Stop Luxury Construction!

`Fare-Free Transit'

 

A folk song from 2022 explaining why MBTA should also establish a fare-free public transit system for riders in Boston, Massachusetts in 2022.

You can ride all buses free in Kansas City

You can ride all buses free in Olympia

You can ride all buses free in Albuquerque

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Outbound trolleys were once fare-free inBoston

And for Philly elders, the subway is fare-free

It's fare-free for all riders in Estonia

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have a billion dollars to spend

For new fare collection machines

Yet they claim the T can't afford to be fare-free

While paying T managers six-figure salaries.

You can ride all buses free in Lowell

You can ride all buses free in Lawrence

You can ride all buses free in Chapel Hill

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

You can ride all transit free in Luxembourg

And for Miami elders buses are fare-free

Elders ride free in Lebanon, Pennsylvania

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have millions of dollars to spend

To pay off "The Big Dig" debt

And they have 30 million dollars to spend

For new stations by BU's campus.

All ride for free in Corvalis, Oregon

And in campus towns like Ann Arbor

And also in Boulder and Denver

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

In France, it's fare-free in Dunkirk

And some transit is fare-free in Baltimore

All elderly ride fare-free in Scotland

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

They have a billion dollars to spend

On new fare collection machines

Yet they claim the T can't afford to be fare-free

While paying T managers six-figure salaries.

You can ride all buses fare-free in Malta

And in Wales it's free for elderly

You can ride all buses free in Hasselt, Belgium

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

Yes, you can ride all buses free in Kansas City

You can ride all buses free in Olympia

You can ride all buses free in Albuquerque

But in Boston, they still make you pay a fare.

City of Masks

Another Boston Refugee

Back Bay Tower

Chuck Turner

Did Boston's Rich White Folks Profit From Slave Trade?

In the 21st-century some of the rich white families that still pretty much control what happens economically and politically in the City of Boston may claim that their families' wealth was not obtained, historically, by profiting from the African slave trade and the enslavement of people of African descent in the USA and elsewhere. But as Russell B. Adams Jr. recalled in his 1977 book, The Boston Money Tree:

"...Peter Faneuil, like most early Bostonians saw nothing amiss in what was later to be termed the `peculiar institution' of the South...Among the effects in Peter's estate at his death were 5 slaves...Peter Faneuil...tried his hand at the slave trade more than once...Not long before his death Faneuil sent a slaving ship, owned half by himself and one quarter each by a neighbor and the captain on an expedition to the coast of Guinea...Ship and slaves were sold at auction, a portion of the proceeds going to the estate of Peter Faneuil."

The Boston Money Tree book also observed that although "it was primarily as slave traders, not slave owners, that Bostonians were to make their mark in the history of human bondage in America," a French visitor to Boston in 1687 "had reported that scarcely any Boston household of consequences didn't have at least one slave..."

According to the same book:

"...Boston's enterprising merchants, always on the lookout for commodities to serve their markets, turned...to trading slaves...It took little imagination for these...traders to sail off to Guinea with cargoes of rum to be exchanged for Negroes who were then exchanged for more sugar cane to be turned into more rum...Thomas Amory, one Boston merchant...was big in the slave trade and...succeeded in helping to found one of the city's latter-day first families."

Boston Police Arrest Occupy Boston Protesters