For Whom The Gov Serves

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Today we talk about who the government really works for. Does our government work for you? Does our government work for vulnerable people? Does our government work for the bottom 50% of wage earners? And if not, who does it work for? We'll talk a little bit about the grand bargain, big lobbies like real estate and insurance and health. And lastly, we'll discuss local elected officials and the pressures that they are under to represent certain constituents or other entities.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 41. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we 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.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. We are here to ensure that we can all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state that truly supports and represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. And today we are going to be discussing who the government really works for.
Does our government work for you? Does our government work for vulnerable people? Does our government work for the bottom 50% of wage earners? And if not, who doesn't work for? We'll talk a little bit about state politics. Things like the grand bargain, big lobbies like real estate and insurance and health. We'll also talk about local elected officials and the pressures that they are under to represent certain constituents or certain other entities.
So that is what we're discussing today. But before we do, I would love to introduce my two fantastic co hosts and Jordan.Can you give us a start? Yes.
My name is Jordan Berg Powers. I use he him. And for the purposes of this conversation, I am local government as a zoning board member in.
Nice. Jonathan. Sorry, sorry.
I accidentally did not click the unmute button just then. He and his from Boston have been active in issuing electoral campaigns across Massachusetts for a number of years. I am, unlike Jordan, not part of local government.
But you're at the state house, are you not? Yeah, well, I'm currently at the state house, which is good for this topic. Perfect.And I am Anna Callahan.
She her coming at you from Medford. I am also officially in local politics. I'm a city councilor in Medford and so definitely getting the water, the fire hose of local politics.
And let's go ahead and get rolling. I'm just going to introduce this topic with this basic concept that we get from some studies done on national politics that there was this Princeton study. I don't know if anybody's heard about it, but you can look it up as the Princeton study and maybe look it up as oligarchy of the US government.
And they studied 20 years of bills that went through Congress and whether they were supported by the bottom 90% of I Can't remember if it's wage or wealth, but the bottom 90% of folks or whether they were supported by the top 10% of folks.And they essentially came to the conclusion that the bottom 90% of us have zero input into which bills pass and which bills fail.
And that the only people, I think they called it minuscule, statistically insignificant amount of input. And that the only people who actually have input in terms of national policy are the top 10%, not just through themselves. But also through the corporations that they predominantly own.
So nationally, we've had studies that show that this is true, that our government does not represent us. It represents the super wealthy and corporations. And now we're going to talk about state politics and local politics and where the influences come through in those arenas.
Who would like to jump in with an example? I will chime in with one thing, because I might be popping off if I get called fora hearing coming up, but since this is relevant to the hearing that's down the hall from here, one thing that we were talking about before the show was the so called grand bargain that got passed in the Massachusetts legislature back in 2018.That was for folks who weren't actively following then when there was the push to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and there was a legislative campaign and a ballot campaign, and there was a legislative campaign and a ballot campaign around paid family and medical leave. And that in response to those, the retailers and the business lobby decided that they were going to do a ballot initiative of their own to cut the sales tax as kind of a way to say, well, if you make us do right by our employees, we're going to drain the state's coffers to get back at you.
And as a result, the legislature said, okay, we're going to look at all of these together and we'll be a convener of negotiation between these factions. One of the things that was always so striking during that is the way in which the Democrats, who have a supermajority, a comically large supermajority in the Massachusetts legislature, treated themselves as just the neutral convener between labor and capital when discussing how should we should deal with these ballot questions,rather than despite this fact that these legislators are regularly supported by unions, despite the fact that unions in many districts represent a large share of their constituencies, or that it's much more so middle and working class people in pretty much every district, and that the party is allegedly the party of labor, that they put themselves as that kind of neutral arbiter in between rather than an advocate of something that many of them ran, which I think is the thing that I often think of in terms of, let's say, the democratic party in the US at large, where too often the democratic party wants to be the party of kind of labor, capital and rent at the same time. And that doesn't make it, let's wrap up the grand bargain thing, right? Dowe have to tell the end of the story? Yeah, there are ballot measures to ensure that there's paid that we raise the minimum wage.
The corporate side threatens to lower taxes, but sales tax, which is regressive also. And what ended up coming out of this is you ended up having the legislature decide when it comes to the minimum wage that they did a disservice to restaurant workers by leaving the, keeping it at only, at 45% of the minimum wage is what. Like they would raise the tipped wage but only to that level.
Continuing to put restaurant workers and other tipped workers at a disadvantage. Industries that are disproportionately women, people of color, kind of immigrants who they do that work as well as that they eliminated time and a half on Sundays and weekends, which was kind of a particularly perverse thing, where there would be workers who could be worse off because of, despite the ways, if you take away a huge source of additional income for them, just because the employers are complaining. It's always wild when you have Democrats repealing key popular things that they're probably, that they are the ones responsible for.
It's just like they'll go back to Democrats defunding acorn 15 years ago. Yeah. And I think it's also important because it's the grand bargain that they call it.
I think the two things that are important to think about it is, one, how much the media loved this. Right? I think the other piece is that the media literally advocated for workers losing money because it fetishizes the idea that everyone needs to compromise more than like, what is the result of that compromise. Right.
Because they worship at the altar of this idea of there's only two sides and the only thing that can exist is somewhere in between. Rather than like, you could just help workers and that actually be the only goal. But they fetishize this idea that they also put pressure on the legislature through their pages, through their things to say, if you are going to help workers, you have to hurt workers, which is a perverse stance, but it is very common.
And I think if you feel yourself feeling it, you need to unpack that we could actually just help people. They are making record profits. They could easily just help people.
They did not require us to hurt people, to take money out of their pockets to do the right thing. And the other piece is that they have a supermajority. So the Democrats, it's not like they needed to do this because you're in the Senate and there's two senators, you need to pass it and they won't.
It's not like, not, you're not getting into, there's not the votes for it they could lose votes and still easily pass things. So they created a false bargaining because they were threatening to get rid of the sales tax. If you were a functioning party that cared about workers, cared about the people who vote for you, not the people who actively pay for your opponents, but the people who vote for you.
If you were to advocate for the people who vote for you, what you would have then said is, fine, then we're going to raise taxes on corporations. We have a really low rate of taxes on corporations and we won't raise it on small businesses. They Would raise taxes just on large corporations who, again, were the people, because small businesses were not opposing any of these.
Know, it's Walmart, it's Home Depot, right? It's these big corporations, these big conglomerates. So at any point they could have done the right thing. And I want to jump in and push this idea that this whole, what I call both siderism, right, that you're talking about that like, oh, they have to be between the workers and capital.
That's the same idea as you have to compromise between climate deniers and climate scientists. Actually, we don't just look for what's in fact true and go with things that are factual instead of going with lies. The whole concept of like, well,there are two sides.
And it doesn't matter how factual, how moral, how helpful to society either side is, we're simply going to look at them as equals and then go between them. That whole idea we should really just throw out the window, it's kind of connected to that. It might be one step off the original topic, but it supports that.
Framing is how polarization discourse can often be a pet peeve of mine because it assumes that polarization is bad just for it. Because being nice, getting along and coming to a consensus in the middle is what is good. And there can be real ways in which polarization is bad, but it is not because people don't kind of coalesce onto the middle and then everybody moves an inch.
And then somehow somebody who doesn't recognize the basic human rights of somebody else and somebody who does kind of somehow come together and then modestly don't acknowledge the human rights of other. I mean, I'll just say really quickly that the things that we like, the things that moved America forward, were done. So when one ideology, when progressive ideology won the day and forced it down the throats of equal, the ability for me to vote in America didn't happen through compromise, it happened because radical Republicans and radical progressives forced it on the south.
And forced it through an amendment process. The same thing is true with women's right to vote. It was forced by a party that wanted power, the democratic party, at the time, and forced it down the throats of its opponents for the sake of feeling like it could help them win votes, gain power.
The five day work week and weekends and 40 hours, like everything. Child labor laws. Child labor laws.
All these things come from. They don't come out of. I mean, there's compromise to get there among a governing coalition.
But ultimately, you know, FDR's great deal happened because one party controlled every mechanism and forced it down the throats, despite the interests of moneyed people who were opposed to it, not through two people who of equal size,fighting it out. And in fact, they're never equal size. There's many more of us where our ideas are way more popular.
So it's also a false dichotomy, because it necessarily elevates marginal position. One of the things I say all the time that the media does is it puts people who are tax absolutists, who don't believe in any taxation. The chamber of Commerce Opposes all forms of taxation.
They're tax absolutists. They are extremists on taxation. And they get put up as equal arbiters to those of us who are tinkering with taxes.
To those of us who are like, a 4% raise or a 3% rate, that's a tinkering. We're not saying 100% on corporations, right? But They are 100% against it. So they're at 0% taxation, and we are talking about tinkering, and they juxtapose us.
And so then you have. Government is supposed to be fighting for us, but instead we have government that is pretending to be in these middles or is frankly just being an arbiter for the 10%, the 15%, the 5% of people of moneyed interest. If you think about, again, similarly for real estate, right.
We know that we can't afford to live in Massachusetts. It is ridiculous. I've been starting to think about the ways in which people think of Massachusetts exceptionalism around abortion, around individual freedoms.
And basically what we're saying is that those are rights for upper middle class and middle class people because other people can't afford to live. I know some people who.
I know sort of a couple who is trying to figure out how to stay in Massachusetts because their literal existence is under threat in the south, but they're considering moving to the south because they can't afford to live like I was just thinking about what is this thing we're creating? We're sort of the things that make us the things that I'm proud of, the things I love about living here, something that's not available to people unless they have enough money. Human rights. Right.
And so it's a really weird thing that our elected bodies continue to privilege people, real estate people who have money and all those other things, rather than regular people. And I see this a lot on the zoning board. So I'm on the zoning board,if I may.
Go ahead. Yes, please. Let me just corral us a little bit to finish talking about state politics first, and then you and I are going to go on and we'll do a bunch of.
Okay, great. Yeah. But on the state side, the one thing I wanted to bring up is that I've heard both of you talk about this.
I have heard it less than you have, but I know that when I've been doing lobbying with my state rep for Medicare for all, and I'm also in those discussions. So I hear other people who have lobbied their state reps around Medicare for all, it's very common that what you hear is, oh, we don't go against the healthcare industry. Right.
Or the other thing you hear often is around any of the housing protections, like the tenant protections and housing policy at the state house. We don't go against real estate. Right.
These blanket statements from legislators, from members of the state house, from representatives saying we don't go against real estate. Right. We don't go against this industry.
And I would love to hear you guys have had a lot more experience hearing that. Talk a little bit about that. It's a separate industry.
But this reminds me of how I just always find it so incredibly absurd that in our economic development bills inMassachusetts, every day we're shoveling money to the biotech sector, which is a heavily profitable sector. And unless we're shoveling money to the biotech sector because we want the patent rights as a state for whatever gets produced so that we can have public ownership of what we're incentivizing comes out of, you're just helping kind of boost their profit margins in a way where you're saying you don't have money for certain basic needs of people, but saying you have the ability to give various tax incentives to one of the most profitable industries. One of the most profitable industries in the state.
Yeah, I'll just say really quickly, I think we see it all the time. I've never heard anybody say outright, like, the only thing they'll say, we have to take them into consideration every year. The speaker of the House, the Senate president, they'll meet with the chamber regularly.
They're not accountable to regular people. They're barely ever lobbying.
Yeah, the chamber of Commerce lobby, they're not meeting with these groups. I don't know. The speaker of the House has never met with a tenant organization every year to speak at their conference, right to the city vote is going to have a conference.
He's not coming to that. And so I think they definitely see themselves as I like to say, they like to tell us how good the song is while the Titanic is going down. Like, they see themselves as arbiters of those, rather than just advocating for the people, which is who they should be advocating for.
So let's go ahead and move to know from, from a very generalized perspective. There's plenty of studies, and I know,Jordan, you and I have talked about this before, that show that the people that local elected officials hear from tend to be wealthier, whiter, more likely to be homeowners and more conservative on policy than the average resident of their city. That's just standard.
I could say, as a city councilor, that I hear far more often from homeowners. And you have to understand that running a campaign, the way you run a campaign if you want to win, is you knock on the doors of people who vote regularly in city elections. In Medford.
That's only about one third of the people who live in Medford who are eligible to vote in Medford. About a third of them that vote in city elections each time. It's really high.
Well, and it is pretty high, but they're almost like overwhelmingly homeowners and wealthier and wider. That's just the nature. And so you spend months invading the personal spaces and asking about the needs of the wealthier, more likely to own homes, whiter people in your city.
And so you hear all their ideas, and then they're the ones most likely to reach out to you after you're elected. So there's just this pervasive understanding that elected officials have, that their constituents have needs reflected by that group of people, and that they don't understand the needs well of folks who are more marginalized, have less money. It's structured in every part of our current electoral system, from the fact that if you're in a poor community, you're likely to have to movearound, so you may not know where you're registered.
So our registration dates are literally designed to ensure that poorer, blacker, browner people don't get to vote. Younger people especially. So first off, from that to the fact that when something goes on in a city, so let's say you have a zoning next to you or a planning issue, it goes to the homeowner of record.
It does not go to the renter, to the person who lives there. It's not sent to that address. The address that it's sent to is the person who owns the property.
So therefore, that's who gets compensated. And then you also have this perverse system where because most of the people who run are wealthier, more affluent, older, on average, that's who they're legislating to. So when you're not those things,the government isn't working for you.
Government's actually an impediment to your life, and it is often harsher, meaner. It does not treat you as an equal to a richer person. And so you are less likely to vote and engage in a system that tells you in a lot of different ways that you're not welcome.
You don't speak this language, you're not a part of this system. And so if you are told that both in lots of indirect ways that are pretty obvious, and then on top of that, none of the things you want ever happen. So it's literally hostile to your things.
And the policies that are being enacted are making your life more miserable, not less, say, taking away your time and a half, making it harder for you to afford to rent, having your health care be totally unaffordable, having your public school have money siphoned off to private institutions run by corporations, when all of those things are happening, then you're less likely to engage in that system because it's literally not working for you. And so you have all of those structural things in place, and they are highlighted on the local level, where there's no media coverage, where no one's talking about what's happening, where no one's explaining these issues, and you literally can't find out about it because you're not getting thenotice, you're not getting the thing, you're not getting the update that this is happening in your community. A lot of are inMassachusetts.
There's a lot of local associations, local groups. Most of those, again, are homeowners. Those are people who get noticed, right? Like, I'm a homeowner and I could not find, it took years for me to find the local park initiative group in my neighborhood because it was all word of mouth to homeowner, to homeowner, white person to white person.
I had to break in through our city councilor, who was like, you should come to this meeting. It's just the white people in your very not white district. I live in the third poorest zip code, I think, in the state.
It was just ridiculous, right? There are so many structural barriers to this. And then what happens is the government itself stops working for those very people. So what do I mean by that? Just really simple things like when you come before the zoning board, you can have a big project and ask for a ton of government support for that project, saying, I can't meet the rules of this city.
I need this change. I need this change. I need this change.
I need this change. And you'll say, look, I'm going to spend a million dollars on this project. I need you to make all of these allowances for me and maybe even a little bit of free money, and the city will bend over backwards for you to get that.
If you're a regular person and you come before the zoning board and you want to put up a deck, it's like you got to pay the exorbitant fee it takes to even appear before us. Right? That's a cost burden. It's expensive to just appear before my local zoning board.
And then you have to hire somebody who speaks the language, or you come before us and don't hire someone. And then all of the other people are like, oh, well, you didn't fit this. You didn't click this box correctly.
You didn't do this correctly. That plan that you submitted, that you wrote by hand, because it's a deck. That's not the correct way.
We submit our plans before the city, and then they'll say things like, well, you should just get. I love this. People will say on the zone, they'll say, other zoning people will say, like.
Or on the conservation commission, this would happen a lot. Well, you should just get a scientist to come out and take a look at it. Do you know how expensive that is? That's like a mortgage payment.
Wow. Right? These are arduous expenses that we put in front of these people who are just regular people who are just trying to get by, who are usually one or two missed paychecks away from total destitution. And we're saying to them, pay extra to make government work properly for you.
So when we say that government isn't geared towards regular people, that's what I mean. It's like, we treat rich people with kid gloves. We expect less of them.
We ask government bends over backwards to make how government work work better for them. And regular people who don't have money, the full force of government comes down on them. Right.
Every rule, every checkbox, every way you're supposed to do it by the rules now applies to you because you don't know the right people. You're not putting in enough money into the city, into the system. You're not a big enough person for us to change the way we do things for you.
And it's a really backwards way of doing things. It's one of the things I say all the time. On the opposite, I say on the zoning board, like, this person can afford to do this.
Right. I'm not interested in. You're spending a lot of money, then you have the money to spend like opposite.
One thing I was going to point to on that, that there's a toxic dimension to that in the way in which making routine things particularly difficult for everyday people, when you often have bodies that largely will consist of at least more conservative than average, affluent white homeowners who run a lot of the things kind of locally, then make things more difficult for other people, whether the same or different kind of demographics, you end up inspiring a certain degree of conservatism in people. And that it has this toxic effect where it either causes people to disconnect from government entirely and being like, this is a waste of my time to even engage, or it helps make, let's say, kind of more middle and working class people to do the bidding of the rich. Because even though that those rich people can typically get around some of the process, it makes the kind of working class and middle class person say, why should this process exist at all if it's such a burden and support eliminating the thing entirely, giving the greatest benefits to those at the top who already were served by the process.
Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Go ahead.
I'll just say really quickly just the other piece that I think about for local government. There's a lot of city managers around the city. City managers are unelected positions.
Our city manager, Ed Augustus, who is now the housing person, met once a week with the Worcester Chamber ofCommerce. Big business, but he's not elected. So he never met with regular people.
He never met with regular voters. He was never accountable to regular voters. He didn't have a meeting every week with tenant people, with people who are poor, with people who are unhoused.
Right. He might run into them, but he's not having an official meeting with them where their concerns, their ideas, their policy positions were met with every week. And that's standard around the state where you have city managers meeting with business owners.
But city. But people in charge rarely regularly meet with regular people. And that's really when we think about how government works.
It's not just that I think Ed August is a bad person. If the only people you meet with are homeowners and business owners and people who tend to be in your upper affluent circles, guess what? Ideas about the world end up happening. Exactly.
I was just going to. Something that you said, Jonathan, I can't remember anymore. Reminded me and made me think of this.
Know, we really could have the government like in many other countries, the government could just calculate your taxes and then it would be done and you wouldn't have to pay people and all this stuff. You know why? Because the tax preparers lobby has lobbied our government to ensure that they don't do that. Because they make a lot of money off of you and me.
That they get to prepare our unbelievably complicated taxes instead of the government just doing it for you because they have all the information mean, it's crazy. And the IRS wants to do know. They'll say things like, oh, the IRS.
The government does this thing and that's like a joke. But I'm like, it's not the IRS. The IRS hates these tax preparers.
They want to make it simplified and just have a system where you automatically. There's proposals out there in Congress. It just gets killed by corporations.
I'll just say again, really quickly, too, just like thinking again for the earlier episodes that you should all support and listen to.We did a great episodes. We did several episodes about tax cuts, about the fact that the Healy administration is paying fortax cuts that go to dead billionaires and day traders off the backs of poor people, unhoused people.
She's now proposing two different allowances for local governments that are all regressive taxes that will be paid by poor people and middle class people to pay, again, for the fact that she's refusing to roll back the tax cuts for rich people that we can't afford. So again, rather than government working for regular people, she's literally proposing cutting services for people who are absolutely need it the most and asking you to pay more in taxes than rich people. And there you have it.
Who does our government work for? Clear. It's black and white. Thank you so much.
Thanks to everyone who listened. You can always donate by the link below. And we are always here to help you understand what's happening in our state.
What's happening in local politics. Thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to chatting with you all next week.Bye.