1. Our Massachusetts: The ideal life we could have for seven million people

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts.  Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

In this episode, we dream big -- what kind of lives could we be living? What could we provide for the seven million people who live here in our state?

Check out the video of this episode on YouTube.
Sign up to get updates.

Imagine going to the doctor without worrying about the cost. 
Imagine living near friends and family, because no one is priced out of your city.
Imagine driving down well paved roads in cities not starved for funds.
Imagine giving your kids water straight from the tap with no concern for lead poisoning.
Imagine knowing that your kids will get a great education no matter what school they go to.
Imagine everyone you know having a job — only one job, with plenty of time for friends and family.

We can have all that right here in Massachusetts.  Listen to the rest of this season to learn how.

Transcript

Producer  0:00  
[Transcribed by a computer program then hand-edited. May still have errors. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Transcript last hand-revised on 5/12/2021-- Thanks to AH]

Anna Callahan  0:02  
Hey there. This is Anna Callahan, you are listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics. investigate why it's so broken, imagine what we could have here in Massachusetts if we fixed it and really report on how you can get involved. 

Anna Callahan  0:14  
And I am so thrilled to be here with Jordan Berg powers and Jonathan Cohn. Jordan, do you want to introduce yourself?

Jordan Berg Powers  0:21  
My name is Jordan Berg Powers, I use he/him, and I have 11 years experience in Massachusetts politics.

Anna Callahan  0:27  
Happy to have 'ya. Jonathan Cohn,

Jonathan Cohn  0:31  
Yeah, Johnathan Cohn, also he/him, joining from Boston and I've been active in Massachusetts politics and issue and electoral campaigns for the past eight years.

Anna Callahan  0:42  
Fantastic! Anna Callahan, she/her, couple years of being pretty involved in Massachusetts State politics. So I'm the I'm the young'un of the group. And we are here today to really dream big. And, you know, I was thinking the other day about my experience a year ago, a little bit over a year ago. You know, I was a Bernie person, but I know people who were Warren people with the same experience, right, there was this moment, during the presidential primaries where, you know, it really looked like one of them was going to win, like, it really looked like they were gonna win. And I was literally, in my life, going moment by moment thinking to myself, when we have our next president, that's not going to be this way y'a know and so I'd be  biking down the street. And, like, just bracing for the hundreds of potholes,  I can't avoid the potholes, this is impossible, because there's like 100 in a one block street and I was like, This is not gonna be like this. 

Anna Callahan  1:41  
Or, you know, we spent probably $15,000 a year on health insurance, and it's literally just lighting our money on fire, because we have an $8,000 deductible. So we've never hit the deductible. So everything we spend in insurance is like the flushing it down the toilet. I'd be filling my car with gas and I would think, you know what? My car is not gonna stink of gasoline fumes. And my house is not gonna leak like a sieve, right? Heat and money pouring out the window. 

Anna Callahan  2:10  
You know, I have friends who've moved away, and they move away because they can't afford to live here anymore. They used to be able to afford to, and that was only five or 10 years ago. So these crazy housing prices, I'm like, that's not going to happen anymore.

Anna Callahan  2:23  
I have a six year old. And for six years, in every house we live in, yes, we've lived in quite a few houses in the last six years, we've got to test the water, we've got to test the paint, we've got to test the soil, because you could totally give your kid lead poisoning and poison them for the rest of their lives. This is this is crazy! And the number of people I know who either don't have a job, or they have two three jobs. But people should just have a job. 

Anna Callahan  2:50  
And there's another thing that we call having a life, right? And that means you can not only have a job, but you get to see your friends, you get to spend time with your family. And this is something that other cultures and other countries do. And in America, I don't know anybody who has time to have a life. It's just not a thing. So that was that was this dream that I had. And I was realizing that there is no reason at all, why we cannot have that here in Massachusetts for 7 million people. 7 million people could have that dream. There's nothing stopping us. Well, okay, there is [laughing] and we'll get to those but like, we really could we have something called a state government. [laughing] y'a know, like nobody thinks about it. But our state government could easily make all of those things true for us.

Jordan Berg Powers  3:43  
Yeah. And when I think about like the big dream, and I have lots of them for the state, I always think about like, what is it about the 1950s that people have nostalgia about? What are the reasons that people want to go back to this magical time, so called magical time. And one of the reasons is that it was a time where people built a middle class. And that was made possible, because we tax rich people, it's very simple. There's so many wonderful things we could be doing if we did this simple thing of taxing rich people the same way we did in the 1950s, where we tax rich people at a high rate. And we diversified who we were taxing. So there was lots of different ways that we were taxing rich people. And we weren't just simply dependent on poor people and middle class people. And that built all the things we love-- schools, you know, roads, bridges, all the big things, those big projects. Obviously, we don't need to build more roads. But we could be building infrastructure if we just tax rich people and invested it back in ourselves.

Jonathan Cohn  4:39  
And to that point where one of the states with some of the some of the highest per capita rates for billionaires and millionaires and one of the highest rates of inequality here in Massachusetts, and that simply doesn't have to be that way. That we don't need to be one of the most unequal states. We could tax those millionaires and billionaires in the state more to help create the world we want to see in this state,

Producer  5:01  
[cues crowd going "Yay!" track] 

Jonathan Cohn  5:01  
because-- I like it-- that the money is there. That there's been so many so many that have the big dreams that we might have the kind of the easy go to response from a naysayer is "Oh, but we can't afford that." But that's just simply false. If we're one of the richest-- one of the richest states, in the US, we can do the things that we want if we have the political will to do them.

Jordan Berg Powers  5:27  
Yeah, and I just wanted, like, take listeners to this magical place where our schools are not falling apart, like they are wonderful centers, where people are-- where our children are dreaming of what they can be, right? I think of schools as places that should be dream factories, or they should feel that way. We, you know, kids have these big dreams, and we diminish them with the places we send them that are drab, that are falling down, that are overcrowded, we could have classrooms with that are well resourced teachers that are there for every student, the resources, the wraparound resources they need. And they can be learning in centers that truly meet the dreams they have, you know, they could be getting full art centers, full of you know, all the places, from gym, to STEM to STEAM, which is a really exciting thing that my daughter loves the connection of science and technology and art together and math, right? All of those can be made possible for every student and not just a select few, depending on your zip code, if we just invested it back in people, and if we spent the money that we have available to spend on them.

Anna Callahan  6:37  
Yeah, and I love also the idea of them not just being for the students, but that the community, they're learning resources for the community for people to, you know, improve their language skills, or to you know, like, really, this this center for people to learn, and the students are, of course, the main learners, but like, really, for the whole community.

Jonathan Cohn  6:57  
I think that kind of lifelong learning vision is something really important. How do we actually structure and that we can set your society that that does create that opportunity for people to educate, to enrich their knowledge and to connect really at any stage of their life, and not just kind of the standard K to 12. So whether that's kind of actually building that that childcare infrastructure in the state so that people don't have to break banks or for childcare. And so the you're both kind of helping to relieve that burden on parents, but also providing those enriching opportunities for kids in those vital early years. And also making making sure that higher education isn't something that people have to incur debt, that in order to attain one of the things and, Anna, if you're noting before, about listening to like Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren talking about things that they wanted to do nationally, debt free, higher ed is something we could we could accomplish on the state level, that people who go through the UMass system, who go to a community college, who go to any of our other public state colleges or universities shouldn't end up saddled with years of debt. We don't make people incur debt for K to 12 education, it shouldn't be the case for after. And those institutions can also kind of continue to be those hubs for kind of continual kind of enrichment for people beyond just their times getting a degree,

Anna Callahan  8:14  
I'm going to jump in on this debt thing, because I'll tell you that like, there's, there's almost nothing that irks me more, that annoys me more than having to pay for doctor's bills when I'm paying all this money for insurance. And like it just it I don't know, there's something visceral when I have to go to the doctor and like we I have, I've definitely not gone to the doctor when I needed to, for sure. Because, I don't know, it's just like, Am I gonna die? Can I do something? Can I, you know, like, my ankles were busted for like, many, many months. And, you know, I went to two physical therapy sessions. And then I was like, Well, I guess I'll just do these at home. You know, instead of actually getting the help that I needed, it took like six months for me to be able to, you know, go on a half mile run. And this this, you know, we were one of the first states to pass a universal health care system. And yet, everyone I know, still has this terrible burden of, you know, having to shell out all this money and sometimes go into debt. And God forbid, you have something really bad happened to you or a member of your family, because that kind of debt is just terrible, terrible. And the choice you have to make, ugh, unbelievable that we make make people make those kind of choices.

Jonathan Cohn  9:38  
Which is a shame because like to your point that the healthcare reform law in Massachusetts, it helped us get near not fully there to the idea of universal health insurance. But that's not the same as health care. It doesn't mean we don't have under insurance doesn't mean you have inequities insurance. And really, we did decide to put the money to try to kind of be a robust universal, publicly funded program. I've had was, okay, single payer, Medicare for all system, which we could do on the state level, state state level would help make sure that we're actually treating health care as a right in practice, not just in veteran.

Anna Callahan  10:12  
Oh, and the one other thing I was gonna say is like, talking to the health care experts here, it would actually save the state money, right. So this is not something that's gonna break the bank. So this one, this is financially fiscally responsible to do in Massachusetts. And just imagine, just imagine the next time you're sick, just going to the doctor. Don't not worrying about it.

Jordan Berg Powers  10:35  
That's the dream.

Anna Callahan  10:36  
That's the dream.

Jonathan Cohn  10:41  
In terms of thinking, well, especially when it comes to single payer, it's just often kind of  marveled at that have, like so many other countries have already managed to realize this as a better system. And one of the other areas where I often think of that, as well as when it comes to public transit, is that when you go to any other kind of country, you just often Marvel about how much more efficient their public transit systems that are, how much more they cover, it's pretty much the case across Europe, where the public transit systems are better, as well as even the like biking and walking infrastructure is better. I haven't visited Japan before, but anybody who ever visits Japan comments, just how much better the public transit systems are. And there's no reason why we can't deliver on that here in Massachusetts. I've been, I've often joked that the MBTA doesn't work well, on cold weather, it doesn't work well, in hot weather, it doesn't work well in weather. And

Jonathan Cohn  11:34  
[laughing] love it, and if we actually put put the resources to it, we could build a far better system that both is more, that is both more kind of efficient, and moving people around to places in terms of it being just kind of getting there faster, but also covering more territory. Massachusetts isn't a geographically large state. But it can it's surprisingly difficult to get around the state from one part to the other. Because we aren't connected with the public transit system and the like, in the real way we could be that it's too much of it is based on coming from Boston outward from a belief that people are commuters coming into the city and then going back home. Rather than connecting people across the different parts of the state, or an even let's say that we can, even if it's just to say, within a municipality of having a better bus system to get people around, around their own city or town without having without having to kind of own a car, which is expensive, and not particularly sustainable. 

Anna Callahan  12:41  
and environmental, yeah

Jonathan Cohn  12:42  
And exactly, unless we could just be we could be building, that kind of building those communities where people can walk can bike can use public transit, which are just more pleasant places to live.

Anna Callahan  12:57  
Well, speaking of living, right, I mean, you, Jonathan, you and I were talking about this the other day, like how, you know, we both live in areas where it's just, it's really transient, like people cannot afford to stay? Do you let you move somewhere, and you think that you're gonna stay there, right? You, you, you're like, this is, I love this place. If you were born there, and you have no desire to move, or you moved there, and you're like, this is great. Want to raise my kids here, I love it. Five years, 10 years later, like you can barely even rent anymore. And the idea of buying, like, it's insane, like, how could you possibly buy in the place where you currently live? Like, that's, that is crazy, the idea that people cannot live in the same town their parents live in, that they grew up in. Like, it's not just that it's bad for the individual people like this is really, it's really bad for us as a culture and as a society to not have those bonds that you have with people that you grew up with. And that you you know, that are your family members. It's it's much healthier for for everybody, if we can maintain our sort of social fabric.

Jordan Berg Powers  14:09  
Yeah, and, you know, having to move around a lot is destabilizing for kids. It's just it's a stress that you have if you've ever had to move, right. And there's no reason that people should have that much instability in in where they live and how they get around. And, you know, unfortunately, also housing is where we build wealth. That's where our society sort of gives people opportunities for next generations. And it's why black and brown people and especially marginalized communities were purposefully pushed out of the opportunities to house right to have housing, to have opportunity. And so that's, you know, the sort of way in which, you know, there's this interesting thing where black people tend to live next to other black people regardless of their economics, but white people live next to other white people with similar economic background. Right. And so that sort of pushing people together is on purpose because then you can, it's easier to keep people and police people who are certain types who look a certain way who live in certain communities. So when I'm envisioning a better world, like a better Massachusetts, it's one where we give people pathways to own if they want, or to continue or to rent in place for long periods of time if they want, if that's the thing they want. And it's communities, which are knitted together because they know each other because they're connected. And there isn't that need to just to just bring armed people to solve simple things. You know, my dream is that when you call the fire department, the, sorry, when you call, when you have a fire, the fire department shows up, when you have a medical emergency and EMT shows up. And when you have a substance abuse issue, somebody who's trained in substance abuse shows up, when you have a homelessness issue, somebody who's trained in homelessness shows up when you have a you know, a domestic abuse, some sort of abuse, somebody who's trained with that really tense, horrible situation is trained with de escalating that situation, the majority of our money for policing is actually just going to drugs, it's going to policing drugs, it's going to find people who are on drugs, it's going to arrest people who are on drugs, to put them in a place where they have more access to drugs, or to learn how to be violent when dealing drugs, but it's not going to any of the things we think it should be. And so I envision a world where we're actually thinking about these things and giving our communities the things they need to succeed. And in art and sending people who are appropriate, we spend almost nothing thinking about how do we get people to calm down, right? Like, that's such a simple thing. We spend billions of dollars on trying to cure cancer, we spend billions of dollars on weapons manufacturing, we don't spend billions of dollars thinking about people, what makes them tick? What makes them healthy, what makes them happy? How do we get somebody who's really tense and violent into feeling safe and calm down, and able to be sort of taken someplace where they can get the mental success they need? We actually don't have a lot of training for that. We don't spend a lot of time energy money on that. And so my dream is that we think that we start thinking about art, we start investing in people, and we start investing in communities, and we start doing it in a way that makes sense, not our current criminal justice system, which just makes no sense and is a total waste of money.

Anna Callahan  17:26  
It's It's so I love how you phrase it, because it seems so obvious. Like, it's like why why do we look like we think, Oh, this is the way that it is? Or has always been or something? And whether it is or not, you know, that's just dumb.

Anna Callahan  17:45  
It just doesn't make any sense. Like, why

Anna Callahan  17:46  
why are we doing that? I mean, we have a fight. Can you imagine calling the police for a fire?

Jordan Berg Powers  17:51  
Right

Anna Callahan  17:52  
That would just be crazy.

Jordan Berg Powers  17:53  
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jonathan Cohn  17:55  
And Jordan's point about, about how that comes to like, I want to say de escalation of people who actually know how to respond to a situation and not make it worse. Just remind me of how police are often trained to respond to things as though the situation is war. But we have, there are so many other jobs where people already have to think about how are you making a situation better? I'm thinking of how parents have to spend a lot of time I'm not the parent of the conversation but

Anna Callahan  18:25  
de escalation, thats so true [laughter]

Jordan Berg Powers  18:27  
As a parent, yes [laughter]

Jonathan Cohn  18:29  
 How can you actually de escalate a situation with somebody who is very unhappy about [laughter] and that is a skill that people cultivate. And that's something that just doesn't even enter into the in how we think about that. Same way that teachers are often have to think about like that some of the best teachers are good at de escalating situations of thinking about how can you actually make sure that you achieve that collective positive goal in a way that de escalates the situation and moves everybody forward. But instead of thinking about, kind of almost, but instead we have things set to like wartime footing? 

Jordan Berg Powers  19:07  
Yeah. 

Jonathan Cohn  19:10  
But in terms of kind of just kind of continuing that discussion about how we could really build kind of the world we want here and get past some of the terrible conventional wisdom that we have something we've also said is we talk a lot, especially with Eric de recently about the idea of a green new deal on the national level. But that type of investment in climate kind of climate justice, and in renewable energy and evermore sustainable built environment is something we can do here, here in Massachusetts were overwhelmingly dependent on natural gas. We often like to think of ourselves as a very green state, but our renewable energy portfolio is not large. We could we as a state have access to a lot of potential wind energy, thinking about the cape, which could be a great re- could be a great resource, harnessing what we already have, as well as Doing things like improving our housing staff, we were talking about housing earlier by retrofitting Homes is something that we could do that has a great equity. I've had great equity connections as well, given that it's disadvantaged communities, communities of color, low income communities that tend to tend to suffer from really old, old housing stock that could be improved, brings down energy bills, creates jobs, and how and helps helps the environment environment as well. And there's no reason we can't do that. Our politicians like to talk about how we are doing such a great job on this. And it would be great if we actually did.

Jordan Berg Powers  20:37  
Yeah, I mean, I have this, I have this dream, where like, every house has a solar panels on it, that the government helps feed or subsidize or puts on there, maybe a small wind turbine, and your car is plugged into that. So that like we don't have to create the technology of the future, to have these things like we could do this right now. You could put a solar panel on every, where everybody lives, and you could put some sort of small wind turbine and you can and you could give them the power, most of the power they need to send their car get around town, right if they want to, or to send their kids to like or have access to the internet. Right? All those things are available. Right now with the technology we have.

Jonathan Cohn  21:19  
Reminds me of what one joke I always like to say is that you know what you call a spill of solar energy, you call it sunshine.

Jordan Berg Powers  21:31  
[Laughter]

Anna Callahan  21:31  
[Laughter] Yeah, um, you know, I, I'm just, it's so fun to think about what our dream lives could be. But But for me, it's not just a dream, like, it was this almost reality. And to think that we don't have to wait for national politics, like we could make that happen here. And there are 7 million people who live here, who could be living in this world, that we all see that this world that I think all the listeners probably see as well. And you know, hopefully, you can just, you can like taste it. It's like oh, man like that, like Jordan, like you said it. There's no new technology we need, like, we have everything to do this. But we gotta we got to be able to pass it through our legislature. And so the rest of this whole series is going to be talking about that. And I so look forward to you our next conversation that we'll have next week.

Anna Callahan  22:27  
Thank you, Jordan. Thank you, Jonathan. We'll see you all soon.

Jordan Berg Powers  22:31  
Great

Jonathan Cohn  22:32  
Thank you so much.