states with us so how do you think the debate went masand i have to say about it yes they declared me the winner that's actually not that unusual in fact i think it's been true every time but what's more important i think is that you know we go into each debate with some goals and one of them was to try and get the other candidates to actually stand firm on some things make their points clearer we heard a lot of rhetoric we also had had a press conference the morning before to talk about the need to pull this debate out of the well in the entire language of the governor's race out of the mud pit and actually get back on to the issues the ads that have been out have have moved the whole discussion very negative and i don't think what's really important about that is if they were negative about real things that to do with our positions or our leadership styles that's one thing but when it becomes about just trying to create some division and whatever mudslinging then it doesn't even inform the voters i've been out talking to folks and ask them so you want someone know in a sense while whole adult life has been about engaging other people in the political process and understanding whatever they care deeply enough about to make them sort of move out of their comfort zone and speak or engage with other people to create change and i've done forever the reason i decided to run is because as somebody who speaks to people on the street all the time who door knocks who goes to events and talks to regular people i was really struck by how hopeless and disempowered people seemed to be and it felt like a time when somebody could get in there who's you know both walk the regular walk that other people walk but also has the skills to bring people together to create the changes that we need great ok big issue what is your position on the set of actual all that and why the first thing in the stand is it's not all taxes it's just the income tax that were so i that's an important distinction though because most of us used to pay taxes most of the taxes we were paying were income taxes that's not true anymore so i don't support an income tax rollback i'd like us to deal with the other taxes we've had sixteen years of supposedly no new tax policy from this government and what it's meant is kinds of new taxes property taxes have gone up forty two percent excise taxes have multiplied if you look at c s the costs of even you know sending your young people to school and then not being able to afford to go to afterschool programs or not being able to afford  sports because of the cost of equipment those are all things that are really taxes and they all fall on regular people the only tax that actually taxes folks at the top the same predominates folks at the bottom is income tax and where are we now because all these other taxes have gone up the ones they don't talk about we are actually paying more out of every dollar the folks near the bottom pay twice out of every dollar with the folks at the top two and that means that we're basically losing three billion dollars of income as a state every year from the folks who can afford it the most well the rest of us are you know trying to figure out how to pay the rent and pay taxes and buy gas and put some food on the table  richest country in the world we have spiraling hunger rates we have homeless race that rival the great depression and you know people think of homelessness we don't have even real rapes anymore homelessness because they only count the number people who are in the shelter system so if you're in your car you're not homeless apparently according to the state so we have a huge problem and it's it's like everybody's focused on how many folks are leaving the stakes as they can't afford things these are all measures of how far economy has gotten from what would be reasonable to make sure that people can survive and certainly in the third highest income state in the richest country in the world we don't need to have poverty how do we get there pretty straightforward like i've been talking about right now the minimum wage is so low that you can work full time and not even be out of the poverty level that's outrageous we have housing costs that are so high that people are homeless and even are working full time again that's outrageous what do we do about it same solutions that work for our overall economy we need to put money in at the bottom you put money in through increasing the wage and comparably you know disability insurance for when you're disabled on the job those kinds of things to provide enough income so that you're above the poverty level then all the sudden all sorts of things happen we have enough money in our local community says a small businesses thrive because all of us can afford to go buy and you know why something when we want to have it right now everybody goes home to get a muffin instead of stopping at the local coffee shop because we can't afford it so those things help our overall economy and if you look at it as abolishing poverty is something you're going to do separate from solving the overall economic problem you can't do that but you can move in that direction and there is no excuse for putting kids to bed hungry and to say thank you what do you understand to be the weaknesses of universal health care weaknesses you know i saw health care real universal health care actually is exactly what we need but it's not always around and the plan that was passed in the spring that people call a plan for all and it's not and call universal is also not universal and the real reason that folks are fighting for health care well are two reasons that people are fighting for healthcare reform one was to try and cover everybody but the other was cost containment our health care costs have actually double in the last ten years that's a huge increase and there's no end in sight and the plan that they passed isn't going to do anything to contain costs at all in fact whoever gets stuck implementing it in january is going to be in real trouble because as the costs increase the huge gap in that plan is going to get wider the folks in the middle who aren't covered are going to get top slapped with a fine of thousands of dollars or have to put in like three thousand dollars a year for health coverage well if i could afford three thousand dollars a year for health coverage i'd probably figure out some way to get it but the fact the matter is those of the can afford it can't afford it that's why we don't have it we know we should have it you don't want to be going around life without any health coverage you know get hit by a car you're in trouble so that's not the answer but if we don't do anything to contain costs we're not going to get there and that's what i keep saying to folks i'm in office on january third i'm sitting down that week with the folks who know how to create real universal health care which we can afford right now on the cost of health care dollars we're already spending we spent almost forty percent of our health card care dollars not on health care we spent it on ministration and advertising etc etc we take that same money and put it into health coverage we've got everybody in the state covered and we have the power as a state then to negotiate with drug companies they're not going to say oh well you have to pay this or we're not going to do business with massachusetts suddenly the pressure is the other direction around we get to say to them fine you're not going to give us the rate you're giving canada which is why our folks jump over the border to get drugs then we're not doing business with you and they're not going to lose the entire population of massachusetts as a market so if you're a what the governor what do you plan on changing with the universal to make it the way the universal health care the way that you buying plan but that's exactly what universal health care is it's everybody buying into the state health care plan so that's a first step and we've actually done questionnaires from small businesses asking us whether they could also buy it so everybody's moving in that direction so let's be plan forward about it and do it in a way that's really going to work you know i for a long time when i haven't had health coverage of wanted to buy into mass health the most comprehensive plan you can get for the cheapest in the entire state is individuals were allowed to buy into that let some folks buy into the businesses in the cities and towns buy into the group health care plan my guess is we're pretty close there already so that's absolute the way to do it it's going to save us by far the most money and it contains costs for the foreseeable future so we're not in the spiral that we're in right now the boston business journal asked me about it because they're worried about spiraling health care costs it's the only answer we've got to get there and people know how it's not my area of expertise completely but i'm the sit down with the folks who are the experts and get us there so that none of us are worried about health care coverage and it's not just a personal thing you know where you were fourteen cases of meningitis in framingham highly contagious and it's hope you don't have health coverage who are getting sick and waiting to the last minute to go into emergency rooms incredibly expensive not healthy for them and you know what we all come into contact with each other but not healthy for any of us which i guess they're ok so another one of your goals is to and racial discrimination what do you feel massachusetts it clear i'm talking about the fact that you know it's still true that in terms of housing options job options race is still a factor it's still a factor in terms of police profiling so we need to look at what are real measures of of people's capacity to you know engage and use those instead so we need to look at fair housing practices we need to look at the distribution of for instance toxic sightings whether it's dumps or  toxic industry still happen overwhelming in lower income more communities of color if we look at where housing is being developed where jobs are being developed again there's a bias in terms of income and race composition of communities and those are all things that the state can ever huge impact and another one that's having a huge impact is that education cuts because the lower income communities are the ones that are really you know bare bones at this point in terms of our public education system because they can't afford it and again  huge racial disparity gets created by that so we've got to deal with all of the different structural and economic things and really deal with the ways in which you know i have friends of color who still don't drive in certain neighborhoods at night because they're afraid they're going to get picked up by the cops i have friends who won't shop in certain stores because they're tired of being followed around just because they're a person of color and those are assumptions that i don't think people intentionally have but you know the assumption that a person of color in a store is more likely to steal something then why person probably  you talk about jobs education what is your feeling on what a fact is a good idea or is it interesting you know the backlash against affirmative action is pretty similar to the backlash we're seeing now against immigrants only happens when in hard economic times i think that what we really have to deal with is i support affirmative action but i supported in the context of the idea that we need to have enough jobs for everybody just need to pay enough for everybody and then the issue of you know the fact that some folks are are sort of culturally seen as different and not as valuable we can deal with that as well but it's when people get into affirmative action instead of dealing with the crises that affect all of us that we get into a competition about it  completely unnecessary but let's deal with housing for everybody jobs for everybody and then we can work with affirmative action in that context going back to your health care plan or universal health care will be universal health care plan if you're in vision if you are seen by the government and if so what will help you be insurance companies well that's actually the reason we don't have it the insurance companies know that they're likely to get phased out for most of the things that they're making money on but remember this is an example like the big dig you know we had a public  works project that we needed some help getting done and it cut completely outsourced to large pulp corporations who took you know profit margin right off of our tax dollars and that's essentially what's happening with the insurance companies you know it used to be that a small the huge profit margins and who's paying for it essentially we're paying for it may not be directly through our taxes but in some cases it is directly through our taxes and in many cases we're paying for it through you know not getting wages increase that are job because the business is trying to juggle increasing health care costs so the fact the matter is that we we have to say to the insurance companies you know our health is what the health care system supposed to be about and there will be some delivery issues that need to get get settled that if they want to play with me intermediary roe well that's fine but we can keep saying it's ok for our public dollars get eaten up for centuries private profits when we're not getting the bill of goods we signed up for and that's where we were with the big dig and that's where we're getting to be with the insurance companies that the bill is we need is a healthy population and if they can help us get there in a constructive way without eating up a lot of our dollars to get there and then you to get out of the way  that they've been stalling for a long time it's only scientists who are still arguing that maybe global warming doesn't exist seem to have a very cozy relationship with the bush administration and the rest of the world knows it's happening in fact when we had our environmental b the  british consulate set to high ups from there from the consulate because england has chosen as their top international priority global warming and that's because the gulf stream which is what makes england so temperate a climate is actually moving south something that scientists have predicted as a possible impact of global warming anybody who saw an inconvenient truth going to see the gulf stream moving south but they thought it was going to happen for ten or fifteen years we can already measure the difference so whe very serious situation and what do we do it's pretty straightforward there are two major contributors to global warming in our economy one is energy production and the other transportation energy production actually turns out to be very straightforward we already have the technolog wind solar and what they call hydro power that's water power going over dams it's like that some people want to look at tidal power i don't know a lot about that but between those three sources of renewal energy we could already cover all of our energy production in the entire state so we already have the means and it turns out many of the industries creating the solar panels and things like that are actually home grown industries which if we create a good market for them now we will position ourselves when the international demand rises for the industries in massachusetts that already creating like the energy conserving light bulbs let's be in the forefront of that so that when folks across the world i'm looking for businesses to go to in that market where the so we already have the technology we already have the know how we have a bunch of the industry here in massachusetts in terms of renewable energies and in terms of energy conservation like the light poles the other side of it's transportation that's a little more complicated we don't have all the technology yet to move away from from to the point of producing i don't know exhaust so the reality is that we have to figure that out and phase it in but one of the things that we have to do is go from from so much dependence on private automobiles to public transportation even if it's buses because a private automobile stays on the road about fifteen years you may not own it but it passes through that many hands for fifteen years very hard to change your technology when your windows a fifteen year window  public transportation both gets used more and has a shorter life span and we can switch over technologies quickly if we move to public transportation and i keep offering people the image you know belmont's on the edge of boston so it's actually a fair amount of public transportation here but if you look at communities where there isn't and you for instance i keep using the amhurst north hampton example but here are two communities that are like satellites to each other people drive back and forth between them all the time madge and he had light rail and then each community had essentially a zip car arrangement the equal marriage issue and yet i think my heart is more in the other areas that i think same sex well still i mean it's done necessarily safe to walk down the street holding hands in certain and certain parts of the state and i think that that more fundamental sense of safety you know it we run into it around around battered women too we haven't managed to society to move away from violence against each other simply over the base is a difference fine you have an argument with me about about who you are who i am what we think about that that's fine but that's very different than having to worry about whether you're safe walking down the street or not and it's not that different in the sense from the racial discrimination issue these are attitudinal things that exist and we have to move to a place where we understand the differences are actually a strain in a community you know and they always talk about biodiversity it's really important to have lots of different life forms because otherwise you know and businesses always talk about the first kind of market so you're not dependent on one revenue stream the same thing with human beings  are here and making less than one major minimum wage and suffering to suffer to suffer to support their families and some of them are still waiting to get a job because they don't have their green cards what the government promised them so what are you going to do about the illegal immigrants and maybe you what not some might put so much focus on well i i love your frame on it because actually it's all about jobs that's that's and the economy that's really you said we're going to get off of that but that's where the immigration issue is times around you know i that when you don't have enough jobs when the jobs don't pay enough we end up with people looking for scapegoats and for sure the folks who even the folks who are working without papers are working usually the most dangerous jobs that pay the least and when you don't have your card to you don't have your papers you're not a position to stand up for the same rights that the rest of us take for granted what is that well it doesn't actually help me as a white us citizen worker to have other workers who can basically get abused by an employer and so they hire them instead of me there's a woman that i've worked with for years whose friends are a number of them don't have all their papers but were working somewhere she wanted a job they had other jobs openings at this hotel come on down she's puerto rican so her english or spanish are equally good she goes into fills out the application in spanish talks to the employer some point in the conversation she switches over to english and they figure out the tina's english and also there are no jobs so that are open there to beas or polic when ever we end up with workers who dress like second class appearance last rights we end up with situations where the rest of us get penalized not the problem of the workers it's a problem of the fact that we need at the same rights so that we can stand together whenever we need to  people still now in the states that have a visa for six years and can i get their driver's i don't know how we change that as governor well i think that's an overall again we need to do a shift on many letters level there's a policy issue which gets said by people holding back right and instead of having the proper administration to make those things move quickly and efficiently the way we should people get into using it as a way of being divisive so we need to move to proper administration for those things and then we've got to look at the question of how do we create a process the so that the people who want to be here legally which is ninety nine percent of folks have a way to be here leave really so we've got to look at that we're going to look at it as a state because right now we're being asked to be police for the federal government we have to decide whether or willing to be a police or the federal government my leaning is go the opposite direction let's create some real systems that work in massachusetts for immigration that work with it with immigrants that actually sort out the folks who really want to be here and folks that are just passing through creates some accountability and create a way for people to be completely incorporated into our society because most of the immigrants who come here that's their goal we need to make it possible used to be you know hundred years ago immigration problems were different and we had ellis island which wasn't a great process but at least get a way to be here legally a lot of folks get here they have no way to be here legally is one of the welcome there so we need a means for people to do that and then people can make their choices and then we as a society can make choices but right now what we're doing is creating an underground economy every time we do that it's pensive it's not safe and it's harmful to the fabric of our society shipping shifting gears a little how do you think best you can improve public schools and do you support charter schools  we've got tons of things we've got to do to improve public schools we are way behind where we were twenty or thirty years ago so i'm a strong believer in we need to put the money back into the system to hire enough teachers to have smaller classroom sizes to make sure that all of our schools have materials for our students to make sure that we're have all healthy schools or some schools that you know basically have their health traps and we said do something about that and we've got to do something about basic things like make sure there's in all the schools which there isn't right now so we've got to do the basic building blocks of having a real public education system again right now more than a quarter of kids are are dropping out before they even get their high school diploma twenty seven percent almost twenty percent  american to it's almost fifty percent and for latino kids it's over fifty percent so we have all segments of the population that are not graduating high school with a diploma and that's going to be terrible in the long run so we have to do all of those things charter schools unfortunately become a drain on a lot of the local school budgets and charter schools basically came about because we had cut back on the regular public school so much that the creativity that was going on a sub programs in the existing public schools  separated out as charter schools we put the funding back into our regulars public schools the district schools as they call them we're going to see that ingenuity their creativity that flexibility a lot of the good programming that we're seeing right now only in charter schools is going to drift back into our public schools and my guess is we're going to get get the merging back in and the longer term issues to work a fair funding so that all of the schools have decent funding right now it's so dependent on the economy of the local community that we're not we're having the wide range instead of having a good standard for all of the schools across the state charter schools are going to end up wrapping back into that in the meantime we need to take their budgets out of the local budget so that we're not in negatively impacting the rest of the school population and i think that of new bedford i think saying that you know he was going to remove the mtesa graduation requirement kind of single handedly because so many kids were graduating same thing was going on in boston so i don't what figures feel is looking at what we know is that the implementation cast as a requirement for promotion and graduation directly parallels the dropout rate so they're obviously connected in one way or another so m p s should not be as for promotion graduation if you want to use it as part of a battery of tasks that was what it was originally created campaign ads would be about trying to reach the best spirit of the people of massachusetts we're going to need that is going to tackle the economy who are going to tackle global warming we're going to tackle the schools these are major crises that are we're not waiting for them to happen we're in them in terms of crossing the line i think it's pretty straightforward you know either to legitimate focuses for ads one is policy issues and the other is leadership style anything else is irrelevant and i'm sorry i don't think you know an image of a woman trying to get into a car before she gets raped has anything to do with someone leadership style ok unless they're her a convicted rapist i guess that would certainly be legitimate then but as short of that it's sort of like that's not relevant and i think that we've got to deal with real issues and this sort of creating you know images for people to scare them or to try and call it unconscious strings to get create division remember we're asking to be governors of the entire state not of the part of the population that we like or don't like and so i think that's actually more of a statement of lack of leadership on the part of a person who puts out those ads and of what your goals were coming into this campaign and what you will take out of well i think it's not just a question what i take out of it you know i ran to get as many votes as possible and you know it's still a possibility to get into that office it has to do now mostly with whether people vote for what they like or not because you walk down the street people like what i'm saying and they've got to decide that you know what my vote belongs to me and i get to put it where i want to put it the other side of that is that there are lots of things to win even if we don't get the corner office when i put out strong policies and people say through those policies anybody who walks into the state house in january to say this percentage of the vote stood behind those policies and no one has any doubt with those policies are you will give all of us the power to fight for what we deserve coming into the next administr coming on our show re hill and john sullivan and of course grace ross we really appreciate it we've had every almost everybody from each campaign this year deval patrick couldn't make it out here or anybody from his campaign we're sorry that couldn't happen but we thank everyone who did come out that's