New Assault on the Poor

(call to action/updates here) This morning, the Senate President, the Senate Chairs of the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities and the Senate Ways and Means Committee announced in a press conference at the State House a “welfare reform” bill that will add more humiliation to being poor, restrict exemptions to the work requirement while spending millions of taxpayer dollars on photo IDs for EBT cards that serves no legitimate public purpose (read ACLU’s testimony against, here). At the same time, the bill takes only limited steps to help poor families learn skills or build assets that will lead to an improved standard of living, the only fair and proven way to lift people out of poverty and reduce taxpayer expenditure. Progressive advocacy groups from across the state will undoubtedly be speaking out against several of the bill’s most onerous provisions as well as against the process by which the bill was brought to the Senate. This [Read More]

Progressive Mass – Senate Roll Call Votes – 2013-2014

SENATE VOTES (for House Votes, click here) Progressive Mass researched and compiled this data, in the chart below, so that progressive voters can make informed assessments of their legislators’ voting records (read more about this work). We welcome you to use and share this material, with attribution! To navigate the data: place your cursor inside the grid, and use right/left/up/down arrows to scroll through the votes. Vote Reference Number key appears below the graph.   TO VIEW SPREADSHEET IN A LARGER WINDOW, click here. Don’t know who your State Senator is? Find out here: progma.us/whoismylegislator. VOTE DESCRIPTIONS AND REFERENCE KEY         See also the 2011-2012 vote records.   Read More on Transparency and Roll Calls    

Progressive Mass – House Roll Call Votes – 2013-2014

HOUSE VOTES (for Senate Votes, click here) Progressive Mass researched and compiled this data, in the chart below, so that progressive voters can make informed assessments of their legislators’ voting records (read more about this work). We welcome you to use and share this material, with attribution! To navigate the data: place your cursor inside the grid, and use right/left/up/down arrows to scroll through the votes. Vote Reference Number key appears below the graph.   TO VIEW SPREADSHEET IN A LARGER WINDOW, click here. Don’t know who your State Representative is? Find out here: progma.us/whoismylegislator. VOTE DESCRIPTIONS AND REFERENCE KEY         See also the 2011-2012 vote records.   Read More on Transparency and Roll Calls    

Assault on the Poor

Over the past two years, we have seen a series of votes in the State Legislature that can only be called an assault on the poor. Over and over again, one house or the other has taken a vote that makes it more difficult for low income people to receive the benefits to which they are entitled. Photo ID requirements for EBT cards. Proof of citizenship for public housing. And it’s not only Republicans calling for more restrictions and more punishments. Conservative Dems have voted repeatedly for these measures (How did your State Senator vote? Refer to items #23,#24 on our 2011-12 Scorecard, #4, #6, #8 on 2013-2014‘s [which we are continuing to update]). Leadership in both the House and the Senate attack these measures under the favorite pretext — “waste, fraud and abuse.” Speaker DeLeo vowed in an Herald interview that he would “clean up two scandal-ravaged agencies in the Patrick Administration, [saying] the abuses in the welfare and [Read More]

Tell Beacon Hill: Raise the Minimum Wage!

Right now, Beacon Hill is considering legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $11 an hour by 2015. Doing so would inject $720 million more a year into the Massachusetts economy and provide greater stability and security to the Commonwealth’s low-wage workers, many of whom are struggling to support their families. Today, our minimum wage stands at $8 an hour — and it hasn’t been increased since 2008 — five full years. A recent report showed that Fair Market Rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Massachusetts requires an annual income of nearly $50,000 — the combined salary of three minimum wage earners. The current minimum wage hurts Massachusetts families. Unfortunately, legislators are too often convinced by the specious argument that raising the minimum wage is “bad for business,” when exactly the opposite is true. Industries and corporations that rely on low-wage labor have armies of well-paid lobbyists on Beacon Hill. Low-wage earners do not. But with your voice, we [Read More]