Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
With former Rhode Island Governor Linc Chafee mulling a run for president, NBC 10 Wingmen discuss his legacy and how his presidential ambitions might affect the Ocean State.
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Interestingly, we all seem to agree that delegating pension reform to then-treasurer-now-Governor Gina Raimondo served the reform effort well but didn’t serve Chafee well. This is, for some odd reason, known as a loss in politics.
I’m sad as hell Pawtucket might lose the PawSox. It’s where I witnessed my first pro baseball game and dozens more since then – highlight: Pedro on a rehab assignment or getting Steve Lyons autograph right from the dugout.
Nostalgia aside, it’s hard to resist the allure of watching the next generation play in downtown Providence. I could take the train up from Wickford, stop downtown for dinner and then watch the sunset on the water from the cheap seats while young adults play a kids game, vying for spots in my memories. It sounds idyllic, and very easy to confuse with economic development.
Rhode Island’s economic needs really have very little to do with where the Red Sox AAA affiliate will play their future home games. That privilege goes to Mr. James Skeffington and the new PawSox ownership group. At the end of the day, those very successful businessmen will be locating the team where they can make the most money – and that has much more to do with where I’d like to watch a baseball game than what’s best for the state’s economy.
State education Commissioner Deborah Gist is leaving Rhode Island for Tulsa, Oklahoma and former Woonsocket state Rep. Jon Brien, my latest NBC 10 Wingmen adversary, says her departure is the fault of the teachers’ unions.
Blaming organized labor for getting rid of Gist is like blaming vaccines for getting rid of the measles. There’s always a few that think the solution to a problem is a bigger problem than the problem.
As Brien, a Woonsocket native, a lawyer and a parent, blames teachers and their unions, his hometown school district sued Gist and the state for not ensuring an adequate education. Meanwhile, during Gist’s tenure in Rhode Island, the graduation rate in Woonsocket dropped 6 percent – from 64 percent of high school seniors in 2009 to 58 percent of high school seniors in 2013.
With one and five Rhode Island children living in poverty, we discussed why this week on NBC 10 Wingmen.
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Can Buddy Cianci really win an election, or will he simply garner a lot of media attention? Sam Bell, of the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats, and Andrew Morse, of Anchor Rising, tackle these questions with Bill Rappleye on NBC 10 Wingmen this week.
“Don’t underestimate the importance of the Democratic primary,” said Bell in closing. “We’re going to have a fresh face and someone who can beat Cianci.”
The Procaccianti Group, the multinational real estate holdings corporation that owns the Hilton and Renaissance hotels in Providence where workers have been protesting and organizing a labor union to demand more humane working conditions, should treat their employees better, agreed Justin Katz and I on last week’s NBC 10 Wingmen.
“In a given circumstance, perhaps they should” form a union, Katz said and said the way they have been treated is “garbage from [employers].”
Katz deserves a lot of credit for this admission. Richard MacAdams, one of the board members for the vehemently anti-union political advocacy group he works for, is also on the chief legal counsel for the Procaccianti Group. I respect Katz for speaking his truth on this issue for the same reasons I respect the fired Hilton Providence workers for speaking theirs.
But, as per every episode, we also had some disagreement. Katz would prefer the invisible hand of the free market create better working conditions for the Hilton employees.
“What I don’t like the union union debate the way it sets it up unions have power to counteract business power,” he said. “If a company isn’t valuing its workers then that’s a problem with the company and we have to create an economic environment in which they suffer for that.”
In theory, everyone agrees I suppose. But from a practical point of view, unfettered capitalism simply doesn’t have an effective way to compel a multinational holdings company to pay poor people a living wage without workers organizing and making a stink about it.
Every time Justin Katz and I tape a Wingmen segment, we find new ways to disagree. But we also find these not-inconsequential areas of agreement too.
This week we debated whether Obamacare is working (guess who suggested this topic!) and Katz articulates well where we agree on health care policy:
“What government is there to do is to say if you need help this is what these programs are set up to do,” he said. “If you need help this is a place you can go to find help.”
But he thinks the government-funded advertisements are going too far. I don’t. Especially given that conservatives like Katz are actively trying to subterfuge the program with their own ads and commercials. But leaving that aside, austerity by way of information asymmetry is a truly perverse political assertion.
Me: “I honestly think it’s unconscionable to try to keep that information from people. That’s not a cool way to save money.
Justin: “Taking people’s money to give it away to people who didn’t know they needed it is not conscionable.”
Watch the video to hear how loud Katz bangs on the table as he talks!
Rapp, Katz and I get an early start on the pension debate this week on NBC 10’s web-only Wingmen segment. I argue the pension case should go to court mostly because I think it’s horrendously unfair that Rhode Island boast about leading the nation when it comes to slashing benefits but loses the stomach for the real fight when it comes to figuring out whether it was legal to do so. (That’s not reform, that’s cuts)
A proposed 10 percent tax on guns and ammo to help fund public/private nonviolence partnerships has shed light on a philosophical difference between Justin Katz and I. And we have a pretty interesting and (sometimes humorous) debate about the ammo tax too, thanks in no small part to our host/referee Bill Rappeleye.
But one quick clarification first, Katz says “guns are not designed to be used in crime.” True, but they are designed to cause violence. And that’s why the sale of them should help prevent violence.
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But back to the interesting philosophical divide though: Katz says the intent of taxes is to infringe. I think he’s wrong about that. And my great fear is that he knows it, but he is going on TV and the internet and purposefully lying about this as a means to an end: to convince the public to shrink government. (More likely is that he’s just become so entrenched in his cause that he’s not able to see the other side of the coin clearly.)
At the end, he explains how he thinks government works: “This is the problem with government and progressive policies in general. You’re not saying hey this is a good thing, let’s feed people, let’s get people jobs, let’s protect people from guns. You’re saying this is my priority I’m going to take your money and give it people I know and trust to do things I want done. That’s not the way the country is supposed to work.”
Progressives certainly are saying the first part that. Our government is too but it can defend itself (if it wants to). As for the latter part of his statement, he’s just got his pronoun wrong. Here’s the corrected quote of how our government actually works:
“We are going to take our money and give it to people we known and trust to do the things we want done.”
This week on NBC 10’s web-exclusive Wingmen segment – starring me, Rapp and Justin Katz – we discuss the tea party’s influence on state government and why Governor Chafee called them out in his State of the State speech.
I do think the tea party has an outsized influence on state politics and public debate. (They have their own radio station, for crying out loud!) I also think Rhode Island gave austerity a pretty fair shake and it hasn’t served us very well.
Earlier today I made the point that the Pope is a progressive. On NBC 10 Wingmen this week, Justin Katz doesn’t disagree. Instead the devout Catholic blogger says the Pope is wrong!
“I’m saying that’s a potential error on his part, that he’s misunderstanding how the economy functions as a practical matter. Which you’re allowed to say the Pope misunderstands a science.”
Note: Katz agrees with Pope Francis that free market economics dehumanizes people and turns them into commodities. “That’s true. That has to be tempered by social structure.” Me: “That’s what us progressives believe.”
It’s well worth noting that I, for one, was really looking forward to hearing Ray “Stop and Frisk” Kelly defend his deplorable practice of what he calls “proactive policing” earlier this week and I didn’t get to because of the widely-reviled Shoutdown at Brown.
But I don’t believe it is the only thing worth noting about the incident.
Another is there is a fairly large, very ad hoc and relatively politically-powerless coalition of activists in Rhode Island that are extremely fed up with institutionalized racism, or what has been called the new Jim Crow. Public policies like the war on drugs, proactive policing, high stakes testing and voter ID that on their face address social problems and in the process disproportionately target poor and minority populations.
I had the great but thankless honor of defending the agitators/organizers who shouted down Ray Kelly this week on NBC10 News Conference.
Watch the online-only Wingmen segment here, in which me, Bill Rappleye and my made-for-TV-arch nemesis Justin Katz debate the efficacy of such political tactics:
