Is Jim Skeffington selling snake oil or saving a baseball team?


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skeffington
Jim Skeffington

Like everyone on planet earth, I’m not sure where the Red Sox’ AAA affiliate would attract the most fans, make the most money and/or do the most economic good. But I’m fairly certain new Pawsox owner Jim Skeffington is using some tricky accounting and very high pressure sales tactics to get Rhode Island to finance the relocation of the business he just bought.

First the tricky accounting.

The stadium will be privately financed, Skeffington said today. But he’s asking for $120 million in public subsidies after he privately finances it. The cost to build is $85 million, so Skeffington makes a net profit of $35 million for privately financing construction of the stadium.

Skeffington, a lawyer from Barrington, would like his $120 million in annual payments of $4 million, please. And the state needs to both rent from him and then subsequently sublease back to him the stadium. So he gets to be both the landlord and its the tenant while taking in $35 million.

Skeffington even had the gall to claim the people would only owe him roughly half that, so long as his sales and hotel tax predictions ring true for the next 30 years. Never mind the property taxes his publicly funded private project deprives from the Capital City. Oh and, by the way, existing zoning laws don’t allow Jim Skeffington to build a baseball stadium there. So he’s going to need some laws changed, too.

As if all this Orwellian accounting isn’t bad enough, Jim Skeffington is doing all this under the ruse that the people need to save minor league baseball in Rhode Island. Nonsense! The PawSox were a perfectly fine franchise – if not a model organization – before Jim Skeffington came along. The only thing endangering minor league baseball in Rhode Island is Jim Skeffington’s willingness to move the team to Massachusetts.

It’s his team now and, Ben Mondor be damned, he can do with it what he pleases. And I don’t begrudge him for wanting the best patch of dirt in the state. But I’m of the mind that Jim Skeffington needs Rhode Island a lot more than Rhode Island needs a minor league baseball team, especially given that Skeffington says he’s in it for all the right reasons and it will cost us a slice of the most prime real estate we’ll ever sell.

Let’s call this guy’s bluff. At the very least, let’s not treat him like he’s a savior while he rakes us over the coals. The PawSox will be plenty fun to go see in Massachusetts, and we’ll all love talking about how they used to be here. Jim Skeffington, on the other hand, will go down in Rhode Island history as the cruel lawyer who took our team to Massachusetts. If Skeffington is really in it for the right reasons, then it is the state that should be negotiating from a position of strength.

Today: Fight for $15 in Providence, nationwide


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Fast food workers, restaurant servers, victims of wage theft, victims of police abuse, labor unions and elected officials will march together in Providence today in a national day of action in the Fight for $15, a nationwide effort to improve working conditions for fast food workers, and others.

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The local march starts at 4pm, at the Grants Block, 260 Westminster St., and will proceed through downtown to Burnside Park. Hotel workers are also holding a separate action today in front of the Hilton Providence at 5pm.

Speakers at the larger action will include Jo-Ann Gesterling, who led this action at a Wendy’s in Warwick, Malchus Mills, a DARE organizer, Mike Araujo, of the Restaurant Opportunities Center who is helping waitstaff win a higher wage this year and Providence City Councilors Luis Aponte and Mary Kay Harris. And while the group is marching in solidarity with workers around the country, they’ve also got a few local demands.

According to a press release from Jobs With Justice:

“The coalition seeks to pass a city ordinance that would require all companies getting tax breaks in Providence to:

  • Pay workers a living wage of at least $15/hr, provide paid sick days, health benefits, and fair, predictable schedules
  • Follow the First Source ordinance by hiring residents of Providence, prioritize hiring people from high poverty neighborhoods, and make sure that people working these jobs have a pathway to a real career by using apprenticeship programs
  • AND, to set up a community board with the power to approve/disapprove projects, take back money if companies aren’t living up to what they say they’ll do, and negotiate the construction of projects community members identify as needs, such as affordable housing, or fixing up an abandoned lot into a park”

Mother Teresa demands you die suffering


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MotherTeresa_094When Mother Teresa appeared on Firing Line in conversation with conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr., she told the following story in response to Buckley’s question, “Why did God permit pain?”

“Once I met a lady who was in terrible, terrible pain of cancer and I told her, ‘This is but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.’ And the lady, though she was in great pain, she joined her hands together and said, ‘Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.’”

Mother Teresa, the audience and Buckley all laughed at this story, reveling in the suffering that their God had inflicted on this woman. For Mother Teresa and her adoring followers, suffering is seen as a purifying gift. To them, the suffering of others has become fetishized, the pain filled deaths of our loved ones a spectacle through which God reveals himself.

Those who do not believe in a God that doles out the gift of soul cleansing suffering reject the terrible “mercies” of Mother Teresa, yet our rejection of her wisdom does little to deter her followers from imposing their views on our lives, dictating how we are expected to live our lives and die our deaths.

During last week’s House hearing on the Lila Manfield Sapinsley Compassionate Care Act, a bill that would allow those facing a terminal illness filled with suffering and loss of dignity to end their lives, opposition was almost entirely organized by the Catholic Church and Barth E. Bracy of RI Right to Life.

Bracy admitted to organizing the opposition to this bill when he said to the committee, “We’ve submitted written testimony from many of the people who have testified, we submitted 23 copies around four o’clock…” Some testifying against the bill also regularly testify with Bracy on reproductive rights issues.

Representative Arthur Corvese, a conservative Catholic social warrior famous for the Corvese amendment, an eleventh hour addendum to the now defunct “civil unions” bill that essentially allowed anyone to discriminate against couples who joined in civil unions based on their religious beliefs, was quick to tell Bracy, “I think it’s obvious, Barth, you and I go back a long way, that this bill and others like it across the country are basically nothing more than the philosophical outgrowth of the continuing culture of death that began in 1972. Where abortion kills the young these bills provide a rationale to kill off the old.”

Too often it seems as if Corvese sees his job, legislating in the General Assembly, as little more than a way to impose his Catholic theology upon the entire state. This is a Catholic theology that sees suffering as something to be embraced, not avoided.

Mother Teresa saw suffering as a way to bring the terminally ill closer to God. “It depends, sometimes, what is in their own hearts. If they pray, I think [suffering] is very easy to accept because the proof of prayer is always a clean heart. And a clean heart can see God…”

Father Christopher Mahar, Rector of the Seminary of Our Lady of Providence, seems to agree with Mother Teresa, saying that, “…at the end of life, there are many beautiful choices to make. Choices to reconcile with loved ones, choices to reconcile with God and prepare for eternal life, if one believes in that.”

Representative Robert Lancia was inspired by Mahar’s comments to ask about Pope John Paul II, who, at the end of his life, says Lancia, “could have chosen to end his life.” This is an odd claim, given that assisted suicide is legally forbidden in Italy and that the Catholic Church is against death with dignity legislation worldwide. Of course, Lancia was really seeking to give Mahar a chance to expound on Catholic theology in regards to assisted suicide.

Mahar brought up Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio. According to Mahar, John Paul II was “always a proponent of caring for people not just based on religious principles, but also upon reason.” This is a bit disingenuous, since what John Paul said is that reason, by itself, is incomplete without faith. In other words, reason by itself is not sufficient, religious faith is a requirement.

This is a religious idea, not shared by everyone. Even many of those who embrace the idea of the necessity of faith do not believe that it follows that suffering must be endured and death must always come naturally. This is not even the belief of all Catholics. 52 percent of Catholics polled in Colorado support death with dignity laws like the one under consideration in Rhode Island.

“I was just so impressed by Pope John Paul and how he ended his life,” said Representative Lancia, embracing the story of his Pope’s heroic ordeal, “It was such a positive. When he could have ended his life but didn’t, he went through the suffering and ended in a positive, dignified way.”

“If you come to our house here in Washington,” said Mother Teresa to William Buckley in 1989, “You would be surprised to see on the suffering faces the beautiful smiles. Through the terrible suffering they are content.”

Maybe for the believers, Mother Teresa’s words ring true.

But what of the rest of us?

 

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