If you don't want to get mad, don't listen to this episode. We give a bunch of examples of our city, state, and national governments bending over backward to allow corporations and the uber-wealthy to skirt the law while burdening regular people with onerous bureaucracy. Can you imagine a world where the opposite happens, where our government makes our lives easier while requiring corporations and the uber-wealthy to submit documentation and follow the law? What a crazy idea!
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on youtube.
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.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
If you don't want to get mad, don't listen to this episode. We give a bunch of examples of our city, state, and national governments bending over backward to allow corporations and the uber-wealthy to skirt the law while burdening regular people with onerous bureaucracy. Can you imagine a world where the opposite happens, where our government makes our lives easier while requiring corporations and the uber-wealthy to submit documentation and follow the law? What a crazy idea!
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on youtube.
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.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 6/29/2021 @ 22:37ET by FL and 6/30/2021 @ 1214ET by CFH.]
Anna Callahan 0:03
Hey everyone, you are listening to Incorruptible Mass. This is where we talk about state politics, why our state government is so broken, how you can get involved to fix it, and all the things we could have here in Massachusetts if we did. So I am joined by Jonathan Cohn and Jordan Berg Powers. You want to introduce yourselves?
Jonathan Cohn 0:28
Yeah, my name is Jonathan Cohn. I'm a Boston based activist who’s been active with progressive issue and electoral campaigns the past eight years.
Jordan Berg Powers 0:37
My name is Jordan Berg Powers. I use he/him, and I'm a Worcester activist and have been working for 11 years in Massachusetts politics.
Anna Callahan 0:45
Anna Callahan, she/her, living in Medford, been involved a few years here in state politics. And today we are really going to talk about who does our government work for? Really, at all levels: the local government, state government, national government, and the idea that I-- we talked about it as a progressive idea, but honestly, I think this is really just a people idea that our government should work for us and not for corporations and the uber-wealthy. So, why do we pool our money at all? Why do we pay taxes and pool our money? Because without having a government, the rich would already win. Uber-wealthy would step over everybody, and they would win. So that's not the purpose of pooling our money, right? We pool our money, first of all, so that we can have things like roads and you know, infrastructure, and fire departments and all that kind of good stuff. But also to protect ourselves from awful things that happen, right, like fires and earthquakes, even billionaires, right? So we want to be able to use our pooled money, for us, for the people for things that can be used by everybody. And to have a little bit of protection in a world that is unpredictable. Jordan, you have this amazing story about your experience with the-- I believe it is the city of Worcester?
Jordan Berg Powers 2:18
Yeah. So I have many experiences specifically with the Worcester police. I have had nothing-- I shouldn't say nothing. I have mostly bad experiences, actually, several very good experiences, but mostly bad experiences. And my favorite terrible experience is I went to complain to the city because they had put up signs saying that nobody could park on the street, and they had had it up for over three months. So it was not clear what days people can park on the street, what day they couldn't. And I went to complain to the city to say "Hey, is there a timeframe for this? Because you can't just leave it up. People park on the street. We're a residential neighborhood in the middle of a city and people are confused. Sometimes they park sometimes they don't. And that's really confusing." And they just said, "Nope, there's nothing you could do about it. We can enforce it any day we want. And it's because we're doing road improvements." But they weren't doing road improvements. We were just sitting there for three months, nothing was changing on our street, nothing was getting improved, nothing was happening. They just had the signs up.
Jordan Berg Powers 3:17
And so after I complained, a few days later, the police came and ticketed every car on the street and told my neighbors that it was my fault that they were all getting tickets. And then when I came to the front door to complain about it, one of the police officer who is ticketing used the N-word and said "You shouldn't have complained, this is your fault." So then I complained a second time saying "Hey, I'm being harassed by the police for complaining about this sign." Then a few weeks later, the city Inspection Services came to my house and ticketed me for having so called rubbish and stuff on our house. And then when we went to remove it ticketed as a second time, because we put it in our driveway, so that the people who come to pick up trash-- and it wasn't a lot of trash. It was like a few leftover things that we were planning to, as people do when they're making improvements to their house were planning to get rid of and they ticketed it a second time and came when we when the person that was supposed to put in the drive was to get picked up. And they ticketed us for that and then came a third time and the only reason it stopped is because I threatened a lawsuit because he started looking at our windows while we weren't there, which is a violation of the law. So and it was only through the threat of lawsuit that finally had their harassment started. And I was thinking that this is strange that the mechanisms of government-- this big thing that it's hard for regular people to feel like they can penetrate-- was being used against me for the simple reason that I voiced my concerns about something or complained about something. Meanwhile, Tenet [Healthcare], who is the corporation who owns St. Vincent's Hospital-- St. Vincent is a saint for ministering to the poor. Catholic saint for ministering to the poor St. Vincent's is owned by a private corporation, one of the worst corporations in America. It has broken the law almost every year of its existence in the last two decades. It has had Medicare lawsuits, it has had to file with the federal agencies, it has broken the law. Worcester has done nothing, nothing to harass this large corporation. It's not going in there with food inspectors and encouraging them to say like, Hey, what's going on with the food here, it's not enforcing all of the rules, which we know because it's a large corporation, it's breaking or, or doing smaller portions are doing smaller, you know, it's cutting corners, it's finding ways to break the law to save money, right? It's not using the power of the state to go harass this large corporation, but it will use the power of the state to harass individual people. And all these politicians come through here, right? Their elected officials, they could use their power to make it clear that Tenet refusing to work with the union to find a contract is unacceptable. Instead, they come, they make speeches, they give money for some food, but they never use their jobs, to say, you know what, we're gonna make your life a living hell, Tenet, until you do the right thing and negotiate with the nurses who live and work in Worcester. And to be clear, Tenet has also gotten tax breaks for buildings. So they've also gotten money, my money from the city for them in this city. And so there is this imbalance that regular people see. And I think that's important to note. And it's your point, right? When people the thing that that connects progressives and conservatives, is this idea that the government should work for us and it doesn't?
Anna Callahan 3:40
Yeah, I'm going to jump in because I was recently canvassing for one of the Somerville at-large candidates. And as I was knocking on doors, out of the like, seven people I talked to, two of them complained about almost exactly what you're talking about. Two of them complained that they-- one of them said that they had been trying for eight or nine months to get a permit to update their garage, and that they couldn't get it. And they noticed, they said, You know what, when developers come in, and they want something and they get a permit right away. But me regular taxpayer, I cannot get a permit! And it is because there's all these forms. There's all this bureaucracy or whatever. My favorite, though, was a conversation that I had with someone he said he had only one issue. This guy's a plumber. And his only issue is that corporations are breaking the law. And he said this to me over and over. And he said, he wants like he gets work when they're when developers are doing things. So it's not that he doesn't want developers to build anything, because that's literally how he gets jobs is-- that's how he gets the biggest jobs. But he said he sees every day himself and other homeowners who are trying to get permits, he himself was trying to get a permit for like a year to just do something small on his own property on his house that he owns. And yet across the street from him, there was a development that was like a commercial development. And he said they were breaking every law there was. They were breaking the law of like how much space between the sidewalk and the building, they were breaking the law about the hours of the day that they were allowed to build and to be loud. He just could list off all of these different laws that they were breaking, but the difference was they got permission from the city. So I think you're right, regular people notice this thing and they know that it's happening.
Jonathan Cohn 8:55
Two things two stats I just want to bring in for this discussion of that imbalance. It was making me think one thing I've made me think of immediately was the issue of wage theft because we typically like acknowledge that theft is wrong, theft is illegal. It's also one of like [INAUDIBLE] moral codes. You always end up saying don't steal from other people. And if somebody shoplifts, if somebody, like [INAUDIBLE], we recognize that that as a crime, and that's kind of [INAUDIBLE] generally recognize that something and can often be punished overly harshly in the system as well. Especially it looks like shoplifting, which-- don't shoplift, but you can do immediate restitution for what you did there, whereas according to the Economic Policy Institute, back in 2017, employers steal $15 billion a year from workers by paying less than the minimum wage. So and I've seen I've seen other stats at countless levels looking at like state statistics or local statistics that wage theft is rampant, especially when you have vulnerable populations as a please. and receive very minimal actual enforcement of wage laws compared-- and that the other thing that reminded me of is a statistic. This is getting this article from Propublica from ast year about how the IRS now audits poor Americans about the same rate as the top 1%.
Anna Callahan 10:27
Yeah, this this article is amazing. I love this article, it really talks about how they totally defunded the part of the IRS that investigates tax fraud from billionaires and mega millionaires. And most of the IRS funding is spent investigating poor people.
Jonathan Cohn 10:47
Yeah. Which is just absurd. And it's this certain use of the arm of the state to bother-- to create unnecessary administrative burden for people for no-- where the investigation likely costs more money than the value that you could possibly gain back from it. Whereas when it comes to high scale tax fraud, that's where the money is. But they're just that
Anna Callahan 11:20
...Has the *obvious* fingerprint of corruption. I mean you can't get more obvious than this. The people who have all the money are able to control the government of every level to make things super easy for them and super difficult for regular people.
Jordan Berg Powers 11:41
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two different ways I think about this. One is, I don't know if you remember a few years ago, when the auditor and the then Obama State's Attorney, spent almost more money trying to investigate welfare fraud and EBT fraud, as they as they recouped in EBT fraud. And they had cameras there, they had inter-agency-- they had several agencies come forward to try to go after these poor people who were essentially going around the EBT system, because it didn't work for them. They were in need of cash to pay for childcare, which is almost always paid in cash, and rent, which is almost paid in cash when you're poor. They were trying to work around the EBT system. And because they were trying to do so the state came down on them and tried to send people to jail, made a big deal about it, look, we're going after welfare fraud, and they spent more money going after poor people than they-- or almost-- it's almost more money than they recouped from poor people. Meanwhile, I can't remember the last time somebody went after a large corporation to say, Are you using that tax break the way you said you would? When was the last time that got enforced?
Anna Callahan 12:59
Yeah, I--
Jordan Berg Powers 13:00
when was the last time the billions of dollars we give away in tax breaks looked at?
Anna Callahan 13:06
When I was in urban planning graduate school, one summer I did a research project looking at all these corporate tax breaks that cities did in the hopes that corporations would come into their cities and start jobs, and looking at the actual benefits that the cities thought they would get, and that they got. And the whole thing is a race to the bottom. It does not end up with the benefits that people think there are. And I will say at the State House, one of the things that people are trying to make happen is to have like a sunset provision so that when the a couple of things that have a sunset provision, so that when a law is passed that is a corporate tax break, that it is reviewed a few years later, it doesn't just go on indefinitely, forever? And another one is to to look at what the purported benefits were supposed to be, and to see if they actually happened. Nobody ever does that! The corporations tell us that we're going to get more jobs, we're going to get a better economy, we're going to get these things. And then no one even bothers to look at whether those things actually happened. And yet the corporate benefits continue.
Jordan Berg Powers 14:21
I'll just give two examples. One is Unum insurance in Worcester-- got a 15 year TIF [Tax Increment Financing] to move basically a quarter of a mile just a little bit down the road.
Anna Callahan 14:32
And a TIF is like a permission from...
Jordan Berg Powers 14:35
A TIF is a tax break from-- taxes in lieu-- so it's a tax break. They didn't pay taxes on this new building, essentially paying for the building to move a quarter of a mile and then they went digital and they decided to just close the office. Right? So there's no more benefit to roofing this thing. And in fairness to the city of Worcester, they are trying to recoup some of that money from it. But it's unclear how they can do so. And again, the state legislature could be giving more avenues for the municipalities to recoup money and tips to actually look at these things. But they don't, of course, they don't look at these things. I'll give another one. This is an example from, from what I see on the ground on a regular basis. So I was on the Conservation Commission in Worcester, for I think, seven years, I think, maybe eight years, somewhere in there. And I then moved on to the zoning board in Worcester, which, so I see a lot of these things. I am in those roles, the power of the government, I am a big part of overseeing government oversight. And one of the things I see all the time is that a regular person comes in, we treat them like they have endless pockets, and we make them tick every single box to get through our process. You want to build a deck on your yard, you better have a climate study, you know, you better have a wetland scientists come in, which costs a ton of money, you better have staking, you better do all these things. And everybody there talks about it, like that's a normal thing for the government to require people to go above and beyond what they clearly have money for, to do really simple things. Meanwhile, a big corporation comes in or a big developer nine times out of ten. And they'll say, look, we got to move this forward, we put in $20 million, or we put in 100 million dollars. And people on the poor start to get nervous. They're like, ‘Oh, I can't cost the city money’, right? So they immediately fold. Now all of a sudden, all of those rules, which were so critical, and they're onerous, right? For regular people, they're onerous. They are just, you know, now all of a sudden, those rules go out the window. Because people with money start saying things like, ‘Oh, well, I don't know if I can afford that. I don't know if I could do it. This is such a big project.’ I'm just like, you know, I regularly say on those boards, ‘but I don't care that you put a billion dollars into it. That means you have a million dollars to spend on this thing, you better do it right.’ We frame it the opposite way.
Anna Callahan 17:02
If they put a million dollars in that's because they expect way more than that out of it.
Jordan Berg Powers 17:07
Exactly. Like your regular person who is working on their house.
Jordan Berg Powers 17:11
So we recently had somebody wanting to put a deck in their yard. And we made them go through all this rigmarole. And finally, I was just like, ‘this is a deck in your yard, you own this property, and you have a deck there. Why is this before me?’ Like, this is insane. This is onerous, and I just had said I was like, ‘This is onerous This is crazy’. No more than 20 minutes later, there was a multimillion dollar redevelopment, which flew through with almost no resistance, it was like nothing happened. And again it’s this thing, and regular people see that, right, like regular people, they feel that that's the way they interact with government. They feel bad, and that's just backwards.
Jonathan Cohn 17:52
You're telling me that the average people in Worcester don't have high powered real estate lawyers on retainer?
Jordan Berg Powers 18:00
You know, they almost do, because there's one guy who comes in and does all of their things. But you know, I assume he's, you know, I assume he's charging the same price. So, I mean, it's totally a racket. There's just because, again, it's a specialized field, right, like getting through the Conservation Commission getting through the zoning board is a specialized field that costs money. It’s really difficult.
Anna Callahan 18:24
I love the thing that you, Jordan said near the beginning about how if our government was working for us, they would be you know, should we use the term harassing? They would be on Tenet’s case, for all the laws they're breaking. Not only are they not on their case, but look at the ways in which our city government, state governments, federal governments bend over backwards, to give money to not even require the regulations that we require for regular people for these giant corporations. And I would love for us to ping around what would our state government especially be doin if it were there to defend regular people and to hold corporations accountable?
Jordan Berg Powers 19:17
I mean, the first thing for me is it would put money behind enforcement of these things because one of the things you realize if you live and if you sort of work on policy, but live in the world, is that the gap between a written policy, a law, and its enforcement, like those two will never meet. They're just so wide. And that's especially true when it comes to protecting regular people. So the way to enforce that regular people protection is to actually hold those large corporations accountable on our behalf and that requires money both to hire better lawyers, and also money to look into it right, to do the work, the enforcement side of it and none of the money is in enforcement. There's we put you know, we put billions of dollars into regulating people's personal drug use, and pennies into corporations’ illegality.
Jonathan Cohn 20:17
When it comes to the enforcement of the on the books laws in Massachusetts around employee misclassification are much stronger than than those of other states. It's just like anything of that, needs to be enforced a lot better, because we all know how how widespread misclassification is. Shout out Uber and Lyft, who are rumored to even be pressuring to try to undermine the existing laws that we have around that, but they're not. But the fact that we don't hear constantly about them being under being investigation. Is that just not enforced? And as strongly as it should be?
Jordan Berg Powers 21:02
Yeah, there's no, you know, one of the things I've been I've been joking around, but I'm actually now serious about calling for is I think every time you know, your landlord illegally says you have to leave or raises your rent, you should call the police. And every time somebody steals your wages, you should call the police. Because, let's start being ridiculous about this. Are you enforcing the rules that are on there? To give another really quick example: my wife and I, we were the lead plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit which cost Santander bank $32 million, which is something I'm very proud of. And the part that never got resolved, is the city. It's illegal in Massachusetts, again, talking about protections, it's illegal in the city. I mean, it's already in the state for tow trucks to come onto private property to take private property. Right, you can't come on to private property to take private property. And this is especially true when you own more of the car, which is a whole other piece to that that's why Santander loss. And I went down to the police station with the law, the literal black and white, the case law that was written that said that you can't do this and they just said, ‘We don't care. We're not gonna enforce it, we don't care.’ They just ignored me. I know, it's crazy.
Anna Callahan 22:33
So crazy. You know, another you're talking about landlords and one thing that I think about a lot is the amount of power that landlords have, just informational power, and the lack of power that tenants have. And so, you know, tenants, if you're a landlord, you can do credit checks on your tenants, you can do background checks on your tenants, you can do criminal, you can do anything you want. And yet, tenants have no ability whatsoever to do any kind of check on our landlords, in part because we don't even require landlords to be registered anywhere. There's no sort of body where you can make an official complaint against your landlord and that will stay with them in some place that future tenants can find that information. Like we just have no, the power dynamics purely of information between tenants and landlords. Like, you know, I've had landlords where I later found out from prior tenants what a totally effed up you know, dude putting literally like putting in from the next door neighbor putting cameras and recording videoing tenants. Like I mean, super, super creepy stuff. And yet there is nowhere that that information has been gathered, except for you know, you just happened to talk to your neighbor, you happen to find some, you know, ex tenant of the same person and hear the same stories. That needs to be recorded somewhere. And yet, from the perspective of our city and state governments, landlords don't even have to be registered anywhere.
Jordan Berg Powers 24:08
Yeah, I'll just go with one more example. And then I think we should go to Jonathan is, you know, there was a whole, I don't know if we all remember, but there's, you know, people who got their houses stolen. Like I also think about how much control banks have over me as I'm a landlord. Technically, I own my house. I have three levels. You know, they literally illegally signed, they had Robo signing of things they were legally signing and taking people's homes and no one went to jail for that. But if if you or if I as a person were to forge a document, which is what they were doing, I would go to jail. I would lose my house, right like they would there'd be consequences. But banks doing it en masse costing millions of Americans their homes in Massachusetts, nothing happened. There was no repercussions. Our Attorney General didn’t bring anybody to court on it. We signed a really generous, get out of jail free settlement with the banks, essentially. And people are getting foreclosed on today. Like they're just having their homes taken away by the same banks.
Jonathan Cohn 25:07
The legislature just passed like a pretty weak foreclosure bill in response that I can't remember as I wasn't following.
Jordan Berg Powers 25:12
it was not only was it weak, it made it easier to foreclose. Yeah.
Anna Callahan 25:17
This is what we're talking about.
Jonathan Cohn 25:19
It reminds me how I have often talked about the forward motion in the Massachusetts legislature is them doing less things that are like actively harmful and instead doing things that are woefully insufficient. Like that is actually real forward motion. The point about that, with the foreclosure crisis, just remembered 10 years ago, I actually moved my money out of Wells Fargo, part driven because of moving and not being there. But in part also, because as I had commented at the time, ‘if I put my money in a hole on the ground, at least the hole in the ground wouldn't falsely foreclose on people.’
Anna Callahan 26:01
That's right.
Jonathan Cohn 26:03
And it's wild about how little accountability there was for anybody involved in that. But the other point I want to make in terms of the ways that cities and states bend laws in favor of very large corporations that we think of the Olympics, since it’s popping back in the news again, and thinking back to Boston's long bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. And having been active organizing against it at the time, it was striking when you see about how much like the hosts posted for the Olympics bend all the forms of city government in service of the Olympics and Paralympics, whether it's your housing policy, your zoning laws, your steering, you're creating a designated lane for those on the IOC and basically causing traffic, for everybody else. The fact that the Olympics actually would get designated space on all city and state owned billboards. So you're just handing over property that strong [inaudible] and trademark. The trademark protections as well as the financial guarantee that a host city would have to say, ‘if your costs went over, we got you covered, we will pay out of our own public coffers for any of the cost overruns.’ And it also reminded me of this earlier about how, thankfully Boston was protected from that though we still have issues on this ground. But what it reminded me of was the stadium in Worcester, which is just like a massive giveaway of tax dollars.
Jordan Berg Powers 27:40
Yeah, Worcester, for people who don't know has the most expensive minor league Stadium in the country. The people who own the Worcester Red Sox are one of the richest corporations that own businesses and one of the largest business owners of sports in the world. So think about that. They own a minor league team, they're one of the richest. And they had basically the city give them an absolutely free stadium. And you contrast that with some of the other large you know, most of the really really big sports franchises are all soccer or football in Europe, those those big corporations and they are forced by their countries to build their own stadiums. And they're in a lot of ways we think of the you know, these things as really large corporations right but a lot of these soccer teams are in small towns or small parts of London right? They are no different than Worcester in terms of size, but they are demanding that their teams build their own stadiums, but we're giving away prime real estate that could have gone to something that people in the community had designed. A canal, other things that they wanted there that the city was like, ‘no, we're not gonna do that’. You know, people who lived there were like, ‘we have these ideas that the government could spend money to own this thing that then would benefit the city’ and the city was like ‘no, what we're gonna do is build the most expensive minor league stadium‘ that ends up being totally ugly and give it to this already extraordinarily extractive sports group, right? They pay their players poorly, they they have an enormous amount of wealth and we're gonna give them this free stadium and a bunch of tax breaks. It is just amazing to think about, it's hard to fathom a better example of how government really works just for rich people. Then you know, the people living there, the businesses, all the folks saying we want this thing and the government going ‘we're just gonna help this one person, this one group of people with a lot, a lot of money.’
Anna Callahan 29:57
Already have the money, that's who we're going to be helping you know.
Jordan Berg Powers 29:59
Yeah.
Anna Callahan 30:00
We’re just gonna close this up. We, I think we're talking about something that most people can feel deeply. You know, already we see it in our everyday lives. And, you know, it's why we need to change things, we gotta change the way that we do politics. As we were talking about before we need a different way of engaging with our elected officials. So we're excited about that. Next week, we are going to be talking about climate change. And I'm excited about that too. Horrified by climate change, of course. One final thing we mentioned, we mentioned Tenet, but we didn't really give a shout out to the nurses 800 have been on strike for how many weeks now?
Jordan Berg Powers 30:48
Think it's three months. Maybe Longer.
Anna Callahan 30:50
It is really incredible.
Jordan Berg Powers 30:55
Just want to say really quickly, that I think the reason progressives need to care about this is progressives should care about government working. It's one of the things that makes us who we are. And we are different from liberals and that liberals just sort of don't agree, they just think government should sort of like do a little bit of things. It doesn't really matter how big it is or what it does. It's just sort of like fix it so that the fleabites don't get out of control, like just sort of broad things. And progressivism understands that government can also be onerous. And so therefore we should be interested in making sure it works for everyone. So I just think that there's something that’s a really important piece to that, that I'm really glad that we surfaced in this conversation to say like, progressives, care about government, we care about it working right. We care about it working for people. It's important. It's an important part of our ethos.
Anna Callahan 31:44
We shouldn't put up with it just not doing awful things. John, as were saying we should expect and insist that it works for us in big sweeping changes to do the things that we need. Awesome. Thanks so much. Always a pleasure. See you all next week.