Dem. Lawmakers Distance Themselves from ALEC


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Democratic legislators distanced themselves from involvement with ALEC, the far right wing group that acts as a stealth lobby organization to state legislators, saying they signed up because Rep. Jon Brien asked them to do so.

Many said they didn’t know much about the organization, even though it has been all over the news as of late, and that they would be taking a closer look to see if it jibes with their politics.

“I was asked to sign up,” said Rep. Peter Martin, a conservative Democrat from Newport, saying Brien asked him to join. “Now, I’m questioning why I did. I’m learning more about it and thinking I better learn a little more. I like Jon Brien but sometimes he’s a little more to the right than I am.”

Brien, a conservative Democrat, recently joined ALEC’s national board of directors. He said ALEC is actively trying to recruit more Democrats. A list of local members of the American Legislative Exchange Council indicates that more than 20 percent of the General Assembly belong to the group.

Rep. John Edwards, of Tiverton, said he didn’t join ALEC.

“Someone signed me up,” he said. “I thought it was more like the [National Conference of State Legislatures].”

The NCSL is a bipartisan group that helps state lawmakers share ideas. ALEC, on the other hand, supports only conservative ideology and is backed by corporate America. Edwards said being aligned with corporate America isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be he added.

“Sometimes corporate America is aligned with my values and sometimes it isn’t, like when they are sticking it to the middle class,” he said. “I’m a moderate Democrat. I’m not one of those far-right Democrats.”

Rep. Sam Azzinaro, a conservative Democrat from Westerly, said he knew nothing about ALEC, even though he was on a list of members provided by Brien.

Rep. Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, a Woonsocket Democrat, said her membership in ALEC does not necessarily imply that she supports the group.

“If someone joins an organization, it’s not always because they are an advocate for that organization,” she said. “It might be just that they are looking for more information.”

Rep. Michael Marcello, a Scituate Democrat, echoed this sentiment, saying, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to get more information. It doesn’t mean I support 100 percent of what they do.”

In fact, Marcello distance himself from many of ALEC’s legislative priorities, saying he doesn’t support voter ID as well as other ALEC initiatives. “I didn’t join as a form of support, I joined to get more information.”

He said he and Brien attended an ALEC reception at G-Tech earlier in the year. Brien was an attorney for G-Tech from 2002 to 2007, and said he attended his first ALEC reception at G-Tech years ago when his wife was a member of the General Assembly, at the request of former Woonsocket legislator Jerry Martineau, who was convicted on corruption charges in 2009 for his cozy relationship with CVS and Blue Cross.

Brien, one of the more conservative members of the state legislature from either party, said he signed up most of the House members during the special pension session in November.

“They all thought it sounded good when they signed up,” he said. “My goal is to sign up as many new members as I can.”

Brien said the special pension session came on the heels of ALEC’s annual meeting last summer, at which he said he spent four days focusing on education reform. He described ALEC as being nonpartisan.

“I don’t find education reform to be a divisive or partisan or ideological issue,” he said. But, of course, in Rhode Island it is – and during the summer Brien almost got into a fight in an elevator with an official from the NEARI after the two exchanged words outside of a courtroom when another union official was on trial for cyberharassing an anti-union Democrat during the 2010 election season.

He said his politics are closely aligned with ALEC’s legislative agenda, but that he will not do its bidding.

“Is my goal to have ALEC have influence at the State House? No,” he said. “My goal is to bring together politically like-minded representatives and senators when we believe in the same issues and ideas. If we do that, ALEC will by osmosis have influence at the State House.”

Ring in Spring with Green at Drinking Liberally Tonight

The trees are budding, the grass is growing and the bees are buzzing.

What better way to kick off Spring than to recognize Earth Day and slip in a mid-week sip? We hope to see you tonight from 7 to 9pm for our monthly gathering at Wild Colonial.

This month’s DL program will RING IN SPRING WITH GREEN ADVOCATES. On the docket are two extraordinary environmental gurus:

Dave Fisher, ecoRI

Abel Collins, Sierra Club RI

Amelia Rose, RI Environmental Justice League

Budgeting for Disaster: How Budgets Are Cut


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FY2013 budget

FY2013 budgetI was at the hearing at House Finance last night, talking about tax cuts for rich people.  The remarkable thing about all the tax cuts we’ve given over the past 16 years is not that we’ve given them, but how we’ve paid for them.

As we saw in the last installment, the story of the past 16 years has been relentless cuts in state income taxes on the top 1% of taxpayers. The cuts have come in several different forms, but the result has been the same: dramatically lower taxes on the top end, much smaller changes for everyone else.

That’s bad enough, but the real tragedy of the tax cutting of the past 16 years is that not a single one of the tax cuts passed by the General Assembly was paid for. The income tax cut of 1997, the car tax cut of the same year, the capital gains tax cut of 2001, and the flat tax cut of 2006 were all “phased in” to avoid having to make the tough decisions people are always talking about.

But the reduced state revenue had to be made up somehow. How did we do it? Over that time, we haven’t cut any major programs. So does this mean that government was too fat? Do we owe a debt of gratitude to the Almond and Carcieri administrations for finally starving the beast down to an affordable size? I’d like to share with you my observations of the five different ways to cut a budget, only the first of which has any claim to being a hard choice:

  1. Terminate a program or benefit.
  2. Supply a program or benefit in a more efficient fashion.
  3. Supply a program or benefit in a shoddier fashion.
  4. Borrow to hide the shortfall.
  5. Foist the cost onto somebody with another source of income.

In my review of state budget cuts over the past decade, I find very few examples of the first method, though there are some. Certainly the Medicaid program is somewhat less generous than it was a decade ago. We cut services for legal immigrant children and pregnant women, for example.  But how many other examples are there? I don’t support Governor Chafee’s proposal to terminate funding of WSBE television, but I applaud him for having the temerity to actually propose ending a fairly popular program.

For the second method, there are a few good examples. The recent reorganization at DMV might qualify. Though it also required some new personnel, they are now providing better service with not too many more people. DOT’s proposal to get designs and buildings from the same contractor has promise in this regard, and the construction of the new train station in Wickford seems to have turned out well.

Unfortunately, too many of these border on examples of the third category: just doing a shoddier job. The General Assembly has, over the years, been not at all deferential to the judgment of department heads and experts about what is actually possible within the budget constraints presented, with disaster or shoddy service frequently resulting.  The transfer of 17-year-olds from the Training School to the ACI a few years ago is an example, and last year’s cut to BHDDH funding is another. A couple of years ago, delays in food stamp processing were so great that the state lost a class-action suit on the issue.

The Department of Transportation’s shameful neglect of maintenance is still another example. Seventeen homes and four businesses in Tiverton are gone today because DOT didn’t maintain the Sakonnet Bridge adequately and they were in the way of the replacement bridge. Nor are they alone in their neglect of maintenance, as any visit to a state facility will attest. A few years ago, URI estimated the cost of deferred maintenance on their campus to be over $400 million, not so much less than a year’s budget.

Category four is excessive borrowing, and DOT has been a prime offender in the category, and so have the colleges, creating fancy new buildings while cutting back on the staff and projects that should be filling them.  Governor Chafee has proposed cutting back the DOT borrowing.

It’s probably the fifth category that has seen the most exercise. In the drive to cut taxes on rich people, the state has cut funding to: municipal governments and school departments who have to make it up with property taxes; to colleges who have to make it up with tuitions; to Medicaid recipients who have to make it up with co-pays; to everyone who fishes, drives, or runs a hospital who have to make it up with increased license fees, and to many more. We’ve even taken it from prisoners, for heaven’s sake, with parole fees, home confinement fees and medical co-pays. Property tax payers, students, poor people, and prisoners have paid for the tax cuts of the last 16 years.

One important point about these categories, is that numbers three and four are only the illusion of cutting costs, and generally make things more expensive in the long run.  And number five doesn’t cut costs at all, either.  If you want an explanation of why government in Rhode Island is expensive, look here.

Let’s be clear: courage is not foisting costs off onto others, nor is it insisting the state do its job badly. It is not borrowing to hide shortfalls or pushing costs into the next year. Calling for efficiency is laudable, but it is not courage, either. (Nor should it be confused with actually finding efficiencies.)

Courage means honesty. It means assessing with honesty our past policies, and not hiding behind some claim that we have to wait and see the effect of tax cuts we’ve been waiting for over a decade to see. It means honestly assessing claims that rose petals will fall from the sky if only we can avoid asking rich people to pay their fair share. It means honestly assessing what our state needs to do and finding a fair way to raise all the revenue with which to do it. Honesty is hard, the reason it’s equivalent to courage.

So listen skeptically when you hear someone — a member of the legislature, an anti-tax activist, or a friend — talking about making those tough choices. Are they talking about categories two through five? Those aren’t tough, so don’t let them hide there.

Democrats Send Progressives To Convention


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Logo for RI Democratic Party

Congratulations to the delegate candidates who won an opportunity to go to the Democratic National Convention in yesterday’s primary. While overall turnout may have been low, it seems as if progressives got out the vote as all but two of our endorsed candidates prevailed.

Anne Connor, whom we profiled, received more overall votes than former Providence Mayor Joe Paolino, who took out an ad in the ProJo (though he did spell the president’s name wrong in it). She even got more votes than him in his hometown of Providence – and she lives in suburban Barrington.

Conservative, anti-union Democrat Doug Gablinske received the fewest votes in CD1

In CD2, the three progressive members of the General Assembly – Josh Miller, Frank Ferri and Teresa Tanzi netted nearly 1,000 more overall votes than the three Weiner candidates, an affluent family from East Greenwich known for being political insiders and regulars at the party convention.

For a complete list of results, click here.

The winners are below, including total number of votes they garnered and percentage.

UPDATE: RI Future Publisher Emeritus Matt Jerzyk writes that our delegate results isn’t accurate because Democratic rules for the representing candidates at the convention employ a sort of affirmative action in which the top 5 men and top 6 women from each district are chosen. As such, these are the results according to Jerzyk:

The top 5 men and top 6 women in each CD are elected – not just the top 11.  That would mean the following won yesterday:

CD-1

  • Myrth YORK
  • Julie E. MEYERS
  • Anne W. CONNOR
  • Joseph R. PAOLINO, JR.
  • Onna A. MONIZ-JOHN
  • Mary A. GASBARRO
  • June S. SPEAKMAN
  • Brett P. SMILEY
  • Tom CODERRE
  • Gerald Pedro CARVALHO
  • David A. SALVATORE

CD-2

  • Joshua MILLER
  • Patrick T. FOGARTY
  • Teresa TANZI
  • Frank G. FERRI
  • Elaine PRIOR
  • Michael A. SOLOMON
  • L. Susan WEINER
  • Mark S. WEINER
  • Elisa M. POLLARD
  • Helen S. TAYLOR
  • Zoe I. WEINER

CD1

Myrth YORK 2831 10.4%
Julie E. MEYERS 2153 7.9%
Anne W. CONNOR 2061 7.6%
Joseph R. PAOLINO, JR. 1986 7.3%
Onna A. MONIZ-JOHN 1880 6.9%
Mary A. GASBARRO 1833 6.7%
June S. SPEAKMAN 1776 6.5%
Brett P. SMILEY 1763 6.5%
Rebecca Kim MEARS 1694 6.2%
Tom CODERRE 1640 6.0%
Gerald Pedro CARVALHO 1369 5.0%

CD2

Joshua MILLER 1313 7.8%
Patrick T. FOGARTY 1272 7.6%
Teresa TANZI 1233 7.3%
Frank G. FERRI 1137 6.8%
Elaine PRIOR 1131 6.7%
Michael A. SOLOMON 1109 6.6%
L. Susan WEINER 1033 6.1%
Mark S. WEINER 1007 6.0%
Thomas J. IZZO 990 5.9%
Ryan Patrick KELLEY 986 5.9%
Elisa M. POLLARD 972 5.8%

VIDEO: Three Perspectives on Income Tax Equity Bill


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At a hearing last night, many spoke in favor of Rep. Maria Cimini’s legislation that would raise income taxes on Rhode Island’s richest residents as a way to raise revenue and encourage job creators to lower the state’s unemployment rate, and I chose three to feature because they represent a wide variety of reasons why it makes sense for Rhode Island to take proactive steps to better fund government.

The bill would raise the income tax on those who earn more than $250,000 from 5.99 to 9.99 and that rate would decrease by one percentage point for each percentage point that the state’s unemployment rate drops. It would raise some $132 million in additional revenue.

Electoral Abstinence: Choosing None of the Above


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Expect the President's reelection campaign to be far tougher than 2008

Thousands of Rhode Islanders went to work today (or looked for work) instead of to the polls. Maybe they were going to vote, but then decided they just wanted to go home. Or maybe they didn’t like the candidates. Or maybe they just didn’t know where their local polling place was. They’ll all be counted as people who didn’t vote.

I didn’t go to my local polling place either, even though it’s a short walk (or even shorter bike ride) from where I live. It wasn’t that I don’t think that the delegate candidates don’t deserve to go Charlotte (or Tampa, if that’s your preference). It’s that I don’t want who they’re voting for. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich; not matter who a delegate is pledged to, what’s the point?

France held its first round of presidential elections on the weekended. U.S. media was keen to tell us how the process works. And buried in this Slate article about Socialist candidate Francois Hollande’s use of an Obama-style get-out-the-vote operation was the idea that the 30% of people who didn’t vote are termed “les abstentionnistes” which I think translates into “the abstainers.” The article makes the point that in France, not voting is constructed as a conscious choice, versus the American idea that not voting is a sign of laziness or inability or apathy.

So I abstained. I made a conscious choice. And, believe it or not, plenty of people made this choice too. When we think about why people don’t turn out, there are certainly plenty of reforms we can make to lower the bar to participation (a week long celebratory holiday for voting was suggested by a teacher once and is my favorite idea). But we also need to focus on why should I turn out for Candidate X. And that’s on Candidate X.

In this case, it’s on President Obama. I voted for President Obama twice, once against Hillary Clinton and once again against John McCain. In 2008, there were a lot of reasons to go to the polls and vote. Sarah Palin as vice president, the traditional idea of Democrats as the solution to economic depressions, the worst stock market crash since 1929, etc. September 2008 had unleashed the idea that Democrats would attempt a second New Deal in many people my age. We had hope, and we voted for change. And we really thought things were going to change.

This woman could've become Vice President.

The President betrayed that hope, and he didn’t bring change. He expanded the scope of the War on Terror to include American citizens, doubled down on the War on Drugs, continues to issue signing statements, failed to push for a strong enough stimulus, fails to forcefully push for LGBT rights; and surrounds himself with Wall Street hacks largely responsible for the crisis (Larry Summers isn’t “change you can believe in”); Mr. Obama has proved over and over that he is a Third Way Democrat; Bill Clinton without the panache or economic rebound. Is it any wonder large portions of Mr. Obama’s voters stayed home in 2010? He hadn’t given them anything to believe in since inauguration day. And his party got shellacked for it.

Occupy Wall Street contains plenty of youth who are angry with the President. The ability of a largely disenchanted and unemployed youth to turn the nation conversation on economics away from the national debt and towards economic inequality proves just how important they are to politics. Even Republicans picked up on this.

OWS’ major flaw is their antipathy towards electoral politics, but understandable, given that their faith in Barack Obama was rewarded with the half-measures and inept political maneuvering that define his presidency. The healthcare plan enacted, while having some great upsides, is emblematic of this. One of its defenses has been “but the Heritage Foundation originated it!” This neither eases conservative anger nor does it rally progressives and liberals.

President Obama should be a lesson for all Democrats and anyone who uses progressives as part of their electoral coalition. David Cicilline is facing the toughest election of his political career. Turning to a populist, energized campaign based on strong, deliverable ideological issues would move the campaign beyond Providence’s finances. It would also pick up dedicated support from inventing young people. Allowing his campaign to become a referendum on the Democratic Party makes his general election prospects dim, as well as his primary ones. Both Mr. Cicilline and challenger Anthony Gemma are going to use the following phrases: “grassroots support” “protect Social Security” “failed Republican policies”. The only thing that will distinguish them are their stances on abortion, unless Mr. Gemma flips.

Governor Lincoln Chafee was largely elected on a progressive coalition that saw Frank Caprio and John Robataille as symptomatic of the Republicrat-Democan system (for more of that, see our editor Bob Plain’s reporting on ALEC). Unfortunately, he’s largely fallen into that dynamic, and has essentially abandoned his progressive followers. If he runs in a three-way race again in 2014 (assuming he doesn’t change parties once again), energizing those progressives will be important.

So, given that candidates are well-versed in not delivering anything, is it any wonder so many people abstained rather than vote for a delegate to go “aye” for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney?