Category: The Codcast

A debate between the campaigns supporting and opposing ballot Question 3 and the effort to bring all-party primaries to Massachusetts

Three red states have launched an attack against laws in Massachusetts and two other states that protect providers of abortions.

In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that white households in Boston had a median wealth of $247,500, while Black households had a median wealth of close to $0. That was more than ten years ago. Now, the Boston Fed has released a new report examining the wealth gap across Massachusetts. Have things improved? What trends do we see in the new report? And how has the ongoing affordability crisis affected wealth disparities?

Organized labor has been out in force on ballot measures — recently literally trying to secure bargaining power through the ballot — and that means manpower, mobilization, and money funneling toward a set of policy measures that the Legislature has waved away. This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith looks at unions and direct democracy with two guests. Nick Juravich, associate professor of history and labor studies and associate director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston, breaks down where we sit in the history of unions and ballot efforts. Then Chrissy Lynch, head of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, explains how the unions themselves pick their targets.

Gov. Maura Healey is all-in on artificial intelligence, but she’s also trying to get a handle on soaring energy costs and a growing backlash to the very structures supporting the AI boom — data centers. This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporters Jennifer Smith and Jordan Wolman discuss the governor’s new executive order trying to make data centers greener and more responsive to community feedback, and the paradox of pushing for expanded AI usage as communities revolt against its infrastructure.

This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporter Hallie Claflin talks with Alecia McGregor, assistant professor of health policy and politics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Katie Murphy, president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association. They dig into the consequences of recent maternity unit closures in Springfield and Methuen, discuss where Massachusetts stands in terms of maternal health care access, and detail what power the state has, if any, to regulate health service closures and consolidations.

We all need care as we age. Adam Scott leads New England’s largest nonprofit provider of senior care and living communities. He says demand is rising as the Commonwealth’s average age continues to increase. This week on Health or Consequences, John McDonough of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Paul Hattis of the Lown Institute talk with Scott about how the broader health care crisis is impacting long-term care.

Massachusetts voters will decide in November whether to make big changes to the state’s primary elections. But it’s not a first-in-the-nation experiment: several other states, including California, already have similar systems in which all candidates appear on the same primary ballot and the top two advance to the general election, even if they’re from the same party. This week on The Codcast, Chris Lisinski interviews Andrew Sinclair, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California about how the Golden State’s primary framework came to be, what the effects have been, and what lessons Massachusetts might take.

For the towns around the Quabbin Reservoir, managing worsening drought seasons comes with a bitter irony: they surround the essential clean water source for distant Greater Boston, and that means harsher water restrictions than the populous downstream cities. This week on The Codcast, Jennifer Smith talks with fellow CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jordan Wolman about his coverage of Quabbin watershed communities and their push for more state support.

When it comes to rebuking federal immigration actions, states’ options are limited. This week on The Codcast, Jennifer Smith and Iván Espinoza-Madrigal of Lawyers for Civil Rights discussed the PROTECT Act’s new limits on ICE enforcement, the fallout from the Temporary Protected Status termination for Haiti, and the federal lawsuit challenging the state’s in-state tuition law for immigrant students — and what, if anything, Massachusetts can actually do about any of it.