YouSaid · the spoken record

John Bouman

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2018-01-11

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2018-01-11

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1. “Poor people? Yes. And you take on these big things and things big and small, but the bigger ones in particular that seemed such a heavy lift, you take those on and after we have this saying that there's no defeats, there's multi-year initiatives. And we've won a bunch of those. And you can see how it's improved things for people. And for some subset of people in poverty, that did the trick. It got them over the hump. And they were able to figure the rest of it out for themselves. And you can't succeed in this if you don't believe it can win because you have to sell it that way to get people to work on it and to get politicians to believe in it and ultimately to do things that their careers depend on.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “You have a chance to get nutrition. You have a better reach of, you know, sort of internet and basic utilities, heat and electricity. I mean, there was a time when, you know, when all this stuff started in the 30s that a lot of the poor people didn't even have electricity or indoor plumbing.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “You know, you'll hand off a set of problems. If you're in this to end poverty, you're going to burn out and you don't understand it well. There's always going to be poor people because there's always going to be a spectrum and there's always going to be people on the bottom. Someone will be there because of circumstances beyond their control. Some will be there because they're being kept down on purpose by other parts of the society. So there's going to be work to do to have justice for them and to improve their quality of life and upward mobility. That changes. It morphs. You can look back though and say it's much better now than it was, right? Everybody's got health insurance, health coverage if you're in a state that at least that's adopted the Affordable Care Act that didn't have a governor running for president or something.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Exactly. They pay minimum wage and the minimum wage is low. They have their part-time. They're sporadic. They compete with family obligations, childcare, getting a kid home safe from school, et cetera. And so those are the problems we have now. We're still working on them. And when I retire someday, another 50 years from now.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “That's a huge problem. And it's a big feature of poverty right now is that more and more people in poverty actually work because those are the jobs economy's producing at the lower end. So they're worried about the jobs done.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “The war on poverty has been actually immensely successful. It was initially sort of shockingly successful in the late 50s, poverty was around 22% by the early 70s. It was 11. It's now settled in around 14 or 15. Without the war on poverty, including the great society programs, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, earned income credit, those things. Without those, the poverty rate would be twice as high, right? So it's not right and it's not fair to say that it failed. It's succeeding right now. It hasn't completely succeeded, but it's helping.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Was not congenial to cases like this decided under the US Constitution, so it was brought into Mexico, which was yet a better chance.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “You might lose around the edges, but generally speaking, if you're supposed to win, you win or you really have a good chance to win. And then around the country, there are very good state court systems where you can opt to take a case to a state court. So I was co-consul in a case in New Mexico, for example, where we ended up with a ruling that found unconstitutional under the state constitution the exclusion of farm and ranch workers from the workers' comp system. That was the only reason for that exclusion is because you could. They were helpless. They were politically helpless and the ranchers and farmers were powerful. And there was a calculation that the federal circuit court, the 10th circuit that sits in Denver,”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Which says something about the case Yeah, and it's stilln't, you get high profile cases in the appeals courts and the Supreme Court where it appears pretty obvious that there's politics at play or at least a political, a certain political worldview. But in the lower courts and in the sort of warp and woof of trial courts and the fact-finding process and the logic, the internal logic of litigation, good lawyers.”

   2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “That's a problem. But we have found, I think, that, first of all, it isn't one of the reasons that elections matter. People need to register and vote. But it takes a long time to turn a judiciary around. And it's also true that even with politically conservative judges, many times when you're supposed to win, you win. Meaning if the laws”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And if the federal government and the Justice Department is going to get out of the business of enforcing the civil rights laws, it's up to private enforcement, and that's going to become a bigger part of our work.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “It is becoming more of our work. We concentrate on the poverty aspects of it. Which are considerable. And the other, you know, another growing part of the work is where we're working in multi-state alliances is around this matter of the criminal justice system, the new Jim Crow issues criminal records, collateral consequences of convictions where you can't get a job or you can't get housing. There was a great set of guidances and regulatory moves by HUD in the last Obama years to make it clear that if you overly use criminal records to deny housing to people, that can and will be found to be a violation of the Fair Housing Act because of the disparate racial impact. There's signals now that the Trump HUD department might roll that back. If that's what the law says, that law is enforceable in court.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Some legal, some not, some citizens, some legal permanent residents, some undocumented. They're all scared. They're all being turned away from benefits bureaucracies around the country because of sort of this concept. There's a sense of permission in the country to discriminate against immigrants in general.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Undocumented people are actually ineligible for most forms of assistance. But because of that, there's a lot of families that are mixed.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “That's we're in the midst of a strategy to build multi state networks of groups that do in their state what we do in Illinois. So we have one we call the legal impact network that now has 33 states, 35 groups from 33 states. And we're exploring how to, it's already really a vibrant kind of peer network where folks are copying each other and getting solutions from each other. And we're exploring how to take concerted action. For example, deployed this group in support of the effort to defeat the repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act. We're looking at access of immigrants to public benefits. Part of the Trump administration's attack on immigration has been discrimination against immigrants in access to basic benefits”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “When that impasse began, there's a constitutional provision in Illinois that says if you don't have a budget, you can't spend money. And so we went to court in this same case and combined it with another case to make it statewide to ensure ongoing payment of Medicaid during the budget impasse. We ended up with a mandatory order that the state had to spend almost $600 million a month in Medicaid and an additional $3 billion in the coming fiscal year to make up arreges in an incredibly explicit order that's very hard to get from a federal court. And that's what kept the hospitals open. We were told that we were within a week of shutting down Roseland Hospital and within a week or two of shutting down Mount Sinai Hospital if we hadn't gotten these. Court orders.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Periodically, when. So, two years ago, when the state went into its budget impasse, Illinois had a showdown between its Republican governor and Democratic legislature around the budget. So we went two years without a budget.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Yeah. And while it was dormant throughout the 90s because Illinois was considering a massive managed care reform, which had then dropped at the end of the 90s. And then so we reinvigorated the suit and we went to trial in 2004 at a month-long trial. And one we settled the case after winning it, settled the relief, and avoided an appeal.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “It was lack of access. In fact, we had powerful testimony from foster parents who had natural children who had private insurance and foster children who had Medicaid insurance. And the same doctors would not give appointments to the Medicaid kids who gave appointments to the Privately insured kids. And that's because the reimbursement rates were too low, the hassle was too high. It was just a headache for doctors to participate in Medicaid. And so it was built around access. It wasn't built around rates.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Yeah, exactly. So children who are covered by Medicaid are supposed to get this array of services. And we were finding out that, and this was in the 90s already, that children covered by Medicaid in Illinois were not getting it. And so we went to court to ensure that children covered by Medicaid would get the services they were required to get. The state denied it. They said, We have a perfectly good system. We can't force people to use it. And we did computer analysis through an expert that showed that of the children in Cook County covered by Medicaid who were supposed to get six doctor visits in the first year of life after leaving the hospital. Just under half of them got none. And 75% of them got one or none. And so similar types of proof, overwhelming proof. We had foster parents.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Well child care, so care for the child when he's not sick. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics catalog of what should be done with a child to be healthy. And then if a condition is found, you detect it early and you treat it right away and you provide whatever treatment is necessary. So that's called the tongue twister is early in periodic screening diagnosis and treatment. EPSDT. So this”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, and that's really an important thing to think about right now because when you have things like civil rights laws or when you have things like eligibility for benefit programs, certainly in the case of civil rights laws, but in the benefit programs too, they're not necessarily self-executing, right? They have to be enforced, especially when people in power sort of wander in the wrong direction. So when a state takes billions and billions of dollars in federal money to run a Medicaid program, with it comes certain strings, not a whole lot. There's a lot of flexibility, but certain strings are attached. And so for children who get Medicaid, one of the strings that is attached is you have to provide quality.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “I think it's a, yeah, it's a legitimate concern, and you do have to find a balance because you want You want people to have opportunities to work their way up. You want some pressure on people to do that. Most of the pressure is from people themselves, though, because it's just a miserable lifestyle, right? It's just not, it's never been anything but hard scrabble even with these benefits. So if you have a chance to work your way up, most people are welcome that most people are much prefer it working, even if it's sort of the same amount of money. They like the view of themselves as workers. So there is sort of moral hazard, it's called sometimes, but you have to find a balance. You can't go entirely one way or the other. And it's really, really dangerous to generalize because it's such an individualized thing.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Right, and also most of them work. Or they're seniors on fixed incomes. The other aspect of poverty is that there's a sizable population of people who are poor, who are not able to work their way off of up because they're old, because they're disabled, because their children, because they're caretakers of family members who are in those conditions. And so part of the fight against poverty is about quality of life for people who are poor in addition to quality of opportunity for people who are able to work their way up.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “That's the, I think you read Welfare Queen there. That's food stamp nation means people who don't deserve our respect. It's those other folks again.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “Yeah, I think the fight, and it'll be a fight not just on Medicaid, but on other forms of assistance. I look for an attack on disability benefits, including disability benefits for children, tightening of the screws on the SNAP program used to be called food stamps. There's talk of making that a block grant, which is a complete mistake for states because it's currently entirely federally funded. Why would you agree to a block grant on federal funds, millions of dollars come into the state of Illinois, for example, to meet nutrition needs? And if that stops or is capped, the needs don't go away, but the duty will follow the states and localities to either fund it or to deal with the consequences.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “So you'll be spending less on education, on higher education, on roads and bridges. The other parts of the state. So the Medicaid block rent is not only a disaster for the health care system, it's a disaster for the entire state budget because of the way it puts a vice to unmet medical needs.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah. And so it's not, you're talking about The block grant does is it caps the federal share of spending. Medicaid the way it works now is a very good blend of state and federal funding. And if the system costs increase, the federal share comes along with it. So if you have, for example, a hurricane, a great recession, an epidemic, or a new therapy, all reasons why you might want to spend more in healthcare or why more people are eligible for healthcare, under a block grant, the federal share is capped. All of the burden of expansion is on the states. If the states don't undertake that expansion, then you've got untreated medical situations. If they do take it, they either have to raise taxes to meet the new costs that were previously covered by the feds, or you cannibalize”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Well, so what happened in welfare reform was that The block grant was enough money because the states just cut people off of assistance. You can't just cut people off of Medicaid, right? Because they're still going to get sick. They're still going to go to the hospital. They're still going to get what will then be uncompensated care in hospitals and emergency rooms and clinics. And that drives the cost up for everyone, which is one of the reasons.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Well, so, for example, under AFDC, if you got a job, you would almost immediately get cut off of assistance because you had your income was higher than the assistance. new regime called temporary assistance for needy families, we were able to persuade the state to adopt a rule that would only gradually reduce a grant and keep you and phase you out of assistance as your income rose towards the poverty level. These are all people below the poverty level, by the way. And so it was more nurturing of work and more used the grant to subsidize the wage, which was usually low in a way that sort of weaned people towards full Employment without assistance.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Yeah, and to understand so. And what happened in welfare reform was that it was turned into a block grant, which meant that the state would get a set sum of money to create whatever program it wanted for poor children and their adult caretakers. So actually states had the freedom to do a lot of things better than they did before, and Illinois did, that was some of the stuff we worked with. What”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “The block threat for Medicaid is an immense mistake, a huge bill of goods. And this is the ominous sound of President Trump saying next we're going to do welfare reform. Because they like to harken back to that time in'96 when welfare was turned into a block grant. It's completely different for Medicaid. So that was a big Republicans. Well, explain that.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Yeah. And so the cynical thing that's happening is that the subsidies are being pulled out of that for the out-of-pocket costs of people. And that's going to keep healthier people out of, you know, they're just going to go uninsured, which will raise the average cost of the insured people because only the six people have insurance and the cost will spiral. So that's what's hanging fire right now in the Affordable Care Act.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “There's major threats to Medicaid in the, actually in the passage of the tax bill, because by raising the deficit, it's going to add a powerful argument to drive spending cuts. And right in the crosshairs there will be Medicaid and food stamps and earn income credit and things like that. So most of the impact has been on the middle class parts of the Affordable Care Act, the private insurance parts of it, and the area where it would have been good to have a public option to keep Keep costies”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “And maybe you could get people to succeed in the workforce. You can keep them out of the criminal justice system. You can get them help. You can reduce the stress in families because you have access to health care. It was huge”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “I never forget that Nixon planned to have a guaranteed minimum income was defeated from the left because it wasn't enough But the other thing about the Affordable Care debate that was fascinating was that it was cloaked in the interests of the middle class by President Obama and the others who were for it. Yet from my point of view, and I think this wasn't law, this wasn't a secret, but it wasn't the way it was advocated. It was the most important anti-poverty thing since the war on poverty in 50 years, by far. You know, 16 million people got eligible for Medicaid who weren't Medicaid never covered all poor people. This filled that gap in finally, right? And now you've got Sheriff Dart with his jail population who are eligible for mental health services. Or, you know, they were all uninsured.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I think you get within the sort of four corners or to change the math analogy, a bubble of an argument where you sort of lose touch. It's probably characteristic of capital cities everywhere, certainly Washington, but you lose touch with the actual impact of What's going to happen? And the analysis of whether a compromise is worth doing or not is corrupted sort of by the egos and emotions of a debate, of a legislative process.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “It was hard to a Democrat to get things done, although by working with the dominant Democrats in the House And finding a way to compromise with the Republicans in the Senate, you could get things done. So I think it was very pragmatic. It was a sort of type of idealism where it's not enough to take a stand and be known for it, but you want to also move the ball. Yeah, well, this is a...”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “He did. And he was very conscious and interested in that, whether the spotlight was on it or not, because it was the path to get things done. His first years in the Senate, the Democrats were in the minority, and the Senate was dominated by a pretty hard-right ex-Marine Paid Phillip and unabashed kind of bigot, I'll say that he was proud of it. I don't think he'd mind or sue me for it.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “He was a freshman legislature. Well, he was very much like the house counterpart also from around here, Barbara Flint Curry. Both of them incredibly smart, incredibly quick studies, and with a set of sort of underlying values and priorities that was really very compatible with what we were trying to do on behalf of people in poverty. And the other thing that Obama had was a good sense for how to navigate the politics of his caucus, right? So he got along very well with the leader, Emil Jones. He got along very well with the chair of the important committee that would handle this, Margaret Smith, who was in the twilight of her career. But he didn't embarrass her and he didn't, but he helped her, right? And she sort of gave him the leadership of it, the de facto leadership of it.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Like the recent experience with the Affordable Care Act, it was the same thing with the welfare reform law. Actually, it was one of the restrictions or the forbidden things for legal aid lawyers to do was to work on welfare reform. It's another reason why we left federally funded legal aid in Chicago and started the Shriver Center. But yes, that was a huge project in 1996 and 97. And immediately one of the leaders there was Obama”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “And sort of bitterness, I see it as kind of a rearguard action. There's parts of the country where it doesn't work as well. I think one of the things that Clinton was probably good at, I was not a supporter of his on some of his stuff, but was his attempt at least to talk to that part of the population maybe because of where he came from in Arkansas and who he was, his own heritage. Right.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Yeah, this was a really interesting part of my early career in uptown. We talked about earlier in the late 70s, there was a large population of rural whites called hillbillies at the time. But in uptown, that was a big part of the population there. And I had many, many clients. The grievances were the same, the behaviors were the same. And so what drives the wedge there, I think, is, again, that it's a productive politics, right? And you can cater to the self-worth notions of people by making them feel like they're at least better than some other people, right? Or that even as someone's fortunes are going down the tubes, you can get their support by making them think he is a Marlborough man or a rugged individualist. And so I trace that to an unfortunately effective politics of division and escape.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “But it was a handy political strategy, I think, to serve an ideology of smaller government lower taxes, pro-business entrenched, maybe rearguard action of the white community that isn't comfortable with more diversity in the country. began to grow and we're heading towards a majority minority country. And so, you know, it becomes a useful politics, I think, to demonize the poor and to blame the poor.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “So it was a caricature, although like anything, you can find examples of it, right? So Reagan had his welfare queen. She was a real person. Actually from around here or did a lot of her queening around here. But that was a hot caricature that didn't describe the whole population. And it was true that some of the programs needed to be improved. Nobody was in love with AFDC, right? Which was the old welfare program. It really wasn't targeted towards helping people get ahead through work. In fact, it punished work. So it's always much, much more complicated and much, much more individualized than you get in political discourse.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Making opportunity And that there are important kinds of spending that we need to do, right? And it isn't about whether government is big or small. It's about whether it's effective and driven in the right direction.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Of fairness, so that the opportunities are real, so that someone who works hard can infect make their way up without being blocked by artificial things like discrimination or like these schemes, these criminal justice schemes that we were talking about a moment ago. And that's the big conversation right now in American life that's hanging fire, right? The role, why do we pay taxes? Why does it matter to people who aren't poor that we take care of people who are? You know, those themes from Obama's famous convention speech when he was a new senator, you know, the reason that speech was so popular in addition to its artful composition and delivery is because I think people are starved for it. I mean, that's a message that can be popular if it's... Delivered and sustained and has the right kind of leadership behind it.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Of sort of the Yeah, races is a big factor and it's more than just the fines and fees thing. It came to mind. It's also isolation, economic isolation. So you can be in a thriving city like Chicago, but in a part of town where there's no economic activity. And the deterioration of public education is another feature. But I think the theme that runs over the top of all that, and that gets us back to the war on poverty notion, is that there is a vital role for government. And it's not just about spending. Actually, that State of the Union message announced the most austere budget since 1951. So it wasn't a spending spree, the war on poverty. It was about priorities. But the role for government is to support important programs to enable success, but it's also about the government's role as a referee, an insurer, a guarantee.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “He has reduced the jail population, actually. He's one of the better ones. She's a brighter light in that firmament around the country.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “They can't pay it, they're held in jail, then there's a fee for being held in jail for the linens and the meal you get, then you're fined for the expenses of the court process that convicted you. People are in jail for a minor offense for weeks, accumulating thousands of dollars worth of debt. Now you've got a debt, now you've lost your job, now you've got a criminal record so you can't get another job. And these are almost all black people. And this is why Ferguson was a powder keg. It was the way that the people of color in that community were being held down in order for the police and the courts to fund themselves, which traces back to the tax cut ideology, right? If you defund government services, but the public still expects services to continue, you got to pay for it somehow. This is how they were paying for it.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source