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Real change takes time. "People don't just cut off the king's head," Gal Beckerman begins "The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Rise of Radical Ideas." Released this month by Crown, Beckerman's new book notes that while the public is riveted by images of a newly ignited social movement "the adrenaline, the tear gas a man standing up to a tank" that's only the third act in a much longer play, most of which has already taken place offstage.

Throughout history, movements that have transformed societies, overthrown governments and beheaded kings, Beckerman writes, started with a lot of talk. It just was not the sort of talk we have today.

"The Quiet Before" which befittingly starts quietly, with the tale of a 17th century French astronomer using an exhaustive letter-writing campaign to stage a scientific experiment in the days before capital-S science at first seems like a Big Idea book, threading together obscure parcels of history into a grand theory of today. But what distinguishes Beckerman's latest (he's also the author of the lauded 2010 history "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry") is that it has heart and purpose.

It's a book born out of disappointment. The promise of liberatory movements like Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter mass movements capable of taking immediate action thanks to the unprecedented outreach of social media was undermined by the very tool that enabled their rise. Compared to slow-cooked, pre-internet movements, both good and evil the smuggled samizdat writings through which Soviet dissidents imagined a post-authoritarian world into being, or the obscure Italian Futurist journals in which a band of proto-fascists laid the groundwork for Mussolini today's revolutionary movements are starving amid plenty, able to talk to the whole world, but not, or at least not effectively, with each other.

RELATED:In an age of fascist counterrevolution, our biggest problem may be the death of ethics

Beckerman has worked on this book, off and on, for a decade, including a years-long pause to pursue a PhD in media studies to inform his suspicion that, in medium-is-the-message fashion, the way we talk online today is making it hard to make real change. The book that's resulted is sweeping in its scope divided into two clear sections and in its diagnosis.

There's the sort of movement that happened before the internet, with the French astronomer using the medium of letters to help birth the scientific revolution, an Irish activist using mass petition-canvassing to raise class consciousness, a Ghanaian newspaperman whose open op-ed pages helped engender anti-colonialist African nationalism, and the American teens with glue sticks whose zines sparked Third Wave feminism. Then there's the after, with the ecstatic rise and tragic undoing of the Arab Spring, the stymied potential of the first iteration of Black Lives Matter, and the frightening fact that, in a world where effective progressive movement-building is often hindered more than helped by social media, the exile of white supremacists and neo-Nazis from many mainstream platforms unintentionally provided them with exactly the incubator they needed to plan their own real change.

It's not all hopeless, but it is serious.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When I started reading, "The Quiet Before" seemed like a "Big Ideas" book. By the end, it seemed more a manifesto on organizing. How did this book come about?

In terms of origin, I trace it back to two things that happened concurrently. One was observing the Arab Spring and the greater moment of revolutions in the early 2010s and all the triumphalism that came with this assumption that we'd been given this new form of communication with revolutionary potential and that all activists or dissidents needed was a connection to the internet to make change. It occurred to me even back then when there was some success and people were able to go gather in the streets at larger numbers and with greater speed than ever before that there was definitely a downside to this. And then a lot of these revolutions just sort of petered out, once that that initial rush of attention and visibility went away.

I was thinking about that, along with the fact that my first book was partly about Soviet dissidents. I got really curious about their use of samizdat, which was this underground, self-published writing, and what it was able to do for them in terms of sustaining a community of dissidents over many, many years. It gave them a forum for developing their ideas, talking with one another, arguing for and imagining different realities for themselves. The contrast of having spent that much time with samizdat, and then seeing how limited the use was of social media for modern-day revolutions, came together to spark my interest in thinking about this, about media and change in general.

It was fascinating to read the chapter on samizdat considering what's happening now with Russia and Ukraine. Is there anything from that history that's applicable to what's going on now?

The situation in Russia over the last 15 years makes me think about the nature of change and how it's often three steps forward, two steps back. It almost usually is. The dissidents in the Soviet Union wanted Western, democratic, liberal values to infuse their societies, and were beginning to create that through samizdat. They experienced moments in the '90s where they saw that seep into their societies. And then, under Putin, it's seeped back out. It should make anyone understand the nature of change and how it happens over time.

The other thing to be said is that samizdat came out of a world where there wasn't any other way for them to communicate with one another. They needed that underground channel because they literally couldn't use typewriters most of the time, let alone publish in any formal way. And there was something generative in what that provided for them, that kind of secluded, huddled space. These days, in Russia and everywhere else, most people, unless their ideas are so noxious that they get shoved off the big platforms, they don't look for those spaces anymore. And there's some harm that comes from that.

How did you find the case studies you use to illustrate the tools that are necessary for successful mobilizing, like the story of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Periesc?

I wanted to find the footnotes I could explode out into bigger stories. And Periesc was one of those footnotes: quite literally just a mention of him and of this experiment he carried out to use a contemporary word, this kind of crowdsourcing where he coordinated an observation of an eclipse in 1635 among dozens of observers who all sent back their data to him. And through that, he was able to figure out the correct longitude of the Mediterranean Sea, which was a sort of a subversive act at the time, when church doctrine still was pretty firm and didn't look lightly on people who were carrying out science.

I started to scratch the surface and found that there is this incredible store of letters that Periesc left behind 100,000 pieces of paper and thousands and thousands of letters. He never wrote a book, but his legacy was in these letters, because they were the connective tissue among these great minds in the early 17th century who were building to the scientific revolution. Essentially, these are people who were all trying to rediscover a new relationship with nature and the power of the scientific method. I was able to go through them and the whole world opened up, of the letter as a form of communication and the role it played in the slow accretion of knowledge and of recruiting these people who he would need for this experiment, most of whom were missionaries, not inclined to carry on science, and how letters allowed him to move them towards a new way of engaging with nature.

In thinking about how the medium influences the potential for organizing, your second example of Feargus O'Connor petitioning the English government for voting rights, not just as a demonstration of mass public support but also as a means of consciousness-raising among the working class was fascinating on its own, but also in terms of how signing petitions today is usually considered activism's cheap grace.

Like "slacktivism," yeah.

There were many petitions in the Chartist movement that they came up with to make their point and try to build political power. But the first one, in 1839, managed to gather just over 1.25 million signatures of working men and women whose living conditions amid industrialization were just horrid. But they had no political leverage, no political representation whatsoever. They literally couldn't vote. Only about one in six men were able to vote in England at the time. And so their recourse, which took the form of this enormous petition, was really the only thing they had. They took advantage of this loophole in British law that went back to the 14th century, that any citizen could petition the king and Parliament for a grievance. Usually, it was used for things like land disputes, but under the leadership of Feargus O'Connor, who is this charismatic, bombastic character who traveled the country rallying people, they concentrated as a class on this task of accumulating signatures. And the difference between the way we think of petitions today and then, is this was hard workto go door to door, convince people, try to gather more and more signatures. It was risky too because there were stories of people exiled from the country for signing allegiance to a union. So all of it was dangerous, hard work.

But something that spun out of that hard work was a real sense of solidarity, community and allegiance to a cause and an actual constituency. I mean, the petition created the constituency because the work of doing it, this whole world of associations and allegiances, spun out of that.

That first petition failed. They brought it to Parliament in the summer of 1839 and were literally laughed out the door. But it laid the groundwork for what would be another 30 years of activism.

In reading the book, I was reminded of a line from a Garret Keizer essay, after the 2004 election: "Reactionary politics work well with electronic media because reaction is electric," while "Revolutionary politics have always been tied to a dogged willingness to teach." Your book seemed to echo that, but also perhaps offer an update?

I think that theory is correct, but I think it's something that people have managed to ignore or be distracted from. It's a truth that people have been distracted from because social media provides a tool for organizers, activists and dissidents that we've never seen in human history, which is this extraordinary bullhorn, this ability to call out everybody in the streets right away at mass numbers. That's incredible. There's no denying that how useful that is. The problem is that it's so good at doing that, it kind of leads one to believe that that's all that's needed.

The Arab Spring chapter, to me, is the greatest cautionary tale in this regard. Here was a coalition of people that came together through the internet, through Facebook, who eventually were able, because of that bullhorn, to take their gathering to the center of Cairo. And their sheer physical presencea presence that the internet facilitatedbrought down a dictator. But they also were so enamored with this tool they had been given that they didn't quite understand it was going to be utterly useless for them in creating the kind of political opposition they would need to build in order to really confront real political power. And in fact, it was going to have the opposite effect, which is the tearing-down aspect of social media we all know so well, to completely undermine their efforts to find consensus, to learn, to teach each other, to do all that work I think progressive causes really, really need and want to be able to do.

That quote still remains a truth. But it's one that progressives have not fully understood when it comes to the tools they're actually using to make change.

Whereas the right has?

The right kind of has!

The interesting thing about the right is that, in the extreme right, they have been forced into smaller and smaller holes, because so much of what they're doing is seen as not legitimate in the greater public sphere of Facebook and Twitter. So they have to find smaller and smaller holes, and in those holes are able to actually do some of the work that I wish that the progressive causes would get a chance to do. They're strategizing. They're refining their ideas. They're thinking about how best to bring them out into the world.

In your chapter about the Italian Futurists, you describe how their culture of in-fighting helped build a proto-fascist revolutionary movement. How does that compare to the jockeying on social media today, which you see as a lot more damaging to movements?

I think the element we have today is it's so public and performative. There is always the worry of shame. I'm not going to put out my most interesting idea or one that is not fully developed yet because I might be laughed at somehow or thought not worthy of participating. Among the Futurists there was this role of egging one another on, arguing with each other and debating, and that is clearly an essential role that a movement needs, especially as it's nascent, as it's trying to figure out what it wants and what it is. There has to be some space where people can argue among themselves and among themselves being a critical part, because you want a degree of allegiance or solidarity before you enter. But once in the room, you want to allow for the push-and-pull that actually creates more solid movements and ideas, that can actually move out into the world and start recruiting more and more adherents.

Related to that, how does today's news cycle, and its intensification on social media, affect movement building? I'm thinking in particular of how "movement moments" whether BLM, #MeToo, or others quickly lead to a secondary news cycle of accusations that they've "gone too far."

The outside glare definitely plays a role in limiting the capacity of movements because everything is so performative and it's all towards the purpose of gaining followers or visibility. Then you're trapped in this loop of needing to see that continue. The saddest example I have of this is in talking with the Black Lives Matter activists who I profiled in the book, from the 2015-2016 iteration of BLM around Ferguson. The movement had some visibility and then somehow they got trapped in this need for extremely brutal videos of police violence on Black men. The media began to depend on those videos, too, as a way of keeping any attention on this movement. And all the work that needed to happen to actually figure out how to turn that visibility into concrete change on the ground was kind of swept away once Donald Trump came to power in 2016. It sucked all the oxygen out of social media. They lost their only means to get their message out. So there can be real harm when you're depending on those cycles, on those booms and busts, as the lifeblood of your movements.

How should we think about these questions in the so-called post-truth era, when a lot of people on the right are developing fleshed-out theories, built in small movement communities, but which amount to QAnon or antisemitic conspiracy theories about "Cultural Marxism"?

It's quite challenging, what's happening in our public sphere today. I'm trying to make an argument that we can't cede the ground to the people coming up with false, antisocial narratives. We need the spaces and the opportunities to counter those. The tools out there need to be seen as neutral, and we need the variety of them to be picked up not just by these forces. But if people look at the internet and say all I need to do to make progressive change is have a hashtag go viral, and against that you have groups of people figuring out how to allow their dark conspiratorial visions to ferment more fully in other places? From my perspective, we need that ferment to happen for the voices that will counter them.

What prospects do you see for returning to a more productive form of organizing, and is there a role for social media within that?

I don't really see the book as a cyber-pessimistic, "we should turn off the internet" book. My point is more about activists' sense of self-awareness to know when the bullhorn is the appropriate tool to use and to understand that there are other means of communication.

I am actually hopeful. People have become aware of the negative impacts of social media on their personal lives how they make us distracted and frazzled and limit the kinds of conversations we can have or push them in certain directions or even when it comes to thinking about democracy, and how we've become so much more divided and outrage has been exacerbated through those forms of communication. There's much more awareness of it now than when I started working on this project.The problem is that often doesn't extend to the way we think about social and political change. We still have this weirdly romantic idea about what that hashtag-gone-viral can achieve. That's where I want people to stop and understand how they are contorting themselves to fit the metabolism of social media when it comes to movement and building towards new ideas.

But there are places. It's not much of a mystery communicating through an email chain or a DM group that only has 10 or 12 people or through an encrypted app like Signal or Telegram those can be very productive spaces and they need to work in concert with the big, public attention-grabbing ones. But my worry is the next time public attention turns towards something like the question of police reform, I want to make sure that those more refined, strategic, pinpointed, even wonky local ideas, for how to turn that attention into real concrete change, that that's happened. That there has been a kind of quiet before.

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Less than social media: How hashtags have hindered progressive movements and fueled the right - Salon

On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden and leading NATO powers escalated the war provocations against Russia by announcing the imposition of substantial economic sanctions in response to Russian President Vladimir Putins recognition of the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk from Ukraine.

In the United States, a bipartisan consensus is emerging for even greater military and economic pressure to be brought to bear against Russia, increasing the risk of a war between nuclear-armed powers. This consensus has brought together a broad spectrum of the political establishment, from the Republican right to the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

This ruling class consensus is part of an attempt by the Biden administration to effect a new national unity aimed at securing American imperialisms interests abroad, controlling the domestic political crisis and distracting from growing inflation and a daily US COVID-19 death toll of over 2,000 people.

Democrats and Republicans alike are expressing criticism that the Biden administration had been insufficiently ruthless in measures taken against Russia.

Ultra-right Republican Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared, Biden-Harris officials are to an enormous extent directly responsible for this crisis. He and his administration instead settled for an endlessly deferred and wholly uncredible strategy of responding to Putins aggression after an invasion.

A leading Trump supporter in the House, Representative Jim Banks (R-Indiana), said that he is still hopeful that President Biden will show the backbone thats been missing all along and well hit Putin where it counts, by restoring the Trump sanctions on Nord Stream 2.

Anti-Trump Republicans were less critical of Biden and equally enthusiastic about a belligerent policy towards Russia. MSNBCs Andrea Mitchell welcomed former Trump national security advisor John Bolton on her program yesterday, providing him a chance to demand Biden take an even more aggressive stance toward Russia.

NBC wrote that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has been on the phone all morning working with Democrats on an emergency supplemental funding package aimed at expanding sanctions, as well as military aid for the Ukrainian government.

Biden faces substantial pressure from within the Democratic Party as well. Representative Jim Hines (D-Connecticut) stated that Biden was wrong for not immediately calling Russias actions in Donetsk and Lugansk an invasion, tweeting, If you know the history of aggressive dictators, you know its critical not to lose clarity. Putin is invading Ukraine. Full stop. Hes done it before, and he will do it again if we dont impose full sanctions.

Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) similarly declared, I think we can stop equivocating as to whether we have an invasion or not. I think the West, the United States has to make it very clear to Putin that the consequences begin now.

Three of the Democrats who were part of the official congressional delegation to the Munich Security Council last weekend were former CIA, military and State Department officials, including Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Jason Crow of Colorado and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey. Slotkin, a longtime CIA and National Security Council official, emphasized the broader geopolitical issues in the Ukraine confrontation, tweeting, Make no mistake: this is about more than just Russia and Ukraine. China is watching our every move to see if the international community will stand up against Putins aggression. This is a moment to show that we wont let them rewrite the next century.

Democrats and Republicans are working together to force the Biden administration to launch more aggressive sanctions. In an article titled Biden faces bipartisan calls for more punishing Russian sanctions, NBC reported yesterday that lawmakers across the political spectrum called on President Biden to impose crushing new sanctions, including Bidens Democratic allies in Congress, as well as the Republican minority.

In the House, Democrats and Republicans are introducing the SUPPORT Act to assess how American imperialism can provide weapons to a Ukrainian military. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Illinois) said, We need to get ready to assist our Ukrainian friends secure their sovereignty if the Russians invade, and second, we need to send a strong message to the Russians and others that the costs of invading Ukraine will be prohibitive. The Ukrainian military includes neo-Nazi outfits like the Azov Battalion.

In the Senate, a similar bill introduced by Senator Menendez is sponsored by 80 percent of Senate Democrats, including self-described progressives like Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.

The bipartisan delegation of Democratic and Republican senators and representatives returned from the Munich Security Conference this weekend and issued a joint statement calling for emergency legislation to further fund Ukraines military. The statement, signed by 21 legislators, reads:

It now appears increasingly likely that Russian forces will initiate hostilities against a free and peaceful Ukraine. We as a bipartisan delegation will bring home the same unity and resolve we have seen among our Atlantic allies against Russian aggression. We pledge to work toward whatever emergency supplemental legislation will best support our NATO allies and the people of Ukraine and support freedom and safety around the world. No matter what happens in the coming days, we must assure that the dictator Putin and his corrupt oligarchs pay a devastating price for their decisions.

The delegations emphasis on the unity of the Republican and Democratic delegations underscores a fundamental purpose of the present drive to war. Racked by immense internal divisions that are exacerbated by the worsening coronavirus pandemic, spiraling inflation and the ongoing threat of fascist coup plotting at home, the American ruling class is attempting to use a foreign conflict to suppress social discontent at home.

As Representative Betty McCollum (D-Minnesota) said at a press conference held by the Munich congressional delegation: Were bicameral, were bipartisan, were united. NATOs united, the EUs united and were ready to do what it takes if Russia walks away.

A particularly important role in the bipartisan warmongering is being played by the self-styled progressive Democrats.

Senator Bernie Sanders issued a belligerent statement yesterday in support of Bidens sanctions against Russia, placing blame entirely on Russia for the present crisis and making no reference to the role of NATO and the United States:

Vladimir Putins latest invasion of Ukraine is an indefensible violation of international law, regardless of whatever false pretext he offers. There has always been a diplomatic solution to this situation. Tragically, Putin appears intent on rejecting it. The United States must now work with our allies and the international community to impose serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs.

Sanders himself voted to support the 1999 US war against Serbia, which was also an indefensible violation of international law, and the Clinton administrations claims of genocide were also false. The same is true of the US invasion of Afghanistan, which Sanders also voted to support.

In the House, Democratic Socialists of America member Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) shared a tweet from former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul comparing Putin to Hitler, denouncing Russia for taking territory from smaller powers, and calling for the US to respond now. Right now. Declaring his support for these threats, Bowman stated, Absolutely devastating. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has not issued a single tweet opposing Bidens war provocations.

On Saturday, February 26, the World Socialist Web Site is hosting an international online webinar to oppose the US-NATO drive to war against Russia. In this webinar, an international panel of leading members of the International Committee of the Fourth International and WSWS writers will review the causes and consequences of the US-NATO war drive and present the political basis for a fight against war. Register here.

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Bipartisan congressional war consensus emerges, bringing together progressive left and Republican right - WSWS

There is a tension between strong employment rights, a supportive welfare state, equal rights for migrants and locals, and an open, non-selective immigration policy that creates hard decisions for progressive politicians but the quandary should not be avoided, says Alan Manning.

Those on the progressive side of politics tend to be in favour of strong employment rights for workers and a generous welfare state for those unable to work, whether because of unemployment or sickness/disability. And when it comes to migration policy, they tend to be in favour of equal rights for locals and migrants and an immigration policy that is relatively open and non-selective.

There are ways in which one can use the academic literature on the impacts of immigration to argue that one can have all the above:the studies that find that, at worst, migration only slightly depresses the wages of locals; and that migrants, taken as a whole, often pay slightly more in taxes than they receive in benefits and public services.

While these studies show that immigration does not necessarily reduce wages or worsen the public finances, there are risks in using this research to draw universal conclusions about the impact of immigration, regardless of the level, or type, of immigration. There are reasons to think their findings apply mostly to the situation under the current restrictions on immigration, restrictions which are designed to limit the impact on wages and the public finances.

To see that there are circumstances where immigration may reduce wages, consider the Gulf and Singapore where full-time live-in domestic help can be hired for very low salaries, perhaps 8,000 a year. Many local households take advantage of this and this migration benefits locals. But it comes at the cost of these migrants having fewer rights than locals with, for example, no prospect of ever becoming a citizen. As Philip Martin and Martin Ruhs have written, there seems to a trade-off between the number of migrants and the rights those migrants have.

In the UK, hiring live-in domestic help costs so much that very few households can afford it. It is not that the migrants going to the Gulf or Singapore want to go there and not to the UK. But the combination of UK labour laws (like the minimum wage or collective bargaining) and the immigration rules (which would not allow migrants into the country) prevent them from migrating to the UK. These rules protect locals from the possibility that migrants might depress wages but have the impact of limiting the demand for work permits from employers, making the immigration system more restrictive as a result. The greater the protections for locals, the lower the level of immigration is likely to be.

To keep immigration open, one could expand the types of immigration that do not require a job offer. Some of these migrants might end up not working at all and what happens then is important. If there are no recourse to public funds policies, migrants will have fewer rights than locals but there is little cost to the locals of sustaining the migrants without work. However, these migrants will end up among the poorest people in our society. Their children could be in extreme poverty yet will go on to become citizens. This can all be mitigated by giving migrants the same access to the welfare state as locals, but then one risks a negative effect on the public finances. Most studies find that the impact of migrants, taken as a whole, on the public finances is small (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) but there are huge differences in the net contribution at the individual level, largely based around whether someone is in work or not. Expand immigration routes that do not require a job offer, prevent very low wages, and give equal access to the welfare state and it is quite possible that this will worsen the public finances.

In 2004, David Goodhart formulated the progressive dilemma that immigration leads to increased diversity that threatens the sense of solidarity within the community which sustains the welfare state. One can debate whether one can create a common identity to avoid this, but some types of immigration can undermine the welfare states fiscal sustainability. Ensuring this does not happen leads us down the path of a more restrictive, selective immigration policy.

Taken individually, the objectives of (1) strong employment rights, (2) a supportive welfare state, (3) equal rights for locals and migrants, (4) a relatively open, non-selective immigration policy all seem achievable. There are often policies that can improve outcomes in one dimension without harming the others. But, deep down, there are tensions between them. For progressives who see all the objectives as laudable, there is then a very uncomfortable decision to make about how to balance them. A decision so uncomfortable that it is very tempting to convince oneself there is no tension at all. But this does not make the tension go away and risks leaving the immigration policy space to those with a less progressive vision of the good society, who are more than happy to sacrifice one of these objectives for others. How to design an immigration policy with an appropriate balance between the competing objectives is the progressive quandary.

____________________

About the Author

Alan Manning is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at LSE, and co-director of the community wellbeing programme at LSE CEP. His research generally covers labour markets, with a focus on imperfect competition (monopsony), minimum wages, job polarisation, immigration, and gender. On immigration, his interests expand beyond the economy to issues such as social housing, minority groups, and identity.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash.

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The progressive quandary: how to design an immigration policy that balances competing objectives - British Politics and Policy at LSE

Those making bids for office include Boston NAACP President Tanisha Sullivan, who is running against longtime Secretary of State Bill Galvin; former ACLU attorney Rahsaan Hall, who is making a bid against longtime Plymouth County DA Timothy Cruz; and Boston City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, who is running for DA in Suffolk County, where newly-appointed interim Kevin Hayden hasnt said whether he will be a candidate.

Thats a stark change from the electoral slates of not many years ago, when entrenched white male candidates were regarded as so unbeatable that many candidates were reluctant to even take their chances.

The shift leftward is visible in other contests as well. Even as Attorney General Maura Healey seems established as the early front-runner for governor, both Sonia Chang-Diaz and Danielle Allen have staked out positions clearly intended to outflank the attorney general on her left.

Not that Healey is any kind of moderate, at least not by the standards of any state but this one. But in Democratic politics, the ground is shifting. And the faces of those running this year are a clear reflection of that.

* As Boston begins the search for its next schools superintendent, one intriguing subplot is what this will mean for the future of the appointed School Committee.

Following a resounding vote in a nonbinding referendum, the notion of scrapping the current panel for an elected one has never had more momentum than it does now.

Thats a potential political problem for Mayor Michelle Wu, who opposes a return to an elected School Committee. (She says she favors a hybrid, with some members elected and some appointed by the mayor.)

Politically, an elected School Committee is an easy sell to voters, just by virtue of being more democratic. Given the choice, who wouldnt opt for electing their government?

But Boston has had an elected School Committee it was abolished in 1991 by Mayor Ray Flynn and its latter years were nothing the city needs or should want again. With every decision deeply politicized, it spent most of its time in gridlock. Running the schools had become nearly impossible. Troubled as the School Department may be now, it bears little resemblance to that old, broken version.

Then, and maybe now, the strongest proponents of an elected School Committee were politicians, not parents or educators. They liked the idea of more offices for political ingenues to run for, and they liked being able to exert more direct influence on decisions, including budgets and promotions. Nearly every appointment of a principal back then prompted a low-key political campaign.

Lets just say educational quality was not always front and center.

People have forgotten what a disaster it was, said former city councilor Michael McCormack, who first proposed replacing it with an appointed committee and got Flynn on board. I hope Mayor Wu sticks to her guns in not going back to that, and I think she will.

Flynn, and Mayor Tom Menino after him, argued that the appointed committee made the mayor squarely responsible for the schools. That hasnt fueled sufficient progress, but accountability has not been a bad thing.

Ultimately, what we desperately need is to improve the schools. If Wu can be an effective driver for the changes that are needed which I believe she can be I dont really care whos on the School Committee, or who picks them. Just somebody, please, fix the schools.

* Under the leadership of Mayor Carlo DeMaria, Everett is a city where weird stuff happens routinely.

The latest is that Schools Superintendent Priya Tahiliani who is currently pursuing a complaint against the city for racial and gender discrimination says through her attorney that surveillance cameras were recently found in her office. The devices were reportedly discovered last month.

Tahiliani, whose contract runs until 2024, maintains that DeMaria has been trying to push her out of her job for some time. The School Committee recently shelved plans to undercut her authority, in the wake of her complaint.

Its anyones guess what anyone thought they might uncover by planting a camera in the superintendents office.

Only in Everett.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at adrian.walker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Adrian_Walker.

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Will this be a big year for progressives, and other thoughts - The Boston Globe

Progressives activists including elected officials gathered at the Florida Capitol Tuesday to complain that the Legislature isnt addressing the problems that average people need help with.

We are tired of a state that continues to demolish the capability of local officials trying to address the needs of their constituents; we are tired of coming year after year to file lawsuits against these bills that are chipping away at our basic human rights, said Francesca Menes, deputy organizing director for Local Progress, during a news conference.

The group represents a collection of progressive public officials.

Jack Porter, who sits on the Tallahassee City Commission, cited one example: Floridas housing crisis. She pointed to trailer park in her community where the owner doubled rents and pushed residents out of their homes.

It breaks my heart to get email after email that people are struggling and they have been removed from their house illegally, Porter said.

One bill pending before the Legislature HB 537 would allow landlords to charge monthly fees instead of security deposits. That would reduce up-front costs but hook renters with monthly fees that they wouldnt get back, unlike a refundable security deposit, according to critics.

Porter argued that policy decision should be left to local government.

Rep. Angie Nixon, a Black Democrat from Duval County, urged repeal of HB1, the anti-riot legislation passed last year. The bill toughens criminal penalties against organizers and participants in demonstrations that get out of hand, even if counter-protesters started the trouble.

A federal judge has ruled the law violates the Constitution.

Nixon has filed her own bill (HB 857), which would repeal the old law.

Our governor keeps saying this is a free state and I say, Free for who? Its not a free state for people who look like me, who are a part of LGBTQ community, and not a free state for women, Nixon said.

Read the rest here:
Progressives claim FL Legislature is ignoring real people's needs this session - Florida Phoenix