My congressman could win an Emmy for his performance in Richie Neal – Gone Washington
If Hollywood is looking for a character to cast as a smooth-talking slick pol, they could do no better than my congressman, Rep. Richard Neal (D-MassMutual).
Neal’s immense talents for spinning an audience were on full display last night at Berkshire Community College, where the gentleman from Springfield held his first town hall meeting (not limited to discussion of ObamaCare) with constituents in eight years. Neal only agreed to the event after suffering through weeks of bad press in June, triggered by a set of clever ads, both print and digital that took him to task for being a chronic no-show in the rural swaths of his First Congressional District.
The ad campaign hit Neal like the Viet Cong’s withering shelling in the Tet Offensive and resulted in harshly critical editorials in The Berkshire Eagle, Daily Hampshire Gazette and front-page stories in the Gazette and Valley Advocate. In addition to that negative coverage, there was a stream of letters to the editor complaining that Neal gives no face time to much of his constituency.
Neal is one of the most thin-skinned politicians that the Bay State has ever produced and he does not like being criticized or challenged. Which is why after co-hosting a town hall meeting in the Tea Party Summer of 2009 where passions over the pending Affordable Care Act ran high, Neal decided he did not need to make himself accessible to the great unwashed in these forums any more.
Neal took the stage at BCC and was introduced by Pittsfield Mayor Linda Tyer. This was interesting because in 2015, when Tyer ran against incumbent Mayor Dan Bianchi, Neal endorsed Bianchi, without ever meeting or speaking with his challenger, and Tyer was livid.
As a former history teacher, Neal knows how to lecture and the crowd before him on September 15 skewed to the left. In fact, as Neal threw out his progressive bromides on climate change “follow the science”, Korea (stay on the “diplomatic path”) and that tax reform should not benefit the rich, if you closed your eyes you would have almost thought it was Bernie Sanders speaking (without the Brooklyn accent of course).
Neal opened by holding up the Boston Globe and commenting on their story about how the Berkshires and many rural communities in the Franklin and Hampshire county portion of MA-1 are losing jobs and population while wages flat-line and more folks go into poverty.
What Neal neglected to say is that many of the key votes he has cast during his almost 30 years in Congress have helped lay the groundwork for the declining economic fortunes in much of his district. On multiple occasions, Neal supported Most Favored Nation trade status for China during the Clinton presidency. According to records from the Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance database, more than 2,040 jobs were lost to shifts in production or imports from China in Neal’s district between 1994-2017. The numbers are much higher for jobs lost to Mexico and other nations.
Or how about the Korea FTA that Neal pushed for in a 2011 op-ed that he co-authored where he claimed that passage of the Korea Free Trade Agreement would lead to new export opportunities and thousands of American jobs that would contribute to our economic recovery. In October 2011, Neal voted for the Korea FTA. But in the first four years of the deal, the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea increased 99% or $5.4 billion (resulting in more than 95,000 lost U.S. jobs) and American exports to Korea of agricultural goods have fallen 19% or $1.4 billion. The U.S. trade deficit with Korea in the top 10 products that Massachusetts exports to Korea including everything from machinery to transportation equipment increased 45 percent in the FTA’s first three years. In short, more Kia’s and Hyundai’s are coming in than American products going out. Nobody asked Neal how he can defend supporting trade deals like this that contribute to middle-class wage stagnation and today’s unprecedented income inequality.
And Neal voted against an amendment by then-Rep. Sanders (I-VT) to the Export-Import Bank Reauthorization Act of 2002 to prohibit American companies from receiving future Export-Import Bank assistance from us taxpayers if they lay off a greater percentage of workers in the U.S. than they lay off in foreign countries. The amendment was offered to a bill reauthorizing the Ex-Im bank, which uses taxpayer subsidies to help U.S. firms compete overseas against government-subsidized foreign firms. At the time of the vote, the bank was providing more than $13 billion in loans, loan guarantees and insurance to companies such as General Electric and Enron.
Neal’s first question at BCC showed how little he knows about stuff after 28 years in Washington. Neal was asked by Joyce Hackett, chair of the New Marlborough Democratic Town Committee about what he could do to speed the deployment of high-speed Internet access to the unserved and underserved rural towns in his district. After mumbling something about how he supports Gov. Baker’s efforts by the Massachusetts Broadband Institute to complete the ‘last mile’ connections to homes and businesses, Neal noted how the BigTelecomms won’t provide rural broadband because it is not in their business model. And Neal added “we don’t have a provider at the federal level.” Wait. What? Somebody should tell Richie about the Rural Utilities Service which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development agency. RUS began with FDR’s signing of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 and now provides loans and grants for rural broadband deployment. These programs are authorized by the omnibus Farm Bill and Richie voted against the most recent one, twice on July 11, 2013 and then again on January 29, 2014. Thanks pal. Much of the funding for the ‘middle mile’ backbone was provided by RUS funds in the Obama stimulus package in 2009.
Neal got a bit testy with a Springfield man who wanted to know if he would support a financial transactions tax on Wall Street and Richie said no, he would not! This should come as no surprise because Neal has been adept at doing Wall Street’s bidding like voting to repeal Glass-Steagall as he did twice in 1998 and finally in 1999 and for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This deregulation bill enabled investors to buy futures contracts on individual stocks. These contracts are the equivalent of bets, or educated guesses, on the future value of a particular stock. Prior to this bill’s passage, most futures contracts concerned the price of agricultural commodities and stock market indexes. This bill deregulated the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s authority over over-the-counter derivatives transactions. Because of this law, market manipulation is allowed to occur without ‘position limits’ driving up the cost of gas and other products. Neal not only votes for what Wall Street wants, he spends whole weekends in New York raising wads of campaign cash like he did this past May 5-7. It is hard to be visible in your district when you have your hand out in the Big Apple grabbing fat checks from corporate PACs and lobbyists.
Several Berkshire County residents wanted to know why they can’t get news, weather and information for western Massachusetts from Springfield’s WWLP television station, Channel 22. Instead they are in the Albany, NY media market and their network affiliates are fed to them from the Empire State’s capital city. Neal said something about asking the unelected Trump-appointed bureaucrats at the FCC to look into the situation. But his questioners would likely have been pissed off to learn that Richie himself helped create their problem with a vote he cast back in June 2006. Neal was one of only two members of the Massachusetts delegation to vote yes on the Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act which enabled the Federal Communications Commission to supersede local authority in the award of franchises for delivering video, broadband, voice and other Internet services to the public. Approximately 30,000 local agencies then made those decisions. This bill made it easier for the nation’s largest telephone companies to begin competing against existing cable and satellite franchise holders. While supporters said more competition would result in lower monthly bills and better service, opponents said the bill would strip away consumer protections as well as local requirements of equal service to all neighborhoods. Guess what happened.
Neal’s all-consuming passion and desire is to one day clutch the gavel of the House Ways & Means Committee in his hand and be addressed as Mr. Chairman. He would have us believe that now, as ranking minority member, he is some kind of a big deal when the reality is that he only gets to give his opening statement and ask his questions before the panel’s other Democrats at hearings. I worked in Congress under GOP control of the House in 1999-2000 and life in the minority sucked then as it does now.
One has to ask, what kind of “leadership” Neal would bring as chair of Ways & Means? If it involves putting forth loopholes and carve-outs like his “innovation box” that even the right-wing Heritage Foundation said was "unsound policy", then no thanks. If it means pushing though more crappy trade deals like TTIP that would force Europeans to import American-grown GMO food and weaken and deregulate European financial regulations like Glass-Steagall repeal did here, again, no thanks.
When a federal lawmaker such as Neal has been tagged as having “gone Washington” it means that he or she has lost touch with their peeps back home and has succumbed to the Potomac fever. Neal is increasingly showing the symptoms of somebody gone Washington. Despite his efforts on behalf of Hillary Clinton, his district went for Bernie Sanders in last year’s Massachusetts presidential primary by more than 5,700 votes. Increasingly there is talk of a primary challenge to him in September 2018. I won’t hold my breath that there will be more town halls hosted by Mr. Neal anytime soon. But the natives are getting restless.