To register please go to:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYscOqtqTstHtY5cReSrhbDQEFrwL0o4scy

 

School Committee, City Council, Assessor

Tuesday October 17, 2023

7:00 to 9:00 pm

John Zon Community Center

35 Pleasant St, Greenfield

Come hear what these candidates have to say and hear them answer questions.

If you wish to submit a question for the candidates, please come a little early, there will be paper for you to write your question.

Sponsored by the Progressive Blueprint for Greenfield Coalition

www.blueprintforgreenfield.com

Legislation introduced by Senator Paul Mark & State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa

Ask your State Representatives and State Legislators to co-sponsor legislation to fund alternatives to our current emergency response system, H.2264 and S.1407, increasing the availability of non-law enforcement, unarmed, community based response options for calls to 911.

We know that well over 90% of 911 calls are for nonviolent emergencies, that is, for wellness checks, reported vagrancy, and personal crises. When 911 responders are armed police, violence frequently results, and the needs of the person who is the focus of the call too often are ignored. Tell your legislators that the best way to address emergency mental health, homelessness, and substance misuse in our communities is through an unarmed response involving trained crisis managers, who may be peer responders, or other behavioral health specialists.

Ask your Representative to co-sponsor H.2264 HERE and your Senator to co-sponsor S.1407 HERE.

Click HERE to read the Bill and a fact sheet

There are already several alternative 911 response programs in Massachusetts. Amherst launched CRESS (Community Responders for Equity, Safety & Service) in August of 2022,

Northampton will inaugurate a similar service in 2023, and the Cambridge City Council just voted to launch HEART (Cambridge Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team).

The 240^th Anniversary of Slavery Declared Illegal in Massachusetts

Quock Walker, a determined and persistent self-emancipated Western MA slave from Barre, took his case to the state’s highest court 240 years ago. On July 8, 1783, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, declared that “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution.” 

Quock Walker was 30 years old when his judicial victory made slavery illegal in Massachusetts, the first state to do so. Massachusetts was the only state to count no Black residents as slaves in the US Census of 1790. Quock Walker and his siblings bought property in Massachusetts.  His nieces and nephews worked to improve civil rights in Massachusetts and to abolish slavery across the country.

Three years ago, Sean Osborne of Lexington, a public historian, activist and water engineer, undertook a successful campaign to have the state declare July 8 Quock Walker Day aka Mass. Emancipation Day. I joined him and others in the effort, enlisting the support of (then) Sen. Anne Gobi who represented Barre, and our Sen. Jo Comerford who said, “Quock Walker stood bravely for racial justice, liberty, and equality under the law. These issues remain pressing today. We should tell Quock Walker’s story, celebrate it, and learn from it.”

On Nov. 1, 2022, the governor signed into law : “The governor shall annually issue a proclamation setting apart July 8 as Massachusetts Emancipation Day, also known as Quock Walker Day, in recognition the significant contributions made by Quock Walker to abolish slavery in the commonwealth…and recommending that the day be observed in an appropriate manner by the people.”

This year, as more communities learn about Quock Walker Day, they plan celebrations for July 8 (Lexington, Cambridge, Lowell and Worcester), and issuing proclamations. Lexington’s proclamation begins “Whereas, This year marks the 240^th Anniversary of the Quock Walker cases that constitutionally ended slavery in Massachusetts;” and concludes, “We, the Select Board of the Town of Lexington,….urge all of the citizens of the Town of Lexington to celebrate the tenacity and audacity of Quock Walker while building upon his legacy to make Lexington and the Commonwealth a more just place to exercise our natural, essential, and unalienable rights.”

Another celebration this year, notable for baseball fans, is the Red Sox will host a Quock Walker Day event on the infield during their July 8 game at Fenway Park. 

On July 8, 2023, let’s celebrate the 240^th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts and honor the courage and legacy of Quock Walker!

For more on the Quock Walker story, and to work on issuing a proclamation in your town, contact the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington, admin@abclex.org. https://www.abclex.org/black-history-portrait-banners

Sharon Tracy lives in New Salem, MA.

 

A grassroots platform for Greenfield city elections

The election season is heating up in Greenfield already. We are hoping for a progressive sweep for City Council, School Committee and the Mayoral race.

FCCPR is working on building a coalition around a “Progressive Blueprint for Greenfield”. Many of you have already given input into the Blueprint.

You can access the abridged version here. This will be available in a printed version very soon and we will begin distribution of it.

We need you help to win this November.

Distributing this platform and beginning positive, issue oriented conversation about the upcoming election is the first step. FCCPR has in past elections created a more progressive city council and school committee. This was mainly done by feet on the ground, door-to-door work by you and other members. As we go through our endorsement process, we will soon call upon you to again join us in that endeavor.

On November 20th we held our General Assembly which was filled with lots of lively discussion. Here are some of the highlights.

Results of ballot questions we worked on.

We had targeted several of the ballot questions for our work. Here are the results.

Question 1 Fair Share -Millionaires Tax Franklin County 21,052 Yes 9,859 No 66% yes

Question 4 Drivers Licenses for All 19451 yes, 11443 No, 61% yes

Question 5 Medicare for All 2nd Franklin State Rep district 9367 yes, 5383 no, 57% yes

Question 5 Medicare for All 7th Hampden State Rep district 9859 yes, 6820 no, 53% yes

Medicare for All passed in all 20 State Rep districts that it appeared on the ballot.

Question 6 Transparency on votes in the Massachusetts House of Representatives:

2nd Franklin district 11623 yes 2977 no, 71% yes

The General Assembly voted to send $500 to the Warnock campaign in Georgia via Movement Voter Project. This has been done.

Discussed the situation of Police and Mayor in Greenfield and agreed to keep having discussions with FCCPR, Racial Justice Rising and Greenfield Peoples budget campaign.

There was a report from the newly formed Reproductive Justice Task Force and people signed up to help with the task force.

It was reported that ballot referendums supporting abortion rights won in all 5 states where they were on the ballot, and suggested that the Democrats did better than usual in the mid-term elections nationally  in part because more women and young people turned out to support abortion rights as a way to oppose the SCOTUS Dobbs amendment.  One legislative priority of the new RJ task force is MA Medicare for All, since we want to connect reproductive rights with economic and social rights.

What legislation do we want our delegation to propose and strive  for in the new session?

There was a very good discussion for what kind of legislation we want our State Reps. and Senators to support. Here are the results. We will be trying to set-up meetings with our Reps to discuss all these issues.

Items in bold considered highest priorities by FCCPR Coordinating Committee

Climate

• Restructure MassSave to eliminate utility control
• Incentivize (publicly owned) solar along side highways and over parking lots and not industrial solar via clearcutting forests or by removing productive farmland
• Add climate education to state standards
• Close the Northfield pump and storage facility as it’s an energy sink and hurts our river and fish
• Build state-owned and run electric car charging stations
• Fund electric school buses

Housing

• Amend the law about funding for housing construction only when its near public transit to be appropriate for rural communities that do not have public transit
• Allocate more funding for community land trusts for housing – Small Properties State Acquisition Funding Pilot: this legislation was passed; we need to lobby our reps for some of the money
• Create enabling legislation for regional housing trusts
• Allow building codes to allow for tiny houses
• Fund energy efficiency and conservation
• Make funds available for collective/neighborhood geothermal
• Give tenants first right to buy building being sold by owner (TOPA)

Reproductive Justice

• Amend the MA Constitution to codify abortion rights (and reproductive justice) in MA
• Truth in advertising re “fake clinics”
• Mandate that Massachusetts not cooperate with extradition requests from other states (already done?)
• Fund an abortion action corps of staff and volunteers
• Establish a fund to support out of state abortion travelers to MA

Medicare for All

• Pass the Medicare for All bill (which would also promote reproductive justice)
• Have our legislators join M4A caucus

Education

• Eliminate MCAS as a graduation requirement; replace it with alternative assessment
• Guarantee that Fair Share funds are above and beyond existing funding (supplement, not supplant) and re-examine the MA funding formula with rural districts in mind
• Establish funds for green and healthy school buildings
• Increase transportation funding for schools
• Reimburse teachers and parents for out-of-pocket school supplies
• Restructure DESE – e.g. elected board members (delete Pioneer Institute influence)
• Divest the teacher (and state worker) pension plan from fossil fuels

Racial and Social Justice

• Increase transparency in House of Representatives
• Provide alternative social services funding (separate from police funding)
• Extend the timeline for new state flag and seal
• Support the landback initiative to local Indigenous people
• Ban MA police departments from accepting federal military supplies
• Expand gun control
• Pass Death with Dignity

Transportation (Question 1 funds)

• Implement East-West rail through Franklin County and North Quabbin to North Adams
• Expand local public transportation
• Provide public transportation to Bradley Airport

 

By Ferd Wulkan and Anne Ferguson

We all know we have a housing crisis all across our country.  Rents have skyrocketed; there are insufficient numbers of apartments and houses available; many people in our cities are unhoused; rent control is considered too radical; there are few protections against evictions.  The American dream has long included home ownership and stable safe neighborhoods.  But the dream has become a nightmare as racism and capitalism leave some without homes altogether, and have displaced so many more.  Most discouraging, few people see any alternatives to the current system of how housing is allocated and paid for.

But there is an alternative.  Two members of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution (FCCPR) were in Vienna, Austria recently and saw how things could be different.  Montague resident Ferd Wulkan was there in September and spent time with several Viennese residents, all of whom proudly talked to him about housing in the city.  He visited the Karl-Marx Hof, the largest of the socialized housing developments – it stretches over 1 kilometer and houses 5,000 people.  The picture shows a small part of that development.

Leverett resident Ann Ferguson was there a few years earlier and learned how the people in the Karl-Marx Hof complex led the resistance to the Nazis in the early 1930s.  She was particularly impressed by the combination of individual kitchens and communal dining services the original complex offered, including dumb waiters to every apartment allowing the food from the communal kitchen to be delivered to each flat, and the communal laundry and child care center.

Between 50 and 60 percent of all Viennese live in permanently affordable, rent-stabilized subsidized dwellings.  These include 220,000 city-owned units and 200,000 non-profit co-operative flats built with municipal subsidies. Vienna’s 1,800 municipal housing estates alone are home to close to half a million citizens (out of a population of slightly under two million).  All of it together is referred to as “social housing”, which they think sounds better than “public housing”.  There has been a conscious effort to integrate the projects such that members of different social classes live next to each other, each paying a similar percentage of their income for rent.

This all started after the devastation of World War I.  In under a decade, from 1925 to 1934, more than 60,000 new apartments were built in large developments situated around green courtyards.  The Karl-Marx Hof is a good example of this. Forty percent of the building costs came from the Vienna Housing Tax, the rest from the proceeds of a luxury tax and from federal funds.  From 1919 to 1933, the city was the only entity building new housing.

While Austria’s national government has been ruled by a variety of parties ranging from right to left over the years, for over 100 years (except for the Nazi period 1938-45) Vienna has mostly been governed by the Social Democrats: indeed, starting in the 1920’s, it was known as “Red Vienna”. The socialists implemented policies to improve public education, healthcare, sanitation and, especially, housing.  Stable affordable housing, how the dwellings were managed, and what services were provided, were key to  the party’s  creation and celebration of  a workers’ culture. It was also a way to increase workers’ power by eliminating a major source of economic stress.

It remains true  today that with so much of the rental market subsidized and affordable in Vienna, there is downward pressure on rents overall .  This means that  owners of private apartments have to compete with the socialized sector and are thus limited in the rents they can charge.  In other words, the rental market is not subject to the forces of the free market or the ideology of neoliberalism.

Ferd and Ann were also impressed by how apartments are allocated.  Starting in 1925, persons with disabilities and other societally vulnerable groups received preference in receiving subsidized apartments.  Even  today, there continues to be  a complicated allocation system so that many of the more desirably located apartments are made available to low-income people.  

So what does this mean for us in the US today?  We need to acknowledge that housing is a basic human right!  The Vienna example shows that where there’s a will there’s a way, but we in the U.S. need a socialist vision that can compete with the dominant capitalist world view.  Learning from other places, like Ann and Ferd did in Vienna, can be part of what could get us there.  

Sources, and for more information:

City of Vienna, “Social Housing in Vienna”  

Miles Howard, “Maybe more of us should live in public housing”, Boston Globe, 3/13/2020

Wikipedia, “Red Vienna”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna

“Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture” by Helmut Gruber [1991, Oxford University Press]

 

Where do We Go from Here?

Hold the Date

Sunday November 20, 2022

2:00pm to 4:00pm

Guiding Star Grange

401 Chapman St. Greenfield

From the FCCPR Co-Ordinating Committee

Yes on Question 1 – Fair Share Amendment, the Millionaires Tax

This is a long needed amendment to our State Constitution.

This proposed constitutional amendment would establish an additional 4% state income tax on that portion of annual taxable income in excess of $1 million. This income level would be adjusted annually, by the same method used for federal income-tax brackets, to reflect increases in the cost of living. Revenues from this tax would be used, subject to appropriation by the state Legislature, for public education, public colleges and universities; and for the repair and maintenance of roads, bridges, and public transportation. The proposed amendment would apply to tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2023.

For more information please go to https://www.fairsharema.com/why-fair-share

Yes on Question 2 – Regulation of Dental Insurance

This proposed law would direct the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Division of Insurance to approve or disapprove the rates of dental benefit plans and would require that a dental insurance carrier spend at least 83 percent of the premiums on actual dental coverage rather then administrative costs. If a carrier’s annual spending on dental coverage is less than 83 percent, the carrier would be required to refund the excess premiums to its covered individuals and groups. The proposed law would allow the Commissioner to waive or adjust the refunds only if it is determined that issuing refunds would result in financial impairment for the carrier.

For more information please go to https://voteyeson2fordental.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInbis26nx-gIVdwOzAB0HGA9EEAAYASAAEgJP6vD_BwE

Yes on Question 4 – Eligibility for Driver’s Licenses

The Republican candidate for governor is looking to use anti-immigrant and racist actions to bolster his campaign. This is an attempt to overturn a law that was passed by the Massachusetts Legislature.

This law allows Massachusetts residents who cannot provide proof of lawful presence in the United States to obtain a standard driver’s license or learner’s permit if they meet all the other qualifications for a standard license or learner’s permit, including a road test and insurance, and provide proof of their identity, date of birth, and residency. The law provides that, when processing an application for such a license or learner’s permit or motor vehicle registration, the registrar of motor vehicles may not ask about or create a record of the citizenship or immigration status of the applicant, except as otherwise required by law. This law does not allow people who cannot provide proof of lawful presence in the United States to obtain a REAL ID.

For more information please go to https://masspeaceaction.org/vote-yes-on-ballot-questions-1-and-4/

Yes on Question 5 – Medicare for All

Instruct your Representative to vote in favor of Massachusetts establishing a single-payer health care plan, also know as Improved Medicare for All

This will be on the ballot in the new 2nd Franklin district which comprises Greenfield Precincts 1,2,3,4, and 9, Athol, Erving, Gill, Northfield, Orange, Phillipston, Royalston, Warwick, Winchendon Precinct 1

This will also be on the ballot in the new 7th Hampden District which includes Belchertown.
Ludlow, New Salem, Pelham, Petersham, Shutesbury, Wendell

In 2018 all of Franklin County voted overwhelmingly for this ballot question. Both our State Reps., Natalie Blais and Paul Mark endorsed the legislation. Now with the change in the State Rep. districts it is on the ballot in the new 2nd Franklin District. We are hoping that Rep. Susanah Whipps if elected will also ensdorse the legislation.

“Shall the representative for this district be instructed to vote for legislation to create a single payer system of universal health care that provides all Massachusetts residents with comprehensive health care coverage including the freedom to choose doctors and other health care professionals, facilities, and services, and eliminates the role of insurance companies in health care by creating an insurance trust fund that is publicly administered?”

For more information please go to https://masscare.org/

Vote Yes on Carbon Tax  

(The number of this question may vary from town to town)

Shall the representative from this district be instructed to introduce and vote for legislation that puts a fee on the carbon content of fossil fuels to compensate for their environmental damage and returns most of the proceeds in equitable ways to individuals as a cash-back dividend?

Another partial solution to a big problem but it is a good step in the right direction.

This will be on the ballot in the First Franklin District which is comprised on Greenfield Precincts 5,6,7,8, Ashfield, Bernardston, Buckland, Charlemont, Colrain, Conway, Deerfield, Hawley, Heath, Leverett, Leyden, Monroe, Montague, Rowe, Shelburne, Sunderland, Whately

For more information please go to :https://www.gazettenet.com/Voters-in-1st-Franklin-1st-Hampshire-districts-asked-to-weigh-in-on-carbon-tax-48395589?utm_source=pocket_mylist

Vote Yes on Transparency

(The number of this question may vary from town to town)

Shall the representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of changes to the applicable House of Representative rules to make each Legislator’s vote in that body’s Legislative committees publicly available on the Legislature’s website.

This will be on the ballot in the new 2nd Franklin district which comprises Greenfield Precincts 1,2,3,4, and 9, Athol, Erving, Gill, Northfield, Orange, Phillipston, Royalston, Warwick, Winchendon
Precinct 1

It seems to us this is a simple ask, have votes by our elected Representatives made public. That’s basic democracy.

For more information please go to https://actonmass.org/the-campaign

Governors Council

Our last recommendation is that people vote for Tara Jacobs in the governors council race. This vote is often overlooked, but the Governors council provides advice to the Governor on selecting Judges and on parole issues. Recently our current Governor appointed an anti-choice person to a judgeship. We believe Tara Jacobs will not work to appoint right wing judges.