Samuel G. Howard – Page 2

February 4, 2014February 4, 2014

People’s Pledge faces tough politics

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“The love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

-First Epistle to Timothy, Chapter 6, Verse 10; King James Version

So proclaims the KJV, and ponder that the famous part, “the love of money is the root of all evil,” is a proverb older than Christianity itself.

“Issues of campaign finance have taken a front seat in this election,” John Marion told RI Future earlier. Marion should know; as executive director of Common Cause RI the task of keeping the three big Democratic primary campaigns of Pell, Raimondo, and Taveras at the table falls to him as they meet to hammer out the details of a People’s Pledge. Raimondo and Taveras also swatted at one another over campaign donations this week.

It is beginning to sound like negotiating a Pledge will be akin to a Herculean labor. The Raimondo campaign hit with a one-two punch of an expansive Pledge, covering all outside expenditures, not simply the Super PAC spending; and also requested that the negotiations be open to the media.

It’s a canny move, given that it’s likely the Raimondo campaign won’t just be facing campaign operations, but also public sector union operations aimed at ending her career. The “typical” Pledge used by during Massachusetts’ Warren-Brown race for Senate certainly seems to harm Raimondo the most, and the blanket outside spending ban will prevent her opponents from mitigating her significant fundraising lead.

As intelligent as that may be in the immediate future, it seems to ignore that limiting the resources campaigns have will probably lead to negative advertising (because it unfortunately works); and then it becomes a race to see who can emerge the least-bloodied in September. Hopefully, instead of these being ironclad demands, the Raimondo team is merely staking out its ideal position, and will allow itself to be bargained down.

Similarly, the call for opening negotiations to the media sounds like a great idea; until you think that few negotiations of consequence have ever been hammered out in the public eye. Negotiations call for discretion and humility, and the court of public opinion rarely rewards those characteristics, especially for politicians.

But a call for transparency about a Pledge aimed at increasing transparency is good politics, and it’s a fine line to walk between voicing legitimate concerns and sounding like you’ve got something to hide.

Make no mistake about it, this is a war of position right now, with each side marshaling what it needs to hammer at each other come the summer and early fall when voters start actually paying attention.

That’s partly why campaign finance has received media attention at all. It is the season of fundraisers and campaign finance reports. With little to report on beyond money, the political scene will be mostly focused on the big political campaigns until the General Assembly starts to take up bills, at which point the media will keep one eye on both.

The problem is that the state is not electing a fundraiser-in-chief, but rather a governor. Ultimately the Pledge is subservient to that goal, providing the voters the ability to select who they think would govern best. Until then, we may find ourselves, like the ancients, pierced through with many sorrows.

January 31, 2014

How to make college affordable: Pay It Forward, Pay It Back coming to RI?

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Almost unnoticed by RI media (save for education reporter Linda Borg in The Journal) is H7201, which would create a “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back” pilot program for funding tuition to colleges. The idea has found traction in the lefty blogosphere (notably by Matt Bruenig of Demos’ PolicyShop) and has been piloted by the State of Oregon. It’s relatively simple. The state sets up an initial pool of money to fund tuition for students at a select higher education institution in the state. That pool covers the costs of their tuition for their time in college. When the students graduate, they then pay back a proportion of their income over a set number of years.

This whole style of paying for college called “income-based repayment (IBR)”. Pay It Forward, Pay It Back gets around the typical student debt relief problem that ultimately subsidizes the educations of the well-off. It’s no secret that wealthier people are far more likely to gain a college education, and they disproportionately make up college graduates. Any broad-based tax that reduced student debt burdens would ultimately have poor people paying for the wealthy to receive higher education, furthering the achievement gaps between the wealthy and the poor.

Pay It Forward, Pay It Back neatly defeats this problem. If you make a lot of money after you graduate, your repayments will basically subsidize the costs of students who didn’t make much. Those repayments happen for a set number of years, long enough that even if you start off paying just a few hundred in your first year out, within in a few years you could be paying thousands.

Theoretically, if this program succeeds, the State of Rhode Island could guarantee every single child who is born in the state a college degree, assuming they get accepted.

Are there problems with this bill? Yes, for one thing, it requires that students graduate within four years for a bachelor’s or two years for an associate’s; while saying nothing about those who drop-out. This may be because it is simply a pilot, but drop-outs and those who take five years (perhaps because of a double major) could simply make payments for less or more time, respectively.

It’s also couched in the “workforce development” language of the skills gap, which is big on Smith Hill right now, even though the gap is fictitious. Another problem is that instead of being for all degrees, it will only be for select courses of study in an attempt to provide workers to state employers; so future English majors don’t expect to reap the benefits any time soon. Presumably education degrees won’t be targeted, despite our rhetoric to have better-trained teachers.

But how you sell the bill is less importance than its existence. Hopefully a Sub A will expand this bill to be far more ambitious with a focus on the students rather than their potential employers who may not even hire these people when they graduate.

The lead sponsor is Speaker Gordon Fox himself, and the press release also credits Rep. Joseph McNamara as House Health, Education and Welfare Committee Chairman. For those saying there’s no ambition in Rhode Island or a dearth of leadership, this is a bill which should give you hope.

January 30, 2014January 30, 2014

Ken Block, ideological stringency and the People’s Pledge

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I read with interest Ken Block’s rejection of the People’s Pledge on the following basis:

“I support comprehensive campaign-finance reform,” Block said. “But I won’t do it piecemeal.” And a People’s Pledge wouldn’t address the disadvantage he’d face against incumbents such as Raimondo, “who has spent three full years as treasurer raising money for this race,” he said.

Something similar to “I won’t do it piecemeal” is a common refrain I hear among supporters of change or reform; most notably among left-wing opponents of the ACA (it didn’t go far enough!). I have no desire to rehash that particular battle, but suffice it to say, we have to deal in political realities, not political desires.

It’s a weird thing for a Republican candidate to oppose the People’s Pledge on the grounds of it doesn’t do enough to address the problem. Republicans of the Citizen’s United-era have been generally anti-campaign-finance reform. And if Block is keeping his previous position of “moderate,” a People’s Pledge would be in line with the model New England “moderate” Republican Scott Brown.

The argument that the Pledge is piecemeal is particularly flimsy. Citzen’s United has made the goals of the campaign-finance reform movement relatively unachievable; the striking down of McCain-Feingold’s section of unlimited corporate and union spending has made so-called “dark money” an increasing reality in all campaigns. And the People’s Pledge is proven to work at reducing that dark money spending.

Ideological stringency can be well and good. Refusing to support something over a matter of principle can be quite admirable. Opposing things as not going far enough when they would be ineffective or damaging is sensible. But this is neither of those cases. The Pledge notably advances the campaign-finance reform movement’s goals while providing proof to skeptical citizens that reform has an impact. Furthermore, while Block’s support of reform is proven and well-known, his ability to get it passed is non-existent. Democratic efforts, notably those under Rep. Chris Blazejewski, have been far more successful (unsurprisingly), though they often run into First Amendment issues and sometimes work indiscriminately when a targeted approach is called for.

One factor gone unsung in this is that the People’s Pledge has been a defining issue of the Democratic primary campaign, I think largely because the campaign-finance reform movement in the Democratic Party is far greater than that in the Republican Party (which is next to non-existent as far as I know). Block’s refusal to support it keeps him from supporting a “Democratic” issue, but also gives him space to keep up his usual attack line of the “ineffectiveness” of Democratic policies. However, it also provides the opening for Block’s primary opponent Allan Fung from having to take a stand on the Pledge one way or the other until the general election (should he beat Block, which seems likely).

As a final thought, Block’s criticism of Raimondo rings hollow. After all, what are we to believe Block was doing for the last three years, not preparing to run for governor?

January 26, 2014January 27, 2014

The desire to return to Bubblenomics, and why that’s a bad idea

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Our own Frymaster made a good point in the comments of Ted Nesi’s blog:

…it’s unlikely that RI – like Nevada which shares our fate – will recover back to those levels [of pre-recession economic indicators] because they were essentially bubble driven.

Let’s take a look at the housing bubble again.

(via http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/)

So that massive bubble from 2001 to 2006 should be the major thing that everyone thinks about when we consider the Great Recession. Houses were tremendously overvalued, and when they crashed, the mortgages didn’t disappear. For a lot of homeowners, it’d be really great if we could return to the bubble, because then they’d no longer be underwater.

Of course, if we made it back there, we’d suffer another crash that would be disastrous for the the state. It’d be really bad to return to the boom-bust cycle that existed in this country prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve system. And given the shakiness of housing prices, it’s possible we’ll go through another crash in the near future.

The question Rhode Islanders need to ask our policymakers is this: how do we return to bubble-era economic conditions without the fundamental instability that created the bubble in the first place?

January 22, 2014

‘Rhode to Work’ plan is decent politics but bad policy

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In an effort to address Rhode Island’s unemployment rate, Senate leadership has announced a new workforce development plan, “Rhode to Work“, designed to address the skills gap. The skills gap is a labor market theory that posits that employers have job openings they can’t fill due to a lack of qualified applicants. This often goes hand-in-hand with rhetoric about building “tomorrow’s workforce” and our need to be competitive in the global economy.

There’s just one niggling little problem: there’s virtually no evidence that such a skills gap actually exists. Certainly not in Rhode Island, where six out of 10 of summer 2012’s job vacancies had either no education requirement or only a high school diploma or G.E.D.

I’ve talked about this before; specifically, UWM researcher Mark Price’s work debunking the skills gap in Milwaukee. Currently, for every 2 U.S. students who graduate with a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degree, only 1 gets a job; usually they cite that either they couldn’t find one or they could earn more in another industry. An article in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Spectrum showed there were 11.4 million STEM-degree-holding workers employed in non-STEM fields in comparison to 277,000 STEM vacancies. Professor Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources concludes that there multiple issues at fault: refusal by employers to hire entry-level applicants, refusal by employers to provide on-the-job-training, overcomplicated job requirements, software that screens out potentially great matches for. For anecdotal evidence tied with data, there’s the manufacturing CEO who told New York Times writer Adam Davidson that he didn’t like workers with union experience and paid less than work in the fast food sector – not uncommon; Davidson says the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data shows that skilled jobs have fallen off and their wages have fallen as well.

Perhaps you’ve noticed a trend there. Virtually all of the hiring issues are on the employer-side of the equation, not the applicant-side. That’s pretty much what a study from Illinois found. The researchers there suggest that there are four main reasons for advocating for the existence of a skills gap: it scapegoats job-seekers rather than business, it could be caused by employers parroting other employers in their sector from low-unemployment states, it increases the labor supply driving down wages, and it transfers the costs of training onto the state and off of the employer’s books.

“Rhode to Work” offers virtually no evidence of an existence a genuine skills gap. Instead, it cites this article from WPRI that used only two anecdotal pieces of evidence from employers, and never once offered data that concurred with their conclusions. Similarly, this article from The Providence Journal‘s John Kostrzewa made the rounds a few weeks ago, offering only employer-anecdotal evidence. Responding to that article, the far-right Current/Anchor’s Justin Katz reached pretty much the same conclusion as the above study (once you get past the moralizing); this is an attempt to socialize job training costs.

Let’s pause and say that job training isn’t bad. It’s perfectly fine for workers to be retrained or to learn new skills. It’s just that we need to make a couple things clear. First, job-training should be paid for by employers, who will benefit from it. And second, it is not a cure for Rhode Island’s unemployment issues. Once again, ostriches.

Rhetorically though, “Rhode to Work” (despite the tiresome wordplay) is a perfectly fine piece of politics. It’s hard to be against it unless you want to be seen advocating for keeping people ignorant (because that’s basically what the “skills gap” talk posits: Rhode Islanders are too stupid to do the work that’s available). And it’s an easy rallying point for supporters of dismantling the public education system; the exact same rhetoric is used, that creepy “building the workforce of tomorrow” language that’s supposed to inspire us to have our kids buckle down real hard for the tests that will decide their future. Also, it mainly focuses on a future workforce, rather than the one we’ve got (you know, the one in need of help). It’s good politics to focus economic policies on the future workforce, because it means during future boom times you can take credit for that success.

That refusal to deal with the problem at hand a real shame, because as we’ve previously pointed out, very few of Rhode Island’s policies are actually targeted at Rhode Islanders who actually need assistance. Maybe we can look to the House for better solutions. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.

January 22, 2014January 22, 2014

Oops, I was wrong about the People’s Pledge’s viability!

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So back in October 2013, just after Angel Taveras called on Gina Raimondo to sign the People’s Pledge, I pretty much wrote it off as not happening. (After I asked for it to happen in September)

Quick up-to-speed: a People’s Pledge is a way to workaround the results of the Citizens United ruling. Candidates agree that if outside interests spend money during the campaign, whoever is the beneficiary of the outside spending will donate half of the cost of the ad to the aggrieved candidate’s choice of charity. This does two things: one, it tells outside groups to back off, because their help will do more harm than good. Two, it makes a candidate donate to charity, which always looks good.

So, long story short, on the 4-year anniversary of Citizens’ United Raimondo backtracked from her campaign’s initially tepid reception of the idea to make a pretty unequivocal statement that a People’s Pledge was needed for the gubernatorial primary. Common Cause RI Executive Director John Marion threw this post up here on RI Future.

Now we could (and will) wildly speculate as to why Raimondo decided to back the Pledge. Maybe the polling for it is good. Maybe it’s an attempt to cloak herself in the Elizabeth Warren mantle. Maybe it’s her significant fundraising lead. Maybe it’s a little of column A, a little of column B, and a little of column C. Whatever. It’s a good thing.

As Common Cause MA points out, the Pledge reduces dark money spending, increases the influence of small donors, and decreases the amount of negative advertising. I wrote a post about a month before the Taveras campaign announced its call for a People’s Pledge, and one of my main points was that we need to avoid bloody primaries. Now, that’s just my partisan progressive Democrat stance, a harsh primary depresses Democratic turnout, and when Dems don’t vote, Republicans win.

Common Cause RI understandably isn’t concerned at all with that, they’re more about the disclosure issues, right of the public to know, that sort of good government thing. They’re hopeful soon-to-announce Clay Pell will also endorse the Pledge, and then the campaigns can get down to brass tacks and sort this out.

I’m hopeful (again). That Pell might refuse seems a bit weird, and would raise more questions than would be good for his fledgling campaign.

So that’s where the Democratic primary stands.

How about the Republicans? Oh dear.

January 15, 2014January 15, 2014

The new Raimondomania

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On Monday, General Treasurer Gina Raimondo kicked off her campaign to be the Democratic nominee for governor by announcing a broad platform. Among them, rebuilding public school buildings, an assault weapons ban along with tougher gun control, college loan forgiveness, raising the minimum wage and indexing it with cost-of-living-adjustments, providing universal pre-K, allowing undocumented workers access to drivers’ licenses, utilizing social impact bonds to fight poverty and social problems, and holding Wall St. accountable.

Had it been announced by any other candidate it would’ve been hailed as the most progressive platform laid out by a RI gubernatorial candidate in a generation.

Even the campaign of Mayor Angel Taveras, who is running for governor in the same primary, didn’t fault it. When asked by The Providence Journal if they disagreed with a single point, Taveras’ campaign manager replied, “no.”

But progressives didn’t hail it as a high-watermark in years of their organizing and work. As architect of the 2011 pension cuts that wreaked havoc on public sector employees in the midst of Rhode Island’s stalled “recovery” from the recession, the general treasurer still has light-years to go to win back the unanimous left-wing support she enjoyed when she waltzed to victory in 2010. Since ushering pension cuts through the General Assembly, the treasurer has remained remarkably out of sight with the exception of a few financial literacy courses and support for payday lending reform. The effective use of the bully pulpit that she displayed in 2011 was noticeably lacking in 2012 and 2013. Her most high-profile media appearances have been to defend pension cuts or argue for the repayment of the moral obligation bonds secured for the 38 Studios fiasco (another of the many dark clouds that hang over Rhode Island politics).

The 2011 pension cuts have been characterized by national critics such as Ted Siedle and Matt Taibbi as a Wall St. cash-grab, and so local progressives seized upon the under-the-radar concept of social impact bonds (SIBs) to tie the treasurer more closely to Wall St. Longtime fiscal policy observer Tom Sgouros asked in his evaluation of the concept whether Raimondo intended “to promote the public good, or sell it?”

Social impact bonds are easy to tar and feather. First, they contain the word “bond” and Rhode Islanders have seen a string of negative implications of what happens when bondholders come looking for money. The reality is that the treasurer used language out of step with the U.S. federal government. The Feds have used the more accurate “pay-for-success contract” to describe the concept. If the bond doesn’t produce success, there’s no payment from the government; which is why this is attractive to governments. The risk falls on the private investor, rather than the public purse. And unlike the 38 studios bonds, if a SIB fails to register satisfactory results, investors don’t get their money back. They lose it.

Second, their pedigree includes Goldman Sachs. Yes, the investment bank was a major backer of an initiative by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to use the bonds to reduce recidivism among 16-18 year olds leaving Rikers Island. But the concept was initially begun at HMP Peterborough in the U.K. There the backing was from a collection of philanthropies rather than an investment bank. Other U.S. attempts have used a blend of charity and private funding. The left-leaning Roosevelt Institute suggested that SIBs “have the potential to be an important tool in the poverty-fighting arsenal.” Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government even has a guide for state and local governments on how to manage SIBs.

Third, the concept has been so low-key in Rhode Island that even our paper of record, The Providence Journal, suggested that Raimondo “had introduced a new concept to Rhode Island’s political lexicon.” In reality, the idea had been consigned to business reporting until Raimondo mentioned it Monday. Rhode Island’s very own Social Enterprise Ecosystem Economic Development (SEEED) has been exploring SIBs already (and bringing them to the attention of both Raimondo and Governor Lincoln Chafee). Master’s students at Brown’s Taubman Center also researched the concept focusing on recidividism.

So it’s neither a bond (at least not as we’ve become accustomed to them in Rhode Island), nor created by Goldman Sachs, nor a concept unique to the treasurer and her venture capital background. We may be entering a new Raimondomania. Whatever comes out of the treasurer’s mouth is instantly controversial. You can count on the media to cover it, and you can count on progressives to denounce it if they’re not familiar with it; usually with the words “Wall Street” to boot.

Yes, the treasurer is deserving of tough criticism. She’s repeatedly made it clear that our contract with the workers who built our state is less important than our contracts with bondholders who were already insured against losses. She made a previously backwater office a major part of the political landscape, achieved a stunning legislative success, and then squandered the next two years by not vociferously pushing the progressive agenda she was elected on. All of the treasurer’s platform ideas could’ve been pushed for and passed in the General Assembly throughout her current term. She rarely lent her weight to these causes. And there’s no EngageRI to provide muscle to rebuild public school buildings or offer college-loan forgiveness.

But the progressive response to Raimondo’s progressive platform is typical of the left-wing infighting that all too often prevents success. Instead of achieving the 99% of things they agree upon, the left will slaughter one another over the remaining 1%, stymieing progress and allowing conservatives to win policy changes they needn’t have.

Social impact bonds are a prime example of this. Yes, the optimal outcome would be for the state to invest in the solutions and save itself the maximum amount of money possible, to be reinvested elsewhere. However, our state legislators have proven unwilling to do the heavy lifting themselves, preferring instead to look towards business for solutions. Social impact bonds aren’t ideal, but they’re better than doing nothing. If they fail to work, they cost the state nothing. Most importantly, they achieve the progressive goal of helping people immediately rather than in some fantastical future when progressives control both chambers of the General Assembly and the governor’s office and are able to pass their agenda without resistance. Perhaps social impact bonds will be the kick that makes our legislators realize they could just save all this money instead of passing a share of the savings on to private investors.

There is a very real possibility that Raimondo will win the primary and then go on to being the first elected Democratic governor since Bruce Sundlun. Should that come to pass, progressives will have a duty to fight Raimondo if and when her agenda damages the economic health of our state and hurts our people. But when a Governor Raimondo’s agenda aligns neatly with the progressive agenda, then it’s time to applaud and support it. If progressives can’t recognize that even the most controversial part of Raimondo’s platform moves Rhode Island closer to alleviating societal ills then how can they lay claim to being the champions of the downtrodden and dispossessed?

January 10, 2014

Republican candidates for governor kick off 2014 with broken promises

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Well, that didn’t take long.

Apparently, the Republican candidates for governor who promised to stay away from WPRO’s talk shows only were going to keep that pledge as long as John DePetro was off the air; making as principled a stand as they dared during the holiday season when few voters are paying attention. Now that the news has turned back to politics with parole offices and the start of the General Assembly’s 2014 session, and DePetro is back on the air… well… Let’s remember what they promised:

Clearly, Cranston Mayor Allan Fung gave himself far more leeway by only promising to stay off DePetro’s show. Former Moderate Party leader Ken Block issued a firm statement expressing his refusal to appear on WPRO until such time as DePetro ceased to be unemployed.

But that was when the boycott was Big News, DePetro was on indefinite vacation, and everyone was about to shut down for Christmas and New Year’s. Block ended his boycott after 3 weeks and six days. Fung waited the extra day, and then appeared on DePetro’s show (although, maybe you could argue that Fung has so far kept his promise never to appear on “John DiPetro’s” show).

For the Republicans, strategically, joining the boycott never made sense. WPRO is perhaps the beating heart of conservatism in Rhode Island (or at least the rebel yell). If you are trying to win a primary of conservatives, refusing to gain access to that audience is a bad move. Which is why Fung’s restriction of his boycott to merely DePetro’s show was smarter than Block’s decision. For one thing, the boycott has been portrayed as union-driven. Fung walked a fine line between being seen to bend to union interests (a big no-no in a Republican primary) or failing to condemn outright misogyny (something you don’t want to do in a Rhode Island general election). Unfortunately, when it comes down to it, Fung appears to have no qualms about the misogyny.

Now, in my cynical nature, I’d say that plenty of political observers will tell you it’s bad form to break a campaign promise before the election has happened. Usually, politicians like to wait until after elections, when they can talk about mitigating factors like “the facts on the ground” and other such inanity. Frankly, I don’t foresee this having much of an effect on the Republican race. Both candidates broke their promises, both candidates made the promise, and thus they really can’t hit each other with it.

But I think it’s a poor sign of things to come that both Republicans chose to begin the election year by refusing to commit to a principle stand they were perfectly willing to make four weeks before. Both these men are going to make statements to effect that we can’t trust the politicians of the Democratic Party to be in the governor’s office, and the lack of accountability that our political class displays. But both these men have just demonstrated that they’re perfectly willing to break a promise when it suits them. And that’s bad, because the whole purpose of a promise is that you won’t break it when it benefits you. As for accountability, well, it’s a value only when it’s other people being held accountable.

The question now is whether Democratic politicians, who are continuing to join the boycott, will continue to stand for their principles.

P.S. I don’t often say this, but if you’re interested in learning more about the Republican primary for governor, Andrew Morse over the Current-Anchor(?) has pretty good transcripts of their talks with the Cranston Republican City Committee, starting with Fung.

January 7, 2014January 7, 2014

A bit more on Rhode Island’s ostriches

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In my last post, I suggested that instead of dealing with actual problems, Rhode Island “leadership” prefers to either focus on distractions or bury their heads in the sand. One of the examples of issues I used was the long-term unemployment rate; which is usually defined as being out of work six-months or more. WPRI’s Ted Nesi yesterday pointed out the chart below, released by the U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Democratic staff in support of Senate Dems’ push to extend unemployment insurance:

Long-term unemployment by state — (via Joint Economic Committee Democratic Staff)

As Nesi points out, RI proportionally has more long-term unemployed than any other state. If you drill down into the JEC Democratic staff’s numbers, what they show is that of our 9% unemployment rate (which is called the “U-3 unemployment rate” – that’ll be important later), 44% of those workers are long-term unemployed.

Why is that a problem? Well, there’s pretty clear evidence that employers don’t like to hire the long-term unemployed; at least according to a Boston Fed study released in October 2012. Not even a “can’t get an interview” situation, it’s a “won’t look at the application” situation. Unlike previous recessions, where when job vacancies rose both short-term and long-term unemployment fell the Great Recession has been different. An increase in job vacancies isn’t causing a decrease in long-term unemployment. So even when employers have openings, they aren’t filling them, despite the existence of candidates who are currently long-term unemployed.

Now, this might be the point where people start saying “well, there’s a skills gap, and we need more workforce development.” But March 2013 research from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee demonstrates that, consistent with 40 years of jobs and training research, “workforce development” has little to no impact on workers and the “skills gap” is a mythological creature on par with Pegasus and the Questing Beast. The study quotes Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University Center on Education and Workforce Development:

Training doesn’t create jobs. Jobs create training. And people get that backwards all the time. In the real world, down at the ground level, if there’s no demand for magic, there’s no demand for magicians.

As Matthew O’Brien of The Atlantic points out in the article linked above, the discrimination against the long-term unemployed is a vicious cycle which has the ability to permanently impoverish the country. Eventually, those 4.1% are going to burn their way through every family member, friend, and place of goodwill available. And they’ll end up homeless. Combine that with the structural deficit in the state budget, a likely loss in revenue from gambling once Massachusetts casinos start up, and a likely future economic crash due to failure on the part of the national government to reform our economy to prevent the abuses that caused the Great Recession… well, that means we’ll have a state even less capable of dealing with the crisis at hand.

Before I move on to our state’s “response” to this slow-motion crisis, I want to make a final point about the unemployment rate. If we really want to imagine what a healthy RI economy looks like, we have to look past the U-3 or “official” unemployment rate. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Rhode Island’s U-6 unemployment rate for Q4 2012 through Q3 2013, which includes the total unemployed plus marginally attached worker (people who have given up looking for work in the past four weeks) plus people employed part time for economic reasons Rhode Island has a 15.8% unemployment/underemployment rate. While this means we are no longer the worst in the nation (5 states are equal to or above ours), it’s nowhere near the 8.3% we had just before the Great Recession hit.

So given that this is perhaps the greatest threat to our state’s economic well-being, what was the major economic package to come out of General Assembly and be signed by Governor Chafee? “Moving the Needle” which states the problem it intends to address in its first sentence: “In its annual ‘Top States for Business’ rankings, published on July 10, 2012, CNBC ranked Rhode Island 50th of 50 states on how appealing the state is to start or grow a business.”

Distractions. State leadership is more concerned with the subjective rankings given to it by a television station (which has as part of its goal, to entertain and make a profit) than the reality in front of it. That’s the reality where 4.1% of our labor force has been searching for work for six months or more. Where 9% of it is unemployed. Where 15.8% is either looking for work, discouraged or gave up looking for work, or taking a part time job until economic conditions improve. Let’s jump back to that Prof. Carnevale quote: “if there’s no demand for magic, there’s no demand for magicians.”

That’s the problem in a nutshell. There is a demand problem in the state. If you’re unemployed or on a really tight budget, you can’t buy what business is selling. So it doesn’t matter too much what businesses Rhode Island can’t attract, because even if it can attract them (“competitiveness” between states is usually nothing more generous cash giveaways), there’s a weak customer base that can’t support them. Moving the Needle is just about getting us more magicians… or illusionists, I think is the synonym.

It’s that mindset that produced 38 Studios, a pie-in-the-sky dream of beaucoup bucks while kick-starting a tech industrial boom and hiring a bunch of Rhode Islanders. It’s utterly backwards. We need a Rhode Islanders First jobs program, that puts our actually existing (and struggling) citizens ahead of all the fantasies of start-ups and imaginary migrating businesses. We know we can’t rely on the federal government to provide one, so we’ll have to do this ourselves. If that’s a Rhode Island-style WPA/CCC type effort, so be it. If it means we pay people to fix our infrastructure, assist our nonprofits and even work in support of our businesses, that’s fine with me.

You can say that’s government picking winners and losers. I will too. I say it’s definitely government picking a winner. Rhode Island.

January 5, 2014January 6, 2014

Furor over Probation and Parole Offices Proves Need for Genuine Prison Reform

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angus davis — Angus Davis, CEO of Swipley, has asked the state not to locate a parole office in downtown Providence.

The response to a plan to move parole and probation offices to Downtown Providence has been a disappointing chapter in recent events. Angus Davis, four contenders for Democratic nominee, the Providence Chamber, and everyone else who took up the call against placing these offices in Downtown should be ashamed of themselves.

Davis’ intellectual dishonesty is especially disgusting in his use of the phrase “government-mandated criminal convention center” as though B&ECon14 and Larceny Conference 2015 will be renting space out at 40 Fountain St. with the intent of spreading best practices and instilling values. It’s representative of Davis’ clear disdain for our criminal justice system. Ostensibly, probation and parole offices are to check in on how criminal offenders are doing rehabilitating back into society. Davis views these offices as doing the opposite.

This view isn’t limited to Davis. It’s in everyone who thinks that as they walk along Fountain Street or walk by Kennedy Plaza (these are not the kind to wait for a bus in Kennedy Plaza) that they can spot a parolee or a person on probation. It’s in everyone who refuses to get out of their car in Providence because of its “high crime” (despite massive reduction in crime rates since the heyday of the “super criminal”). And its in every employer who views a criminal conviction as a scarlet letter to be carried around for the rest of one’s life.

Recently, the State of Rhode Island passed “Ban the Box” legislation that prevents employers from asking about criminal convictions on job applications (in interviews, employers are allowed to fire away). This was a positive first step aimed at dealing with the effects of our twisted prison system.

And make no mistake about it, our prison system is twisted. What was supposed to be a genuine reform from hangings, beatings, and mutilations to a reflective period has turned into a for-profit enterprise, complete with school-to-prison pipelines, mandatory minimum sentencing, three-strike laws, and a plethora of policies that add up to give the United States the highest rate of incarceration in the world; possibly our only rival for this position in North Korea. Even the most policed country in the world, Russia, still manages to come in many places below.

What’s on display in the reaction to this simple relocation is a classic example of Rhode Islanders hiding their heads in the sand when it comes to genuine problems in the state. If Davis was at all concerned about reducing the number of parolees and people on probation around his offices he would be calling for serious prison reform in the state of Rhode Island. Perhaps along a Scandinavian model. Instead Davis and his partners in opposition are perfectly fine with moving the location to Cranston (a proposition which I doubt Cranston residents and businesses are particularly in love with).

The implied threat, as always, is “I will take my ball and go play with it elsewhere” the classic employer flight threat that’s used to pressure government on everything from taxes, not enough parking, the education system, etc. And lawmakers listen.

I expect, given his propensity to kowtow to parochial interests, Governor Chafee will listen to Davis rather than his own agencies which oversee this population and have said that such offices are not the sites of dangerous criminal activity. Such a give-in will be another loss in a state which refuses to take serious action against the ills which plague our state; whether it’s lack of affordable housing, high unemployment (especially long-term unemployment), our incarceration and recidivism rates, etc. Focusing on all of these would save the State money and reinvigorate our economy. Instead we focus on ill-advised band-aids, half-measures and one-off deals: creating higher-risk casinos, giving away our limited land to the expensive and tax-free “meds and eds” which can only support a weak service economy, or paying $75 million for an unproven video game company.

I’d argue that there are those in state and local government who are willing to tackle the big issues, but given the cowardice in the vast majority of the Providence mayoral candidates in their handling of this issue, I don’t have much… hope.

January 1, 2014January 1, 2014

CRMC: Taylor Swift Is Building a Completely Legal Wall

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Photo courtesy of WJAR/NBC 10. Click on image for original.

About an hour after my post on Taylor Swift’s wall rehabilitation I saw this column by Tom Mooney in The Providence Journal where the Coastal Resources Management Council’s* Laura Dwyer gives a pretty definitive answer about any criticism of Swift for building a wall on her property.

Dwyer said the CRMC expected the permit applications from such an international celebrity would draw attention.

“Our executive director [Grover Fugate] had a feeling this was going to happen, so doing more than his usual due diligence, he went to the site a number of times, just so he had a good understanding of the present conditions, what they wanted to do, and in order to feel comfortable that this was all under ‘maintenance’ of the seawall.”

Swift’s hard-working publicist points us to another story by The Day‘s David Collins, the writer who kicked off the whole hullabaloo. Here’s the key bit:

Turns out, though, Swift and her engineers suggest in their application to the CRMC, the old cement wall is well above the mean high water mark, the effective property line for oceanfront land.

In fact, the plans indicate Swift’s property extends in some places up to 40 feet beyond the concrete wall.

And if you were to extrapolate from that line, along the beach, it would mean much of the big wide sandy beachfront the public enjoys every summer in Watch Hill is above mean high water and owned by the adjacent homeowners.

This seems counterintuitive because it’s not what people usually think of as the high tide line, the part of the beach where a “wet line” is left as the tide goes in and out.

I learned some of this from a CRMC geologist Monday who explained that the legal definition of mean high water in Rhode Island comes from a very specific court case and involves complex calculations unrelated to the vagaries of ocean tides on a beach or the classic “wet line” left behind.

Unless I’ve got my facts wrong, the case in question was in the Rhode Island Supreme Court, State v. Ibbison (1982); where a property owner had fishermen arrested for trespassing. The fishermen had figured that the high water mark (usually marked by seaweed) was public property. The property owner asserted that the mean high tide mark was. The property owner was ruled correct, but the arrest was ruled to be unfounded, because up until Ibbison, there was no standard definition for what the “shore” was. And thus for the last 30 years the mean high tide mark is our standard (which has left large portions of public property underwater). (Information on Ibbison from page 116 of The Rhode Island State Constitution by Patrick Conley and Robert Flanders, Jr.)

So what does all this mean for Swift? Well, it means she’s in the right and clear, that David Collins can’t necessarily eyeball “mean high tide,” that the CRMC does their due diligence, and that I’ve once again poked my finger in someone’s eye who’s much bigger then me without genuine cause (the sad thing is that I know about Ibbison since my 11 Awesome Things about RI post, Collins didn’t have that benefit).

However, it also points to the problem with using undefined and vague words when trying to protect rights in our Constitution. I mean theoretically, if you have the constitutional right to gather seaweed from the “shore” that same “shore” should extend to the highest extent of seaweed. If you have to swim out to gather your seaweed, I’m not sure that should be counted as “shore.” Anyhow, defining “shore” as equivalent to “high water mark” not “mean high water mark” is a constitutional change (or a judicial one, but it’s hard to roll back 30 years of judicial interpretation), and that’s really up to the voters.

So yeah, if you were hoping to use this little episode to nurse your weirdly deep and inexhaustible hatred of Taylor Swift, then you’ll have to find some other reason.

*Edit: An earlier version of this post referred to the final “C” in CRMC as “Commission” rather than “Council”

December 31, 2013January 2, 2014

Is Taylor Swift Stealing Public Property? [UPDATED]

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Well, it’s not 2014 yet, but Taylor Swift is already making a bid to be on GoLocalProv’s “14 who made a difference in RI in 2014” list, mainly by making RI a little smaller.

Reporter David Collins of The Day describes the scene around the Nashville country star’s mansion:

Not only is the Swift contractor plucking and moving around big ocean boulders, but they have added a whole new line of rock sea wall on what had previously been a public beach, at a location that appears to be below mean high tide.

Just a note, if it’s below mean high tide, it’s public property in RI, specifically to prevent folks like Swift whose reach might exceed their grasp from grasping up our waters and beaches.

Collins also points out that the wall is permitted only by the RI Coastal Resources Management Commission, not Westerly:

After touring the Swift construction site Friday from the public perimeters, I headed to Town Hall, thinking the permits on file there would better explain what’s going on.

So imagine my surprise when the first person I encountered at the building office said the only work she knew of at the Swift mansion was the installation of a generator.

I then asked to speak with Building Official David Murphy, who acknowledged that he does indeed know of the extensive work going on at the Swift house.

Indeed, when I suggested it must be costing more than a million dollars, he raised his eyebrows and said it is probably costing a lot more than that.

Still, he said, he has decided that no building permit is needed.

That means, of course, that there are no plans for the work on file in the building office. And there will be no building permit sent along to the tax assessor, to trigger a property tax increase.

And no permit fee, assessed at the rate of $7 per thousand spent, was charged.

I don’t know, maybe this is typical Watch Hill behavior. They say good fences make good neighbors, so I imagine a fence made out of boulders will make very good neighbors indeed. Hey, and a fence down below the mean high tide mark, well, that might be even better.

Gawker decided to run with the story in this manner: “Taylor Swift is Fucking Up the Rhode Island Coastline”

UPDATE: CRMC Says It’s All Okay, Swings on 1982 Court Case

December 25, 2013

The Christmas Truce, 99 years later

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In December of 1914, around 100,000 soldiers from Britain and Germany spontaneously left their trenches during World War I and fraternized in no man’s land. They exchanged gifts (such as they had) and sang songs. This event is known as the Christmas Truce. The truces were varied; in some sectors there was still fighting, in others the truce lasted until New Year’s Day. To a lesser extent, there were also truces between the French and Germans elsewhere on the Western Front and the Austrians and the Russians on the Eastern front.

It’s important to emphasize the spontaneous nature of this truce. Despite attempts by Pope Benedict XV, the belligerents of World War I refused to call a temporary cessation of hostilities. While of course the commanding officers opposed the truce, other notable opponents were a young Charles DeGaulle and a young Adolf Hitler. But thousands of rank and file soldiers, acting against orders and in violation of military discipline, chose to recognize their combatants as fellow human beings.

In military lingo, this is “fraternization” a serious problem for fighting a war. Mostly, when we hear that word in our culture, it’s associated with risk of leaking sensitive information, a problem for a military that could lead to lives lost. But the Christmas Truce represents another issue with fraternization: it can lead to lives saved.

That’s a problem when you’re trying to fight a war. “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country,” George C. Scott as Gen. George Patton tells us in the eponymous film. Fraternization makes it extremely difficult to do the latter; and this was during a war when only about 15 to 20 percent of soldiers fired their guns at enemies in view (it’s a testament to our ability to commit carnage that close to 31 million soldiers were killed or wounded during the four years of the war).

That’s ultimately the problem. The blame for a big disastrous war like World War I definitively falls on the shoulders of the warmongering politicians who rattled sabers and pushed it forward and negotiated the secret alliance system that made it inevitable. But it’s impossible to fight without millions of acts of cooperation from ordinary, everyday soldiers. When that cooperation isn’t there, the war doesn’t happen.

What the Christmas Truce demonstrates is that “peace on earth” is more than just a Christmastime slogan; it’s an actual possibility. And that’s not pie-in-the-sky thinking. We live in perhaps the most peaceful time in all human history. For example, the amount of military casualties in both the Afghan and Iraq wars (a nearly 13-year long period of conflict) are far fewer than the amount of military casualties that were snuffed out in seven days in World War I.

It’s possible because we make it so. We may lament the distancing of the average American from the average soldier, but in many ways, this is a reflection of the peaceable nature that’s now seized hold of us; one where war is a ridiculous way to solve global problems.

Play us out, John McCutcheon:

December 15, 2013

38 Studios: The gift that keeps on giving to the RIGOP?

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House Minority Leader Brian Newberry is suggesting that the need to pay $12.5 million each year for the next decade is going to be a political winner for the RI Republican Party. The thinking, as Newberry explained to me on Twitter, is that legislators who are held relatively blameless for spending the money in 2010 will be judged by their votes in 2013 and 2014; going into November 2014, General Assembly members who voted “Aye” twice are going to have spent $15 million of the state’s money to pay back bondholders who were already covered with insurance in the event of 38 Studios going bankrupt and the State refusing to pay.

The problem with default is that Moody’s has actually threatened Rhode Island that the rest of its bonds will suffer should it choose to utilize the insurance option. Given that we can’t find anyone (except Ted Siedle) to study the impact of default, I still think we should take Moody’s at their word. After all, we have Lehman Brothers as proof that they’re stupid enough to do it.

But I think Newberry is wrong when he says that 2014 will be the year that the Republicans ride 38 Studios to victory. First, it assumes that the General Assembly passes nothing that might buoy the incumbents’ popularity in 2014. Second, just because someone hates their current Democratic representation doesn’t necessarily mean they want a Republican instead.

We’ve had scandals in the past that brought down Democratic leadership; only to have it replaced by another set of Democratic leadership (scandal used to be the typical method of succession among Speakers of the House). The Republican caucuses in the GA are small enough that they skew rightwards, and if you only look at the population of the places they’re from (not their districts represented) they come from towns that make up less than a third of all Rhode Islanders, mostly more rural and suburban areas. When close to 6 out of 10 Rhode Islanders live in an urban area, I simply don’t see how Republicans are supposed to appeal to these voters with the flagship policies pushed by their current legislators.

But beyond that, Republicans are also to blame for not being great enough critics of the deal at the time. Going into the 2010 election, 38 Studios was an unpopular deal with voters, and had Republicans wanted, they could’ve assaulted the Democrats for it. Except that that would’ve entailed going after Gov. Donald Carcieri, who was the leading shepherd of the deal as well as ignore that its primary beneficiary was Republican Curt Schilling, baseball hero.

The problem is that 38 Studios is a bipartisan boondoggle. The money was appropriated by Democratic and Republican legislators to be given by a Republican governor to a Republican businessman (I use that last term loosely). There’s an old saying, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That’s the situation legislators find themselves in. What gets people riled up is that the deal should not have happened. Now that 38 Studios has gone belly up and the bill has arrived on our doorstep the subsequent vote each year for funds isn’t going to be a referendum on whether you support the original deal. It’s whether you think Wall Street is bluffing or not, and whether Rhode Island can afford to take the risk to find out.

So 38 Studios isn’t a hammer for the Republicans to use against the Democrats. It’s a sickness in the state budget that politicians on both sides are going to have to figure out what the appropriate cure for it is.

December 13, 2013December 13, 2013

Yes, politicians can boycott a radio station

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The Rhode Island right is angry that Democratic politicians are joining the boycott of radio station WPRO until host John DePetro is gone from the station. DePetro is using the “free speech” argument which, of course, is bull. Free speech means you can call protestors at a Gina Raimondo fundraiser “whores.” It doesn’t absolve you from the consequences of your speech. I have the right to call anyone I see an “asshole.” I don’t have the right to not be kicked out of places and yelled at for doing so.

Justin Katz (in the first link above) uses the economic argument, that this is government intervening in the economy for personal reasons. He also sets up the idea that politicians (specifically Chafee in this instance) aren’t allowing their constituents to hear them.

Katz’s argument doesn’t hold up. Businesses can get hammered for the things they say or the things they support. If WPRO had a white supremacist or a communist host or someone who said things more repulsive than DePetro’s pronouncements, I doubt that Katz would be rushing to defend WPRO maintaining their business relationship with such a person. Even if they were a ratings bonanza. But because Katz’s views and DePetro’s are largely in line with one another, we’re being “pushe[d]… one step farther into the realm of Banana Republics and Lord of the Flies“.

Meanwhile, Marc Comtois posits on Twitter whether it’s more effective for politicians to boycott going on-air on WPRO or to go on and express their distaste and then sit through the interview.

Comtois has a way more interesting point. First, let’s talk about the politics of this. WPRO and its hosts tilt conservative. The constituencies that elect Democratic politicians tilt liberal. Therefore, there is very little for a Democratic politician to lose (politically) by refusing to going on-air on WPRO over misogynist comments made by WPRO’s most conservative host. Case in point, Gina Raimondo, whose fundraiser was the reason for the protest which led to DePetro making this remark, was one of the first politicians to join the boycott. Raimondo is one of DePetro’s favorite politicians (I suspect largely because DePetro hates unions, many unions dislike Raimondo, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend). Raimondo doesn’t appear see any problem with calling for the removal of possibly her biggest supporter in Rhode Island’s media landscape.

Notice I used the phrase “media landscape” there. That’s because WPRO is not the only radio station in town, much less the only media outlet in Rhode Island. If Rhode Islanders need to be informed as to what their politicians are doing, they can pick up a paper, turn on the T.V., check the Internet or turn the dial on their radio. It’s possible to cover virtually all of Rhode Island while missing one outlet (as disrespectful a practice as that might be).

The politicians may also have a bit of room here when dealing with WPRO. They’re not going on-air, but it’s unclear whether WPRO’s reporters will be able to get quotes. I’d bet they will. And they’ll still be able to attend news conferences and the like. But just because you have a media organization doesn’t mean you’re entitled to interviews from politicians (RI Future can attest to that).

The politicians also have a bit of leverage. It’s not as though WPRO is going to blackout coverage of the boycotting pols. After all, what Gina Raimondo and Angel Taveras and Lincoln Chafee are doing is news that gets ratings. And for any blackout to be effective, it’d have to include other media organizations. Which means getting all those other news sources above to take a stand, and tacitly support the right to say misogynist things on air without consequence; while also losing the ability to gets views for their coverage of important political figures. Somehow, I don’t see this happening.

But finally, while denying WPRO’s talk-show hosts access to their lovely personalities is one thing, actually joining the boycott of the businesses that advertise on DePetro’s show is another. And it’s unlikely to me that we’ll see politicians doing that. There’s far more to lose by doing so.

UPDATE: While this post was was waiting for approval, Alan Fung announced he’s following suit. And so did the RI Republican Party. Oh and so is Ken Block.

December 12, 2013

International news you should be paying attention to: Europe and Thailand

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As much as this is a blog about Rhode Island, it’s worthy to look beyond our own borders occasionally. So let’s talk about other things than right-wing zealots.

First up, [the?] Ukraine

If you haven’t been paying attention, the Ukrainian government rejected a deal to enter the European Union, causing mass protests from Ukrainians who fear that Ukraine will fall further under Russian hegemony (the Russian Federation is pushing its own customs union). In the capital of Kiev, protestors seized the main square and City Hall and smashed a statue of Lenin. They then defeated an attempt by riot police to clear them out (ironically, they turned a fire hose on the police). The US is thinking about sanctions.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry released a statement, containing this gem:

The United States expresses its disgust with the decision of Ukrainian authorities to meet the peaceful protest in Kyiv’s Maidan Square with riot police, bulldozers, and batons, rather than with respect for democratic rights and human dignity. This response is neither acceptable nor does it befit a democracy.

I’m not sure where the United States gets off making these kinds of pronouncements. For one thing, when it was Egypt, the State Department was all about “stability” rather than “respect for democratic rights and human dignity.” And when it was our own country, the federal government actively assisted in meeting peaceful protest with riot police and batons (they used garbage trucks instead of bulldozers).

Anyhow, the implications of the Ukrainian protest movement are important. Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution is a used as a watchword among Russia and its client states, which fear having their political orders undone in that manner. It’s also an inspiration to anti-Putin Russians. Furthermore, the Ukraine has been under Russian hegemony since at least 1772. Joining the EU would be one of the most dramatic shifts in its foreign policy, siding it firmly with the states to its west.

Next, Thailand.

Thailand is also experiencing anti-government protests. The inciting action is that the parliament considered an amnesty bill; which the opposition Democrat Party thought was just a way to bring back former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin was overthrown by a military coup in 2006. His sister, Yingluck, is currently prime minister from the ruling Pheu Thai Party, a successor political party of her brother’s original one (two incarnations have been banned by authorities). Protestors have been demanding that the current government resign and a “people’s council” take power, selected by the protest movement. Yingluck instead has dissolved parliament and early elections. Pro-Shinawatra parties have not lost an election since 2001, though the Democrat Party was placed in power in 2006 by the military. Protestors have cut power to the P.M.’s office. And now the military is meeting with the protest leader, a former deputy prime minister from the Democrat Party. This is unnerving, because there have been 18 coups or attempted coups in Thailand since 1932.

The situation is intriguing. For one thing, the Pheu Thai Party is popular enough that offering an election isn’t much of a risk. In the international press, Democrat Party members have been suggesting that the choice is between corrupt but popular government in the form of Pheu Thai or enlightened but undemocratic government. They say the government should be run by “good people.” Forgive me if I’m wrong, but that’s generally the goal of democratic government as well. But saying that government should be run by good people isn’t a platform for success, being as “good” tends to be somewhat subjective.

As far as as the international investment community is concerned, it appears it doesn’t matter whether Pheu Thai or the Democrats run the country; this is a momentary blip.

European coalition talks

Three nations in Europe, all bordering one another, have been trying to form governments since their fall elections.

Germany: Germany held an election on September 22nd and some interesting things happened. Incumbent chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union / Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CDU/CSU) won 41.5% of the vote, but her coalition allies (Germany has a mixed-member proportional representation system for its parliament) the Free Democratic Party failed to get the 5% of the popular vote that allows them to hold seats in parliament.

This meant that CDU/CSU had to seek to form a “grand” coalition with its; rivals the Social Democratic Party (SPD). However, the SPD leadership did a noble thing, they threw the decision to their members. One reason is thought to be because the last time the SPD went into coalition with Merkel, it suffered the worst electoral defeat in its history in the subsequent election.

On Saturday, we find out how they voted. However, it looks pretty good for Merkel, so much so, she’s already said she’ll announce her cabinet on Sunday.

The weirdest bit of commentary I read suggested that Germany’s system was broken because a party that won less than half of the vote was unable to form a government. I think it was due to the advocacy in Britain of alternative voting systems from that country’s junior coalition party, the Liberal Democrats. Current polling in Britain shows the Lib Dems falling to fourth place behind the nativist UK Independence Party.

Austria: Keeping in the German-speaking world, Austria also went into coalition talks after its September 29th election, and these are likewise wrapping up. This is slightly different. In 2008, Austria formed a grand coalition led by their Social Democratic Party. The junior party was the conservative People’s Party. They’re pretty much poised to return the same government.

Czech Republic: The Czech Republic doesn’t get much coverage, mainly because people forget it’s no longer unified with Slovakia (I blame out-of-date maps). The previous government appears to have collapsed thanks to a complicated spying and corruption scandal, that included Prime Minister Petr Necas’s chief of staff spying on his wife. Necas has since resigned, divorced his first wife, and remarried to his chief of staff. Necas’ government had consisted of his conservative Civic Democratic Party, a conservative party led by a prince, and an anti-corruption party that expelled three of its members when they accused another of bribery.

The primary benefactors appear to have been a newly-formed party (ANO 2011, translation: YES 2011) led by a billionaire who owns two of the country’s newspapers and the Communist Party (which still uses the archaic “of Bohemia and Moravia”). However, the new coalition, likely to be announced today will be led by the Czech Social Democratic Party and contain ANO 2011 and the Christian and Democratic Union – Czechoslovak People’s Party.

However, this is complicated by the fact that ANO 2011’s leader, Andrej Babis, is on trial in neighboring Slovakia for possibly collaborating with the communist-era secret police.

December 5, 2013

RI: The biggest little state in the union (for penis size)

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Well, this will get me some clicks, and feel free to point this out the next time I suggest someone isn’t doing much Hard-Hitting Journalism™. But I really couldn’t let this slip by.

You won’t see this in the MSM (well, except for TIME), but Rhode Island is . According to a study. By America’s first online condom store. Based on sales by state. So that can bring us to any of the following conclusions:

Rhode Islanders who order their condoms online are doing so for Rhode Islanders more well-endowed than those who don’t and the nation’s online-condom ordering consumers as a whole.
Rhode Island men are more deluded about how large their trouser-snakes are. Or have some ulterior motive.
Rhode Islanders who order condoms online practice safe sex more than most other states’ online condom-orderers. Kudos.
One person is skewing our results by ordering a ton of large condoms.

Okay, now a lot of you are probably thinking “wait, wasn’t there some babble about recently?” And yeah, okay, there was. And the conclusion to draw is that we need this, Rhode Island. This is a top-ranking, which many of us can be proud of.

Why, I have to wonder what the economic impact of this will be. It’s not something I expect the prudes over at the Tax Foundation to be concerned with, given their fascination with irrelevant stats like tax rates. We could actually be “moving the needle” here. Probably by holding our impressive tumescence down on the scale.

Rhode Island: It’s All in Our Backyard. ;)

Wait…

(h/t Jezebel)

December 4, 2013December 5, 2013

How to buy the Providence Journal, and why

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With the news that The Providence Journal is up for sale, there’s a lot of people trying to suss out who will be the new owner, with famous rich people being thrown out as names.

One name I suggested was the people of Rhode Island. Maybe a “Make The Journal Your Own” campaign or something. The problem is, of course, that you still need some rich civic-minded millionaires. If the sticker price for The Journal is say, $30 million, then you need 30,000 people to average a payment of $1000. It’s not impossible, but it’s not likely.

This type of arrangement, where a group of people get together and buy a corporation is more typical of sports. In America, the most prominent example is the Green Bay Packers, who have been a nonprofit corporation since 1922 and have 5,014545 shares of stock owned by 364,114 stockholders, according to the team’s website. Their history of being owned by their supporters is a bit different, it took benevolent local businessmen to ensure that that would happen.

I certainly feel like news media is a more important investment than a football team, especially in Rhode Island. The value would be that the entirety of The Journal would be beholden to Rhode Islanders; instead of to some single entity, whether a faraway private corporation or an extremely rich owner and their family. They’d have a board of directors picked by the shareholders, and the corporation could even have a rule that no single person could own a controlling majority of the stocks.

Could you make money? That’s ultimately the question, and the argument might be that the concern for these new citizen-owners wouldn’t necessarily be a return on investment in financial terms, but rather in news terms. There’s no mistaking that The Journal has been gutted over the years; the physical paper’s shrunk as fewer and fewer journalists are working for it.

This isn’t a solution for news media though. One of the more interesting things said by the authors of Dollarocracy at a talk I attended earlier this year was that for too long we’ve thought of news media as a business because advertising has been investing in it. But as they went on to say, this wasn’t because advertising loves news, it’s because the eyeballs were there. In the modern era, where you can go to Google or Facebook and purchase a demographic (16- to 32-year-olds who love skateboarding-dogs), why bother making your demographic New York Times readers or Providence Journal readers?

The authors had an idea for a citizen voucher to fund news, based off of an idea that came out of the Center for Economic and Policy Work for a “Artistic Freedom Voucher” which was aimed at working around America’s restrictive copyright laws. This puts news outside of the profit-making scheme and into the publicly-financed realm. That might be an interesting policy decision for Rhode Island, but in the here and now, I don’t think it’s likely.

If The Journal was also printing money along with newspapers, I don’t think A. H. Belo would be selling it right now.

December 4, 2013

We can do the ConCon

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Steve Ahlquist laid out the case against a Rhode Island Constitutional Convention recently. Early last month, Gary Sasse also suggested that a Convention was unnecessary if the General Assembly acted to create constitutional change itself (Sasse also made the case that constitutional amendments originating in the Assembly during the ’90s were more effective than those originating in the 1986 Convention).

Ahlquist’s arguments boil down to a few major points:

The Convention delegates lack accountability, being elected for a single 2016 session
The election process will vulnerable to influence by large, monied interests
Civil rights are a particularly important arena vulnerable to the whims of the Convention

In terms of the first point, I should start out by adding I’ve heard the delegates will also be able to set their own rules, so how accountable they’ll be is entirely up to them. I personally find that a far more convincing argument than Ahlquist’s argument that the delegates are unaccountable because they’ll only serve for the duration of the Convention. The accountability of a legislator to their constituents isn’t solely found in the ballot box, it’s also in the willingness of constituents to exercise their right to lobby their legislator.

That transitions us nicely to the second point, that large monied interests are capable of influencing this election. That’s true, but no more than they are capable of influencing the election of the RI House of Representatives. Which is essentially what the Convention is; it’s a 75-member group elected from House districts. The difference is that the Convention is tasked solely with the creation of constitutional amendments that don’t need to pass the checks of a Senate or Governor. While such a group might be more appealing to dark and big money, it’s not a guarantee of getting their agenda passed. Indeed, such groups have had success in the General Assembly before, hiring former Speaker William Murphy as their lobbyist seems particularly effective.

More worrisome is where do you get 75 Rhode Islanders (probably more since not all will be uncontested) to be delegates? And that brings us to the third point. What progressives seem to fear is a repeat of 1986, when the Convention produced a cleverly-worded amendment to restrict abortion. Thanks to those who defeated it. One thing to say is that Rhode Island in 2013 is not Rhode Island in 1986. The state has moved considerably left in the last 27 years. Now that’s no guarantee, after all, as we moved left, we’ve also gone right with our economics. We also should rightly fear that the Convention would attempt to undo marriage equality. But these are fears that we should harbor if there’s a bad leadership change in the House as well.

All of the charges Ahlquist levels against the Convention are true of the General Assembly. And the Assembly is highly problematic in its relationship to regular Rhode Islanders right now, as I tried to demonstrate in my series on alternate election systems. I want to make this point when it comes to delegates: in Rhode Island the right-wing doesn’t win unless the left-wing stays home. The most important problem with the Convention is that delegates are elected in 2015; an off-off-year. Odd-numbered years result in low turnout with more conservative-minded voters.

I don’t think the right-wing is oblivious to this fact; otherwise I don’t believe they would be trumpeting the Convention as their Last Great Hope to finally be swept into power. The question progressives should ask themselves is whether they’re willing to do the work to ensure that the left turns out. That might mean focusing on the 2014 and 2015 sessions to pass voter-access legislation; such as introducing early voting, automatic registration, repealing or weakening the Voter ID law, and making Election Day a paid holiday. That might mean setting aside some part of 2014 for beginning to organize who their candidates for delegate will be and what they want proposed and to fight to 2016 for.

Ahlquist holds up as an example of the Assembly’s intransigence the “master lever” bill so favored by the right wing. The problems of Rhode Island government lies deeper than a single voting mechanism. It lies in the assumptions of Sasse, that meaningful constitutional change can’t come from the citizens of this state. It lies in what Ahlquist suggests as a fear: that radicals might make radical change. But this is what we need, radical change. The Convention doesn’t have the power to upend power relationships in this state, but it does get to determine how those power relationships are played out. Whether the monied get easy access to decision-makers, whether redundant systems stymie citizen voice, whether legislative games facilitate bill failure, etc.

The Convention offers the possibility to do things that the General Assembly would never dream of doing. This is what frightens many Rhode Islanders. The Convention doesn’t have to abide by established rules, it doesn’t have to play in deference to convention. At its very best, the Convention can offer revolutionary change to the people of Rhode Island, if they’re willing to take it. That’ll be a risk, and it could cost far more than it’s worth. Sometimes, you have to be Caesar, and roll the dice.

November 27, 2013November 27, 2013

GoLocal’s Russ Moore misdefines ‘public service’

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In between telling its readers the street price of pot, claiming exclusives and scoops other outlets have already covered, and trying to force-feed readers another slideshow, the misnamed GoLocalProv also publishes a few right-wing to “centrist” commentators. The one who is (in Douglas’ Adams’ famous words) “mostly harmless” is Russell Moore; the former Warwick Beacon reporter / Caprio for Governor campaign worker. But Moore’s most recent column stepped into strange territory. Moore states:

Nobody can tell me that the government bureaucrat is a public servant but a private sector business owner isn’t. Without the private sector, and the risk takers that keep the engine of commerce running, we wouldn’t have a public sector.

Yes, that’s a collection of business class-babble. And a lot of it is untrue. Let’s unpack this a bit more, when Moore gives us his definition of public service:

…when someone starts a business and employs people, and pays taxes, there’s no doubting that that too is public service.

Nope. Paying taxes is not a public service. Paying taxes is part of a citizen’s social contract with the government so that government can provide genuine public services so that someone’s private service can function. Starting a business is not a public service. It’s a decision you make with the intention of gaining profit. Employing people is not a public service, it’s something you do so that you have the productivity to turn a profit.

Moore’s definition of public service is so expansive, we can even turn it on its head a bit. If employing people is a public service, then surely being employed is a public service as well, since you provide productivity for someone else to make a profit while also earning income to pay taxes. Heck, it’s so expansive that it covers everyone in the country, since there is no one who does not pay tax at some point.

Meanwhile, genuine public servants (Moore’s “government bureaucrat” – gee, I wonder why that word was picked…) are out there doing things like enforcing laws so that other private citizens don’t destroy Moore’s business owner’s profits. Or putting out fires so that other negligent private citizens don’t destroy Moore’s business owner’s profits. Or registering and regulating businesses so that fraudulent hucksters don’t destroy Moore’s business owner’s profits. And they do it all without expecting that they’ll make more money if they do their absolute best. Unlike a private business, if the government earns more than it spends, it doesn’t necessarily get to keep that money and expand capacity or reward productive employees (or overcompensate executives as some less scrupulous businesses do).

Instead, public servants get what the whims of legislators (and by extension, voters) and the negotiating skills of their union representatives bring them (and that latter bit was hard fought for and continues to be hard fought to protect). Yes, they get paid, they get benefits, etc., and they have stronger protections than private sector workers, but they’ve fought hard to keep those.

Okay, let’s go to another Moore gem:

…far too often it seems like the needs of the private sector get lost in our political dialogues. At times, it seems like we’ve lost sense of the interconnectedness of the two sectors.

Take that first part of the sentence and compare it with recent legislative history. Let me point out that the General Assembly did not introduce and pass a set of 25 bills to improve conditions for the struggling citizens of this state. They certainly did not create a new executive office complete with a cabinet secretary position tasked with looking for ways to make life better for the state’s hardest hit citizens. The focus of the “Moving the Needle” package was business.

It’s odd for Moore to be the one suggesting we’ve failed to consider how government and business are interconnected, when he routinely calls for lower taxes, less spending, and laxer regulations. All of that translates into fewer public services that can benefit business or keeping the rules and laws enforced.

But my favorite part of Moore’s off-kilter argument is back in that first bit I quoted: “Without the private sector… we wouldn’t have a public sector.”

Look, I don’t care where you stand in politics; left, right, up, down, etc… you should have enough knowledge to know this isn’t true. You don’t have to look far back to see public sectors existing without private sectors. The fact that the idea of private industry is only a relatively recent concept should be enough to dissuade you of this notion. Now, don’t get confused and think that I’m suggesting that a world without a private sector is preferable (they’re clearly not). I’m saying that, regardless of ideology, you have to acknowledge that it can, has, and probably will continue to be done.

In contrast, there is virtually no flourishing and peaceful private sector that has existed without a public sector. You can’t have a market if there’s no one there to ensure that people play by the rules.

Public servants have been under attack for the last few years. While the State has been willing to break its contracts with public servants in the form of pensions, it’s been more than willing to keep its contracts with private business with the 38 Studios bonds being the best example. Media often asks for the insight of business into government, whereas it rarely asks public servants their opinions and wouldn’t dream of asking for their insight into business. The writers who grace GoLocalProv’s pages routinely insult public servants and portray them as barriers to progress, impediments to business, drains on the economy, and a thousand other such insults. Now, Moore is trying to appropriate the good feelings Rhode Islanders hold for public servants by expanding the label to cover those in private service (but specifically business owners, not all private sector workers).

I know that the pageview journalism GoLocalProv engages in is a relatively shameless enterprise, but I hope some of its writers (oh, I’m sorry, “mindsetters” trademark yadda yadda) have a sense of shame when they publish ill-conceived articles that fail to understand the fundamental differences between “citizenship” and “public service.” We shouldn’t get those confused, though I know it’s a bit hard not to for media folks sometimes.

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