January 22, 2016 – RI Future

January 22, 2016January 23, 2016

“Zero-emission” cars running on fracked gas

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In an editorial this week in the ProJo, Janet Coit and Marion Gold come to the rescue of embattled Governor Gina Raimondo. Janet Coit is Director of Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management and Marion Gold is Commissioner of the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources. Both serve at the pleasure of the governor and whatever strengths, independence is not one of them.

Governor Raimondo has troubling connections to Wall Street going back to her days as Rhode Island treasurer. Here are just two of a recent flurry of publications questioning the pension fund reforms that she pushed through in those days:

One of Governor Raimondo’s key supporters is John Arnold, a former Enron trader who went on to found a profitable hedge fund.

The irony of the Coit-Gold ProJo editorial is that it’s based on Enron-style accounting, used in this case to hyper-inflate Governor Raimondo’s “visionary” contributions to the climate change battle.

In their editorial Coit and Gold mention that RI ranks number four on the State Energy Efficiency Scorecard put out by ACEEE. You do not have to know how this ranking is produced to understand that it is pure bunk. Just look at what the Energy Information Adminstration web site has to say about Rhode Island:

Natural gas fueled 95% of Rhode Island’s net electricity generation in 2014.
Rhode Island is the second-lowest emitter of carbon dioxide among all states. Like the lowest emitter, Vermont, Rhode Island does not have any coal-fired electricity generation.

Natural gas is mostly methane. It is a greenhouse gas that is about 100 times as potent as CO₂. Methane is burned and escapes unburnt to generate Rhode Island electricity, but we put all of those climate threatening emissions on our neighbors’ tabs.

There is more about the ACEEE rating of Rhode Island as fourth in the nation that is disconcerting. Scan the ACEEE web site and you quickly discover that they mention EPA’s Clean Power Plan again and again. There are some minor problems with this plan:

Obama’s “Clean Power Plan” is a huge gift to the methane (“Clean Energy”) industry — we’ll show you how in a minute. And guess who’s big in methane? Big oil, of course […]

The plan fits perfectly with Obama’s general practice of saying one thing and doing the opposite.

Director Coit is one of the members of the Energy Facility Siting Board that is currently deliberating the fate of the new fracked-gas power plant with the Orwellian name Clear River Energy Center, Invenergy’s plan to sacrifice Burrillville to unfettered greed.

Coit is publicly on record with her support of methane:

With her so-called pragmatism, doesn’t Director Coit not sound remarkably like House Speaker Mattiello?

In the Coit-Gold editorial there is not a word about Clear River, nor about the natural gas that already produces 95% of RI’s electrical power. There is no mention that Governor Gina Ms Wall Street Raimondo is on record supporting fracked gas. That silence must be “because there is a fire wall,” as Director Coit said in the preliminary hearing of the siting board last week. How convenient!

As the Clear River theater of the siting board progresses, we might hear about the CO₂ emissions the power plant will produce in Rhode Island. What we will not hear from the Governor and her allies on the board is to whom we will charge the fugitive methane. Most of that escapes at the wellheads in Pennsylvania and along the pipelines and from the compressor stations. Nor will we hear about the suffering it causes to the people on the frontlines in Burrillville and across the globe. None of that, but we’ll follow the statutes, because we are a nation of laws.

Indeed, all of the Enron-style accounting is perfectly legal, but, dear reader, you surely do not believe any more than I do, that Mother Nature is impressed.

There is yet another accounting trick buried in the Coit-Gold editorial: the Zero-Emission Vehicle Action Plan. True, we need electric cars and they have no tail pipes that emits CO₂. Still, the electric energy such cars use has to be generated somewhere. If it comes from renewables we win; if we generate it with fracked gas, we loose. The latter is of course exactly what will happen if we let Invenergy build the Clear River Energy Center.

We are constructing a 30 megawatt wind farm off Block Island and are talking about a frack-gas facility with 30 times that capacity in Burrillville. Accounting gimmicks devoid of physics may fool the people, the editor of the the ProJo and our hapless leaders, but none of that will change the laws of nature.

Update after the original post: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from National Grid has finally made up his mind and now supports the Clear River Energy Center. He uses his same old arguments about choke points and price spikes. That was none of that last winter is but an irrelevant detail: As New England freezes, natural gas stays cheap.

January 22, 2016

Are the documents Phil Eil is requesting from the DEA public?

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If you follow Phil Eil on social media you’ve surely heard about his public records request of the DEA. Eil is working on a book about Paul Volkman, a doctor who was convicted to four consecutive life sentences for dealing drugs under the guise of writing medicine prescriptions.

Eil has requested from the DEA all the evidence presented at the trial, he says he’s requested more than 200 pieces of evidence that the DEA has interpreted as 15,000 pages of documents. The trial ended in May of 2011 and Eil filed his FOIA request in February, 2012.

Is Eil getting the run-around from the feds? He told me an FBI agent subpoenaed him as a witness during the trial and he wonders if that was a ploy to keep him from covering the trial as a journalist. Or is he requesting documents that aren’t public? Much of the evidence consists of people’s medical records, which I don’t believe should be public records simply because they were used as evidence in a trial. Or is it just good old fashioned feet-dragging on the part of the government? The Obama Administration doesn’t have a great track record on complying with public records request.

It could be a little bit of all three….

January 22, 2016

Teriyaki House surrenders to direct action, pays workers

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Workers declared victory today after Teriyaki House management finally gave into the pressure of direct action and paid their employees the money the US Department of Labor stipulated.

Teriyaki House workers and their supporters once again protested outside the restaurant in Downtown Providence during lunch to demand that the restaurant pay its employees thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. During the last protest, just before Christmas, Teriyaki House management and lawyers agreed to pay Fidel de Leon, Emilio Garcia, Vicente Lobos and Pedro Gomez their back wages (and damages) as stipulated by the US Department of Labor, by January 22.

As the workers and supporter, organized by Fuerza Laboral and RI Jobs with Justice (JWJ) marched in front of the restaurant on Friday, dissuading customers from eating at the restaurant, the manager of Teriyaki House came out and discussed surrender terms with JWJ executive director Michael Araujo. After Araujo spoke with Teriyaki House’s lawyer on the phone, the restaurant manager headed directly to the US Department of Labor offices downtown and paid.

Minutes later, the unpaid employees, who had been fighting for what they have been owed for years, emerged holding checks. It was a surprising and joyous end to a long and difficult battle for fair pay.

This was the fourth demonstration at Teriyaki House over this issue. For years workers were not being paid minimum wage or overtime for 70-85 hour work weeks. You can see the demonstration and its successful conclusion in the first video below. In the second video, Heiny Maldonado of Fuerza Laboral talks about the power and necessity of direct action against a system that does not empower workers against their employers. Keally Cieslik provided the English translation in both videos.

January 22, 2016

Mass incarceration creates a permanent underclass

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“The country’s poverty rate would
have been more than 20 percent
lower between 1980 and 2004
without mass incarceration.”
Villanova University study

Like most U.S. adults, I have violated the nation’s drug laws.

The year was 1971. A freshman at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus, I began smoking marijuana with two of my three roommates. As police did not arrest drug offenders on campus, I never worried about being jailed.

Not so for Clifford Runoalds, an African American who was arrested for failure to cooperate with prosecutors. They wanted him to testify against a defendant in the infamous Hearne, Texas “drug bust” of 2000. A rogue police task force arrested 28 residents on the word of only one informant, on drugs, who lied about his African-American neighbors.

Runoalds was innocent. The drug deals never happened. Still, he was jailed for a month before prosecutors released him. As Michelle Alexander explains in her extraordinary book, The New Jim Crow, Runoalds was technically free—but his life was decimated. Jail time resulted in the loss of his job, his car, his apartment and his furniture.

Moreover, Runoalds was grieving the death of his eighteen-month-old daughter. Handcuffed at her funeral, which was about to begin, police rejected his pleas to say goodbye to his daughter.

Runoalds is not alone. Systemic discrimination begins with traffic stops. National data indicates blacks and Latinos are three times more likely to be searched than whites. Pedestrian stop-and-frisk is far worse. The New York Police Department frisked 545,000 people in 2008: 85 percent were black; eight percent were white.

Prosecutors and judges amplify this discrimination. According to Human Rights Watch, at least fifteen states sentenced black drug offenders at 20 to 57 times the rate of white drug offenders. In addition, the U.S. Sentencing Commission documented that, from 2007 to 2011, blacks received sentences 19.5 percent longer than whites.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics projected that one in three black males born in 2001 would be sent to prison during their lifetimes; for Latinos, one in six; for whites, one in seventeen.

The War on Drugs is an excuse for mass incarceration of black and brown people. SWAT teams do not descend on college campuses. Police do not target the homes of white suburbanites. No, they target poor minority neighborhoods. But as Alexander’s extensive documentation indicates, “The notion that most illegal drug use and sales happens in the ghetto is pure fiction.”

Poor minorities are swept up into the criminal justice system in numbers whites will never face. Those arrested are often unable to pay bail. So they languish in a cage. Faced with many months or perhaps years in jail awaiting trial, even innocent people accept unjust plea bargains. Many serve long sentences on probation—just one misstep from prison.

In addition to 2.3 million incarcerated, more than 7 million people are currently on probation or parole, many for drug or other nonviolent offenses. The fact that minorities are vastly overrepresented in this system means, as Alexander emphasizes, they constitute a new caste, a permanent underclass.

Under Jim Crow, separate but “equal” treatment was legal. This systemic racism supposedly ended in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. A new Jim Crow has arisen, however, with discriminatory effects even more powerful than the blatant racism of an earlier era.

Challenges to the system’s racism is now barred by court decisions. Alexander concludes, “The legal rules adopted by the Supreme Court guarantee that those who find themselves locked up and permanently locked out due to the drug war are overwhelmingly black and brown.”

Like many young white men, I smoked marijuana. Unlike massive numbers of young black men, few of us with white skin lost our freedom and our families. We did not lose our jobs, our apartments, our cars. Nor should we—but neither should drug users of color.

January 22, 2016January 22, 2016

NARAL demotes Raimondo to ‘mixed choice’ on repro rights

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NARAL Pro-Choice America (NARAL) rated Governor Gina Raimondo as “mixed-choice” in their recent report, a step down from her previous rating as “pro-choice.” Raimondo had run as a pro-choice candidate, earning the endorsement of Planned Parenthood Votes RI PAC and Emily’s List.

In Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States, NARAL rates each of the states with an over all grade. Rhode Island received a failing grade of F. Massachusetts and New Hampshire received a C+, Vermont and Maine a B+ and Connecticut an A-. Rhode Island’s failing grade makes it, to borrow a favorite word of Speaker Nicholas Mattiello’s, an “outlier.”

The report notes that “Rhode Island enacted a measure that restricts insurance coverage of abortion in the state insurance exchange” in 2015, a reference to Raimondo’s behind the scenes budget shenanigans that ultimately resulted in an estimated 9000 people losing their abortion coverage under Obamacare. This story was covered here on RI Future first, and received scant attention elsewhere.

NARAL, a non-profit that engages in political action and advocacy efforts to oppose restrictions and expand access to abortion, has three ratings for governors and legislative bodies: pro-choice, mixed choice and anti-choice. Both the Rhode Island House of Representatives and the Rhode Island Senate were rated anti-choice.

All three Democratic candidates for president are running on strong pro-choice platforms. Hillary Clinton recently won the endorsement of Planned Parenthood and Bernie Sanders called for an expansion of Planned Parenthood funding, Raimondo’s mixed-choice rating puts her badly out of step with the national Democratic Party.

As of this writing a request for comment from the governor’s office has gone unanswered.

January 22, 2016January 22, 2016

Trio of common sense gun bills introduced in the House

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Last year, when Speaker Nicholas Mattiello brought the legislative season to an abrupt end, he said that the bills that did not come to the floor were “not very consequential” and “just not as important” as the legislation he had dealt with and passed. Among the bills that Mattiello deemed inconsequential and unimportant were three that dealt with guns.

Those three bills have just been reintroduced in the House.

H7199 criminalizes the manufacture, import, possession, purchase, sale or transfer of any ammunition feeding device capable of accepting more than ten rounds. Two years ago, when this bill was first introduced, Jerry Belair, president of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence asked the following question, “Rhode Island law limits the number of rounds to five when hunting deer. Rhode Island law limits the number of rounds to three when hunting ducks. If we can limit the number of rounds in a firearm to protect deer and ducks, how can we not limit the number of rounds to protect our children and citizens?”

H7243 provides that only peace officers and persons approved by the school authorities for the purposes of educational instruction may carry firearms or other weapons on school grounds. A similar bill was introduced last year and died in committee. Apparently the idea that someone might bring a gun into a school in Rhode Island without the knowledge of school administrators does not bother our legislature.

H7283 prohibits any person convicted of a misdemeanor offense under §12-29-2 (a crime involving domestic violence) from purchasing, owning, transporting, carrying, or possessing any firearm. A similar bill submitted last year died in committee after Frank Saccoccio of the Second Amendment Coalition successfully mischaracterized the bill as a gun grab in both the House and Senate committee meetings.

Last year a poll indicated that 80 percent of Rhode Islanders want to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, yet when it came time for action, the General Assembly, under the leadership of Speaker Mattiello deemed the bills above “not very consequential” and “just not as important.”

What has to change in Rhode Island before common sense gun legislation can be passed? Mattiello has an A+ (100 percent) rating with the National Rifle Association (NRA). Senate President M Teresa Paiva-Weed has an A (93 percent) rating from the NRA.