the property. Once he secured it, Turner sold the warehouse for a $1.6 million profit in 2018 without developing it. The cost for Turners gains will get passed along to condo buyers to the tune of an additional $146,000 per unit. (Turner has not been charged with any wrongdoing.)

Lynch wasnt the only guy looking to use zoning adjustments to turn a buck. Over the past 15 years, small-time developers have fanned out around South Boston, knocking on doors, offering longtime homeowners loads of money for their triple-deckers. One by one, families have been selling off their homes for huge profits and moving out.

Some developers, like Turner, received permission to build higher than existing zoning allowed. Others did not. Thats why South Bostons zoning map now looks like a crazy quilt. Single-family and multifamily homes, apartments and condos, and industrial, mixed-use, and institutional buildings are jammed together side by sidethe result of hundreds of individual petitions approved by the Zoning Board of Appeal (ZBA).

Perhaps all of this side-dealing would be acceptable if Boston were truly booming. In fact, the city is being crushed under the weight of poorly regulated development geared to enrich a few at the expense of the many. Based on current stats, more than 34,000 households are cost-burdened, meaning that out of every dollar they earn, 50 cents goes to rent or the mortgage. Subtract taxes, and theres not much left for food. Over the past decade, the number of homeless families in Greater Boston has increased by 27 percent and the number of homeless individuals by 45 percent. A 2020 report by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council revealed that the majority of large units in Greater Boston are occupied by roommates (who can pool resources) or a handful of retirees rattling around in big apartmentsnot families.

Walsh says hes concerned, but the one thing he hasnt been able to confront is Bostons development machine. And because the mayor would like to have his development and eat it, too, hes demanding that the BPDA solve Bostons housing crisis the only way it knows how: by building more.

In the six years that Walsh has been mayor, 18,607 residential units have been built around the city. Sounds good, until you consider that most of them are small and expensive. Notably, more than half of these units are in luxury or ultra-luxury buildings, many of them in the South Boston Waterfront neighborhood. Records show that only a slim majority of all new units built since 2012 are owned by people who claim them as their primary residences. Many were bought by LLCs or shell corporations as a way to park wealth or launder money.

Of course, solving the housing crisis isnt merely about simple math, and yet the BPDA is still chasing numbers, furiously approving every proposal that comes its way to reach a quotathe mayor wants 53,000 new units built by 2030without much consideration given to equity. When I met with Councilor Edwards, I repeated the administrations argument that more housing will eventually satisfy demand.

Where? she asked me. When I laughed, she said, No, Im serious. Where has that happened? You show me where building a bunch of luxury studios helped house working-class families. You show me where it happened, and Ill shut up.

The BPDA argues that we can build our way out of the crisis because when developers need variances (and nearly every project requires a variance because the citys zoning is so outdated), they must either build affordable units into their projects or pay so-called linkage fees that go into a fund for affordable-housing construction. For example, Jonathan Greeley, BPDAs director of development review, defends Seaport Squarea huge South Boston Waterfront projectby pointing out that in return for approval, We got significant investments inaffordable housing, significant investments in the arts, a whole bunch of different things.

The BPDAs build-more-to-get-more-affordable-housing argument might make sense at first blush. Over the past decade, developers incorporated 2,983 affordable units into their market-rate projects (though the definition of affordable is up for debate). Other developers paid the one-time fee instead, contributing $93 million to the citys housing fund. But when you crunch the numbers, youll see that $93 million doesnt buy much in Boston. Over that same decade, federal, state, and city governments have spent an additional $2 billion in Boston to finance 5,286 new affordable units and refurbish existing ones, which cost the city an average of $450,000 a pop.

Based on these figures, its clearly more economical for the city to have developers fold affordable housing into new developments or just build for the mid-market than to conjure such housing from scratch via linkage fees. (The latter also further segregates the city, building by building, neighborhood by neighborhood.) For example, if real estate developer Millennium had made 15 percent of its massive new downtown tower affordable, it would have created 66 units. Instead, the developer paid $1.9 million to the city, a sum that, without state and federal subsidies, will cover the cost of only four such units.

Regardless of how affordable units get built, there are consequences to pursuing luxury housing in formerly middle-class neighborhoods. Rampant speculation. Evictions. Aggressive pricing out. Joseph Michalakes, a housing attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, has worked for several years defending hundreds of families from eviction in East Boston, one of the most recent battlegrounds of development and displacement. Michalakes argues that if projects in Boston continue to be approved without bringing a fair housing perspective to the planning process, then what weve seen happen in East Boston over the past five years, and really longer, is going to keep happening until theres nowhere left.

He knows the market-oriented response to people getting priced out: If you cant afford Boston, then move someplace cheaper. But, he says, Where is that place? Where are people going to live? People who dont have a car and make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, where are they going to go?

Tom OBrien, the former director of the BRA, is currently overseeing the development of Suffolk Downs for the HYM Investment Group, where he is the managing director. / Photo courtesy of the Boston Globe via Getty Images

Suffolk Downs may feel like the hinterlands, over there in Eastie beyond the airport. But if you think our traffic is bad now, if you think the cost of living is high now, if you think Boston is the countrys most segregated city now, just wait until our last affordable neighborhood vanishes.

On a freezing January afternoon, I met Councilor Edwards at Maverick Station in East Boston to drive to Suffolk Downs, where we sat in the car and looked over the abandoned racetrack and clubhouse while the winter wind whipped across the vast, open expanse. This is the site where a massive, multi-phase project is slated to be built. Of the 161 acres before us, 122 of them lie in Edwardss backyard in East Boston, with the remainder in Revere.

For Edwards, the 16-million-square-foot project proposed for the site is a potential threat for the mostly Latinx, renter-heavy, lower-income population that she represents. For local developer HYM Investment Group and 33-year-old Texas billionaire William Bruce Harrison, who together bought the land in 2017 for $155 million, its a potential gold mine.

Although the BPDA had plenty of warning that the racetrack was shutting down and was potentially ripe for development, the agency had few thoughts about how this enormous piece of land might be used, or about how development might affect the local community. Those questions were left to the marketor, more specifically, Harrison and Tom OBrien, HYMs managing director and a former head of the BRA. They drafted their own plan, complete with new zoning that would allow office, residential, and retail space. Anticipating some pushback, the developer preempted impact fees by proposing that his team pay for some roads and infrastructure improvements. Most of these so-called improvements, however, are streets within the development itself.

So far, the project has been designed like a Houston office park, with chunky buildings looming around a yet-to-be-defined open space, linked by wide streets designed to get cars in and out of the development. It is nothing like Easties existing street grid, in no way resembles the Boston 2030 vision, and certainly looks nothing like the citys most livable neighborhoods. The project is so inconceivably big that the 65,300 to 76,500 additional vehicle trips per day its expected to generate would hopelessly snarl traffic on Route 1A. Its shocking, opponents of the development argue, that the BPDA has once again escorted the developer through the usual steps, using the standard large-project timeline, without regard for the many serious problems that the project is bound to create.

During a pair of four-month-long public-comment periods in 2019, in fact, objection letters poured into City Hall, many several pages long and carefully crafted by lawyers working for nonprofit advocacy organizations such as Boston Lawyers for Civil Rights. The letters argued that the BPDA did not properly prepare the community, failed to do sufficient outreach in the multiple languages of the community, and, most important, failed to understand the impact this enormous development would have on the people of Eastie, the environment, and Greater Boston. The complaints repeatedly noted that the affordable units being proposed were not affordable enough, large enough, or numerous enough to accommodate even a fraction of those living in the neighborhood who would likely be displaced. Other complaints came from environmental stewards, who warned that raising the land to protect the immediate Suffolk Downs development from flooding would exacerbate drainage issues throughout the surrounding area within a few years.

Leading the charge was Edwards, who invoked the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to demand that the BPDA take concerns about equity more seriously. Appalled at the fast-track approval process and lack of consideration for her vulnerable constituency, she directed her office to draft Planning for Fair Housing, a document that details how the city could use planning and zoning to create a better Boston for everyone. The report calls for the BPDA to join the 21st century by embracing a holistic equity lens in its planning decision and negotiating for public interest concessions from development projects to impose fair housing obligations on private developers.

Although its been just three years since HYM and Harrison bought the racetrack, Greeley says the BPDA has put in the necessary work to sign off on the largest private development ever proposed in Boston. If we were in a rush, which were often accused of being, Greeley says, we would have done this thing a long time ago. But were not. We have slowly, iteratively, tried to figure this out. In the BPDAs defense, Greeley adds, If you were to sit with Tom OBrien, hed tell you how many hundreds of meetings [with the community] hes had.

Meetings, though, are useless if the two sides arequite literallyspeaking different languages. On February 3, Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development against the BPDA, citing the lack of translated materials available to community members with limited English throughout the process. The complaint also asserted that the BPDA, using archaic tools, had failed to properly assess the larger impact on the region. Suffolk Downs will fundamentally change the character, cost, and composition of every neighborhood it touches and all surrounding communities, it states. Simply put, the stakes for affected communities in Boston, who are primarily Limited English Proficiency residents of color, are enormous. For those reasons, the group requested that the BPDA immediately halt its review process. The BPDA says it did provide the necessary translations required by law, and as of press time, the agency was still formulating a response to the letter, but it continues to usher the project along.

Regardless, the project is so huge and its impacts so unfathomable that it may finally provide city councilors and civil rights advocates with a big enough platform to shine a spotlight on the BPDAs shortcomings. It seems to be working: Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tweeted about Suffolk Downs ahead of the March 3 primary, saying, We need affordable housing for all instead of more gentrifying luxury developments for the few.

Edwards, for her part, decided that the only way to rein in the BPDA was to change the law. In January, her office submitted a lengthy amendment to the Boston Zoning Code designed to incorporate equity-based impact analyses into the approval process. Her proposed amendment is now going through working sessions in the city council. She admits it may not get passed soon enough to save the city from Suffolk Downs.

In the meantime, the wheels of justice continue to grind away elsewhere in Boston. There was considerable fallout after Lynch was charged with (and later convicted of) bribery involving an organization receiving federal funds and filing a false federal tax return. Though no one else was charged, one member of the Zoning Board of Appeal stepped down after the scandal. In February, Walsh issued an executive order tightening the conflict-of-interest rules for those who sit on the board.

Still, some see Walshs response as akin to trying to fix the cracked foundation of a house with paint and spackle. The ZBA isnt the problem; it is just one feature of a city planning and development structure that is fatally flawed. What Walsh needs to do with the BPDA is what his administration has done besttake a wrecking ball to the old agency and build something shiny and new and modern where it once stood.

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The BPDA: Paved and Confused - Boston magazine