Blue Mass Group

Jim Aloisi’s latest piece on the MBTA in Commonwealth Magazine is really a must-read. Don’t take my too-long-didn’t-read summation here. While Aloisi praises the T staff that seem to be doing the best they can with inadequate resources, he takes Governor Baker to the woodshed. Since 2015, when he took ownership of an agency already in crisis, Baker has exhibited a lack of leadership in providing what it desperately needed: Funding.

If there has been a big disappointment in all of this it has come from the very top. The week after the derailment we had the governor and his transportation secretary assuring everyone who would listen that there’s enough money available for the repair and modernization program the system obviously needs. This “we don’t need more money” mantra continues despite the clear and acknowledged inability of the T to get more work out the door – largely a failure of insufficient resources that only additional revenue will provide.

More to the point, even the $8-9 billion available for repair and modernization over the coming five years is not enough to get the job done at either the pace or the scale necessary. Getting our public transportation system to a condition where it can properly support our economy and overall society means an investment in repair, modernization, and strategic connectivity projects on a schedule and at a scale well beyond current thinking. This isn’t hyperbole. That’s how you get out of a crisis. This transportation crisis is not the sole fault of the current administration; this failure has been decades in the making and bipartisan in nature.  But it is the responsibility of this administration as the current caretakers of the public interest to act decisively in a manner that matches the need.

Like George H.W. Bush’s ill-fated “no new taxes” pledge, Gov. Baker’s insistence that we could get by cheaply was doomed to failure. Whether out of ideological rigidity or genuine wishful thinking, I’m sure it seemed politically safe in 2015 to Baker. In fact, it was an enormous gamble, with both Governor Baker’s political “capital” and a functional transit system pushed to the center of the table.

As John Walsh pointed out on Twitter (and has been doing for years), the legislature is equally if not more culpable for penny-wise/pound-foolish austerity — and blaming leadership is no excuse. State reps haven’t used their leverage to effect tangible change on behalf of their T-riding constituents, instead choosing to tread water and keep their committee positions. That was also a years-long gamble that did not pay off.

Perhaps today is a new day; I see new reps Tami Gouveia, Tommy Vitolo, and Maria Robinson (et al) prominently championing the T; the Speaker claims to want to pass interim funding before the Grand Arrival of the Millionaire’s Tax some years hence. Grand.

But all this is late. Years late. “We don’t need more money” was a bluff that’s now being called. Someone tell the Governor.

We didn’t launch this website just to rep for Democrats as laundry. And especially since we do have an extremely (!!) active primary, it is our duty, our solemn obligation to give airing to the differences between candidates.

This time it’s even a little more sensitive, a little closer. Before she was a “political person”, our now senior Senator Elizabeth Warren had her uncomfortable run-ins with various Democratic politicians, including those who have been or are Presidential candidates. This included, famously, Hillary Clinton. And now — recounted in this excellent NYTimes Magazine profile — Joe Biden.

By 1997, Warren had become a Democrat, but she was battling within the party as well as outside it. In particular, she clashed with Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware. Biden’s tiny state, which allowed credit-card companies to charge any interest rate they chose beginning in 1981, would become home to half the national market. Individuals who worked for one giant lender, MBNA, contributed more than $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Biden strongly supported a bill, a version of which was first introduced in 1998, to make it more expensive to file for bankruptcy and more difficult to leave behind debt. He was unpersuaded by Warren’s charts and graphs showing how the change would increase the financial burden on families. “I am so sick of this self-righteous sheen put on anybody who wants to tighten up bankruptcy,” Biden said during a Senate hearing in 2001.

…

In the years since it became law, the bankruptcy bill has allowed credit-card companies to recover more money from families than they did before. That shift had two effects, Matthew Yglesias argued recently in Vox. As Biden hoped, borrowers over all benefited when the credit-card companies offered slightly lowered interest rates. But as Warren feared, the new law hit people reeling from medical emergencies and other unexpected setbacks. Blocked from filing for bankruptcy, they have remained worse off for years. And a major effort to narrow the path to bankruptcy may have an unintended effect, according to a 2019 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by making it harder for the country to recover from a financial crisis.

I remember the bankruptcy bill battle with grave disappointment  Like NAFTA or the welfare law, it was another gut-punch for those expecting the Democratic Party to be the defenders of the vulnerable. And that law has had lasting, dreadful consequences. Everyone was warned.

Warren has seen her job as protecting those people on the “ragged edge of the middle class”, which has made powerful interests — and their politician/advocates — uncomfortable. Just as Biden earned the suffix-sobriquet “(D-MBNA)”, through his tireless advocacy of that “hometown” industry, she has earned her brand. When you rep for an industry as rapacious as the banks, you cannot expect that there will be no political cost, ever. In 2019, Elizabeth Warren is here to extract that cost from you, on behalf of the rest of us. There shall be no political debt forgiveness; the bill is due.

And that’s why we have primaries. It’s far too early to decide that we have to settle for a politician with such major blotches on his record, especially when we have better, even inspiring, alternatives. We can choose, you know we ain’t no amoeba.