January 18, 2010

Dear President Obama,

Last year, on or around November 5th, one of your Revenue Officers hand delivered an envelope to my family’s home, addressed to me. The Internal Revenue Service has decided I owe them about $30,000, and the handwritten letter inside carefully detailed missing tax returns, requests for payment, and deadlines and threats about future actions if I decline to pay. Unfortunately, the officer, Matt Corewitz, dropped the envelope at the front door, which hasn’t been used by anyone since the house was bought nearly 40 years ago. If it hadn’t been spotted by my sister as she walked her dog, it would probably still be there today, with the full gravity of its threats of levy and seizure and summons languishing powerless in the snow. I guess the good news is that the house isn’t under surveillance (yet), or surely Officer Corewitz would have known to take his letter to the door that everyone uses. But I’m not writing to you to recommend hiring more competent revenue agents, or to put a camera on the house, or even to thank you for the friendly reminder about my delinquent payments. I’m writing to tell you about war tax resistance, or why the IRS hasn’t heard from me since 1998.

The following letter was submitted by the Portuguese-Speaking Complete Count Committee to the Boston Globe and WBUR in response to the recent call for a Census boycott that Jason Pramas described in his Open Media Boston editorial on this issue. It was printed in part in the Boston Globe:


Dear Editor,
The position adopted by a few people who oppose immigrant participation in the 2010 US Census does not reflect the overwhelmingly pro‐Census sentiment in our communities. Last month, more than 30 Portuguese-speaking leaders and advocates formed a statewide complete count committee to spread awareness about the Census and its fundamental importance for immigrants.

Daniel Grabauskas, General Manager, MBTA
10 Park Plaza, Suite 5610
Boston MA 02116
dgrabauskas@mbta.com

Re: MBTA Courtesy Button



Dear Mr. Grabauskas,

We've designed a badge for public transportation customers to wear in order to encourage passenger civility. We hope to raise awareness of fellow passenger's comfort with this visual reminder.

An Open Letter to Professor Jacob Hacker, University of California, Berkeley

Dear Professor Hacker – You have become a vocal proponent of including in national health reform a Medicare-like public insurance plan to compete, in the commercial market, with privately-run health insurers. The primary goal of letting a public plan compete with commercial insurance would be to control rising health care costs – addressing a crisis in its own right that is at least as serious as the crisis in access to care, and allowing us to pay for expanding coverage to the uninsured and underinsured.

An Open Letter to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D - Mass.)

Dear Senator Kennedy – The crisis being induced by high and rapidly rising health care costs in the United States is well known. It has become the #1 issue for workers, most businesses, and almost all municipalities; it is the largest and fastest growing item on every state budget, as well as a very large portion of the federal budget; and its spill-over effects – particularly the impact on the affordability of adequate health coverage for patients – have made it of central concern to health care providers. We know also that we aren’t getting anything for our high costs, that countries spending half or even one-third what we do have better health outcomes (longer lives, lower morbidity rates), receive more care along a broad range of services, and even have better clinical outcomes – calling into question the notion that our quality of care is better than nations with universal health care.

Dear Bill Keller and Clark Hoyt – For the first time in the span of a generation, national health care reform is back on the horizon, and I’m writing to you to step back for a moment into the history of the Times’s reporting on health care reform. Last year I began a research project with two researchers from Harvard Medical School, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, to look at the history of major state health reforms such as TennCare, the Oregon Health Plan, MinnesotaCare, and many others. A sweeping health reform bill had been passed into law in Massachusetts in 2006 that was being hailed as a unique, first-of-its-kind bipartisan strategy to achieve universal or near-universal health coverage without raising taxes or adding new regulations on the health care industry. We initially set out to find how unique the Massachusetts health reform law really was compared to previous state efforts, and to see if by analyzing the outcomes of those earlier reform efforts we could learn some lessons about what to expect in Massachusetts.

This Tuesday (11/18/2008) I joined a delegation of about twenty security officers, organizers and community allies from SEIU 615, the union representing security officers in many of Boston's largest and most profitable properties.

Hi Everybody,

I just wanted to pass along to you a experience I had to deal with On September 17th, 2008.

submitted via email on 9/1/08 to info@openmediaboston.org with the subject line "Latino Workers Launch Campaign..."

Good morning,

In reference to your article 8/28/08, please know that I did not receive any calls from Open Media Boston as reported.

If my cousin still had a voice I wonder what he would say. If he had the opportunity to tell his story, I wonder who would listen. He would be 21 this month and maybe a junior or senior in college.