Paid-for Performance

The recent letter of support to the Boston Globe’s unionized reporters signed by a number of Massachusetts politicians is posted here. The signers are listed below, and (what a surprise!) all are Democrats. Why is it that a fair, impartial, and objective news organ like the Globe can only sign up Democrats on a petition like this? Don’t Republicans also want to collect an IOU from the Globe reporters and editors who make daily decisions about the newspaper’s content? (“Sign this, Mitt, and that hit piece on your Mormon friends will never see print!”) Or did Republicans simply refuse to sign this petition? Who knows? The Globe isn’t reporting on this. But now the Globe union boys (and girls) certainly know who their best friends are. However, I’m sure that fact will have zero impact on the Globe’s future coverage of these people. That is unless like the Globe’s owners, these folks want to pay for performance.

Here is the Boston Globe’s list of the ‘socially friendly’*:

US Congress

• Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) United States Senate
• Stephen Lynch (D-MA) U.S. House of Representatives
• Michael Capuano (D-MA) U.S. House of Representatives (who drafted his own letter)

Massachusetts State Senate

• Jarrett T. Barrios (D - Cambridge )
• Jack Hart (D - Boston )
• Robert Havern (D - Arlington)
• Brian A. Joyce (D – Milton)
• Joan M. Menard (D – Somerset)
• Steven A. Tolman (D - Boston)

Massachusetts State House

• Christopher Donelan (D – Orange)
• John D. Keenan (D – Salem)
• James Leary (D – Worcester)
• Charles A. Murphy (D – Burlington)
• Anne Paulsen (D – Belmont)
• Timothy J. Toomey Jr. (D – Cambridge)
• Martin J. Walsh (D – Boston)

Elected City Officials

• John M. Tobin, Boston City Council
• Felix D. Arroyo, Boston City Council
• Chuck Turner, Boston City Council
• Stephen J. Murphy, Boston City Council
• Michael A. Sullivan, Boston City Council
• Joseph A. Curtatone, (Mayor, Somerville, MA)
• Brian Murphy, Cambridge City Council

Organized Labor Leaders

• Robert Haynes, President, Massachusetts AFL-CIO
• Dennis Rivera, President, Service Employees International Union Local 1199
• Rocio Saenz, President, Service Employees International Union Local 615
• Gary Sullivan, President, Utility Workers Union Local 369
• Edward Kelly, President, Boston Firefighters Local 718

Other

• Joseph Kriesberg, President Mass. Assoc. of Community Development Corporations

*In “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn describes the class system within the Soviet labor camps. The persons who were convicted of ideological crimes, called ‘article 58s’ were at the bottom. At the top were a group of expert criminals who somehow ended up in the Gulag. These prisoners were trusted and privileged by the Gulag administrators because they were not ideologically deviant. They were merely cruel, violent, sadistic, and rapacious. They practiced these vices on the other prisoners, particularly the 58s. The Gulag administration referred to them internally as ‘the socially friendly’.