There is far too much for me to say about UMass Boston to fit in one editorial; so I'll restrain myself and keep this brief. Open Media Boston strongly supports the Occupy UMass Boston movement's decision to found an encampment at the UMB Campus Center on Monday. And supports the movement itself. For the first time in a long time, Boston's working class university - my alma mater - is home to a growing and vibrant network of progressive students who are organizing for radical and much needed changes to public higher education system in Massachusetts. There have been many attempts to spark such a movement in the last four decades - some of which I have personally participated in, and helped organize - but this is first attempt that is part of a society-wide movement for social change. And the first one that looks to be willing to engage in sustained direct action outside "official channels" to demand full government funding for public higher education, an end to the privatization and corporatization of the Mass. public higher education system, free speech on campus, and a complete reorganization of the UMass system to serve the needs of the Commonwealth's working families rather than the needs of the unelected businesspeople that currently control the UMass Board of Trustees - and our government at all levels. The OUMB movement is swiftly gaining traction among UMass Boston students, staff and faculty - which, as a commuter campus, has long been a very difficult place to engage in grassroots political organizing. And that's all to the good.

The annual public ritual of rendering homage to Martin Luther King Jr., the man, while obfuscating - if not actively betraying - his message, is de rigueur for elected officials, with or without the gospel choirs. Once a year, these officials issue their compulsory paeans to Dr. King's legacy, or to what passes for his legacy these days. Their homilies secure that legacy firmly within the civil rights realm - King's later writings and speeches are not exactly on the tips of their tongues.

A handful of Massachusetts legislators have offered some solutions to the state's budgetary woes, fearlessly pursuing the criminals who enrich themselves at public expense but pay little or no state taxes. The big banks, you might ask? The pharmaceutical companies bilking the state's Medicaid system of tens of millions of dollars? Well, no. It turns out that the most serious pillagers of public funds, to judge by these proposals, are not predatory lenders or tax-dodging corporations, but the poor. Not exactly a new idea.

Massachusetts' poorest residents are stealing your money and using it to buy drugs, cars, boats and condominiums, in case you haven't heard. It seems the state is being bled, to the tune of a billion dollars per year, by impostors who pretend to be poor in order to claim benefits.