In response to this ruling, the ACLU of Rhode Island issued the following statement regarding The Providence Journal Company et al. v. The RI Dept. of Public Safety:

The ACLU is very disappointed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Caleb Chafee case. We believe it fails to give sufficient weight to the important public interest in monitoring police investigations of high-profile cases.

“In denying the Providence Journal access to any of the requested documents, the Court inexplicably points to the large number of records that were withheld as proof that ‘a thorough investigation was performed.’ But without being able to examine the documents, it is impossible to determine a key fact behind the records request — whether the public outcome of the investigation properly reflects what the undisclosed investigation actually uncovered.

“For decades, the ACLU has strongly supported both the individual’s right to privacy and the public’s right to know. In this instance, we believe the Court tipped the scales the wrong way. Instead, the decision highlights the need for a stronger open records law in order to allow the public more critical oversight of the state’s law enforcement agencies.”

After years of spin, lack of comment, and problematic answers, we bring you an analysis of the sworn and true answers of the three public officials to occupy the governor’s office since the deal was struck.

DONALD CARCIERI
After multiple days and 562 pages of deposition testimony, it is clear that former Governor Don Carcieri, the man responsible for the 38 Studios deal as chairman of the EDC, is nervous. Throughout the transcript, he peppers his answers with “you know” – a sign of anxiety.

When Carcieri took office in 2003, he touted himself as a pro-business reform candidate, campaigning on a promise to bring a ‘Big Audit’ to the convoluted state government. One of these moves included merging the Economic Policy Council and a smaller EDC into the single agency that approved the 38 Studios funding package. He says of the decision:

[I]t was a board decision. This was not my decision alone. I mean, this was a quasi-independent corporation. We went through lots of pains to restructure the whole corporation, created a whole new board, and as I said, I felt very pleased at the quality of the people we were able to attract, and I wanted to make sure that they could do their job.

Carcieri thought they had a prize in 38 Studios, a company that would spur the growth seen in the Cambridge, Massachusetts high-tech corridor on Route 128 decades earlier. At one point, Robert Stolzman, now a defendant in the lawsuit, wrote to the governor thanking him for involving him in the 38 Studios issue. With predicted earnings of $50 million by 2015, they believed they were going to be responsible for a high-tech renaissance.

They expected that they had a real winner in terms of a game and what they were doing in developing with a lot of industry expertise in this multi-player game was going to be very well received. They, you know, were supported in that, to my knowledge, by entertainment arts [Electronic Arts video game publishing] who understood the industry as well.

But there were warning signs from the outset that Carcieri refused to heed. One board member at the EDC, Karl Wadensten, voiced concern about the total monies being dedicated towards the project. Rosemary Gallogly, a seasoned adviser with years of experience regarding government accounting, raised multiple red flags that the governor blew off as infrastructural issues, part of the ‘big government’ he had vowed to fight.

-I don’t recall reading the whole [Strategy Analytics] report [regarding risks and possibilities]. Often they have executive summaries is what I would read, then I would skim, possibly, through, but what I’m saying to you is this is not my recollection of what was presented to the board meeting. That there was a slide dec. like all — PowerPoint or something that, you know — the sum and substance was, on balance, positive that’s my recollection, Tom.
-You’re saying your recollection on balance was positive?
-Yeah.
-Of the Strategy Analytics report was positive?
-Yes.
-Now, but you don’t know if you actually read the entire report or not, do you?

Two things become abundantly clear from Carcieri’s testimony.

First, despite boasting about his business savvy, he remained woefully out of touch with the industry he was trying to get involved in and remained so last year when deposed. Throughout the transcript, he consistently confuses the name of EA Games, the third-largest video game firm on earth, calling them ‘Entertainment Arts’ instead of Electronic Arts. When discussing the second title 38 Studios was working on at the time of their bankruptcy, a massive multi-player online game akin to the popular WORLDS OF WARCRAFT, he is hazy on the terms used in distribution, calling the industry-standard subscription-based servicing of those titles a “lease.”

That is a sign of bad business management. The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, has been very open with how he made his fortune, explaining that, if he cannot understand a prospective investment and how the company works when he sits down at his kitchen table with the spreadsheets, he passes on the investment. Buffett does not have access to the secret formula for Coca-Cola or understand how Dairy Queen produces all their dessert items, but he does understand how to drink soda and take his grandchildren out for ice cream. The trick with smart investment is understanding exactly why a product or service will have success, not due to innovation as much as appeal. In the case of 38 Studios, Curt Schilling could and probably should have done what most sports players do in retirement when they get involved with video games, release a title based on his name recognition and sports career. It may not have been as exciting as the roll-playing fantasies he hoped to develop with sci-fi author RA Salvatore, but no one has seen John Madden crying on the way to the bank. Carcieri and Schilling were both clueless about everything from basic game programming to distribution models. The former Governor was so out of touch he did not even realize that the board he was chair of had not hired IBM and Wells Fargo as consultants! That he did not know he was not the first to talk with Schilling about the venture is merely the pinnacle of his lack of connection, regardless of whether politicians like William Murphy, Gordon Fox, and others lied to him.

Carcieri also seems to have let his ideology get in the way of basic economic logic regarding recovery from a recession. Even though they portrayed themselves as conservatives, Schilling and Carcieri bear all the markings of classical English liberals in the economic sense, fiercely opposed to unions and praising the virtues of so-called ‘free markets’ and supply-side economics. They wanted to create a business boom in the tech sector, which is non-union.

Besides the aforementioned lack of industry literacy, Carcieri and other Rhode Island officials fatally misjudged why the Massachusetts Miracle happened in the first place. In that instance, technology firms since the 1960s had been creating a diverse set of products that reaped millions. And while they did see a particular boom in the 1980s and 1990s with computer software, the vast majority of the products created were technologies used in unionized jobs, such as municipal construction or lighting devices, industries with almost-guaranteed supply-and-demand ratios as opposed to video games, which are wildly uncertain in success based on the nature of customer satisfaction.

The reality is still as John Maynard Keynes told us 80 years ago, the way to get out of a recession is by having a government spend huge amounts on public works and infrastructure projects that create long-lasting, good-paying, unionized jobs. As the workers continue to take home good paychecks over the course of years, they in turn spend their earnings on everything from houses to cars to luxury services that they could not afford previously. That was the reason President Eisenhower, as a Republican, was pro-union and opposed the anti-labor ideologies of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. He knew then that the middle class prosperity he oversaw was dependent on organized labor serving as a balance with the controlling powers of big capital. The fact Carcieri mistakenly thought that RISD could perform the same services as MIT and Harvard and that their wildly unpopular former President John Maeda would help foster this boom is the tragically ironic icing on the cake.

LINCOLN CHAFEE
When Lincoln Chafee took the governor’s office in January 2011, the state was in a complete crisis. Municipalities were on the verge of bankruptcy. The pension system was in trouble. And when, during his campaign, he had opposed the passage of the 38 Studios deal, he was blocked from speaking at an EDC meeting and “swatted aside” by a state trooper. He left office as a very unpopular man, with then-Treasurer Gina Raimondo having bad-mouthed him both in the press and during election debates.

I was apprehensive, given my very, very vocal opposition to the deal in the campaign, including going uninvited to an EDC board meeting and being barred from entering, that I could be accused of meddling, micromanaging, interfering. There were still board members that were very- had voted in favor of this deal. The executive director and I had sparred in the course of the campaign, now he was my executive director of the EDC. I was very apprehensive about, as I said, micromanaging or meddling in this. I saw my role as to be supportive and write the checks and hope that that first game was successful… We inherited an inferno.

Now comes the release of his deposition. Of all the motley crew of big-shots and political players, he comes across as not just respectable but actually the closest thing to a hero. I do not agree with all of his policy moves while in office, including the public sector pension reform he oversaw, but it is obvious he did not care about his image, he cared about Rhode Island.

-I did get a call from Providence Equity leadership who experience in this area and shared my initial thoughts and opposition and reinforcing that.
-When you say Providence Equity leadership, is there a particular individual you spoke with?
-My classmate, Jonathan Nelson… I had expressed opposition at that point to the loan, and he said I’m in the business, this business, and you’re right about your opposition.

From day one, Chafee was educating himself about the video game industry and saw a turkey. One of the many exhibits in his deposition is a packet of news articles and analyses that he had in his campaign office, representing the level of research he was doing during a busy election season about an industry he and everyone else knew nothing about.

-Yes, these documents we came upon after the request to make sure we had given everything that we had, and just in further searching, these are the documents that reflected that further search.
-Where were they found?
-Some in my campaign office, which was not my original campaign office that I had during the campaign, but a subsequent mini closet, almost, where we store a number of items, and others were in the governor’s office.
-Okay. The mini campaign office you refer to, where is that located?
-Airport Plaza, Warwick, Rhode Island…
-Did you ask any members of your campaign staff to do any research for you into any issues which may concern this type of potential relationship with a company like 38 Studios?
-I’m sure being a team effort and this being a major item in the news and being, you know, a very, very competitive campaign everybody was involved in finding out as much as they could about all the details of this type of state investment.

In both the deposition and public statements, Curt Schilling and his lawyers have tried to blame Chafee for their failures. They claim the governor’s press statements were the kind of bad publicity that drove away potential investors and ultimately caused the company’s failure. In the deposition, Schilling’s lawyer Michael Sarli repeatedly tries to pigeonhole Chafee and make him seem incompetent, a poor chair of the EDC board that was asleep at the wheel. The question, rephrased and repeated time and again, is contemptuous of the Governor’s office, to the point Max Wistow, the lawyer Chafee hired to represent the EDC and launch the current lawsuit, says “The gentleman is the governor. It is being abusive and argumentative.”

Regardless of how one feels about Chafee, every Rhode Islander should understand that Wistow is not standing up just for one man, he is defending the integrity of the state itself, which Schilling is trying to drag through the gutter. Chafee had no ability to impact the company’s success or failure after taking office. What killed 38 Studios was inherent to Schilling’s management style, the nature of the video game industry, and the economic impact of the 2008 crash. They failed to sell enough copies of their first game because it was a mediocre title and people were tightening their belts due to the recession.

GINA RAIMONDO
The deposition of Gina Raimondo is a one that occupies a unique time and place, having been taken on September 11, 2014, two days after she had won the Democratic primary, but before she won the gubernatorial race and ceased her duties as treasurer. Having emerged from the private sector as a venture capitalist prior to entering politics in 2011, she had a particular level of insight on the issue when news of the 38 Studios deal first broke.

-Well, as a professional in the field of venture capital, did the idea that the state was looking to enter into some sort of an agreement with 38 Studios pique your professional interest at all?
-Yes.
-Did you do anything in follow-up to having that curiosity?
-I did. I wrote that e-mail to Keith Stokes suggesting that, in my opinion, it was a high-risk venture, and if I could — since I had expertise in investing, if I could be of any help, I was here to help.

Raimondo was in the minority of those who expressed concern about the deal after she talked about the issue with her co-workers, who had a history of financing video game firms and did some research on 38 Studios. Before the company moved to Rhode Island, it was based in an area with a high concentration of gaming developers and the venture capital firms that traditionally finance their efforts.

-Okay. So, at least at the time you had knowledge that there were people that you regarded as experts in the gaming business that had decided not to invest and had looked at 38 Studios specifically, fair?
-Yes. Yes. The nature of the way this happens in general is, you know, Monday morning, you have investment committee meetings. You sit around at a table like this, you say, Sean, what do you think — Sean was my partner, who is a… gaming expert, what do you think of this 38 Studios deal? It’s casual chitchat. And so I don’t remember doing that, but the nature of it, the conversation would have been, in the vernacular it’s called shopped, the deal has been shopped around. I don’t remember him saying it, but I’m thinking reading this, he probably said, oh, that’s been shopped all over the place, and everyone’s passed… I didn’t know anything, really, about the deal or anything other than what I read in the paper, but it’s just the general concept that he was a famous baseball player in a really hot area of gaming in the venture capital mecca of America, and if he couldn’t get venture capital money and had to come to the State of Rhode Island for money, hit the pause button. Like, I didn’t know anything just from the outside looking in, if you’re a famous guy in the hottest area of gaming in the hot venture capital market in the world, and you can’t get funded,… what does the State of Rhode Island know that the whole rest of the world doesn’t know? So it was just a general concept of hold your horses.

It is possible that Raimondo will be able to use quotes like this to her advantage in the future. She is on the public record regarding how she said from the outset that this was a bad deal. But as one reads further on in the transcripts, a troubling image emerges. It becomes absolutely clear that this is a cunning and ruthless politician that will sacrifice anyone to get ahead in a political contest. Consider her treatment of Chafee in May of 2012:

-I’m going to direct your attention to the part of this document that follows the header, “A company doesn’t run out of money overnight.” Do you see that
-Yes.
-And there’s a quote attributed to you in this document and it says… ”To me the much bigger question is what’s been happening over the past 17 months.”… ”General Treasurer Gina Raimondo said in an interview on the Dan Yorke show on Wednesday… “How has the governor and his staff in his capacity as chair of the EDC board been monitoring this investment? A company does not run out of money overnight.”… Would you expect that there would be, on a deal like this, when you talk about monitoring the deal, when you use that word, does that mean that at some point the board of EDC is given information as to how this risky loan is performing?
-I have no idea… I do not know, even as I sit here, how the governance of the EDC, I don’t know the ins and outs of how the governance of the EDC works… I don’t know what information the board is supposed to see, Governor sees, counsel sees, executive director sees, I have no idea.

Ergo, she has no idea what she is talking about but does not mind dragging Chafee through the mud to score a political point. That sort of realpolitik is sadly part and parcel of a political system that traffics in media hype rather than actual ideological standards, treating the contestants as rock stars as opposed to political thinkers. Consider Raimondo’s comments about her own education in law, a point emphasized by her political campaigns.

-Okay. If you recall back to those days at Yale when you were in Evidence class, do you remember past recollection recorded?
-I never took Evidence. Don’t you know they don’t actually teach law at Yale?
-What do they teach, networking?
-Pretty much, yeah.

How encouraging.

Raimondo’s private sector line of work is bitterly referred to as ‘vulture capitalism’ by those who have run afoul of people in her line of work. There are success stories, such as when Facebook went from a college start-up to a multi-million dollar company. But there are thousands of shattered dreams and broken lives also, far more than the successes. She has already set her Wall Street cronies loose on the public sector employee pension system. The fact she even allowed PawSox owner Larry Lucchino to entertain the idea of a taxpayer-financed stadium this summer despite economic analyses forecasting doom shows us this is a person who would not blink an eye while selling out her voters as long as she can curry favors. Carcieri may have been foolish and Chafee swamped, but Raimondo is someone who knows how to get ahead regardless of the consequences as long as she can benefit.

LESSONS LEARNED?
There are lessons to be learned from this mess. It may turn out in all probability that Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein finds for the defendants and rules that the State was not conned by Schilling, they merely made a very bad financial decision. With the disclosure about Chafee’s friend Mr. Nelson and Raimondo’s warnings from the private sector, it seems clear that there was a reasonable level of insight about Schilling and in fact the politicians just let their egos get ahead of them.

But the type of reform really needed goes well beyond political parties and into the realm of revising our basic norms of government. 38 Studios is not an aberration, it is symptomatic of something deeply embedded in the corruption of Rhode Island’s political culture. The one who was the voice of reason and sanity ended up as a reviled one-term politician, now walking a Quixotic trail towards the Presidential primaries with little support or media hype. The majority of the culprits in this rip-off are going to probably get off scot-free. And the type of people that create these kinds of economic nightmares now have one of their own in power, biding her time and eyeing advancement to Washington DC.

Karl Marx, the prophet who told us capital is a system of contradictions leading towards deeper and wider economic disparity, famously told us “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Unfortunately, the joke is on us.

“You come to HealthSource, and right there, you can very easily sign up for coverage regardless of your income,” she said. “We’ve developed an infrastructure that’s really designed for this unified approach.”

Wallack explained Rhode Island decided to create its own exchange because it presented “significant advantages, in terms of local control and customer service.” With a state based exchange, rather than a federal one, they could better tailor their services to the needs of Rhode Islanders.

HealthSourceRI uses what she called a “one door policy,” meaning that customers could come in and not only apply for health insurance, but check to see if they were eligible for Medicaid and other benefits. This is where much of the exchange’s success comes from, since this is a policy only a few states have adopted.

Wallack said that making customers jump through hoops only serves to make things more confusing, and they miss out on important information because of it. Right now, Wallack and her team are expanding their open door policy, and making it possible for customers to begin to apply for other assistance programs like TANF or SNAP.

“When we’re done building our system, you’ll be able to sign up for those with one stop shopping,” she said.

Wallack added that there are a number of ways that customers can use this one stop shopping, that all services are provided online, over the phone, or in person. Face-to-face assistance is also provided right in the community health centers, so customers can sign up for insurance right in their hometown. HealthSourceRI also has enrollment events during the open enrollment period, which is from Nov. 1 to the end of January each year. During open enrollment, a customer can renew, reenroll, or sign up for coverage, or just change their plan. There are two other types of enrollments as well- special enrollment and Medicaid coverage. Special enrollment occurs when a customer’s circumstances change throughout the year and they need to change their plan, and Medicaid coverage happens throughout the year to see if a customer is eligible for Medicaid.

“We try to find any avenue where we can come into contact with people who may be looking for coverage,” Wallack said concerning their community accessibility.

This level of accessibility has worked for the exchange, proved not only by the Gallup poll but the hard numbers that HealthSource has collected so far for this year. In 2015, they have enrolled 32,554 individuals as of July 31. Most people who enrolled were age 55 and over, sitting at 29 percent. 53 percent of enrollees were female, while 47 percent were male. More than half of the enrollees – 59 percent – were eligible for financial assistance in the form of an advanced premium tax credit and cost-sharing reductions. These numbers show an upward trend from last year, with over 7,000 more enrollees. Small businesses are signing up through HealthSource as well, with 542 employers enrolled in 2015, compared to the 381 from 2014.

The Gallup poll found that states that set up their own exchange and expanded Medicaid saw the biggest drop in their uninsured rate, something that the Ocean State has been doing since day one. According to Wallack, as long as they continue with this, Rhode Island can serve as a model for other states and their healthcare exchanges, especially as HealthSourceRI moves forward. Within the next month, HealthSource will be releasing its own survey, which will give more accurate results than the Gallup one, because it will only look at Rhode Island. But, the national survey still shows a trend, and that Rhode Island is headed in the right direction.

“What I take from this, is that those policy decisions, as well as our decisions to take a coordinated approach, was successful for us,” Wallack said.

HealthSource’s next step is to find those last remaining uninsured individuals, and understand why they’re uninsured, as well as work with employers to make sure that they are able to retain coverage. Now, their job is to help control healthcare cost growth, provide support for small business, and provide affordable choices for everyone, especially that last 2.7 percent.

The most poignant and politically instructive story I covered in 2014 was the shameful treatment of the Providence hotel workers who, having successfully petitioned the Providence City Council for the right to place a $15 minimum wage measure on the ballot, were frustrated in their effort by the General Assembly, under the leadership of the newly elected Speaker of the House, Nicholas Mattiello.

The situation for many hotel workers in Rhode Island is bleak. Some hotels pay wages that are close to a living wage, but many do not, most notably the Hilton Providence and the Providence Renaissance, which are mired in a labor struggle with its staff. Both hotels are managed by The Procaccianti Group (TPG) a multi-billion dollar real estate and investment company headquartered in Cranston, Rhode Island. Properties managed by TPG are notorious for extracting profits from investments by keeping wages low and treating employees as disposable commodities.

Hotel employees organized by Unite Here Local 217, have been demanding fair wages, humane working conditions and a union. The hotels have responded punitively, firing high profile and vocal organizers such as Krystle Martin, Adrienne Jones and Marino Cruz.

The hotel workers worked hard last winter and spring to collect the 1,000 signatures needed to compel the City Council to consider putting a $15 minimum wage ordinance for hotel workers on the November ballot, presenting their petition on April 10. The City Council held public hearings on the measure on May 27. Though the ProJo tried to convince the public that there were dozens of speakers on both sides of this issue, in truth there were 22 speakers in support and only five hotel lobbyists speaking against the measure.

But the hotels lobbyists still have power. They have so much power that the Providence Ordinance Committee cancelled a meeting to decide on the measure under pressure from… who knows? To this date no one has explained exactly why City Councillor Seth Yurdin cancelled the meeting. Rumor has it that Mayor Angel Taveras, who was planning a run for governor, was anxious to present himself as a friend to corporate interests, but of course, the mayor has no power to compel the cancellation of city council meetings.

What is known is that nearly one hundred hotel workers, their families and supporters made huge efforts to be at the City Hall that night, arranging child care or dragging their kids with them, getting to the City Hall by bus, carpool or walking, losing out on valuable paid work or rare time off in the process. Because the meeting was cancelled at the last minute, the hotel workers ended up in an empty City Hall, with no one to hear their case.

It is thought that actions to stall the passage of the measure were used because, despite the pressure on the City Council by corporate interests, early handicapping revealed that the measure would pass if put to a vote. In addition, polling indicated that Providence voters were quite receptive to the idea of raising the minimum wage for struggling workers.

So despite the financial and political power of the forces opposed to the measure, things were going well for hotel workers in Providence.

Enter ALEC

It’s pretty well known that Mayor Taveras had mixed feelings about the hotel worker’s minimum wage bill. It seems he did not want to be known as the kind of mayor who vetoed such popular measures, but he also did not want to end a promising political career by angering monied interests.

Fortunately for his future plans, Taveras avoided having to address the issue thanks to State Representative Ray Gallison, a “Democrat” from District 69, covering Bristol/Portsmouth. Gallison introduced House Bill 8276, which would take away the power of cities and municipalities to set their own minimum wages, effectively blocking the hotel worker’s efforts. According to a House spokesperson, Gallison’s bill was a direct response to the hard work and determination of the hotel workers, who had followed the rules and used the democratic process in an attempt to enact a positive change.

Gallison’s bill was modeled on legislation pioneered by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, what Bob Plain called “the right wing bill mill that drafts corporate-friendly legislation for state legislators.” Why would a Democrat introduce a right-wing bill that caters to corporate interests by keeping hard working people in grinding poverty? I don’t know, because Gallison refused to respond to my requests for clarification.

Gallison’s mistake, however, was putting the proposal out in the form of a bill. A bill needs to be debated in committee, which invites public commentary and media scrutiny. A bill, introduced in the House, must also be passed in the Senate. That means more public commentary and media scrutiny. A bill requires each and every legislator to vote on it and essentially declare themselves for corporate interests or struggling workers. A bill would have to be ultimately signed by the Governor. All that democracy engenders uncertainty and becomes a huge problem when a multi-billion dollar corporation is demanding that something be done to protect its bottom line.

So Gallison, under the direction of the Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, removed his bill from consideration and slipped the measure into the budget. As a budget item, the measure is just one little part of a huge pile of legislation that is passed all at once as an up or down vote. Legislators can say things like, “I don’t support every part of this budget, but as a whole it strikes a compromise I can live with.”

The budget passed the House and the Senate with barely a word spoken against the measure. One notable exception was Representative Maria Cimini, a Democrat. She introduced a measure to amend the budget and undercut Gallison’s ALEC inspired end run. The measure failed. In retaliation for this and other progressive sleights, Speaker Mattiello endorsed Cimini’s opponent, Dan McKiernan, in the Democratic Primary, successfully unseating her.

On June 13, the same night the House passed the budget, the Providence City Council, under the leadership of Michael Solomon, passed a measure putting the $15 minimum wage bill on the November Ballot in what amounted to a symbolic gesture. The efforts of the City Council didn’t matter. The deed was done. On June 16 the Senate passed the budget. All that was required now was Governor Chafee’s signature.

Still, the hotel workers did not give up. Amazingly, hotel workers Santa Brito, Mirjaam Parada and Yilenny Ferreras along with Central Falls City Councilor Shelby Maldonado (now a State Representative) organized a hunger strike, camping outside on the State House Steps for days as the Governor contemplated signing the budget into law.

I visited the hunger strikers every day. I can’t speak highly enough of their determination and grace. On June 19, day three of the hunger strike, Governor Lincoln Chafee signed the budget into law, effectively ending the effort that had started months ago as hundreds of people collected thousands of signatures in order to get a bill placed on the November ballot that would have improve the lives of countless Rhode Islanders.

Since that day, economic prospects in Rhode Island have steadily worsened. Rhode Island has the highest poverty rate in New England. Despite such dour news, the idea that the General Assembly, following Mattiello’s lead, might do anything this coming session but cut assistance programs to the poor is almost laughable. Only 27% of the jobs in Rhode Island pay enough for a family with two children to survive on. The rest of Rhode Islanders are the working poor, disposable commodities for the rich to use, abuse and toss aside when broken.

When Rep Ray Gallison first introduced his ALEC inspired bill to cut off the efforts of the hotel workers to improve their lives, Santa Brito, housekeeper at the Providence Renaissance and hunger striker said, “House leadership is moving to jail us in poverty.”

Who would have thought that Rhode Islanders would stand by and actually let that happen?

As president of the Humanists of Rhode Island, I waited until the day after the election to formally request a spot in the State House for our Roger Williams banner. This banner, placed for the first time in the State House last year, has been relegated to a spot on the second floor of the State House, in an area designated for displays by local ethnic and civic groups.

The idea of such an area is to allow a “free speech zone,” a place for symbols and ideas of a religious nature to be displayed on public property. In this way has the law evolved so that the separation of church and state may be violated. Here you will find all sorts of statements and displays about religion. There are mangers and baby Jesuses Jesii?, Christmas trees and icons of saints. In fact, far from being a public space free of religious endorsements, the State House has become a public space chock full of religious endorsements: Christian, Jewish, atheist and other.

This is why I don’t call the battles over such displays a “War on Christmas.” These battles should more properly be called a “War on Secularism,” and we are all losing. None of these displays belong in a public building, with the possible exception of the Humanists of Rhode Island’s exceptionally designed banner which celebrates the birth of Roger Williams and the separation of church and state, which has secular, historical and seasonal value, but no religion.

But the law is the law, and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon, so those with a secular and non-believing outlook will be compelled to at least balance the religious views on displays with their own for the foreseeable future.

There is one big problem though. Humanists, atheists and all non-Christians and non-Jews are victims of viewpoint discrimination, an illegal process where the opinions and ideas of certain religious groups are prioritized over others. Certain groups are routinely being given better placement in the State House, garnering their displays greater visibility than others, which gives these groups the appearance of favoritism.

What I’m talking about is the placement of the Christmas Tree in the main rotunda. Governor Chafee was onto something when he called it a “Holiday Tree.” As a holiday tree, devoid of religious meaning, the tree could stand every year in the best, most visible location in the State House, and no one could make a case that their religion or non-religion was being discriminated against. But calling it a Christmas Tree means that Christian views are being prioritized by being given the favored spot, year after year.

The addition of a Hanukkah menorah, also always located in a favored spot just off the main rotunda, does little to make the situation better. Note that the menorah is never given the center spot, but is always off to the side. Note that the Christmas Tree is never moved to the side so that any other viewpoint might be displayed in its dominating place of honor.

The message the State of Rhode Island is sending is clear: Christians are #1, Jews are #2 (perhaps by virtue of the history, monotheism and holy texts they share with Christians) and all other view points are relegated to the second floor, where visitors must search them out.

This year I repeatedly asked that our banner be allowed to occupy some space on the main rotunda, either hung near the tree or displayed on a structure we would provide. My requests were ignored. When I said that I wanted a place on the main rotunda, I was told that I could have the space on the second floor or nothing.

This is wrong. The second floor is for second class citizens. First class citizens are given the main rotunda, given a state sanctioned lighting ceremony, and given the endorsement of our state government. This is a clear violation of the first amendment, and a clear message to non-Christians that this is a Christian state, run by and for Christians alone. The rest of us are simply tolerated.

Next year the Humanists of Rhode Island will once again demand placement on the main rotunda. We hope that Gina Raimondo does the right thing and allows our banner to be placed with the Christmas Tree.

Support Steve Ahlquist!

The commission issued a report and recommendations in early 2013. And, much to my surprise, the Taveras administration actually tried to implement it. You could fill the library at Alexandria with the commission and consultant reports that were written and immediately shelved. (Commerce RI’s 2010 Roadmap to a Green Economy comes to mind…)

The push toward implementation shows that Taveras and his administration took these issues seriously, as they rightly should. It is a pity that he won’t be able to pick up on the good work done on this front by Governor Chafee at the state level, but I digress.

Open data and information technology are the kinds of tedious, nerdy things that nobody cares or thinks much about—much like highway bridges—until they break. Then everybody freaks the hell out. The fact is that open access to government data or the lack thereof has a profound effect on regular people.

Would you like to log in to your account with the city government and see all your stuff there on a single page? When I say “your stuff” I mean your car tax, your property tax, your parking tickets, your application for a vendors license, your building permits, your communications with public works about that dead tree that’s about to take down the utility lines, etc. Yeah, that stuff.

I certainly would, but I can’t. And it’s not like I haven’t tried. On the commission, my main job was constantly to advocate that the city provide basic web services for residents and develop an internal capability to do so instead of paying ridiculous money to third parties that provide mediocre, rapidly obsolete systems. Sensible and cost-effective as this might be, it remains just a distant possibility. Many things need to change—especially the knowledge and attitudes of city councilors, department heads and…well, everybody in government that can’t make a web page with a text document.

The ugly reality of IT in Providence city government

Your Frymaster also enjoyed a courtesy interview for the role of Chief Information Officer for the city, but I was never really in the race. Jim Silveria, who landed that job and also served on the commission, has done his best to deliver on the commission’s recommendations. This is no slight to Jim. It’s an indictment of the inertia, entrenched interests, lack of resources and lack of capability of existing resources within city government.

I would not have made the same decisions that Jim has, and that’s probably why he got the job instead of me. But at least he made decisions and moved the situation forward in a significant way.

Providence now has an open data portal, an open meetings portal, live streaming and archived video of council meetings and highly-transparent, browsable repository of all the bids to all the city’s RFPs since they started using the system earlier this year. Not for nothin’, but that’s serious progress.

Here’s the thing: all of those new services—just like the previously existing services for paying parking tickets, taxes and your water bill—are from third parties. Expansion of the city’s internal capabilities has been virtually nil. (NB: the RFP repository was developed in-house by the city of Newport, so it can be done—even in RI. Also, using Ustream and Vimeo for the video is kind of a no-brainer.)

While it’s true that outdated job descriptions and overall municipal employees union intransigence hold the city back, the primary cause is a catch-22 in which a lack of resources leads to inefficient use of the resources that are available. This problem stems from an overall lack of understanding at the highest levels (in this case, the city council, department heads and possibly even the executive administration) of the importance of investing in technology and tech-savvy people.

By no means is Providence alone in this regard. Most governments and most corporations have the same problem. This 2008 article by the internationally renowned IT pioneer JP Rangaswami sums it up pretty well. JP starts by repeating one of his favorite quotes, itself from years before:

When you turn down a request for funding an R&D [read: IT] project, you are right 90% of the time. That’s a far higher rate of decision accuracy than you get anywhere else, so you do it.

And that’s fine. Except for the 10% of the time you’re wrong. When you’re wrong, you lose the company.

~ Howard Schneiderman [editorial comment is mine]

If you go read that article, scroll down to the comments. Somebody you know might have weighed in…

“There’s two ways to do things: the right way and
the Army way”

My father used that well-trod quip anytime I tried to cut corners or get away with a half-assed effort. At its core is the recognition that institutions have a hard time changing their thinking and making the tough decision to do what’s best in the long run. Corporations have quarterly reports to shareholders; governments have elections. Doing today the same thing you did yesterday and kicking the can down the road remain the default options for almost every leader everywhere.

And more’s the pity.

In the case of the city of Providence, the combination of an inflexible union, a poorly informed city council, resistant department heads and the absence of a breakthrough leader that could change those three previous items has created the situation where you cannot do things the right way; you can only do things the Army way. Specifically, the city can’t hire a qualified IT person for $100,000 per year, but the city can pay an outsider vendor $100,000 a year to do what the qualified IT person could do in a couple of months.

Thus our tax dollars—that could be paying local people and small IT firms to do great work, as I have repeatedly advocated—go to massive, far off corporations that give us mediocre systems. Just imagine what the city pays in licensing fees just for Microsoft Office. Right?

Code Island, civic hackers and open data

In 2014, Code for America sent a cohort of fellows to work with the state of Rhode Island and created the first state-level “brigade,” Code Island. (All previous brigades worked at the municipal level.) Yours truly serves as the official brigade Storyteller, a CfA-required position for all brigades that roughly translates as communications resource. Open Providence commission chair John Marion and commissioner Nelson Rocha also play active roles. Shawn Selleck, the civic innovation consultant to the city of Providence who has helped Jim Silveria fight the good fight at City Hall, is the brigade’s official Community Organizer.

CfA and its brigades are known as “civic hackers,” computer systems developers and designers that volunteer their time and talent to produce web- and mobile-enabled software applications that let regular people see and use government data. Code Island is greatly enabled by Jim Silveria and Thom Guertin, a Woonsocket native and RI’s Chief Digital Officer.

Code Island has several development projects in process, the most ambitious being a visualization tool that will let users slice and dice the five years of state budget data recently released on the state’s transparency portal. Our tool will provide far greater detail and flexibility that the state’s visualization. Again, this is no slight to RI.gov or Thom and his team. They can only do so much, and by making the data accessible to us, they enable us to take it to the next level.

This is how civic hacking works: open data + free apps = teh awesome.

Code Island wants the candidates on the record

Last week, the brigade sent the three major candidates for mayor of Providence a questionnaire, asking them to go on the record about how they would approach the issue of open data. We focused only on the city of Providence because, despite the significant progress that the Taveras administration has made, we still rate just a D+ for spending transparency, according to RIPIRG.

It’s not like RIPIRG has an ax to grind on this. The rating is in line with the open data census that the Open Knowledge Foundation runs. We rank #41 with a score of 230 compared with New York City, the national leader, with a score over 1600.

The sad fact is that Providence is woefully behind the curve. For a place that fancies itself a geeky little IT haven, that’s fairly pathetic. Yes, IT is nerdy and hard to understand. Yes, hiring people is more complicated than paying a vendor. Yes, EVERYBODY in IT needs to be on a lifelong learning path of continuous improvement.

Yes, yes, yes to everything that is difficult and complicated and…the right thing to do. So, candidates, is any of you willing to push through the inertia so that Providence can finally stop doing IT the Army way?

So far, nobody has given us a response. Jorge Elorza, unsurprisingly, has listed continuing and accelerating implementation of the Open Providence report as part of his ethics agenda. He even specifies creation of a dashboard, which is that thing where you log in to your account and see all your stuff.

I’ve only been pushing for a dashboard for, I dunno, a decade. Can we please?

We’re gearing up for another year at the State House to ensure all residents pay their fair share in taxes, not just you and me. Can we count on you to help?

Tell Governor Chafee Rhode Island can no longer afford unsustainable tax breaks for the wealthy.

After years of tax breaks for the wealthiest Rhode Islanders, our state’s  unemployment rate has grown to the second highest in the country, working families are paying higher property and car taxes, and deep cuts have decimated funding for education, infrastructure, transportation, and services for Rhode Island’s most vulnerable populations.

Despite significant legislative and public support Governor Chafee has blocked efforts to end the failed tax cuts to the wealthiest Rhode Islanders during his time in the Statehouse. It’s time for change!

That’s why Ocean State Action is teaming up with Rhode Islanders for Tax Equity (RITE is a coalition of labor and community groups fighting to restore tax equity) to call on the wealthiest Rhode Islanders to join the rest of us in rebuilding our economy.

CLICK HERE to Tell Chafee to end tax breaks for the wealthy in his budget this year.  

It’s time to get Rhode Island back on the right track, join us today!

Regular readers of the blog know that Treasurer Raimondo has become a lightening-rod for criticism of the state’s recent changes to the public employee pension system.

As a tactic, I’ll admit it’s a good one, simultaneously riling up the base and drawing media attention to the union and retiree’s position. It’s also the first salvo in what’s bound to be a contentious Democratic primary for the Governor’s office. But is the General Treasurer actually at fault? Consider the duties of the office.

Duties
The General Treasurer receives and disburses all state funds, issues general obligation notes and bonds, manages the investment of state funds and oversees the retirement system for state employees, teachers and some municipal employees. She is also responsible for the management of the Unclaimed Property Division, the Crime Victim Compensation Program and the state-sponsored CollegeBoundfund.

Noticeably absent is any mention of negotiating union contracts. That’s simply not her job. What critics would have you believe is that Treasurer Raimondo should have essentially “gone rogue” and usurped the Governor’s duties and possibly those of the General Assembly. L’état, c’est Gina? I’m not convinced. This blog has even gone so far as to suggest that the General Treasurer should be more concerned with “main street” than with the state’s investments and bond rating.

I’ve been a fairly consistent Raimondo supporter, but I was also present at last year’s State House protest adding my voice to the position that the plan asked too much of the neediest pension recipients. In fact I agree, as Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Healthcare Professionals president Frank Flynn put it, that it’s “not a simple math problem as some people describe it.”  But that isn’t the job of the General Treasurer. For a treasurer, it is a math problem, and we shouldn’t expect otherwise.

And Raimondo spent an inordinate amount of time speaking with voters, union members, and retirees throughout the state before making her proposal. Oddly that’s what now seems to rile opponents. As Paul Valletta, the head of the Cranston fire fighters’ union said, “It isn’t the money, it’s the way she went about it.”

I’m not sure what else she could have done. Valletta is essentially complaining that the General Treasurer acted within the duties of the General Treasurer. That’s what we as taxpayers pay her to do! If the unions and retirees are unhappy with the absence of a formerly negotiated outcome, let’s be honest. It’s the Governor, not the General Treasurer, who’s to blame.

I’ve also been concerned that many progressives seem intent on framing the General Treasurer as some union hating, right-wing ideologue. It’s not a fair characterization given that we know little yet about what priorities Raimondo would bring to the Governor’s office, and what we do know is largely in line with progressive priorities (a social liberal who believes in marriage equality and respects the rights of immigrants). During the Carcieri years, we’d have been thrilled with a candidate with progressive credentials a fraction of hers. Yes, she has been at the forefront of a pension reform movement heralded largely by the fringe right. But to assume that makes her one of the fringe right, ignores how seriously underfunded the pensions have been here in Rhode Island. It’s quite a different thing to enact reform out of a sense of obligation than to do so because of an ideological desire to eliminate them entirely.

Ms. Raimondo also learned early on about economic forces at work in her state. When she was in sixth grade, the Bulova watch factory, where her father worked, shut its doors. He was forced to retire early, on a sharply reduced pension; he then juggled part-time jobs.

“You can’t let people think that something’s going to be there if it’s not,” Ms. Raimondo said in an interview in her office in the pillared Statehouse, atop a hill in Providence. No one should be blindsided, she said. If pensions are in trouble, it’s better to deliver the news and give people time to make other plans.

How much easier it would have been, how much less detrimental to her political future (at least with the progressives of the state) to simply enact some changes around the margins and kick the can down the road for someone else to address (historical the way most pols have handled the problem). Should we as progressives be critical of the Raimondo plan? Absolutely, but let’s not shoot down a potential rising star before she’s even had a chance to announce her platform.

Sam;

Publishing the contents of the OP discussion list serve on -line with links at RI Future blog is a violation of our safety/security policies.

Of course, anyone is free to criticize OP, publicly or on the list itself, but exposing the discussion list to the public is not acceptable.

Unfortunately, this is seen by OP as a serious infraction.of our rules for the list. We have had to ask members of the press to leave the list for that exact reason – they wouldn’t respect OP confidentially on its’ list..

We’re requesting that you remove yourself from the OP discussion list.

solidarity;

[Name Redacted]

Well, I’m a good sport, so I fired back this:

I’m sorry, I thought Occupy was committed to a higher level of openness and communication; you know, that the 99% should be able to see the 99%’s list. I’m sorry that’s not the case. Go ahead and remove me.

Sincerely,

Sam

Sam; I hope this is just a misunderstanding. When people post to the OP discussion list, they have to have a certain level of trust that their posts will not be published in the [public] media (certainly not without their prior permission). That’s just common sense. In the past, people have been targeted by the government, employers (lost jobs), and been the subject of harassment for belonging to social protest movements like Occupy. For instance: there’s currently a war on public education, a war on women, and a war on the middle class, designed, engineered and promulgated by both parties – a broad austerity and state security agenda that we’re opposed to. We have teachers, students, and working people in our movement – people who could be targeted and hurt from exposure. In case you haven’t noticed, the US is not really a ‘free’ society anymore. Publishing the contents of emails from the OP list is wrong on so many levels and has nothing to do with any perceived ‘higher openness’. That’s not the same thing as publicly criticizing OP’s tactics or ideas. The right wing does that all the time and we’re perfectly capable of publicly defending our ideas and tactics, but we draw the line at intentionally opening up our people to potential harassment, intimidation, and reprisals. We don’t really want you to leave the list, but do need your promise that you will not publish or publicly expose posts, discussions, threads, etc.from the OP list. If you will make that commitment and agree not to in the future, we’re perfectly happy to have you stay on the list and participate in OP activity. If you feel that you can’t agree to this, then we will have to agree to disagree and you will be removed.

The federal death penalty is legal in every state in America.  There are over 30 federal statutes authorizing the death penalty for any American, including a generic 1st Degree Murder, and it would be difficult to imagine a case that would not qualify under federal law.  Certainly when the people of Rhode Island eliminated the death penalty, they did not consider it would be alright if a courthouse bearing the “United States” logo rather than the Rhode Island “Hope” motto, could sentence a man to die.  The same jury pool of Rhode Islanders would be drawn upon, yet anyone with an objection to the death penalty would be barred from serving on the jury.

Attorney General Eric Holder amended the Federal Death Penalty Protocol (DPP) last year, in an attempt to assist Attorneys General such as Peter Neronha (District of RI) regarding when to seek this punishment.  There is no regard as to whether a state has abolished the death penalty or not, but states that the Feds should only take the case from a state when “the Federal interest in the prosecution is more substantial than the state or local authorities.”  Here, the only factor that seems to apply is the vague “ability and willingness for the state to obtain an appropriate punishment upon conviction.”  Perhaps this is a snub at RI State Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, a career police officer who apparently never handled a felony case.

The DPP guidelines do suggest that victims’ family members be consulted, yet this is a quandry in prosecutions: whether the government stands in for a particular victim, or an entire state.  A victim’s family in Mississippi tried to stop the execution of Henry Curtis Jackson.  He was instead killed by lethal injection yesterday.

After sentencing Jason Pleau to 18 years in state prison for parole and probation violations, a federal grand jury indicted him.  The U.S. Attorney then put in a request to take him into custody under the Interstate Agreement on Detainers Act (IAD).   Governor Lincoln Chaffee (known as the Republican who opposed President Bush on the Iraq war and domestic wiretapping) denied the request under Article IV of the IAD.  The feds then tried to evade this federal Act with a second type of request.  The state asserts that once the federal government puts in a “hold” under the IAD, all future requests to produce Pleau are covered by the provisions of the IAD- no matter what you name it.  This is how it played out, and a three-judge panel of the First Circuit agreed (2 to 1) with Gov. Chaffee, who believes the only reason the federal government would want Jason Pleau is to execute him.  Particularly after Pleau agreed to serve Life Without Parole in state prison.  This is known as the Other Death Penalty.

The Obama Administration, however, asserts that their request was not covered by the IAD for two reasons: (1) the Habeas Corpus ad Prosequendum they filed is outside of the IAD procedures, and (2) the federal government reigns supreme (as laid out in the Supremacy Clause of the constitution) and a governor cannot refuse the request.  The problem with the Feds’ first issue is that the traditional method of transferring prisoners between jurisdictions has been supplanted by the IAD, and they did in fact begin IAD procedures prior to the traditional Habeas.  The title of the paperwork is irrelevant, and the First Circuit agrees.  As for the Supremacy Clause argument, it is difficult for the United States to say they do not need to obey the IAD when they are listed as a party, along with 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and others.  If they have some special status, why bother writing rules that apply to the United States at all?

The First Circuit Court of Appeals, however, credits the United States with the trump card: the Supremacy Clause.  Three judges interpreted a key case to mean the U.S. is above the limitations of the IAD.  Two judges, in their scathing dissent, took the majority to task for what they feel was an “unprincipled” misreading of the key case, U.S. v. Mauro, 436 U.S. 340 (1978).  The dissenting two justices called the ruling “unwarranted and unprecedented,” and “fails the test of common sense.”  As it stands, the split opinions of five judges are the difference between putting the executioner’s hood over the heads of a Rhode Island jury.

It was only a year ago that I, and about a dozen others, testified in the Rhode Island legislature’s bill to posthumously pardon the last man murdered by the People.  Historians testified about the malice of a vindictive crowd, and the racist furor that suspended rational judgment: someone had to pay.  In 1844 it was John Gordon, and seven years later this punishment was abolished for it.  The Public Defender spoke about the current need for best practices in eye-witness identifications and the necessity of videotaped confessions (two reforms advancing in RI).  I spoke about how a similar pair of Irish scapegoats, the Brennan brothers, were railroaded in 1984 for the murder of an Italian landlord in Providence.  They are still in prison.  Here, nobody has argued that Jason Pleau, who was once the catcher on my softball team, is innocent.  However, death penalty supporters are just as certain of guilt when a convicted person is later exonerated.

Rhode Island has filed a petition for certiorari, seeking review in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Justices may find their ideologies torn, such as Antonin Scalia who often speaks of states’ rights in the face of an overbearing federal government, yet he rarely finds a wrong when it comes to the power of the government to exert police powers, and administer the death penalty.  Some say that judges take a moral position, and then manipulate the law to reach it.  Yet as to whether the IAD applies to the federal government, it will be difficult to get around Article II, which reads “(a) ‘State’ shall mean a State of the United States; the United States of America; a territory or possession …”    It will also be difficult to affirm the First Circuit’s belief that Governor Chaffee can’t deny the federal government, where the Act reads “the Governor of the sending State may disapprove the request for temporary custody.”

To do so, the Court might have to say Congress lacked the authority to grant a Governor power over the federal government.  Yet the federal government signed onto this agreement, and now they want out.  Those who advocate for States Rights use it to define marriage, gun laws, and many other issues (it once was a code word for allowing Jim Crow laws), including the Death Penalty.  This legal battle will cost the taxpayers about a million dollars, just to see what will happen to Jason Pleau, a man that none of them likely care an iota about.  Sometimes I wonder what gets people up in the morning.