Electing our mayors would not be the end of the world

The first article of Cambridge’s progressive faith is that the Plan E city manager form of government is a mighty fortress against chaos. Corruption and cronyism were tossed into the “scrapheap of history” by the Cambridge Civic Association.

Indeed, Cambridge’s last “strong” mayor was removed from office and jailed for fixing contracts. Yet the campaign for charter reform had not been fought on corruption issues. It was about the property tax rate, and the difficulty of making ends meet in a Depression economy.

Political decisions were made to deal with joblessness and deteriorating city infrastructure by adding debt and payroll. This alarmed the banks and substantial taxpayers.

But after sixty years of administration by city managers, Cambridge carries much more debt, and has a far bigger payroll, than in 1940. And there are 30,000 fewer Cantabrigians today than there were then.

Just as Cambridge changed to Plan E, the economy was reborn in World War II. Unemployent dried up and people started paying taxes again.

According to the textbooks, a city manager is supposed to be “above” politics, should have a professional degree and not have local political connections. Only one of Cambridge’s seven managers has fit that description, and Robert Healey isn’t that one. His North Cambridge roots alone disqualify him as the “ideal” city manager.

Yet he seems to be doing all right. And why shouldn’t he, with a city destined for prosperity by its location, desirable for industry and housing, the seat of two of the country’s richest universities and of the state’s largest county.

With all this going for you, you don’t have to be a wizard to get AAA bond ratings.

Bond raters do look at policies. They can see that city manager form government in Cambridge has worked well for real estate developers. It works well for the universities.

For all our “planning studies” and “processes,” Cambridge asks much less from the developers and universities than do Boston (with its “strong” mayor) or Brookline (with its representative town meeting). The developers and the universities could care less about democracy and the accountability of elected officials to the people.

There have been proposals, off and on, to leave the city manger in place, but increase the power of the city council.

But how would that work? A city’s executive, under whatever name, will still administer the city. The bureaucracy, however divided, is unified under the executive, day to day and in the final analysis.

City councils, on the other hand, are and ought to be divided. Their rôle is to represent differences within the wider community. This means they are really not in a position to control a city manager.

In fact, the Plan E charter makes it illegal for city councilors to try to do so! All the council can do is approve budgets, pass ordinances, and choose managers.

Every ten or twenty years, a Cambridge city council has exercised its option and fired a city manager. At such times there has always been a smell of sulfur in the air. Cronyism, revenge - all the usual crap from the “scrapheap of history.”

The rest of the time, since the manager isn’t really accountable to them, the councilors point fingers at each other, and at the manager, to avoid accountability themselves.

An elected mayor might be no better, but is unlikely to be worse, than an unelected manager. Would there be any difference at all?

In 1928, Mayor Edward Quinn extracted the first payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) deal in the US history simply by having the streets dug up in places and at times that seriously inconvenienced Harvard. Can you imagine any city manager doing that? We have had seven, and Cambridge’s in-lieu formula has not improved since Quinn’s time.

Democracy is no guarantor of justice, but there will never be justice without democracy. Direct election of mayors is no more than a minimal requirement for a democratic city.

Why couldn’t we decide to elect a mayor by instant runoff the way we elect the city council? And continue to elect the council in that same way?

Perhaps after sixty years of ‘Uncle Bob’ government, we fear democracy, afraid that an elected strong mayor may be one of them, rather than one of us. And so we keep on sliding toward the monolithic University City; afraid to give force to our own plans for the future; unwilling to be free.

And we call ourselves the People’s Republic.

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Subject:    Re: bush and terror Date:    Oct 2, 2004 4:39 PM

Look, I almost always feel that you pick the right stuff to send on, but I really don't like this piece, which was of course written to support the Democrat alternative. Since Kerry and Edwards have made it clear that they don't intend to get out of Iraq any time soon, what is this alternative?

In order to accept Kerry as an alternative to Bush, you have to do two things. First, ignore the bipartisan record of repressive legislation from the 1970s to the "PATRIOT" Act. Second, accept the bullshit about the Iraq war having something to do with a "war on terror" and "building democracy" in other countries.

The first of the modern crop repressive laws was RICO, passed in 1970, under Nixon yes, but with all-but-unanimous support in both houses of Congress. Under that law, you can be convicted of a crime committed by another person who belongs to the same organization, even if the crime was committed before you joined; and your property can be seized and sold, and even if you are later exonertaed, you don't get compensation. The secret court that runs the PATRIOT Act and shields it from legal challenge was set up in 1978, under Jimmy Carter. Clinton's 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act contains many of the provisions that we now think of as part of the PATRIOT Act -- an Act which Kerry, and most Dems, supported; and most of which he still supports.

Second, the Iraq war is about oil. OIL, not terrorism. The reason for the disunity among the "allies" is because they can't agree on who gets the oil and other contracts associated with the occupation of Iraq. The reason the US is trying to occupy Iraq now isn't because Gore is not president, but because there is no longer any USSR in the way. The desperation of the scramble for oil must never be forgotten. The world is running out of the stuff; the demand for it is growing; there is no viable substitute for it in industry or in the military. The control of oil resources is about the mastery of the world. The US is now "sole superpower." Kerry and Bush do not differ on the implications of this AT ALL.

This shakes right down to the consequences of the oil-based industrial-military economy. Look at the supposed differences between R and D on "the environment" —the Kyoto Treaty is often referenced. How many people realize that the Kyoto Treaty was an initiative of the Reagan Administration? Which is to say—not that drastic a measure! And yet, when Clinton put a resolution in front of the Senate to test support for Kyoto, 95 Senators voted against it, including Kerry.

Yes, the Bush administartion is associated with a clumsy right-wing ideology, and has not worked well with other countries. This would be too bad, if there really were really any question of fighting for democracy and against terror. But there JUST ISN'T any question of that. It is about the US Empire. When I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the Republic, for which it stands, I am taking a vow against the US Empire, so why should I be interested in finding someone who will do a better job of forwarding its ambitions and aims?

As for being against big government, Bush has presided over the same steady process of growth that all others have done, since the 1950s. I should think that we would be afraid a philosophy of greater government power and coordination being put behind "Homeland Security," such as this Democratic party publicist advocates. Bush "dragging his heels" ? Actually, this is just what Kerry's security advisor, Rand Beers, said about Bush. He spoke for Kerry in support of the move by several Repub Senators in August to centralize all intelligence agencies under the direct control of the president. In other words, the Dems are proposing to establish a true secret police agency in the U.S.!

Fuck that, and fuck Kerry, the Democratic party, and all the professors who yearn for a taste of power and privilege should Bush be voted out of office.

Don't get me wrong. I can easily imagine voting for a lesser evil, if I could find one. I can't see voting for a lie.

-----Original Message----- Subject: Why the Republicans can't fight terror Driven by rigid right-wing ideology, their heavy-handed policies have made America and the world less safe, not more. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Stephen Holmes

Sept. 16, 2004 | Vice President Cheney says that he and President Bush should be reelected because they alone know how to respond adequately to the terrorist threat. His Democratic opponents could never fight terrorism with sufficient élan, he elaborates, because they are trapped in "a pre-9/11 mind-set." They view terrorism as large-scale criminality, he says, to befought by policemen and prosecutors within the bounds of law, while he and Bush see the battle against terror with open eyes, as a worldwide war against an implacable enemy to be waged with whatever means the White House and the Pentagon deem effective.

But the 2001-2004 Bush/Cheney record provides no support for the boast that Republicans are well equipped to fight transnational terrorism. On the contrary, that record, both before 9/11 and after, reveals an ideologically driven administration that has consistently made disastrously wrong decisions about how to fight terrorism.

Before 9/11, as we know from Bush's former top anti-terrorism advisor, Richard Clarke, the Bush administration cavalierly downplayed the terrorist threat. Prisoners of its own "pre-9/11 mind-set," it focused on extremely expensive and technically unproven Cold War programs such as ballistic missile defense, utterly irrelevant to the war on terror, and exhibited only lukewarm interest in ongoing programs to limit WMD proliferation.

The Bush administration's distracted security policy and irresponsible neglect of proliferation and the terrorist threat was presaged, we should remember, by the Clinton impeachment. The passionate drive to humiliate and weaken a sitting commander in chief revealed the Republican leadership's deep conviction, fed by ignorance and arrogance, that the world was no longer an especially dangerous place for the sole surviving superpower.

True, Cheney and Bush have both said that 9/11, from out of the blue, roused them from their pre-9/11 complacency about terrorism. And we should take them at their word. But they awoke feeling disoriented. Faced with something altogether new, they reverted to old and comforting habits.

The administration's response to 9/11 was manifestly shaped by a pre-9/11 agenda, even if the political support that Bush needed to carry out his highly risky invasion of Iraq did not materialize before the terrorist attack. After shattering the Taliban regime and driving al-Qaida further underground (without capturing its leadership), Cheney and Bush marketed their Iraq war plan by presenting it, mendaciously, as a justified response to 9/11 (based on false claims that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaida) and also as preventive self-defense against an imminent threat of a WMD strike on the U.S. When these two selling points crumpled under inspection,the administration shifted to the refrain "the world is better off without Saddam Hussein," as if Saddam's well-documented malignity, in and of itself, were an adequate casus belli. This phrase is rhetorically shrewd, because of its bumper-sticker simplicity: Anyone honestly trying to rebut it is forced into a complicated explanation, difficult for television reporters and audiences to absorb. But it is morally and politically despicable, because it obscures the real issue.... blah, blah....

To understand why a Republican administration has been unable to mount an effective war against terror, however, we need to look behind Cheney and Bush, and even behind the neocon architects and champions of the war in Iraq. The roots of the Republican failure to make us safer lie deeper. They can be traced, once again, to a distinctively Republican "pre-9/11 mind-set." This mind-set can be boiled down to a set of fundamental beliefs. When we measure these beliefs against the requirements of an effective counterterrorism strategy, we quickly understand why it would be a calamity for American national security if Cheney and Bush were reelected on Nov. 2.…

About the writer: Stephen Holmes is a professor at the New York University School of Law and author of several books, most recently "The Cost of Rights" (with Cass Sunstein).

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