Opinion

As the #MeToo movement gains momentum and the penalties for even being accused of sexual harassment are increasingly severe, society must not circumvent judicial due process in order to prevent injustice.

Working families are, as usual, getting the short end of the stick from the new Trump-GOP tax law. Huge tax cuts that mostly go to the wealthy and corporations are exploding the national debt, and threaten deep cuts to essential public services like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and education.

While ethnic issues are indeed important there are often other considerations of greater significance than the questionable concept of race. As blacks become more involved in sophisticated political, business and professional activities, personal commitments regularly emerge more forcefully than binding ethnic ties.

Minister Louis Farrakhan wants “to change the world.” His contribution to this effort is a collection of music, from classical to the blues, that has been developed with the collaboration of outstanding musicians of all ethnicities. While Farrakhan is well known as a fiery advocate for the rights and interests of blacks in America, he has also been acclaimed since his youth as a gifted musician.

Well before Boston’s building boom erupted, Elma Lewis Partners, LLC had been granted development rights for Parcel P-3. The imaginative plan was to construct housing, office and retail buildings along the now barren site that had been levelled in an earlier plan to extend Interstate 95 through Roxbury and the South End. That highway plan failed and the present P-3 Project under the management of Feldco Development is about to follow suit.

Homeownership is the number one way that working families build wealth, and protect themselves in stormy seas. But black families have consistently been discriminated against, generation after generation, and the results are there.

It is clear that during the era of lynchings, black lives did not matter in the South. The callous shooting deaths of unarmed black men by the police, who rarely suffer prosecution for their conduct, seems like a continuation of racial terror lynchings. Is it any wonder that many African Americans believe today that black lives still do not matter to the police?

While poverty is by definition a lack of funds, the problem is not always cured by giving money without conditions to those in need.

After 50 years, the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lives on through the legacy of Unity Bank and Trust, the current work of OneUnited Bank and all black banks.

Together hundreds of residents to ask for their ideas for addressing segregation as part of Boston’s new “Assessment of Fair Housing.” This community engagement was prompted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s implementation in 2015 of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule that sought to finally make good on a key provision of the Fair Housing Act requiring HUD to actually address not just explicit discrimination but also continuing place based disparities in access to opportunity — a mandate that for nearly 50 years Republican and Democratic administrations declined to enforce.

The fundamental premise of a democratic government is that voters will support those policies that benefit them, and they will oppose issues that are harmful. The problem in America is that society has become so complex that it is often difficult to determine whether or not a government policy is really beneficial. Republicans are often willing to finance expensive and sophisticated public relations campaigns to delude voters into supporting conservative policies that the middle and working classes should oppose. A prime example of this is the campaign against the Affordable Care Act.

Petitions to change the name of a public way in Boston are usually perfunctory matters. According to a report in the Boston Globe there have been only six petitions since 2011. However, the petition initiated by John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, to change the name of Yawkey Way outside Fenway Park, has stimulated considerable controversy.