Joe McNamara – RI Future

September 18, 2016September 18, 2016

RI Dems turn out to launch local Hillary headquarters

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A full roster of elected officials and almost 200 people packed the Rhode Island Democratic headquarters in Warwick Saturday morning to kick off a statewide effort to support presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The storefront office was standing room only as the governor and our congressional delegation energized attendees with their perspectives on the race and the importance of a Clinton win.

The rally, which began at 10:30, lasted about half an hour, after which many of the attendees pulled out cell phones and laptops and began to make calls for Clinton. Governor Gina Raimondo started off the event by talking about the critical nature of November’s choice.

“There’s more at stake in this election than any I can remember in my lifetime, because the consequences of Trump presidency are so terrible that it’s hard to even fathom,” said Raimondo.

She went on to talk about what she says when asked by voters why she supports Hillary, stressing Clinton’s values and experience. “Hillary’s values are what I believe are the right ones: making college affordable, investing in K-12 education and universal preschool, raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure and building an economy from the middle out, not from the top down. And she’s the most experienced person ever to run for the US Presidency.”

Sen Jack Reed picked up on the theme of experience. “She is the best prepared individual to lead this country that I have seen in my lifetime. On the other side, we have an individual that lacks the emotional, experiential abilities to be President. That is obvious for all to see.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse drew on American and Rhode Island history to make his case for Clinton. “People say that we have a divided country. Well, we do. But in our history, we had a country so divided that we were fighting a civil war. And in that civil war, we could not have been more divided. What did the President then do? He called us to the ‘better angels of our nature.’ Donald Trump stirs the darkest demons of our nature.”

Whitehouse continued, “Bigotry is deplorable. Period. And that’s a Rhode Island lesson that goes back to when George Washington, when he was campaigning for President, wrote to a Rhode Island synagogue guaranteeing that it would always be the policy of the United States to give ‘to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.’” Said Whitehouse, “Tell that to Donald Trump.”

Rep. Jim Langevin (D-2) echoed Whitehouse, saying that Trump draws on some of his followers’ worst impulses. “I hope that when we go to the polls in November that we speak loud and clear as a nation that we reject that kind of politics.”

“This election,” said Rep. David Cicciline (D-1), “is a referendum on the founding principles of this country. We’re a country that was founded on the ideas that everyone should be treated with dignity, free from discrimination, that everyone should have an opportunity to get ahead, have access to quality education, make decisions about their own healthcare, and in so many ways, this is a referendum on those ideas.” He added a pointed personal observation: “Jim and I know first-hand serving in the House what the country would look like if Donald Trump and the Republican Party have their way.”

Democratic Party Chair Joe McNamara (RI D-19) closed the rally by asking the room to finish a few sentences by reading off cards that were handed out to attendees at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. McNamara led the group in a series of powerful and emotional call-and-response prompts. “We know that we are stronger together,” said McNamara. “Under a Clinton administration, all families will…” The whole room shouted, “Rise Together.”

“And we know that bigotry will never prevail,” said McNamara, “because…” “Love trumps hate.”

“And with a President Clinton, we know that we will have…” “A future to believe in.”

As the attendees broke to make calls, a reporter for RI Future asked Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse specifically about the importance a Clinton win for efforts to combat climate change and protect Rhode Island’s shoreline.

Whitehouse cited two reasons that make a Democratic win essential. “First of all,” said Whitehouse, “Trump has gone down the sort of lunatic path of pretending that climate change is a hoax, and that all the scientists and every American scientific society, all the scientists at NASA and NOAA, the scientists at every American national lab, are all wrong or are in on some evil conspiracy. Which is almost creepy as a point of view, it’s so wrong.”

“And then, second, he’ll be representing a party that basically has become the political wing of the fossil fuel industry. So, for both of those reasons, it makes it far less likely that anything will get done if he’s the President. Now, Nature does not forgive, and sooner or later, it will become clear to everybody that we’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. We just don’t want that realization to come too late.”

An RI Future reporter caught up with Rep. Cicilline to ask about the reticence of some to throw their support behind Clinton, and what he would say to local progressives who are still on the fence.

16sep17_kickoff_cicilline — Rep. David Cicilline

“Anyone who examines these two candidates carefully, who shares progressive values, frankly, the values of our Party, will see it’s very clear that there is only one candidate who both has a record of getting things done in this area, and also a set of policies that will really advance our country and move forward on many important progressive priorities. Ultimately, elections are about choices, and while I know there was a lot of enthusiasm for Sen. Sanders — and I’m a huge fan of his, he raised some incredibly important issues in the campaign — I think he would be the first to say that the campaign was not about him as a person, it was about a set of issues and a commitment to move forward on those issues.”

Cicilline continued that a Trump win, “Would set back our movement and our country significantly, and this is going to be a close election. We can’t take anything for granted. We need to work hard to vindicate the progressive values we care about by electing Sec. Clinton.”

July 26, 2016

RI delegation praises Michelle Obama, Bernie Sanders

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Members of the Rhode Island delegation were still buzzing about the first-night speakers at the Democratic National Convention as they met for breakfast in Philadelphia.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said he was particularly moved by the reaction of Bernie Sanders supporters during his speech.

“Seeing the Bernie people, the young people, in the close-ups on TV weeping as he spoke, was a reminder to all of us how deeply some people put their hearts into that movement,” he said. “For those of us who have lost primaries, either as a candidate or because our candidate didn’t win, it was a reminder that there is a real sorrow and a real adjustment that’s required.”

Whitehouse was impressed by the way Sanders worked to bridge the gap between his supporters and Hillary Clinton. “I honestly don’t know that he could have done that job any better. Clearly he really wanted to try to make sure that took place. He really put his heart into it, and I think he will continue to. Nobody – Bernie voter, Hillary voter – wants to live in a Trump presidency America. Nobody.”

For Congressman David Cicilline, Michelle Obama was a highlight.

“The speech of the First Lady was the most powerful speech of the night,” he said. “She reminded us all of the progress we’ve made — ‘I wake up every morning in a house built by slaves, and I watch my children play on the front lawn’ — it reminded you that this is a great country and we’ve come a very long way, but she also recognized that we have many challenges, that many people are struggling in this country, and that we need a president who understands that struggle, who has real solutions, and that can bring us together. We have only solved problems in this country when we have come together, worked together to overcome them. The tenor of last night’s speeches was such a contrast to the Republicans. They were speeches filled with pragmatism but with tremendous hope and optimism about what is great about this country and our ability to build upon the progress we’ve made.”

Clinton delegate and former candidate for governor Clay Pell agreed that Michelle Obama stole the show.

“The highlight for me was Michelle Obama,” he said. “She was incredible. The whole place lit up. She was an inspiration. The First Lady’s message was about what her own family had been through, and the power of believing in this country. She had a very powerful story about how she lives in a house that was built by slaves, and is now watching two young, smart black girls play on the White House lawn and grow up and believe that because of Hillary Clinton that they too could become president of the United States.”

Pell had kind words for Sanders and his supporters.

“Sanders gave a great, impassioned plea,” he said. “Not only to his own supporters, but to the country, and shared a lot of the values we all way to keep moving forward. I hope he continues to be a leader in the Democratic Party, because he is a person not only of integrity but of vision, and he’s independent in so many ways, and we need that. He’s brought young people, and people of all kinds into politics, and it’s important that we embrace that and recognize that what he’s talking about is the future.”

Sanders delegate Linda Ujifusa wanted to keep the focus on the senator from Vermont.

“I think people should focus on the fact that we were all cheering Bernie,” she said. “I was really impressed with his speech. Of course, as he pointed out, we are disappointed. But his message, of trying to keep the political revolution that he began going is really, really important. I personally decided to run for office based on Bernie’s call to action, because for people to sit on the sidelines is to admit that we’re not willing to be involved.”

Still, some Sanders supporters were unhappy with the message. “I felt betrayed,” said Sanders delegate Laura Perez. “At the beginning of his speech, he even suggested, still vote for me. And then at the end of the speech, okay, you’re all in. This is what we’re going to do.”

Sanders delegate and organizer Lauren Niedel shared in the disappointment.

“Bernie’s speech was inspirational and showed why he should be our next nominee,” she said. “I’m not at all surprised by the message of Bernie’s speech. He stated from the beginning that was his intention. What I’m disappointed in is that if all was fair, if his message could have been seen and heard by more people, and if independents and unaffiliated had their say in each of the primaries, Bernie would be our nominee.”

RI Democratic Party Chairman Joe McNamara praised New Jersey Senator Cory Booker.

“Michelle Obama was great, and I believe we saw a rising star in Cory Booker,” he said. “Booker really took it to the mountaintop with ‘we will rise together.’ That will be a speech that will definitely go down in the history of the Democratic Party, and we’ll be hearing a lot more from Cory Booker.”

“Bernie did an excellent job,” added McNamara. “The speech was wonderful, and everyone — everyone — cheered him.”

McNamara added, “Sen. Sanders stating that this campaign is not about Bernie Sanders, it is not about Hillary Clinton, it’s about the future of our nation, our children and grandchildren, was something, to me, that really hit home.” McNamara said that felt like Sanders’ way of telling his followers, “We’ve worked very hard, but it’s time to support the platform that represents many of the ideals of the campaign.”

July 25, 2016July 26, 2016

Roll call vote for Sanders anticipated at DNC

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With Sanders organizers fanning out to all the convention hotels to collect delegate signatures supporting a roll-call vote, there was reaction from both the Clinton camp and among local delegates at their daily breakfast meeting this morning.

“We anticipate there will be a roll call vote tomorrow night and that every vote will be counted,” said Brian Fallon, Hilary For America’s national press secretary, at a media briefing this morning. “We’re happy to have it. It is exactly in keeping with our philosophy that every vote should count and that means every delegate being counted on the floor of the convention.”

At the Rhode Island delegation breakfast this morning, a volunteer from Pennsylvania was circulating among the tables collecting some of the required 600 delegate names. “It’s so that there can be a roll call vote, so people can actually say if they’re for Bernie Sanders” said Lauren Niedel, a Sanders delegate and one of the leaders of the Sanders movement in Rhode Island.

“No one would ever ask them not to,” said RI Democratic Party chair Joe McNamara. “But I think the important takeaway is the inclusion of those Democratic ideas and ideals that Sen. Sanders promoted in his campaign into the platform. We can see and hear the party uniting behind Secretary Clinton.”

John Hamilton, Sanders delegate and committee co-chair, acknowledged the direction that the floor vote seemed likely to head. “I don’t think there is going to be a second ballot. I don’t see it happening.”

Also at the breakfast, McNamara reported on their walk-through of the hall. “We checked out the Wells Fargo Center yesterday, and Rhode Island is positioned exactly where we should be, in the middle of the convention hall, slightly elevated above the rest on the floor, approximately 220 feet from the podium.”

Speaking to an RI Future reporter, McNamara praised the efforts of Aaron Regunberg in representing Rhode Island on the Rules Committee and helping to work out the Unity Commission compromise on superdelegates.

“To have a young, talented state representative like Rep. Regunberg on board gives a great deal of credibility to that,” he said. “I think everyone agrees that there has to be some adjustment in that process.”

McNamara called Regunberg “A great asset and a great role model for millennials.”

In a not-so-subtle dig at Brandon Bell’s remarks at last week’s Republican Convention, McNamara reported that “Speaker Mattielo will have a positive message tomorrow when he reports the votes, and we’re looking forward to a great convention.”

May 19, 2016

Justin Katz, Joe McNamara, and all this Gaspee chatter

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What do Democratic Party Chair Joe McNamara, Justin Katz, the burning of the HMS Gaspee, and a concentration camp have in common? Quite a good deal!

There is a bit of a schoolyard tiff being had out in public today between Joe and Justin where they are trying to see who can be the most bloviating about colonial history in Rhode Island. Joe is having a fit because some outfit called the Gaspee Project is doing typical right wing think tank nonsense and Justin is posturing and preening about how this is all within the heritage of the Gaspee.

Joe is very involved with the annual Gaspee Days celebrations of these events, including marching in the parade every year. He is very dedicated to this image of civic engagement and the role the Gaspee plays in that image, ergo the use of that historical incident to go after him and/or his colleagues is a huge taboo.

As someone who spent five years researching every aspect of the Gaspee incident, I find this spectacle patently offensive and white supremacist, not to mention banal as all hell after communing with the soul of Hannah Arendt.

An advertisement for a runaway slave in the predecessor of the ProJo.

In 2010, with the help of Drs. Richard and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Ray Rickman, I decided to make a film about the Gaspee and what really happened.

The Gaspee was a revolt by American colonists against English efforts to abolish slavery, plain and simple. The English Parliament had begun to levy a series of taxes on slave trade-related commodities, including rum, molasses, and sugar cane, and slave traders like Moses and John Brown did not like that. As such, they decided to launch a nighttime citizens militia attack against a government tax enforcement agency, the HMS Gaspee. Whereas Joe and thinkers like him look at the Gaspee and think red, white, and blue, I see the same iconography and think of Auschwitz.

The fact that Justin Katz, whose political movement to criminalize abortion uses American abolitionists as a rhetorical device sometimes, does not know this basic element of the history of the abolitionist movement in Rhode Island indicates just how preposterous such analogues truly are. The fact McNamara consistently calls the Gaspee raiders, who were engaging in a vanguard attack on behalf of the Triangle Trade genocide against Africans, patriots and heroes is indicative of what Frantz Fanon described as cognitive dissonance.

On behalf of this cognitive dissonance, in November 2014 Joe premiered a documentary created with the Gaspee Days Committee about the Gaspee, produced after he had seen my film about this topic, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, that totally leaves out the fact this whole incident was all about the enslavement of human beings and treating African people as if they were lower than pig droppings.

So, in closing, I hope we all learned something.

I hope Katz has learned to stop giving praise to slave traders and actually do some basic historical research that goes beyond the tawdry material offered by the Gaspee Days website. But then again, looking at the Gaspee Project’s website and ideology, perhaps he is actually correct, their mission is pretty much in line with the ideology of John Brown.

I hope the general readership has learned that, when the Tea Party does it over taxes that can unfairly target working class people while giving freebies to the rich, Joe and his fellow Democrats call it extremism, but when rich white men who trade in human slaves do it, they are “patriots”.

And I hope we all have understood that part of getting rid of white supremacy is beyond going after random personalities who say boo about people of color and gets into toppling structures such as our Disney-fied colonial history to show the ugly, racist, despicable nature of it all.

This country was founded on two genocides that are inter-connected. The first was the extermination of the Native Americans, begun here in Rhode Island when Roger Williams sold captives taken from the Pequot War out of Boston to Bermuda, which proves that his glory as some kind of freedom fighter is white supremacist garbage.

The second was the genocide against Africa, which was enacted because the refugees from the Pequot War escaped inland and told their fellows to migrate West to escape the wrath and wickedness of the white man. That migration reduced the number of Natives the colonists could enslave, therefore they looked across the Atlantic to the Gold Coast for a fresh supply of human beings.

The Gaspee incident was our Warsaw ghetto uprising. Aaron Briggs, who I profile in my documentary, was the Afro-Indian youth who tried to rebel against the slavery system by trying to testify against the Gaspee raiders in the trial the British set up to figure out what happened.

And the Gaspee raiders were the Nazis who suppressed the uprising and continued the murder.

Some would perhaps say that using an analogue between the Shoah and American slavery is problematic for any number of reasons. Ah, but here’s the rub, Adolf Hitler said in Mein Kampf that his plans for the Final Solution were modeled on the American treatment of people of color.

Those who are curious about further elements of this story can find a good deal of scholarship in Dr. Gerald Horne’s excellent monograph The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America or my film AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE.

If you like my reporting,please consider contributing to my Patreon!

February 28, 2016March 7, 2016

How we all will pay for Raimondo’s pension “reform”

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The annual Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) is one of the most vital elements of living on a fixed income. If things are moving smoothly, the recipient of benefits, be it their retirement plan or Social Security disability insurance, is given a COLA that compensates for inflation or the rise of costs for things like heating fuel and food.

But imagine if, after putting in years of hard work at an honest job, the administrators of your retirement plan told you to go blow, that you were a selfish leech who should have known better than take a public sector job, and that there would be no more COLAs for you?

Welcome to the plight of the retired public sector worker in Rhode Island!

The Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, a law loaded with more hyperbole than honesty, forbade any future COLAs from being given to retired teachers, janitors, and thousands more people who had done an honest day’s work for decades only to be screwed over by a legislature full of ne’er do well legislators and a Treasurer, now Governor, who used confusing polysyllabic verbiage to occlude the building of a pipeline from the Rhode Island pension fund into the coffers of former Enron traders and a host of other dubious figures on Wall Street who have never done a day’s honest work.

It is time to talk seriously not just about the case of the missing COLAs but what is going to happen when people cannot dip into their savings anymore to make up the difference in their monthly budgets.

Are we supposed to be mum when droves of retired public employees are lining up at the Food Stamps office? Should we be impressed when the Baby Boomers are spending their final years in destitution? Is part of Raimondo’s plan having these seniors taking out loans from her friends on Wall Street that they might not be able to pay back?

The systemic ripple effect caused by this 2011 law is going to impact this state in a negative fashion for years to come and we will all be paying for it.

Perhaps one of the doors to begin asking questions at would be that of Rep. Joe McNamara, the Chair of the Democratic Party. McNamara spent his career in the Pawtucket school system and yet we hear nothing yet from him about restoring the COLAs that would be going to his mailbox. Why is beyond me, but I do know that Mao Zedong would call that a contradiction.

Regardless of one’s political orientation, repealing this law should be made an election year issue. If you are a self-described fiscal conservative, it makes perfect sense to want to reduce the need for social safety net public benefits. If you are a liberal, it is about restoring the social contract and upholding the state’s side of a bargain it made with honest working class people. If you are someone who is opposed to corruption, it would clean the clocks of several dirty politicians that might be benefiting from the pension heist. The only person who might not benefit is myself, who would have less muck to rake, and Gina Raimondo, who might see her dubious blind trust stop sending her fat checks every month.