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Business & Tech – RI Future http://www.rifuture.org Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis Sat, 29 Oct 2016 16:03:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.25 Jeff Grybowski: GOP corporate lawyer turned CEO climate hero http://www.rifuture.org/jeff-grybowski-ceo-climate-hero/ http://www.rifuture.org/jeff-grybowski-ceo-climate-hero/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2016 01:11:40 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=67287 Continue reading "Jeff Grybowski: GOP corporate lawyer turned CEO climate hero"

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Jeff Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind.
Jeff Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind.

Jeff Grybowski didn’t set out to save the world from climate change. The CEO of Deepwater Wind, which just completed construction of the nation’s first offshore wind farm, wasn’t trying to be the first in the United States to commercially harness the offshore breeze and, in the process, potentially create a new sustainable industry for his home state.

“I freely admit that I didn’t know anything about energy before I started this,” he said, during an interview at Deepwater Wind’s downtown Providence office. “I didn’t think anything of it. I had no opinion.”

The Cumberland native and Brown grad was a corporate attorney in Providence, fresh off serving as chief of staff during conservative Republican Don Carcieri’s first term as governor, when a group from New Jersey approached him about the idea.

“It was the middle of 2008, that summer, when they called me and asked me how do we get a permit to build an offshore wind farm in Rhode Island,” he recalled. “I was doing regulatory law and we all started scratching our heads. But we were lawyers and we wanted to help answer the question.”

The process

Grybowski knew a thing or two about the regulatory process, both from his legal practice and his tenure in the executive branch at the State House, and that proved to be the name of the game.

“For offshore wind in the U.S. it’s never been about construction,” he told me. “It’s always been about the regulations and the legal structure that allows it to happen. Obviously we build things that are as big and as complex as an offshore wind farm. The offshore oil and gas, that stuff is much bigger. The question is can we as a society agree how to build these things, where to build them and what steps you need to take in order to get, let’s call it, community sign off. It was the newness of it, that was the biggest obstacle.”

The Block Island wind farm had to win approval from more than 20 federal, state and local government agencies before construction could start, he said.

“It was great that the U.S. Department of Energy says we think offshore wind is a huge resource and we should develop it,” he said, “but the reality is that really wasn’t as important to us as whether the town of New Shoreham thought it was a good idea.”

Navigating the regulatory process, Grybowski said, is Deepwater Wind’s “core competency.”

He explained, “You need to take it to not only all the agencies of the federal government and people who need to say yes, or who have a veto, and then you bring it down to the state government, all the different agencies, and then down to the local government. And all across that chain you have stakeholders who have the ability to influence the agencies. It’s a huge matrix. You’ve got to find a way to get yourself through that matrix of agencies and stakeholders, and that’s what I did.”

An energy transformation

Along the way, Grybowski also went from being the company’s legal counsel to being the company’s CEO. Eight years after the project was first conceived, Deepwater Wind just finished construction of the first offshore wind farm in the United States. The 5-unit array will produce 30 megawatts of power. Enough, Grybowski said, to power 17,000 average U.S. households.

It’s a relatively small amount of electricity, but Grybowski thinks it’s a big step in what he called an “energy transformation” away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy sources.

“I think offshore wind is about to become a huge component of this energy transformation,” he said. “As a native Rhode Islander I might have been quicker than others to recognize how ideally suited this state was because of our proximity to this enormous resource and because of some of the logistical advantages we have.”

It’s an obvious opportunity for the Ocean State, he thinks.

“We don’t generate a lot of resources locally,” Grybowski explained. “Coal gets shipped in. Gas gets piped in. We’re the end of the line from an energy perspective. But that’s one of the brilliant things about offshore wind for this region. We’re the beginning of the pipeline here because we control the resource. It’s right off our coast. It’s the single biggest natural resource that we have to produce energy in this region.”

The future for offshore wind

Deepwater Wind is already planning its second project. The company has leased 200 miles of ocean about 15 miles southeast of Block Island that could support 200 turbines, compared to the first farm’s five – or 1,000 megawatts compared to just 30. He thinks there is five times that much potential wind farm energy in the vicinity.

“There’s the capacity for 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind out there,” he said. “That’s just in the area that’s been identified in the near term, what could be developed in the next decade or so. That’s certainly not the limit of what we can do.”

Collectively, all the power plant in New England currently generates some 30,000 megawatts of power, Grybowski said. The northeast can expect offshore wind to meet a more substantial portion of its energy needs when it goes even farther offshore.

“That cable really isn’t that expensive,” he said. “It’s copper and plastic, so a little bit more really doesn’t matter that much. The other difference is it becomes deeper the further out you get so the steel structures that you have to use to put these on the ocean floor get taller and heavier. The equipment that you need to install it becomes bigger. Part of the science of the business is where is that sweet spot. Where is the sweet spot of the benefit of the wind versus the downside of the extra costs of getting to that wind.”

Grybowski added, “It’s a lot like the offshore oil business, forget about the resource. It’s the same kind of analysis we go through.”

Much of the offshore wind industry, he noted, is based on the offshore oil and gas industry. Deepwater Wind President Kris Van Beek relocated from the Netherlands to Providence. “He transitioned from offshore oil and gas to offshore wind and he moved to Rhode Island to do that,” Grybowski said. “He knows how to build things in the middle of the ocean.”

Rhode Island, energy exporter

It’s part of the energy transformation he spoke about.

“Unfortunately, the change from a micro-perspective seems really slow but I think the change is pretty inevitable,” Grybowski said. “It’s inevitable that, here in the Northeast, we are going to be building a lot of offshore wind in the coming decade. It’s impossible for us to meet our energy needs, and doubly impossible to address our energy needs and address climate change in a meaningful way, without building a significant amount of offshore wind.”

He was quite confident offshore wind would help us get the Ocean State to sustainability, boasting, “I think Rhode Island – for the first time in, maybe, forever – is going to be an energy exporter.”

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PawSox are still looking for money and one fan is not happy http://www.rifuture.org/pawsox-one-fan-not-happy/ http://www.rifuture.org/pawsox-one-fan-not-happy/#comments Sun, 26 Jun 2016 05:12:44 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=64815 Continue reading "PawSox are still looking for money and one fan is not happy"

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Lucchino
Lucchino

He’s a lifelong unionized worker, has gone to PawSox games for the last four decades, and knows cities intimately as a former telephone worker. Dan Murphy also went to every Listening Tour stop last summer when owner Larry Lucchino was trying to get a new stadium built by the taxpayers in Providence as one of the leaders of the grassroots resistance, vociferous in his rejection of the proposed deal then and now still opposed to public funding for renovations of private buildings, be it McCoy Stadium or the Superman building in downtown Providence.

Recently the pre-bid press conference was held at McCoy Stadium for “proposals from qualified firms to prepare a master plan study (the “Study”) of the McCoy Stadium facility and surrounding area located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The intent of the Study is to develop a master plan for significant repairs, upgrades, system replacements and/or improvements to McCoy Stadium and the surrounding area. The State of Rhode Island has regularly financed capital improvements to McCoy Stadium.” This comes more than a year after the late Jim Skeffington and Lucchino told the public a study had already been done and found that renovations for McCoy were too costly.

Dan Murphy
Murphy

At a moment when bankruptcy is being floated in regards to the capital city, school buildings are in abject shambles, the birthing unit of a Pawtucket hospital is due to be closed, and unemployment and under-employment still high, Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien and state leaders are seriously considering this in two different instances. Murphy has read through the bid solicitation document for the PawSox and remains unimpressed.

“You can’t buy it with capitalism and pay for it with socialism, it doesn’t work that way,” he said. “If the state owns a piece of it and it looks like a good deal, then it’s worth considering. Other than that, no. To make rich people richer? No way! Neither one of those facilities is life-essential, like a hospital or a police-fire station combination or something to that effect. This is just a stadium and its just a building and they’re not going to make anyone any richer except for the people who own them.”

Click the Player Below to Listen to More of This Interview!

Is there any indication that Lucchino has any interest in keeping the team in Pawtucket for at least the next 25 years? “Oh God no. They’re shopping around, they’re holding their cards close to the vest. I think this whole song and dance they’re doing now with they’re supposedly rebuilding the trust and all that crap? They’re not looking to do that. They’re looking at the fans that go to a certain amount of games every year, and you can count on them like clockwork, they’re not bothering with them, just like they didn’t bother with us last year. They assume we’ll keep coming and if we don’t we’ll be replaced with the new hipster-type fans.”

Murphy’s years of going to the PawSox games have helped him learn about the neighborhood surrounding McCoy intimately. “I think their only investment in the community surrounding McCoy Stadium would be to level it and to build it into something that they want. That’s about it. If you recall when we were putting up with those dog-and-pony shows last summer, [team president Charles] Steinberg never really had anything good to say about the neighborhood around McCoy, he saw that as a negative, almost like it was a ghetto or a slum or something. It’s a lot of three-decker houses that were very well-kept and that’s a very clean neighborhood. Walk around it sometime! It’s a very clean neighborhood. But that whole neighborhood is going to get the kiss of death if Lucchino and his boys get their way.”

What is Lucchino like in comparison to late owner Ben Mondor? “Ben Mondor brought almost like a warmth, a trust, a friendship, a guy that you would sit down with and have a beer, even though his social and financial stature is way different than your own. He was a good guy. That’s the way he was looked at and people supported what he wanted to do because he never wanted to bring that stadium above the people who went there. He wanted to keep the team in Pawtucket, he wanted to keep the games being played there, he wanted to stay in that stadium if at all possible. He was your typical Rhode Islander, even though I believe he was from Canada originally,” he says.

“Lucchino, his history has been just build a stadium and flip it or rebuild a stadium and flip it. He’s not a baseball man, he’s a businessman and the same thing with his whole crew with him, his yes-men.”

“I don’t think they are above moving [the team] right when [construction] is starting to happen. It’s strictly business.”

 

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Wage theft law gets teeth http://www.rifuture.org/wage-theft-law-gets-teeth/ http://www.rifuture.org/wage-theft-law-gets-teeth/#respond Mon, 20 Jun 2016 10:19:28 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=64690 2015-12-22 Teriyaki House 20
Wage theft action at Teriyaki House last year

Wage theft in Rhode Island may be a much bigger problem than robbery.  And, as Steve Ahlquist previously reported, even high profile violators may be getting away with a slap on the wrist with workers left with little recourse.

Thanks to a bill introduced by Representative Shekarchi and Senator Nesselbush, now passed by the House and Senate, that will change upon the Governor’s signature.

In written testimony supporting the bill, the Rhode Island chapter of the Progressive Democrats of America (RIPDA) summarized how the bill makes a difference:

The bill improves the current law in several ways.  First, in redefining “employee,” the protected class is broadened to generally include “independent contractors” (minus the groups that have been specifically excluded).  Second, it provides for the State to suspend a non-compliant business’ license.  Third, it allows employees to recover double damages and attorneys’ fees from a wage-stealing employer.

Not only does this bill deter unscrupulous employers from stealing from employees with suspension of a business’ license, but, for those who are deprived of their rightful wages, the bill gives a real solution.  Instead of merely filing with the Department of Labor and Training, employees will be able to sue directly and recover twice as much as was stolen from them.  Attorneys are encouraged to take meritorious cases — if successful, the employee’s lawyer is entitled to be paid by the employer.

The most financially vulnerable among us are targets of wage theft.  The biggest challenge remains:  Employees need to be aware of their rights, and have the courage to seek legal help when standing up to unethical and manipulative bosses.

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Avon Theater owner Richard Dulgarian on Thayer Street parking meters http://www.rifuture.org/avon-theater-richard-dulgarian-thayer-street-parking-meters/ http://www.rifuture.org/avon-theater-richard-dulgarian-thayer-street-parking-meters/#comments Mon, 30 May 2016 23:28:52 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=63825 Continue reading "Avon Theater owner Richard Dulgarian on Thayer Street parking meters"

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Parking meter avonIf you have been up to Thayer Street within the past few months you probably have noticed a series of new parking meters being installed on the roadway. These new meters are part of an effort to raise monies for the city that have been wildly unpopular.

There are several issues that are coming up for patrons as they try to visit the stores. First, the meter system has proven to be confusing and not as user-friendly as hoped. Second, the maximum time limit for parking is in fact far too short for anyone who wants to go out to eat at Andrea’s Restaurant, have a few drinks at the bars, or see a movie at the Avon.

And that in turn leads to the third problem. The meters, which were billed by the city as a way to bring in more customers, are in reality chasing away business. Storefronts have been vacated and left that way for spans of time that have not been seen before. Grosses are down for businesses. One of the longest-lasting Providence shopping centers in its history which has brought in a consistent line of high-spending clientele is effectively being given a slow and painful death sentence.

Richard Dulgarian is the owner of several properties on College Hill and the Avon Theater with his brother Kenny. His family has been doing business on the street for decades and has started this petition online calling for the removal of the parking meters. He sat down for an interview with me and explained his consternation.

“First they did one street, then another street, then they came up with parking pay stations. It’s happening over the last year, I think, and every time one section goes in, it was affecting my business, it would go down a little bit. You know, it’s like peeling off a band-aid one little bit at a time, you keep thinking that was the last tug,” he says.

“It doesn’t make it pleasant. Next time you’re thinking of coming here, he’s going to remember parking meters didn’t work, he had to find a merchant to help him out, and he’s going to go somewhere else. These things are not friendly and our business has gone down. Not just ours, other businesses on the street, they’re all reporting their grosses are off up to 40%, some more, and how can you sustain that? We’re seeing vacancies like we’ve never seen before. I’ve been on the street forty years and, I’m not saying a business never went out of business, but within a couple of days something took its place. Now we’ve got eleven empty storefronts, last time I checked, and no one is coming in.”

“This administration has destroyed in a year what it took 50-70 years to build up!”

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Corporate Reform Coalition takes on Vanguard Group via social media http://www.rifuture.org/corporate-reform-coalition-takes-on-vanguard-group-via-social-media/ http://www.rifuture.org/corporate-reform-coalition-takes-on-vanguard-group-via-social-media/#comments Tue, 24 May 2016 10:47:13 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=63584 Continue reading "Corporate Reform Coalition takes on Vanguard Group via social media"

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Last week, the Vanguard Group, a major investment management firm, thought it was being hip and trendy by opening its Twitter feed for an Ask Me Anything session wherein clients could post public questions. This did not go as they hoped, with users turning the opportunity into an effort to promote transparency and corporate political spending disclosures.

The Public Citizen press office said:

More than 65,000 current and prospective clients have written to Vanguard asking the fund’s leadership to change its voting habits and support disclosure at public companies. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates for corporate political spending, shareholders deserve to know how their investments are being spent, especially if these dollars are going to politics.

Rhode Island currently has two major clients with the firm. The first, TIAA-CREF, handles the retirement of some public employees, such as professors at Rhode Island College. The other client, CollegeBound Fund, handles savings of those who want to help build some capital to be used to fund a later academic career.

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Letter in response to previous inquiries from investors.
Letter in response to previous inquiries from investors.

So to better understand this, Rachel Curley, who was involved with this effort, sat down with an interview with me to help better explain the cause and, more importantly, what local investors connected to the Vanguard Fund might try.

Rachel Curley
Rachel Curley

If you like my reporting,please consider contributing to my Patreon!
If you like my reporting,please consider contributing to my Patreon!
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Questions raised about Invenergy’s Clear River Energy Center in Burrillville http://www.rifuture.org/questions-raised-about-invenergys-clear-river-energy-center-in-burrillville/ http://www.rifuture.org/questions-raised-about-invenergys-clear-river-energy-center-in-burrillville/#respond Thu, 24 Mar 2016 18:13:40 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=60713 Kingston, Rhode Island, March 22, 2016 — On October 29 of last year, Invenergy Thermal Development LLC filed an application with the Rhode Island Energy Facility Siting Board to construct a fossil fuel —mostly fracked gas— power plant in Burrillville, RI, the so-called Clear River Energy Center (CREC).  At its open meeting on January 29, the siting board excluded numerous groups from formal participation in the review of the CREC proposal.  Among those groups are the Burrillville Land Trust, the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats and an array of grassroots organizations including Fossil Free Rhode Island.

Invenergy-30-25Last year, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved a build-out of the compressor station in Burrillville which started in the fall of 2015 and is part of an interstate pipeline expansion called the Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) Project.  This project has been highly controversial.  In New York, the expanded pipeline would pass within 105 feet of critical infrastructure at the Indian Point nuclear power plant.

In response to this situation, last month Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York directed four New York state agencies to perform an independent safety risk analysis and asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to halt construction of the pipeline until this review is completed.

Invenergy’s CREC proposal, which capitalizes on the AIM pipeline expansion, raises serious concerns about the cumulative impact of these various projects on public health in Rhode Island.

Last week, in an email to Directors Janet Coit of the RI Department of Environmental Management and Nicolle Alexander-Scott of the RI Department of Health, University of Rhode Island physics professor Peter Nightingale raised a number of questions about the cumulative impacts of fracked gas infrastructure developments on public health in Burrillville, RI.  Among these are Spectra Energy’s AIM Project, Invenergy’s CREC, and Access Northeast, a project of Eversource Energy, National Grid and Spectra Energy.  In addition, on December 1 of last year, TransCanada applied to the Energy Facility Siting Board to build yet another gas-fired power plant, Ocean State Power Phase III, in Burrillville.  TransCanada seems to have abandoned the project for now, but who knows for how long?

Nightingale wonders:  “How can a modeling done at average temperature and humidity conditions capture the true episodic nature of the impact of CREC and the other nearby pollution sources on public health?  Human health is highly susceptible to episodes and these are smoothed out by taking averages.  Temperature, humidity and sunlight fluctuate wildly in Rhode Island and, due to climate change, they are expected to vary increasingly fiercely during the lifetime of the proposed Clear River Energy Center.”  Nightingale refers in this context to research by Hansen and Sato that found a more than ten-fold increase in weather extremes that occurred during the last 45 years, a time span comparable to the expected life time of the power plant Invenergy is proposing.

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As part of the regulatory process of the siting board, Invenergy submitted a report produced by the ESS Group, an environmental consulting group, that claims to take into account the polluting background effect of other sources in Rhode Island near Burrillville.  Data required for this was, as the ESS study mentions, supplied by the Department of Environmental Management.  Obviously, no information is available yet for the new situation that was created by the 2015 compressor station build-out that is part of the AIM Project.

The environmental impact study performed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before it approved the AIM Project pipeline expansion last year lists Providence County as “moderate nonattainment,” which means that the air quality is below the standard required by the Clean Air Act.  The same  federal study shows that the noise level of Spectra Energy’s compressor station was above the legal limit even before the last build-out started.

In addition to the public health risks posed by CREC, it is clear that building a 1-gigawatt fossil fuel power plant in Burrillville will be a serious impediment to the growth of green energy in Rhode Island and neighboring states.  As Marie Schopac of Charlestown, a member of Fossil Free RI, remarked: “The financial investment in the wind farm will be all for naught if a gigawatt fracked gas power plant is built. Rhode Island needs a coordinated energy policy.”

Clearly, all of the above raises serious questions about the validity of the assessment of the impact of the newly proposed power station.

Hansen’s latest: Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms Video Abstract
Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions

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NORAD celebration private—for pooh-bahs only http://www.rifuture.org/norad-celebration-private-for-pooh-bahs-only/ http://www.rifuture.org/norad-celebration-private-for-pooh-bahs-only/#respond Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:00:08 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=59802 Governor Gina Raimondo’s office issued a press release with this title: “State, Congressional Leaders Hail 6th Consecutive Record Breaking Year for Auto Imports at Quonset’s Port of Davisville.” This was the reason for today’s celebration at North Atlantic Distribution, Inc. (NORAD) attended at Quonset by the governor and our congressional delegation.

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As part of the “FANG needs YOU: To protest Governor Raimondo to confront Governor Raimondo” campaign, I went to the NORAD event to confront our governor about her support for fossil fuels.

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When the governor passed, I asked her about the cost of the proposed gigawatt, fossil-fuel fired plant in Burrillville, aka the Clear River en Energy Center.  Holding up my sign, I said: “Nice jobs program, Governor, $2.3 million per job.  How do you justify that?”  Even from within six feet, she did nor see nor hear a thing!

We seem to have a trend here, as observed by Lorraine Savard, who staged a respectful bird-dogging presence at the Cherry Blossom event at the State House earlier the same day. Referring to Governor Raimondo, Lorraine observed: “She is either ignoring me or she is afraid to look me in the eye.”

You’d expect that Governor Raimondo has friends who would be quite able to invest the $2.3 million for a comfortable early retirement of  the 300 workers who might benefit from the construction without creating a sacrifice zone.  But I’m loosing my thread.

I had the pleasure to exchange a couple of words with our senators and representatives. When I asked Congressman Cicilline if he was planning to join us in opposing the power plant, he replied that Burrillville was not his district. True enough, but not all that gutsy.  Fortunately, he agreed with me when I replied that it was not my district either, but my world.

The NORAD celebration made twitter buzz; @QuonsetRI:

@jimlangevin: I never get tired of coming down to @QuonsetRI for these great announcements

One of Representative Langevin’s staff told me, when I asked his boss about Burrillville: “This is a different event, Peter.”  I have to sleep on that one.

Unfortunately, Mike Miranda, private owner of NORAD, did get tired with me and my off-topic message.  He asked me to leave the event, which he referred to as private.  The press was there and my impression was that the public was invited, but I left.  Do you blame me when I wonder how much state and federal money is spent on shuttling our leadership to and from these “private” events?

Mike Miranda of NORAD
Mike Miranda of NORAD

One final tweet from @QuonsetRI:

Mike Miranda, CEO & Pres. of NORAD: We’re likely only port in country w/ 7 diffrnt manufacturers snding cars here

Undoubtedly, what you see in the picture are all electric cars that soon will run on electric power generated by Invenergy’s fracked-gas power plant in Burrillville.   We call those “zero-emission” emission vehicles  and that’s how we implement the Paris Accord and the #CleanPowerPlan.  Unfortunately, not only here in Rhode Island.
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Rep Ucci needs to disclose financial ties to Raytheon ahead of drone bill considerations http://www.rifuture.org/ucci-drones-raytheon/ http://www.rifuture.org/ucci-drones-raytheon/#comments Tue, 01 Mar 2016 14:00:29 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=59633 2011-09-12 Drones 008The House Commission on Drones has shown itself, over the course of its three meetings, to be very pro-drone. The concerns of those who seek to profit from drones have been given every consideration, the concerns of privacy advocates, not so much. As bad as this is, Rep Stephen Ucci used to be a lawyer working for Raytheon, one of the biggest drone manufacturers in the world, and he has declined to reveal what, if any, financial ties he still has to the company.

Raytheon has been aggressively moving into new markets,” says a typical stock investment website, “One area is drones, which are increasingly used for both military and civilian purposes. Raytheon is already the leader in the development and manufacture of drone sensors. As world demand for drones takes off, Raytheon will reap the spoils.”

Raytheon doesn’t just make drones, it makes the sensors that drones need to operate. Theoretically, a little bit of Raytheon could end up in every drone ever sold in the not too distant future. “Raytheon’s sensors are prized by the military for their unique ability to penetrate cloud cover. Raytheon continually develops lighter, high-reliability sensors—exactly what the military covets most,” wrote Investing Daily Managing Director John Persinos in 2013.

As drones become pervasive, cities and states are moving to enact meaningful regulations to restrict their use over issues of safety and privacy. In Rhode Island, State Rep. Stephen R. Ucci (D-42 Johnston/Cranston) helped to sponsor the legislation that created “The Special Legislative Commission to Study and Review Regulation of Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” and then got himself appointed to head up the committee. The 11-member House panel, which just finished hearing public testimony on drones for the first time last Thursday, has been tasked (by its organizers) to study and make recommendations about potential laws, rules and regulations that Rhode Island should adopt concerning the use of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Depending on the kinds of laws, rules and regulations that Rhode Island adopts, Raytheon and other drone manufacturers will either be helped or hindered in their efforts to market commercial and recreational drones in our state.  This could mean more or less money for Raytheon and have real financial implications for anyone who maybe invested in the company, like Rep. Stephen Ucci.

Until very recently, Ucci was the senior counsel for the defense contractor Raytheon and general counsel for their Integrated Defense Seapower unit. Ucci’s job at Raytheon wasn’t just legal work. Speaking to the Providence Business News, Ucci said, “I review things from a legal perspective but also from a business perspective. Not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new.”

While at Raytheon, Ucci became the only attorney in the company’s history to receive the Raytheon Business Development Award. “Mr. Ucci has demonstrated ambition and achievement in the best sense. Professionally, he is the first Raytheon attorney to earn a Raytheon Business Development Award, meaning that he goes beyond providing legal advice to helping the company grow,” said Mark Murphy, editor of Providence Business News.

About two years ago Ucci moved from Raytheon to Locke Lord LLC, a law firm in downtown Providence. It is unknown if Locke Lord LLC has business ties to Raytheon, but depending on his financial ties to Raytheon, Ucci’s involvement in drone legislation potentially opens the door to allegations of conflict of interest. This is especially relevant since later today the House Corporations committee will be hearing testimony on the very first bill that has come out of the Drone Commission, H7511, which will ban cities and towns in Rhode Island from enacting any rules, regulations or laws regarding the operation of drones, if passed.

The bill, introduced by Ucci and cosponsored by virtually every legislator on the House Drone Commission, does nothing to answer the concerns of privacy advocates who testified on Thursday. This is a pro drone bill. Under this bill, instead of having to deal with the special concerns of individual town and city councils, drone advocates now only have to convince the reflexively pro-business General Assembly to pass laws in their favor. As demonstrated by the creation, makeup and behavior of the Drone Commission, this is easy to accomplish.

An email to Raytheon, the House of Reps and Ucci asking for clarification regarding Ucci’s present financial and political ties to Raytheon has gone unanswered as of this writing.

Until the public receives answers about this possible conflict of interest, the General Assembly should not be passing any pro-business drone bills that come out of this suspect commission.

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Richard Wolff explains why capitalism hit the fan in 2008 and why neoliberalism happened http://www.rifuture.org/richard-wolff-neoliberalism/ http://www.rifuture.org/richard-wolff-neoliberalism/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2016 05:01:06 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=59164

Richard Wolff is a Marxist economist of great talent who lays out in this brief discussion why neoliberalism had to happen as a system and why capitalism itself is simply unable to keep itself away from the danger zone. As we have gone again and again through crisis after crisis, it has become abundantly clear that an alternative is necessary, something he explains with a certain deadpan irony and zeal indicative of a mind worth giving attention to.

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Why Elizabeth Warren should not replace Scalia http://www.rifuture.org/why-elizabeth-warren-should-not-replace-scalia/ http://www.rifuture.org/why-elizabeth-warren-should-not-replace-scalia/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:00:08 +0000 http://www.rifuture.org/?p=59056 Continue reading "Why Elizabeth Warren should not replace Scalia"

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warren_again_630When Elizabeth Warren took Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate, America got an old fashioned New Deal/Great Society liberal in one of the major seats of power. She has been a thorn in the side of her neoliberal colleagues for years and needs to stay there.

Yet Sen. Alan Grayson, for reasons that should be held up to skepticism, has begun to circulate a petition asking “The President should appoint Warren right now, before the end of this week. That would make it a “recess appointment,” and Justice Warren could take office immediately. The obstructionists in the GOP couldn’t do anything about it.”

Whatever the motivation of Grayson, I think this is a terrible idea. Why?

In the first place, it would potentially limit whatever actions Warren might be taking to reign in the financial sector. She may have flaws in a variety of areas, but she has done some great things also that I think need to continue. Taking her away from that Senate seat would take away a great advocate for banking reform.

Second, it would effectively nullify the potential for a Sanders-Warren ticket in 2016. At this point it is almost impossible for Sanders to overcome the super-delegate fiasco, but there is the highly unlikely chance in Hades and Hyannis that things might change. But by taking away his most likely running mate, that would become more of an outside chance. And as Nate Silver has pointed out previously, a major element of the original base in the Sanders campaign came from when the Run Warren Run PAC dissolved this summer and sent its members to, as it were, Feel the Bern.

Third, does Grayson remember that raving psychopath Scott Brown, the Tea Party darling who made everyone miserable with his faux-rugged tough guy attitude and boneheaded behavior? What is to say that either

  • Warren would not be replaced in an electoral free-for-all that would allow all sorts of goofballs and doofuses near the levers of power, or
  • Governor Charlie Baker would not appoint someone with deep ties to the financial, tech, and pharmaceutical industries that find solace in the Boston area, particularly since Baker has long-standing ties to the medical-industrial complex?

This of course is assuming that the Democrats would act in good faith and actually want to hold the seat. But I do not think that is a sure thing. If one thing is abundantly clear from this election season, it is obvious that Bernie Sanders, whatever his flaws (and they are many), has absolutely horrified the banking and medical industries that are known Democratic Party donors. The whole charade of the debates and controversy involving the behavior of Debbie Wasserman Schultz is demonstrative of a party in the midst of a massive identity crisis.

On the one hand, the Democrats are the party of Wall Street, the tech/drug/education deform advocates that make no bones about busting public sector unions and raiding pensions to help out their buddies in the banks. On the other hand, their major voting demographics are sick to death of this status quo paradigm and want to return to New Deal/Great Society Keynesian economics under the auspices of Sanders and Warren, something Hillary Clinton and her donors would rather drink hemlock than allow.

I would go as far right now to predict that, if through some absurd miracle Sanders does win the nomination, the Clinton machine and their slimy weasel operatives like David ‘The Real Anita Hill‘ Brock and Sidney ‘Birther Numero Uno‘ Blumenthal, along with the godforsaken mainstream press (MS DNC/Clinton News Network/New York Time/Time Magazine/whatever other birdcage liner you can name) would go into overdrive and actually work against a Democratic Party victory to protect Wall Street. Why think something so radically insane?

Because the Clintons did it before!

Arguably one of the finest moments in American Left history in the past two decades was the “Battle of Seattle”, the 1999 protests of the World Trade Organization conference that saw everyone from green anarchists to the Teamsters take to the street to protest a job-killing policy initiative that could have furthered neoliberal hegemony for decades to come. Bill Clinton knew he was in hot water when Jimmy Hoffa Jr. could not be silenced. And yet, in an electoral year that in hindsight we know was so vital for so many reasons, Bubba nobly soldiered forth. In fact, it was only because delegates from the Global South looked outside and knew they would be crazy to sell their countries down the river on a platter that more damage was not done.

A year later, my editor at CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair, and his writing partner, the late Alexander Cockburn, promoting their account Five Days That Shook The World: Seattle and Beyond, told a packed crowd that one could make a decent case that what killed Gore’s votes in key states was the events in Seattle. Activists and socially-conscious liberals who were disgusted by the police brutality and refusal of the Democrats to cede to the whims of democracy were finally fed up and went to vote for Ralph Nader. This is not to say that Florida and the actions of the Bush political machine were not real, it is to say that Florida would have just been a side-show story with no impact on the election had Clinton and Gore listened to what people thought about their wretched World Trade Organization. But back then, the corporations were more important than the voters.

What’s to say they would not do this again? It’s why I have been keeping my vote for Jill Stein squeaky-clean all year while everyone else goes nuts for Chairman Bernie.

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