March 25, 2013 – RI Future

March 25, 2013March 26, 2013

Where The SNAP Cards Are

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The five cities with the biggest budget problems also have the highest percent of residents who use SNAP benefits. In other words, there’s a correlation between the communities that can’t pay their bills and residents who can’t afford to feed themselves.

According to the Department of Human Services, 181,567 Rhode Islanders – 17 percent of state – use SNAP cards. But 59 percent of all SNAP users lives in one of the post-industrial cities that have experienced serious budget problems in recent years.

Central Falls; 40.3 percent
Woonsocket: 33.8 percent
Providence: 33.8 percent
Pawtucket: 27.9 percent
West Warwick: 25.8 percent.

The communities with the lowest percentage of residents who use SNAP cards probably won’t surprise you either:

Barrington: 2.7 percent
Block Island: 3 percent
Jamestown: 3.5 percent
Little Compton: 4.3 percent
Smithfield: 5 percent

Here’s the other 29 cities and towns:

And here’s the entire list:

CENTRAL FALLS   40.3%

WOONSOCKET   33.8%

PROVIDENCE   33.8%

PAWTUCKET   27.9%

WEST WARWICK   25.8%

NEWPORT   15.4%

EAST PROVIDENCE 14.8%

CRANSTON 14.5%

WARREN   14.7%

NORTH PROVIDENCE   14.2%

JOHNSTON    13.4%

WARWICK   12%

HOPKINTON   10.7%

BURRILLVILLE   10.6%

COVENTRY   10.5%

WESTERLY   10.1%

LINCOLN   9.6%

CHARLESTOWN   9.2%

NORTH SMITHFIELD   8.9%

NORTH KINGSTOWN   8.8%

MIDDLETOWN   8.6%

TIVERTON   8.3%

CUMBERLAND   8.1%

EXETER   7.6%

BRISTOL   7.3%

FOSTER   7.1%

RICHMOND   6.9%

SOUTH KINGSTOWN   6.3%

NARRAGANSETT   6.3%

GLOCESTER   5.6%

SCITUATE   5.5%

EAST GREENWICH   5.5%

PORTSMOUTH   5.2%

WEST GREENWICH   5.1%

SMITHFIELD    5%

LITTLE COMPTON   4.3%

JAMESTOWN   3.5%

BLOCK ISLAND   3%

BARRINGTON   2.7%

March 25, 2013March 26, 2013

Fox “News” And The War On Woonsocket’s Poor

If you didn’t know that local conservatives were going to take to Fox “News” to exploit Ken Block’s food stamp fraud report, I would like to bet you that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Then, maybe we can go double or nothing on whether or not the days will get longer until late June, when they will then get shorter for about the next six months.

The Providence Journal this morning reprised Dave Fisher’s post from Friday about Woonsocket Mayor Leo Fontaine going on Fox “News” and blaming the city’s economic woes on the fact that one in three residents needs SNAP benefits.

The ProJo picked up on the similar themes as did Fisher’s post*: Fontaine inaccurately claimed that Block’s report uncovered “massive fraud” (or, me and Fontaine have an entirely different idea of what the word massive means) and that even the Fox anchor was surprised that Fontaine was blaming the poor for the city’s problems.

Unfortunately Fontaine wasn’t the only conservative using Block’s investigation to bash our poor on national television.

Rep. Doreen Costa, the voice of the tea party in the General Assembly, was on a Fox segment that included not-too subliminal messages of “‘Rhode’ to Economic Disaster” and “Who is ruining our economy?”

Costa, whose major legislative accomplishment is a failed bill that would mandate drug tests for welfare recipients, is no stranger to this form poor-bashing-as-political-shell-game. Here’s how it works:

Fox: “Why is Rhode Island suffering so much?”

Costa: “Well, I think Rhode Island is suffering so much because we don’t have any jobs here and because no business friendly legislation has been put in up at the State House…”

Fox: “Do people at least recognize that this is a problem or are you the lone ranger in this?”

Costa: “I don’t think people up at the State House even think this is an issue, they just want to keep giving out and giving out and giving out…”

Fox: “If you are trying to help these people, do you think they are trying to help themselves?

Costa: “That’s a good question. We just had a major report…”

There’s a lot in here that is either blatantly wrong or half-true to the point of being misinformation.

Rhode Island is suffering from a lack of jobs, but it’s not the kind of jobs that the myriad of business-friendly legislation at the State House addresses. In other words, putting the DEM under an economy czar isn’t going to get anyone off food stamps in Woonsocket, probably few – if any – Woonsocket residents lost their jobs when 38 Studios failed and I’d reckon that doing away with the sales tax would do far more damage than good, in the short and long term
So I get that very few people in politics care that the mayor of Woonsocket and the state Rep. from North Kingstown are spreading lies and half-truths about Rhode Islanders living in poverty on Fox, but what do Costa’s legislative colleagues think of her spreading lies about them. The idea that no one at the State House thinks about these issues is not in any way, shape or form true.
I like Doreen plenty but the idea that she is “trying to help these people” on SNAP benefits, as the Fox reporter said, is cartoonishly incorrect. She may be a member of the middle class – Costa sells advertising for WPRO – but her overarching philosophy of trying to shrink government down until it can be drowned in a bathtub is nothing but bad news for the working and middle class folks of Rhode Island and good news for the corporate elite.

To date, I think Fisher – WHO LIVES IN WOONSOCKET – has done the most interesting journalism on the Washington Post’s Woonsocket piece. He points out that while the city and the schools are going bankrupt and a third of the residents – and the local economy itself – is reliant on SNAP benefits, Woonsocket is also home of Rhode Island’s largest private sector employer, CVS, which gets more than $15 million in local and state tax breaks and pays its CEO $18 million a year.

There’s something to all that that I believe is the major reason Rhode Island finds itself in such bad economic shape.

I think conservatives, moderates, liberals and progressives all agree that the state’s struggles are pretty much concentrated in our urban areas. And I think everyone also agrees that the systemic poverty in Woonsocket, West Warwick, Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence is terribly bad for Rhode Island (I think it’s the state’s biggest economic obstacle). Here’s where there is disagreement: do we want to continue with austerity measure and trickle down ec0nomics or do we want to try some bottom-up solutions.

I don’t think the couple dozen ACI inmates who may – or may not be – scamming the system will affect either our real-life economy or our made-up CNBC rankings one way or another.

March 25, 2013March 25, 2013

Fine Line Between Hate Group And ‘Faith Alliance’

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Last week, while waiting at the State House in the long line that formed to give testimony at the Senate Judiciary Marriage Equality bill hearing, I decided to check out the website of MassResistance, a group instrumental in the loud, raucous anti-Marriage Equality rally held when the House took testimony on the issue back in January and who repeated that performance for the Senate.

MassResistance, for those who don’t know, is a Southern Poverty Law Center certified anti-LGBTQ hate group headed by bigot and homophobe Brian Camenker, who just this February compared school administrators who support LGBTQ students to “Nazi concentration camp guards” and claimed that homosexuals don’t actually exist.

Imagine my surprise when State Senator Frank Lombardi, a Democrat from Cranston who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and an opponent of Marriage Equality, was interviewed on the MassResistance website:

Last week MassResistance spoke with Sen. Frank Lombardi (D-Cranston), one of the committee members. Sen. Lombardi, who supports traditional marriage, predicted the vote of the 10-member committee would be a tie — meaning the bill dies. But he acknowledged that it’s is only his best speculation.

I was surprised that Lombardi would consent to an interview on the website of a hate group, and wrote up a quick piece about this for RI Future from my iPad. It’s tough to format blog posts from my iPad for this site, so I asked my editor, Bob Plain, to put the finishing touches on the piece and post it. He did so, but in the process we lost the link to the MassResistance website where Senator Lombardi’s comments could be found.

In the “middle of the night” Bob received a phone call from from Senator Lombardi’s office informing him that the article I wrote was inaccurate. Senator Lombardi was claiming that he never spoke to MassResistance. Bob pulled the post pending confirmation of my source.

I conferred with Bob and sent him the link to the MassResistance website, showing that the story was accurate insomuch as MassResistance was claiming Lombardi talked to them, which Lombardi denied doing. Obviously either MassResistance or Frank Lombardi was not being honest.

Lombardi denied talking to MassResistance, but acknowledged giving an interview to the Faith Alliance. The Faith Alliance has among its members a fair number of Evangelical churches, the Providence Catholic Diocese, the Knights of Columbus, NOM-RI and MassResistance. State Senator Harold Metts, a Democrat from Providence a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee with Lombardi, spoke at the January State House Rally in support of the Faith Alliance.

This raises some interesting questions.

Is the Faith Alliance merely an arm of MassResistance? If the unidentified writer of the piece on the MassResistance blog (I’m guessing it’s Camenker) can call people up and identify as the Faith Alliance for the purpose of interviews, doesn’t this indicate that MassResistance believes that it speaks for all Faith Alliance members?

If MassResistance in truth cannot claim to speak for its various members, such as the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic Church, why resort to such a subterfuge when speaking to Senator Lombardi? Could it be that Camenker knows that being associated with his toxic hate group is politically poisonous and that no savvy politician would consent to talk to him otherwise?

I said way back in January, when MassResistance first entered our state and helped to form the Faith Alliance that aligning with such an odious hate group is “disgraceful.” I later called upon Bishop Tobin to repudiate the ugly comments and hateful views of MassResistance and Brian Camenker, something the Bishop or his spokesmen have declined to do.

It is obvious why religious groups and politicians have no wish to be associated with a group like MassResistance. Their opposition to marriage equality, they say, is based on his deep commitment to faith, not on anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

The problem, of course, is that they have aligned themselves with the Faith Alliance. And the Faith Alliance, it seems, is MassResistance.

I’m reminded of an old saying about laying down with dogs…