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In an announcement that quickly made national news and immediately reshaped the 2014 gubernatorial campaign, Lincoln Chafee said today that he won’t run for re-election.
Chafee’s announcement sets up a likely Democratic primary between Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and General Treasurer Gina Raimondo. The news was a relief to many progressives, who feared that liberals Chafee and Taveras would cancel each other out, giving Raimondo a clearer path to victory. A primary between Taveras and Raimondo would seem to me to be a good opportunity for Rhode Island to see the clear difference between progressive and conservative Democrats.
After the announcement, Matt Jerzyk, tweeted, “!….!!….!!!”
Chafee began his political career as a Republican and was elected as an independent in 2010, when he prevailed in a three-way race in which fourth-place finisher Ken Block siphoned away votes from the more conservative candidates. Earlier this year, he became a Democrat.
Chafee has had a spotty relationship with the progressive community since becoming governor. He is seen as a champion of the marriage equality movement but a foe to ending homelessness. He lost the confidence of organized labor for supporting pension cuts but he gained respect among civil libertarians, environmentalists and peace activists who have appreciated his principled efforts to defend their causes. Many feel that he was well-intentioned as governor but out of touch with working class Rhode Islanders, while some lauded his efforts to help financially-struggling cities. His relationship with the conservative community in Rhode Island was much more clear: they didn’t like him and were very vocal about it.
Linc Chafee stammers and stutters when he speaks and he holds the most high-profile state-based position in an industry that places a huge reward on fast talking. But if you ever talk to him for more than a soundbite, he’s a a tremendously thoughtful and bright guy.
Here are some of my favorite pictures I’ve taken of Chafee over our years of working together … and here’s to many more!!
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State Rep. Ray Hull, who lives in and represents the Mt. Pleasant area of Providence, has sent a letter to Rhode Island’s congressional delegation asking them not to support a military strike against Syria. He’s the first member of the General Assembly to speak out on the matter (to my knowledge).
Here’s his letter:
Like you, and all other compassionate and humane individuals, I find the situation in Syria to be both sad and despicable. I simply do not understand how the leader of a nation – whether torn by internal strife or civil unrest – could wantonly murder his fellow countrymen, especially through the use of chemical agents.
That being said, I nonetheless must ask you to not support any U.S. military intervention in the nation of Syria if or when the issue comes before Congress when it recovenes next week.
I believe that what we are observing in Syria is a civil war. I believe that what we are seeing is a situation that does not, in any way, shape or form, have an immediate or direct impact on the United States or American citizens. I do not believe that, if we were to intervene, even in a limited way, the outcome would result in a situation that would be beneficial to the United States. I fear any potential repercussions resulting from our intervention, and I do not believe that any faction of the civil unrest in Syria that might come to power as a result of our assistance would be an American ally.
America has already spent too much money and shed too much blood attempting to bring peace and democracy and human rights to other countries in that part of the world that have not shown a willingness to end centuries of religious and tribal warfare. We must not go that route again.
Please stand strong against any attempt to seek U.S. military action in Syria.
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It was hard for me to work up the willingness to purchase Papers, Please, 3909 LLC’s game about a border checkpoint worker. $10 to check fictional paperwork? No thanks. But a string of good reviews kept my interest, so during the Labor Day weekend I coughed up the cash and set about learning how to stamp passports at the Grestin checkpoint between the fictional countries of Arstotska and Kolechia.
Papers, Please has appropriately been described as “bleak.” From the dull colors, to the pixelated artwork, to the plot and circumstances of the game (the war between Kolechia and your communist home country of Arstotska); Papers, Please is game that explores the darkness of the mundane. And yet, despite the interface which looks to repulse, it’s extraordinarily engrossing.
Dropped in without a tutorial or much instruction, it was up to me to figure out how to survive. The more people you process in the day, the greater your pay. But the faster you go, the more likely you are to make mistakes. And after a while, mistakes cost a lot. By about Day 3, I no longer had enough money to pay more than my rent; my poor performance at the checkpoint meant I had to forgo things like food and heat. Which meant my family fell sick. By the time I was able to earn enough money to pay for medication, my son had died from the combination of exposure, hunger, and illness. For the rest of the game, I was left with just my wife, mother-in-law, and uncle; until my sister died and I took in her niece.
Now, here’s what gets to me: for the rest of the game, I played as though my son’s death had had a serious impact on me, and changed the way I looked on my job; even though he was never more than a dot with the word “son” printed on it. I was more willing to bend rules. And I’d started to hit my stride as a passport inspector; able to adapt to the increasingly byzantine regulations my superiors were placing on immigration. I was also kind of a hard-ass, turning away journalists, detaining people (which thanks to a corrupt guard, earned me extra cash each time I did it, though I never detained anyone without a legitimate reason), refusing to let wives join their husbands due to expiration dates or printing errors.
The game ended for me when I assassinated a government agent sent to hunt down members of the resistance. This is one of 20 endings. At that point the government finally figured me out; though not before I’d assassinated another of their agents (with an incidental death of an innocent guard), and funneled multiple resistance agents into the country without proper documentation.
This is where it’s worth reflecting for me. Why did I, on my first play-through, make the choice to attempt to overthrow the government I was employed by? They once seized all my assets, true, but those were illegally gained by working for the resistance, and the government only got wise when I conspicuously spent them purchasing a new apartment (that money also allowed me to save my sick family). Perhaps it was the money the resistance compensated me with. Yet bribery never worked on me from anyone whose passport I checked. Or perhaps it was because Arstotska is presented as a totalitarian communist regime, and perhaps that’s why I wanted it overthrown, the natural default of Americans. Yet I never saw much of the oppression; I had almost zero information about what the regime was doing. Perhaps because I’m a romantic and a Rhode Islander, and rebels tend to have my sympathy. But the sad parade of people, who gave me more information about themselves than the resistance did, could hardly earn my hesitance before I stamped their passport.
Regardless of my reasoning, Papers, Please forced me to consider the following question in regard to bureaucrats: when do they get to decide to make the choice between what is legal and what is right? I did what I thought appropriate; help the resistance, but attempt to maintain a near-impeccable record elsewhere.
Small government advocates might think this game is a perfect way of demonstrating the overreach of government; but it’s not. It’s a great way of discussing bureaucracy; which isn’t intrinsic to government; but rather any large system. This game would work just as well were the setting a bank.
A moment that stands out to me was when a woman set a bomb on my desk and stood ready to die. It failed to go off, the guards detained her, and I eventually disarmed it, whereupon the corrupt guard sold it for scrap and gave a portion of the profit to me. I, personally, wasn’t the target. Arstotska was. But as a member of the bureaucracy, an employee of the government, I was a fine stand-in for Arstotska, even though I was sole breadwinner for four other people, and was just doing my job (to my estimation, none of the regulations ever seemed unreasonable, except for automatically strip-searching Kolechians, but that was stopped thanks to international pressure).
I was talking with a couple of former public employees recently, one of whom had recently left public service, and their outlook was that it was a relief to be out of government work. “It feels great to not be treated like I’m the scum on the bottom of someone’s boot,” said one, referring to the way we view our government workers in Rhode Island. It’s hard for us to separate the employee from the employer. Papers, Please forces us to consider that the bureaucrat in front of us is a human (in all its meanings), attempting to following complex rules, take care of their needs, and get through the day.
I’ve yet to play a game more relevant to our day-to-day lives.
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Rhode Island exports fewer dollars worth of goods to foreign countries than any other New England state, according to the TradeStats Express website.
Only four other states export fewer dollars worth of goods to other countries than Rhode Island. Here are the top and bottom ten:
Top 10
Bottom 10
1. Texas
$264,708,659,761
50. Hawaii
$731,664,010
2. California
$161,879,918,490
49. Wyoming
$1,420,924,817
3. New York
$81,358,857,002
48. South Dakota
$1,556,241,031
4. Washington
$75,618,900,503
47. Montana
$1,576,876,497
5. Illinois
$68,127,010,189
46. Rhode Island
$237,0156,815
6. Florida
$66,201,800,100
45. New Mexico
$2,967,650,904
7. Louisiana
$62,892,633,604
44. Maine
$3,047,707,915
8. Michigan
$56,993,402,032
43. New Hampshire
$3,488,610,845
9. Ohio
$48,647,707,663
42. Vermont
$4,139,591,084
10. Pennsylvania
38,829,058,903
41. North Dakota
$4,308,687,941
But when it comes to selling scrap metal and waste paper abroad, the tiny Ocean State far exceeds its size. In New England, only Massachusetts sells more scrap and waste to other parts of the globe. And not by much:
In fact, only nine state in the nation export more waste and scrap to other countries than Rhode Island. Here’s a list of the top 15:
1
California
$5,648,331,328
2
New York
$3,661,343,535
3
Texas
$2,366,551,325
4
New Jersey
$2,127,648,030
5
Florida
$1,816,976,101
6
Illinois
$1,208,238,823
7
Washington
$1,061,639,428
8
Pennsylvania
$924,915,927
9
Massachusetts
$784,148,339
10
Rhode Island
$644,038,774
11
Georgia
$607,482,513
12
Oregon
$544,914,550
13
Ohio
$505,601,547
14
Virginia
$490,487,057
15
Maryland
$460,032,638
Rhode Island exports scrap and waste all over the world. Here are the ten biggest importers of Rhode Island scrap and waste:
1
Canada
$242,082,822
2
Turkey
$190,260,075
3
Germany
$86,248,123
4
Italy
$71,996,044
5
Egypt
$13,268,208
6
Belgium
$11,707,432
7
China
$11,102,657
8
Vietnam
$9,697,288
9
Sweden
$3,425,180
10
United Kingdom
$1,402,006
Note that Rhode Island sent $13 million worth of scrap and waste to Egypt, a country we don’t exactly have great diplomatic relations with right now. And also note that Canada imports more of our scrap and waste than any other country in the world. I’d love to know what companies there are doing with it.
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