This little gem, posted by Rob Eno today on RMG, explains why working men and women vote Democratic:
It is my belief that the vast majority of public employees are corrupt. The vast majority of the legislature, including members of both parties are corrupt.
http://www.redmassgroup.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=18387
Mind you this is not just one of the usual haters who posts on RMG – Rob’s the power behind RMG and has been a host on Herald radio.
So according to the most visible Republican website in Massachusetts if you work in the public sector you are corrupt. No evidence needed, no proof required.
And damn, they just can’t understand why workers vote Democratic.
Please share widely!
In that, attacking unions in either the public or the private sector won’t get you particularly far politically. Sadly, that is not the case in a lot of other states, though the tide seems to be shifting back in the Midwest.
I also always find it amusing when these guys practice what they preach and move to New Hampshire, and all their complaints about taxes and illegals give way to complaints about lousy public schools, lousy roads, and lousy snow removal. I’ve seen that evolution happen more than once amongst relatives and family friends who moved north to avoid taxachusetts and now are eager to come back south.
are the ones who want to “get away from all the taxes,” so they buy a house an hour and change north in a NH town with higher property taxes BEFORE they figure out that they’ll still have to pay MA income tax on their MA job.
…who still wonder why more workers DON’T vote Democratic.
It’s a problem in the Midwest, and becoming a national one as well.
A handful of whack job posters.
Eno not much better. Doesn’t really get the concept that if you want to get something done, you need a majority or at least a coalition.
Are there Republicans you’d recommend?
The dedicated audience is not interested in reasonable intelligent discussion. I’m not sure of the future of Republicanism, especially in MA. The crazies on RMG said after 2010 and 2012 “Baker & Tisei lost because they are too liberal.” If they win this time then maybe there’s a future. If they lose it’s the end.
It depends on how they respond to that loss. What I find interesting is how, even in MA, Republicans have begun embracing some of the same purification rituals band extremist tendencies that have infected the national party. Smart Republicans, even conservative ones, recognize this is a long term problem. In RI I know a socially liberal Republican tried running last cycle in the Moderate Party which he disbanded and is now running as a Republican. Some kind of similar rebranding could occur here as well. We are obviously getting a kinder and gentler Baker and Tisei, but they are still following outdated strategies. Hard to govern in a smart state when you’re the anti-government party.
They also put all their chips on the Corner Office. Markey isn’t particularly popular, Deval wasn’t when he won in 2010, and there are a host of incumbent reps and senators at the local level who are vulnerable. Running a credible true libertarian style Republican for AG could get a lot of cross over support, Auditor, Treasurer, and Secretary. Galvin isn’t particularly popular, and those other offices could use libertarian style watchdogs that could win over independents and even progressives. The MA GOP just doesn’t seem to do a good job building a bench or recruiting.
Entertainment conservatism has displaced responsible conservatism.
What’s the Matter With Kansas is a book I recommend to anyone wondering why labor votes for Republicans. The book gives some answers and there is some debate, naturally, but it does a good job at explaining it. For those who will not be reading the book, here is what I got out of it:
The Republicans have claimed one side of a few polarizing issues that resonate with poor folks and labor. Gay Rights, Guns, Abortion, you know the drill. They use this to convince the poor that the Republicans are the party of morality, virtue, trust.
Add to this the reality that Clinton got chummy with the banks, hurt labor with NAFTA, and had his peccadilloes. So these poor laborers feel abandoned and they want to believe in something, so the Republicans give them something, a symbol, to believe in.
Since it actually puts faces and names to a lot of the issues Frank discusses, and sort of minimizes the general cynicism and hopeless strident tone that animates a lot of Frank’s written work (though I remain a big fan).
I think the thesis made sense for the 90s and 2004, I think the social issues have moved in our direction, so moving right on ‘culture’ is not a solution, but moving far to the populist left makes a lot of sense.
Basically, voters aren’t stupid. The Democratic party has long decoupled itself from organized labor, taking that voting bloc for granted just as it is increasingly taking the black and latino bloc for granted, and is a loose coalition of Rockefeller Republicans, social activists, and minorities and truly down scale whites. It has basically been this way since McGovern. What is needed to revive the New Deal is a bottom up brand of the party that remakes itself as a workers party, fighting for their rights, their hopes, their aspirations, and their dreams. This means jettisoning some of the elitism of the Upper East Side cultural left-particularly when it comes to visible signs of unironic patriotism and being unafraid of outward religiosity.
But it also means adopting many of the paradigms of the Old Left-taking on big business, busting trusts, putting the farmer and laborer front and center, cracking down on unfair trade and tax deals, and calling out or economic and political enemies at home and abroad and taking them on.
Elizabeth Warren is a master at all of the above. She comes across as an authentic voice of the midwestern Methodist farmer’s daughter (because she is!) while also taking on the business elites in the same way Ted Cruz takes on the culture elites. The big difference is, she is talking straight while Ted is talking out of his ass.
How do you separate farmers and agribusinesses?
What if the farmer’s big issues are things like:
Safety regulations
Environmental regulations
Addiction to subsidies
Desire to produce crops that make things we don’t need (corn for ethanol or corn syrup).
Note that many family farmers are actually millionaires based on the value of their property. I get out to farm country regularly for work and the big complaint is that despite wages of $40-50K they can’t get young people to be farmhands. Another issue is that there is a generation of new farmers waiting to own, and a generation of old farmers refusing to sell. Try solving that issue.
Not sure you’re in the right century on this.
There actually is a decent farm bloc in the Midwest, and it’s referenced in the Frank documentary. Encouraging coops, ending corporate welfare in general but to agribusiness specifically, encouraging organic and sustainable farmers, encouraging urban farmers, adequately funding agricultural schools to ensure that next generation. These are all good policies.
Ethanol is environmentally destructive and economically deficient, but you won’t win friends in Iowa making that argument.
I wonder if more of a resonant issue could be made from the way the GMO seed manufacturers are aggressively pursuing farmers who inadvertently grow crops from patented seeds.
Workers in all other developed nations of the world have universal health care that is not provided by their employer. They are free of that sort of enslavement. There is a saying “if you have your health, you have it all”. Here in the USA, our employers have our much of health in their control. I am only aware of one candidate who has this as a key point of their campaign. Yeah, Don Berwick. As to “jobs and the economy” that all the other candidates have shouted (Republican and Democrat alike), as we have seen since the early 1970’s, all the profits of that growth have gone to the few, not the workers. We need bold change now.
“Vast majority” is certainly an overstatement more suited for the Herald than for meaningful discussion.
At the same time, the stances of leading Democrats like speaker Bob DeLeo and Boston mayor Marty Walsh towards the Probation Department criminal conspiracy alienates those who care about corruption.
I suggest that it would be easier to dismiss Mr. Eno’s bluster with good-natured humor if there was even one leading Democratic candidate who had been loudly and effectively criticizing the behavior of the three convicted Probation Department felons during the many years they operated their illegal racket or even after their criminal conspiracy was exposed.
It is difficult to reconcile an assumption of state officials (like AG, Speaker of the House, and President of the Senate) who passionately oppose public corruption with their silence during Mr. O’Brien’s illegal enterprise, given the enormous scope of that illegal enterprise.
The use of this as a political ad aside (my opinion- fair use of a public video), this is the kind of public criticism that needs to be made of elected officials assuming they deserve it. Say it and let the chips fall where they may. If everyone keeps their mouth shut because it’s someone from the same party, how is anything supposed to change.
http://www.itemlive.com/news/lynn-school-commitee-member-tisei-locked-in-dispute/article_41a140d0-1d0e-11e4-ab54-001a4bcf887a.html
…but if you were to ask me who leading Democrats are in this state Deleo’s name would not be on the tip of my tongue. Yes, he is technically both a leader and a Democrat, but he is far from the first name or face who pops into my head when you say the words “Massachusetts Democrat”. Therese Murray is only slightly higher on that association list. I guess I’m more likely to think of our constitutional officers, congressional delegation, John Walsh, or some of the more active DSC members.
Bob DeLeo is, in my view, far and away the powerful Massachusetts public official. Deval Patrick wanted a tax increase and a significant increase in public transportation funding. Robert DeLeo did not. Mr. DeLeo won, Mr. Patrick (and the rest of us) lost.
I see nothing “technical” about observing that Mr. DeLeo is the “Democrat” who has led the way in gutting public transportation and basing the state’s finances on revenue from casino gambling. He has also “led” the way in making cronyism the central theme of Massachusetts government — as we learned from his participation in the criminal Probation Department conspiracy (whether or not he was indicted).
I doubt that you’ll hear John Walsh’s name or see his picture between now and election day in November. I think you’ll hear of and see Mr. DeLeo a LOT — it will be from the GOP or from PACs, and it will not be positive.
So long as working men and women are sweating blood to keep a roof over their heads and food on their children’s plates, they will loathe people of power — especially government officials — who flagrantly steal from them.
A laborer who is still, at 67, arriving at 7:00a every morning and punching out at 3:30p every afternoon (longer if he can get the overtime) because he can’t afford to retire is going to be really pissed off at public employees who retire at 50 with “full disability” pensions because they “sprain their knee” on a stairway while “filling in” for a supervisor on their final day of work.
You do understand, don’t you, that those public employees get a higher pension for *life* because their pension is paid according to the grade of job they were doing when “injured” or when they retired, right? You do understand, don’t you, that a hugely disproportionate number of Boston city police and firefighters retire this way, right? You do understand that our overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, city government, and AGs office have found NOTHING to deter or slow down this practice, right?
In my view, if Martha Coakley and Maura Healey are the Democratic nominees for Governor and Attorney General, then many of the GOP ads write themselves.
We Democrats ignore worker anger towards flagrant and pervasive government corruption at our extreme peril.
I just don’t see Bob Deleo as the face of the Democratic party, even though he may be the face of the House. I’m fairly certain you will find nothing in the platform, the official statement of party views, that endorses corruption.
It will not be hard to show the embarrassingly long line of Democratic Party officials describing the Probation Department conspiracy as “just politics”. Mr. DeLeo provided ample video footage for GOP attack ads on the day the verdicts were announced, and new Boston mayor Walsh added more with his version of the same thing.
An even modestly-talented campaign strategist for Charlie Baker can make Bob DeLeo the cover-boy for their narrative of the “Democrat Machine” (they like to spell it that way because it irritates us).
Do you require a formal platform endorsement of corruption to believe that the Democratic Party is corrupt? How many unqualified godsons, daughters, nephews, nieces, or
contributorsfriends does it take to persuade you? How many sigma outside the standard distribution do the Boston police and firefighter disability pensions have to be before you believe that maybe they’re gaming the system?I prefer the “duck” rule … if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck then it probably IS a duck.
..who had a clear distance from this corruption, an outsider, someone who could take the same moral high ground as Charlie Baker and pledge to clean things up. Gee, wouldn’t that be nice?
As enthusiastic as I am about Don Berwick, I found the 1-Aug-2013 Globe piece about the close ties between the MA DPU and the Berwick family unnerving.
It seems that Dan Berwick, son of candidate Don (and wife Ann) Berwick, is “vice president and lobbyist” for Borrego Solar Systems, Inc. Ann Berwick is the chair of the state Department of Public Utilities.
The Globe’s piece says (emphasis mine):
Sorry team, but this is too close for me. Are we to believe that Ann Berwick was shocked and surprised to find her son sitting across the table from her at a “negotiation session” between the state of MA and the solar industry?
One of those two (either Ann or Dan) should NEVER have been at the table. Candidate Don Berwick should have done all in his power to avoid this situation.
This is precisely the kind of creepy-close relationship that makes voters furious about Massachusetts government.
A position held by one family member should not automatically disqualify other family members. There should be checks and balances for particular circumstances and I think ad hoc recusal is sufficient recourse in this case.
From the piece I linked to (emphasis mine):
I’m sorry, but two meetings where the chair of the DPU is the MOTHER of a principal in a “negotation” is two meetings too many. It should not have taken “inquiries” from the Boston Globe to cause the recusal.
Ann Berwick should have recused herself the moment she knew that her son was going to appear.
I was making a more general response to what sounded like a more general comment.
An aide resigning from Bump’s office suggested that some political activities were being run out of the office. Not good.
There was also a lot of innuendo in the article that there was a connection between an overly mild audit by Bump of the DCF and her seeking the SIEU’s endorsement.
Link.
It also feels a little bit like a messy (political) divorce, but one never knows.
The actual charges (excluding the SIEU bit- not enough details) seem pretty tame, but the auditor absolutely must be beyond reproach. If it’s true it’s bad.