Board member Mohammed Missouri was featured in the Boston Globe's "The Argument" section, making the YES case for the question "Should Massachusetts tax unearned income at a higher rate than earned income?" Read it on the Globe website or below.

Two PM board members recently had letters to the editor published in the Boston Globe.

Jonathan Cohn, "Mass. should move on Safe Communities Act before session ends," 12/28/20:

The Globe editorial board is spot-on with its call for ending Bristol County’s 287(g) contract with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in light of Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s latest abuses of power (“Time’s up, Sheriff Hodgson,” Dec. 21). Massachusetts is the only state in New England where such contracts exist. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait until the new presidential administration to end them.

A bill called the Safe Communities Act, filed in the Legislature by Representatives Ruth Balser and Liz Miranda and Senator Jamie Eldridge, would end such contracts with ICE and take additional steps to make sure that the rights of our immigrant communities are respected. It was reported out of committee in July, and it deserves a vote before the session runs out.

If we don’t take action soon, Massachusetts will have gone the four years of the Trump administration without passing any new legislation to strengthen the rights of immigrants in our Commonwealth, a sorry reflection of the politics in our so-called deep blue state.

Issues Committee Chair Jonathan Cohn recently penned an op-ed in CommonWealth about the ascension of Majority Leader Ron Mariano as Speaker of the House. Entitled "Don't Expect Change for the Better under Mariano, it begins:

All signs point to House Majority Leader Ron Mariano being elected the next speaker of the Massachusetts House.

What does a Mariano speakership mean for a progressive policy agenda in Massachusetts? As Reps. Denise Provost and Jonathan Hecht remind us, he shares the same top-down leadership style as Speaker Bob DeLeo, with an even more conservative ideology.

If we want to get a sense of what a Mariano speakership will be like, it’s useful to look at the process and output of the working groups and task forces he has led. And that doesn’t inspire confidence.

You can read the full piece here.

If you’re angry that Trump spewed lie after blatant lie during the election and yet somehow won, you’re not alone. As a candidate and now as President, Trump has consciously eroded trust in traditional news sources by wildly calling any unfavorable coverage “fake news”. Meanwhile actual fake news has some people convinced that Clinton was responsible for the murders of dozens of people, and that a pedophile ring was being run out of a pizza restaurant (also connected to the Clinton campaign, of course). Yes, really. During this election we’ve witnessed the alarming movement of conspiracy theories from the fringe to the mainstream.

Short of grabbing our Trump-befuddled friends and family members by the shoulders and shaking some sense into them, what can we do to fight this disinformation campaign? What can we do to prevent ourselves from being taken in by half-truths and outright lies, and what can the responsible journalists do to stop their propagation?

To get to some answers, Progressive Watertown hosted the public forum "What is the Role of the Media in our Democracy?” last Sunday, April 2nd.