SoCo Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 29) By Richard Costa | Photography by Chip Ford You Can Fight City Hall, B arbara Anderson may have decades of experience keeping income tax low and helping to sustain Proposition 2½, but the insights she’s gained as a private citizen working with and against the well-oiled bureaucratic machine on Beacon Hill give her a special savvy. She quotes a friend who describes politicians as “Homo politico,” a genus different from Homo sapien. “They have a different way of looking at the world,” says Anderson about the Beacon Hill club. “It’s a very different paradigm they live in. If you sit and look at them, you grasp the concept that they’re different. “Governor King came out of the private sector,” she recalls. “He did things that governors don’t do. He was a nice guy who officer. Both men are a different genus and just what Taxachusetts might need. They might have a chance against the junior senator, despite his purportedly large war chest. “Money isn’t everything,” says Anderson. Mitt Romney’s failed bid for the presidency punctuates that point. “It depends on the exact moment in time when the election takes place and the mood of the populace. The voting population is acting very strange this year; they’re more nervous than they’d normally be about their elections.” In politics, anything can happen. Proposition 2½ could be repealed, just as Carla Howell’s initiative to end income tax could land on the ballot and pass Just Ask Barbara Anderson 2½ on the ballot in 1980. It became law in 1981. Anderson was the right person at the right time and place. “Back then, a lot of women were still not in the workforce,” says Anderson. “Women had more time to collect signatures; men did it on the weekends. Women took care of the house. Both sexes had more free time. People are so busy now and there’s a lot of distraction. It’s a different world for couples.” Her description of the past sounds like a fairytale filled with people who don’t want the state to play substitute daddy. “In my generation, there was more disgust than apathy,” she says. “When Prop 2½ passed, we found you could fight City Hall. Our victory inspired people of “Governor King came out of the private sector,” she recalls. “He did things that governors don’t do. He was a nice guy who happened to be a governor and ran the state like a business.” happened to be a governor and ran the state like a business.” But King’s mindset, or genus, grates against the peculiar species that thrive on the Hill. “If you go into office like him, they carry you out in a white sheet talking to yourself,” Anderson says. “Their whole incentive [on Beacon Hill] is different. They can’t run it like a business. In a business, you’re there to maximize profits. In government, you keep the job going as long as possible because that’s where you’ve got to be to keep your pension.” We discuss the two hopefuls running against Senator Kerry, Jim Ogonowski and Jeff Beatty, both with military backgrounds and Beatty also a former CIA operations (it received 45 plus percent of the vote in 2002 with little support from the press). So, in a state that Anderson describes as saddled with large pension debt, health insurance liabilities, bridge repair and construction problems, the MBTA, crumbling infrastructure, and plenty of sweetheart jobs to go around, how can Proposition 2½ or similar initiatives come to pass? Directly through the grassroots efforts of people like Anderson and the Citizens for Limited Taxation. The Three Governors Anderson’s story begins in the late 1970s, when Citizens for Limited Taxation gathered signatures that put Proposition all political persuasions—environmental groups, animal rights groups. It set the template for petition activism. The initiative petition process is a constitutional amendment that allows us to make our own laws or repeal laws we don’t like. The amendment was passed in 1918 to bypass the [at the time] Yankee Republican power structure. It wasn’t used a lot prior to Prop 2½.” Anderson describes herself in those days as a navy wife. She previously lived in places like New Jersey, where there was no income tax, and Pennsylvania, which taxed its residents much less severely than Massachusetts (in part, she says, because they had a large blue-collar population to resist it). M ay 2 0 0 8 | s o co m a g azi ne . i nfo | 29 http://socomagazine.info
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