Incorruptible Mass
Incorruptible Mass
The Dream: The road to change starts with a vision of the world we want to create
Welcome to Season 5!
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We know that change cannot happen without a vision of the world we want to create. So join us today as we paint a picture of what we could have here in Massachusetts if we fixed our state politics.
In dozens of other countries, people go to the doctor without worrying about the cost. Roads are well-paved and pothole free. Water that comes out of the tap does not have lead in it. Kids get a great education no matter what school they go to. People graduate from college without massive debt. Friends and family live near each other, because no one is priced out of their city. And people who work have plenty of time for friends and family.
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 1. 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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Hello, and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help you transform state politics. We know that together we can make Massachusetts policy reflect the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. And today, we will be talking about the dream, right? We know that there is no change without a vision of the world that you want to create. So join us today as we paint a picture of what we could have here in Massachusetts, if we fixed our state politics. Before we get into that, though, I would love to introduce my fantabulous co host here, Jordan Berg Powers and Jonathan Cohn. Jordan, would you like to introduce yourself?
Jordan Berg Powers:My name is Jordan Berg Powers, I use he/him, and I have coming on 13 years experience directly in Massachusetts politics.
Anna Callahan:And Jon.
Jonathan Cohn:Jonathan Cohn, he/him, and I'll be hitting 10 years later this year for my first time doing work, doing something for a campaign in Massachusetts. Wow.
Anna Callahan:I am Anna Callahan, She/her, coming at you from Medford. And I love state politics, been involved for a little bit too. So we are all very excited to be here with you, transforming state politics together. And today, we're painting this picture of what we could have. And the way I think about it is to really, in many ways, compare our country and our life to the way that people actually live in other countries in many, many other countries. And I'm going to talk about a number of different policies. And it's not just that each of these policies happens in one country. But in most of these, in tons and tons of countries, all of these policies are true. All of these dreams are true. People go to the doctor without ever worrying about the cost. Roads are well-paved, and there's potable water that comes out of your tap doesn't have any lead in it. Kids get a great education, no matter what school they go to. People graduate from college without massive debt. Friends and family live near each other for their whole lives because they're not priced out of their city. And people have jobs, and they also have time for friends and family. And I'm gonna go into a little detail about the way that I experienced these things. Because I am not a particularly underprivileged person; I'm a middle-class white woman. And, you know, all of these things have affected me personally. And imagine how much they are affecting the more marginalized and underrepresented underserved people in the communities we live in. You know, my family, because we're self employed, we pay probably $20,000 a year in health insurance. And we have an$8,000 family deductible, $3,000 each, so we never hit the deductible, and we have to pay for out of pocket for everything. So I would actually prefer to take all of those dollar bills and light them on fire, because I get more enjoyment out of lighting them on fire than I get out of insurance companies that that, you know, their job is to make sure we don't get the care that we pay for. Our roads are filled with potholes, like 100 potholes in one single block. And I've injured my wrists before biking in the rain not being able to see all the potholes. It damages our cars. You know, it's just unpleasant. And I have a young child; he's now over six, so I don't have to worry about lead anymore. But every time we moved, when he was under six, we would have to test the water, we would have to test the paint, we would have to test the soil because you can poison your child forever. And we should have water that we can drink coming out of our tap. I know when I was a kid, my mom did not make a lot of money. She at one point, for my high school, my sister's junior High and high school, she spent 70% of her income on rent, so that we could go to a good school. Because if you don't live in the right neighborhood, your schools are totally underfunded. And then, you know, most of my friends and family lived far away. And that's not good for our communities. It's not good for our peace of mind and our mental health. But everybody is priced out, you know, every 5, 10 years you can no longer afford the rents in the place or the housing prices in the place where you once lived or where you're grew up with your family. And so many people that I know have multiple jobs and have a job where they have to work, you know, tons and tons of hours. Whoever has time to have a life? What happened to that whole concept of habit In a life, being able to spend time with your friends and your family, because you have time, and you're paid enough money to have a decent life? That's my dream. That is my dream. And I know that we could have it here in Massachusetts for 7 million people.
Jordan Berg Powers:Yeah, you know, I think all the time about how silly it is that when you're sick, you have to figure out how sick you are, and whether or not to go to the doctor. And nowhere else is that true. I've never experienced that in the other places. I've lived around the world. And you know, there's all these talks about how there's all these delays and rationing and other places that have things, but like, who here gets appointments right away as soon as you need them? Who in our system has easy access to their health care providers? I don't know anyone in this system who has easy access to their health care providers. I guess if you have unlimited money, you can pay for anything. But you know, most people, even if they have good plans, still have trouble getting to their doctors. And when we say plans, I think it's important for us to remember what we're talking about. They're not making things for us, they're not giving us food, they're not building us cars, they're not paying people to do things for us. Health insurance companies are just an in-between. They're in between the thing we actually need, which is health care. And they make money as an in-between. So they literally serve no purpose. They don't make anything. They don't do anything for us. They don't serve any purpose, except to push paper. And they extract our money, they make profits, and they go to Wall Street. That's an absolutely bonkers system. That makes no sense. What should happen is, if you get sick, you should get the care you need. That's what should happen. Just like the mail comes, right? It's just you pay somebody a little bit, and the mail comes your house, just like you pay property taxes. If you go to a school, there's teachers there, and there's services there. Or if you you pay, you pay taxes, and they don't you know, there's nothing in between that you call to have the fire department come, right? Thank goodness! Watching people saying like, how on fire is your house right now? Right? That's happening in health care.
Jonathan Cohn:it just makes no sense, this system. I feel like the fire argument is one that really kind of aligns well with healthcare. One of the reasons why it is very valuable to have a fire department is it if there is a fire at your house, that fire can spread to every other house around you. And that is an important thing to stop before it does too much damage to your house as well as others in the same way in which like, sickness is something that by its nature spreads. And it's like a fundamentally warped model that we view it as a very individualized thing as opposed to a social thing that then requires robust social infrastructure, to make sure that we are able to be able to kind of to address problems early. And I think just in general this speaks to a lot of the weakness of social infrastructure in the US. The one thing I was thinking about--whenever I see this stat, I'm always horrified by how expensive childcare is in Massachusetts. And the simple fact that there are so many things in other countries that are built-in parts of understanding, whether it's child care, whether it's like elder care, that spectrum of care, knowing that that is a strong burden that for families to have to have to bear the costs of themselves, that not everyone would able to be able to afford. And that's fine. Like when you're in your old age, you should not have to be worrying about how you can afford to be in a nursing home that you want to be in or how your children can afford to do that for you. Because it should be a part of a general spectrum of making sure that people are taken care of early when they can't quite take care for themselves that they're taken care of late when they can't quite take care of themselves.
Anna Callahan:Everybody gets old unless you're very unlucky.
Jonathan Cohn:Exactly. You're lucky enough to get very old to be taken care of. And the one thing I've wanted before is just the ability to get to where you need to go in the state. It's that we should be designing communities and people should be able to afford to live in those communities where the things that they need they can get to and trips that are not going to be kind of done under by traffic. That the things that you need to get are near you. And that you can get to them whether it is by walking or biking or public transit. So you are not auto-dependent. To be able to get the basic things that basic things that you need are the basic trips that you need to make on an everyday basis.
Anna Callahan:I know Jordan, you and I both have kids in the school system and like, you have thoughts about their whole education.
Jordan Berg Powers:So I have a friend who's currently, you know, having a kid and they're talking about, like, how are they going to afford it? People often, you know, in Massachusetts, some people stop working so they can be home because the money they bring home from working is not enough to cover child care, which is a really bonkers thing to say out loud. You know, for my wife and I, we only could afford one day of child care week. Somebody had to be home with Ella when she was a baby because we couldn't afford more than a day. It's like, really, it's a huge deal. That our state basically is treating it like a thing maybe we can fix at some point in the off future. Like it's an inconvenience, like the way they talk about it and the way we treat it. But we could do that tomorrow. I think that's the important thing to know, for all of these things. We could have a health care system where when you get sick, you go to the doctor tomorrow. We could vote that into existence tomorrow. We could vote into existence having childcare that affordable for people. We don't need to be imaginative, we can just look at what other people are doing and do it tomorrow.
Anna Callahan:Sorry to interrupt, but not only could we do it tomorrow, I mean, any state could do it tomorrow. But in Massachusetts, those are popular policies. People want those policies. So the question is, why are we not passing those policies tomorrow? Yep.
Jonathan Cohn:One thing I think even when, again, when thinking of like, what's the basic infrastructure, that a state that values its people and thinking of having just even like economic efficiency, is universal broadband access. It's something I'm always very shocked about has been seeing, let's say, both in rural parts of Massachusetts, as well as in some of the low-income urban areas, broadband being something that people just don't have. And that's something that like that, again, is that type of like vital infrastructure on which everything else has to be built. And so much in this day and age, where we should be treating things like that are like good public transit. Not that good public transit is some type of add on; it is that foundational aspect on which people's ability to do what they need to do, people's ability to get to a job to where they do run errands, or to do or kind of to function in society.
Jordan Berg Powers:Yeah, and I just want to say, and we should talk about education in a second, but just want to say just on transportation, like how bonkers our system, we don't even think of it, and we should think of it in a Massachusetts thing. But I saw a thing the other day that I just want to quote because it's just fantastic about how bonkers our country is about this. In 2019, there were 18,142 flights, with over 2 million passengers flew between Atlanta and Orlando, 400 miles apart. They are not far away. It takes a French train, about three hours to do that flight. And it's almost no carbon would come out; like just the carbon from those trains would be almost nothing. 18,000 flights, there are so many every day. There is a flight that flies out of Worcester, and goes to Newark, or goes to some other place, that there should be a train to. And it would take less time than it would take to drive to the airport, park at the airport, get in the plane, right loaded up, fly, do a bunch of carbon and get to JFK. It's not just that it takes forever to get from Boston to New York on train; you can't go from Boston to Springfield. We can't go from Worcester to JFK. We can't go. You know, there's not any infrastructure for these things. And that's what it means to like, think about when we're driving. It's not just that people are going to and from Boston, and it makes no sense that it's less expensive and more efficient to drive than to take public transportation. Like that's a horrifying reality that we've allowed to happen because we privatized our public institutions and believe that they should make money instead of losing a ton of money, which is what they should do. You can't get from Western to any place except for Boston. Like there's no infrastructure beyond that. We're not imagining public transportation that gets people around efficiently around the city, around the state, let alone to in front Boston, right? And so we just, you know, but we can do this. This is it; like, there are countries that are tiny compared to Massachusetts, in terms of GDP and things that have far less infrastructure that we have, that could still get their people to and from places, through trains, through buses, through things that are more efficient, because they understand that they should lose money. They're not doing things like trying to balance the budget of their public transportation systems, which makes no earthly sense.
Jonathan Cohn:I think that the fundamental thing of viewing things as public goods and your public good is something that you invest in, rather than you expect to charge people to have and to make the money back from it. Because it is something that is a base. Even like public transit, an essential part of any response to climate change is getting people out of out of cars, and in cleaner forms of transportation, that many other countries are far ahead of the far far ahead of us at doing. It's not just for work, but for leisure as well. One thing that I always think of, that I know like Bernie Sanders would often bring up, is about how much the US stands out with our lack of having paid vacation time. As a country, wherein, like in most other advanced industrial countries, there's just assumed that you have a certain number of weeks each year, that in some countries, everybody seems to just take them in August, but that you can take off. And that's something that we don't have here. And it's kind of recognizing that value that exists in leisure. And how that even relates to building those systems of like, if you're building the parks, and the beaches and the museums and the theaters, you need people to have time to enjoy them. And it is better if people can have time to enjoy the people who have time to enjoy them or not just those who have the most money.
Anna Callahan:Yeah. And on that idea of vacation time, there's also maternity leave and paternity leave. Let us not only think of maternity leave, because it really alters your entire culture when fathers are under the gun as well, not under the gun, but like fathers are encouraged and sometimes required to take time off when they have a child.
Jordan Berg Powers:Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was critical for me. And it's something that most, you know, most fathers don't have the luxury of. We've just recently gotten paid family medical leave. And it was difficult and hard; it's still being implemented. But yeah, I mean, we, you know, we're a state that still doesn't value time off, and there's laws that we could put in place to make sure that we're protecting people for those things.
Anna Callahan:Yeah, we're gonna take a quick break before we come back and talk about education, and talk about all of the underlying things that if we could pass the stuff that is popular, if we could just get these policies passed, how else would our society benefit from having these things passed aside for the policies themselves? Don't leave, we'll be right back. Here is a word from our sponsors. Hey, listener, we have some lovely people who have been donating to this podcast for literally years. And we know that some of you out there listening and watching would like to join that group. You might notice that we're adding music again to the beginning and end of the podcast, we're adding little graphics to the beginning and end of the video, we are going to be doing more social media and really getting this into the ears and eyes of more people to get this information out there and to grow the number of people that are working together to transform our beautiful state. So please look for the link below so that you can become one of our sponsors. And as always, thank you so much for listening and watching. Welcome back. This is Incorruptible Mass, and we are about to keep the conversation going about our dream of how we could maybe enter the rest of the world in having policies that were truly people-focused and people-supporting. A little
bit about our podcast:we talk about why state politics is so broken, what we could have here in Massachusetts if we fixed it, and how you can get involved. And we do that because we know that if we as a community don't understand the underlying problems, then we can fix them. And a lot of people don't really realize that fixing Massachusetts is in fact, the fastest way for us to get our national policies passed. So listen to this podcast to hear how you can have the most impact on the policies that matter to you. Who should listen to this podcast? So we know there are at least 10,000 progressives who volunteer to progressive electoral work, if you believe in fighting for social justice, reducing inequality, in health care for all, in affordable housing, in reforming our criminal justice system. And if you want to be part of getting these policies passed, and more, then this is the podcast for you. So continuing our discussion, Jordan, I was going to ask you, if you would mind showing off your beautiful little placard. And talking a little bit about education.
Jordan Berg Powers:We have a little thing that my wife made from a quote that I said on this podcast two years ago: "I think of schools as a place that should be dream factories." And so you know, education doesn't need to be a place where kids are bored. Where kids dread going to school, where kids aren't being engaged on in ways that make sense on issues that make sense and dynamic ways. They don't need to be placed at or weighed down by corporations' ideas on what kids need to learn. They can be places where we allow teachers, students to be thriving in, engaging in their world, and thought in ways that make a lot more sense. Paces like Finland, right? Places that understand that the purpose of education is not to fill children's brains with things that they can Google. But to give kids the critical skills they need to understand what they find on Google, to better give context to what they found in Google, and to replace Google someday with something better, right? And so that's the skills we want to have kids going into education. And we underfund education. Really, we barely fund it. And again, just to link it to these other things. Remember that almost, you know, a one in three, maybe one in two, and I'm sorry, maybe one in$4 that you spend on education is going to help insurance companies. So like first off that, like no other country is doing that. Their teachers have health care through the government. So they're not paying, you know, Blue Cross Blue Shield for that service. And then on top of that, you know, schools should be places that are our place, should be epicenters of learning for people. And maybe also, you know, a good school isn't a place where kids show up and then leaves It's a place where people are paid well, where there's more than one staff that people rotate through. And there's lots of learning happening for parents who might need to learn English, parents who need a place to go, maybe food or help or maybe health care checks, right? These schools can be epicenters of life in communities, and in some places they are. In Massachusetts they're not enough. And in Massachusetts, they're old, they're decrepit, they don't have heat that works reliably. They don't have windows; they don't have air reliably. My daughter's school has no way to cool it in any way. And the education system is burdened by the MCAS. I ran to get this thing. So this is my daughter's kindergarten math book. I want you to think about what a kindergartener should be doing is learning soft skills. They should be learning how to interact with other kids, they should be learning to play with others, they should be learning some basic things, right?
Anna Callahan:All the things I learned in kindergarten, right, right.
Jordan Berg Powers:They should not be filling out workbooks to prepare them for the MCAS. They did two and a half of these. Two and a half of these. And I guarantee you that no professional did this. Right? There's a corporation. I'm sure they had some college students, some master's students maybe who needed some money to throw together. There's stuff in here that makes no sense. As somebody who's been a lifelong math person, there's math in here that's clearly made to fill pages, that doesn't even make sense when you're teaching math, just to sell this, you know, billions and billions of dollars to prepare kids for the MCAS. And five years ago, six years, you know, well, my daughter's older. But like a decade ago, you would have maybe filled out one or two pages, right? The problem is that because the MCAS ratchets up the need to compete with other school districts, every year, they have to complete them. They're getting pressure to complete more of these books. So it's not one of them. Now, it's not two, two and a half of those books my daughter went through. She cried when they finished the second one at five years old, because she was like, "I don't like this. This is terrible. I hate these days." What are we doing?
Jonathan Cohn:Ssomething that I would often see pointed out, particularly when, and often in discussions around those who like, the very wealthy donors who backed charter schools, is that where they send their students, where they tend to send their children tend to be the subset of often like liberally minded, elite private schools, that have small classrooms, that have a lot of like creativity built into the curriculum, and like well-rounded curriculums where they have a number of different electives to take. That is how the how people who have the most resources often view what they want for their own children. But shouldn't other children also be getting that rather than a rigid and punitive system for for children who need the most resources? Give them that same type of kind of holistic education. Yeah.
Anna Callahan:So I want to go ahead and move our conversation a little bit to, you know, if we're dreaming of these policies passing, there's something I think about a lot. If you travel to Denmark, to Finland, to Italy, to a lot of other countries, you know, just I'm just talking about places where friends of mine or I have have spent real time, actually lived there and experienced it, the people who live there believe in their government, the people who live there believe in democracy, and democracy is very healthy. Because their government actually serves that. Because their lives are this dream that we've been describing. So I know there are people listening to this who are worried about democracy. And we try to fix democracy, by doing all these things that are like purely democracy-based, right? We try to register more people to vote. We try to, you know, change laws around voting. We try and do things that are purely about democracy. But the underlying reality is that when your government does not serve you, you lose faith in democracy. And you know, you can just see it. You can see the people who live in these other countries and go to another country and live there, and they really believe in it. So in Massachusetts, we, we live in a state where the vast majority of people want these policies, right, we don't have to fight against the populace. We don't have to fight against the voters, the voters want these things. We could pass them tomorrow. And we could be reinvigorating democracy across here and also across the United States. And I just want to open up a little bit of a discussion about like, what would change if we were able to get things passed here?
Jonathan Cohn:I think that's a great point about like that role of like small d democratic civic culture and social trust, and how much that's about because if people don't think that the government will do anything for them, then it's like, why even bother to vote in the first place? And changing voting laws can be helpful, but if a person doesn't think that the election matters itself, that's not the obstacle. And that when you actually invest, when you invest in the public, when you kind of value those extra kind of strong, robustly funded universal public goods, it's something a part of a general civic ethos that that has positive effects because people then view themselves a part of something.
Jordan Berg Powers:Yeah, I just keep thinking like this is the problem with immediate focus as the goal of it of, as the goal for government is for Democrats and Republicans to get along as opposed to actually pass thinks, that the goal of this is somehow to keep, you know, the goal is to keep the Titanic sort of chugging forward, not like fix it. So it doesn't like miss the iceberg or go and sink, right? Like, it's really weird what they focus on. And so in that place where the goal is not to pass things, or make people's lives better, but the goal is to have this magic like everyone get along. People then think that government isn't working, even when people pass things, right? Then it just builds into this problem that we then can't get people to engage in this process. Because they'll say, like, "Oh, well, they just fight." Or "they just lie," which is true. You know, they don't. I mean, I wish they fought more. Frankly, they barely fight at all. They barely advocate for us or fight for us, and they should fight with each other. They should disagree. I don't understand why we would want people who don't agree with things to agree; it makes no sense at all. And you know, we don't, and so it just hurts our whole overall thing of democracy. And also because it makes it harder to then pass things. If there's no reward, there's no political reward, because the media doesn't cover it at success. Right? The media doesn't say like, "They did these things," "they passed these things," right? Like we need those things. And frankly, we're actually playing into it on the left, like, we need to be more clear, when we get change, even incremental, not to say that it's the goal, like the goal isn't to incremental change, but we should celebrate incremental change, because it helps build towards other change, right? Like it helps build towards the thing. And so it's justa mess, like how we think about our democracy is a mess. And then it it filters out to people engaging, and it becomes fertile ground for fascism.
Anna Callahan:Any final thoughts on the dream?
Jordan Berg Powers:I just want to say that we could do this, like this is stuff that is, you know, farcical or fanciful, right? We have the technology to put solar panels on every house tomorrow; we could do that. We don't need to be beholden to National Grid, and all of these terrible corporations, if we could have a government that cared about us and put solar panels on our house, and our electricity ran through that. And then maybe we paid a little bit to these corporations, and didn't matter if you're a renter or not, just put them up and figure out how to make it work. Like we can do that tomorrow. We can, you know, we can have a transportation system that gets people around efficiently and fast, just like other small European countries. Luxembourg can do it. We're bigger than Luxembourg. Our GDP is much larger than Belgium. Belgium has high-speed rail. They can get people around, they have with GDP is a fancy word, they have less money than we do. And they get their people around more efficiently. That makes no sense to me.
Anna Callahan:With health care for all like a Medicare for All system. I know a ton of people don't think that can be done at the state level, they think it can only be passed nationally. But that's totally not true. We could pass it here in Massachusetts, we could have passed it 30 years ago in Massachusetts. We could pass it any time. The bill is there. It's well written; everything is thought through. Like there's no reason why we cannot do it in Massachusetts. And by doing it in Massachusetts, that's when we're going to get national change is a passing into the state.
Jonathan Cohn:The mindset stuff just made me think of like, the improv, like, framing of "yes, and." That is the response that politicians should give when you're asking them to do big things. And yes, we can do this. And maybe we can do like,"What are the other things that we need to do?" Not, rather than viewing it as a no to respond to something that people are asking them to do. Because we do have the resources to do it.
Jordan Berg Powers:And, you know, I always think about, like, a lot of the politicians get frustrated with me, because I'm impatient and intractable in my beliefs, that these are things we can and should do. And I just think all the time about regular people's lives, the people who don't have access to power in the way that we wish that they did. They're, you know, disconnected from political sources, because they're rightly frustrated with this. You know, it was minus 18. And people were unhappy, just they didn't have, you know, they're trying to figure out where to go in a system where we were hoping that maybe they could get on the internet and see people posting it for them, you know, in a in a place where we don't have easy access to Wi Fi and through these things. But think about think about my friends who are struggling to figure out where to put their kid. They're like arguing over childcare, which should be in a moment of the happiest moments of their lives. They're stressed about how are they going to pay for their care for their kid. I see teachers quitting my best friend, one of my best friends in high school. All she ever wanted when we were in high school, the thing she would say she want to be as a teacher, only thing she wanted to be as a teacher. And she quit over state testing, over MCAS systems, because she was so miserable with a test with the with the workbooks, the testing regimes and the ways in which it's curbed her natural interest, her natural passion for teaching. We should be impatient about this. These are things we can fix tomorrow. And we only don't because people are just like,"Wow, it feels hard." That's right, but it's not hard. It's actually not that hard. Just copy and paste what other people are doing.
Anna Callahan:Absolutely. So we're dreaming big. And I love the idea of a "yes and." That is what this podcast is going to be about. It's about "Yes and,"and getting our politicians to give us "Yes and." Thank you so much, everybody, for listening. Please do donate to the show. And we are also going for that, you know, 1000 subscribers, help us get there. You can forward this to your friends and ask them to forward to your mom and ask her to subscribe for this and your dad. And we're so appreciative of all of you who have been listening for the last, you know, year and a half or more, and we can't wait to have another talk with you. Thanks, everybody!