From the headlines, you would think that CNBC is the gold standard economic authority. After the cable news network released its 10th annual “America’s Top States for Business 2016” listing, in which Rhode Island was ranked dead last, local corporate media raced to bring the bad news to readers and viewers. CNBC ranks R.I. worst state for business, CNBC: Rhode Island ranked ‘Bottom State for Business‘, and RI back to dead last in new CNBC rankings are typical examples from the Projo, Channel 10 and Channel 12 respectively.

Missing from the Cassandra-like coverage is any hint that the rankings are meaningless and based on metrics that rate our state on how well our policies kowtow to the whims of business, not on how well they benefit the poor and middle class. Only Ted Nesi even approaches this angle in his coverage, but he did so through the lens of competing political discourse. But what about the economics of the report? Does it hold up under scrutiny? I’ve tackled the subject of economic rankings before, here and here, trying to bring some sort of real economic analysis to bear.

I asked Doctor of Economics Douglas Hall, Director of Economic and Fiscal Policy at the Economic Progress Institute, for some insights. Hall said that many of CNBC’s economic indicators “have a lot of merit and point to the need to address matters via public policy, such as repairing the state’s crumbling infrastructure and the need to help Rhode Islanders improve their educational attainment. But when you deconstruct their aggregate groupings,” said Hall, “many of the categories are deeply flawed and point to policies that would severely undermine the well-being and quality of life of working families in Rhode Island.”

One indicator the report uses is “union membership and the states’ right to work laws.” Low union membership and strong anti-union right to work laws contribute to a higher economic ranking for a state in CNBC’s report, yet Hall says that “research clearly shows that as unionization rates have gone down, the well-being of the American middle class has gone down.” In Hall’s view, this metric “taints the entire aggregate measure.”

Another metric, the CNBC aggregate category for the cost of doing business, considers the cost of paying wages and presumably, says Hall, “a state in which every employee worked for sub-poverty wages would get a very high grade in this category, while those paying living wages that can sustain a family and support a viable business community through demand for goods and services, would get a low grade in this category.”

It seems clear that these rankings of states by various business interests, including corporate entities such as CNBC, puppet organizations such as ALEC and members of the State Policy Network (which includes the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity) and various Chambers of Commerce are are not objective measures of a state’s economic well-being, but are tools crafted to shape public policy to the advantage of large business interests and to the detriment of the poor and middle class.

The most sensible tactic in dealing with such garbage is to file it accordingly.

The event was not interrupted and proceeded as planned. At one point Leah Bamberger, Providence’s Director of Sustainability, confronted Nick Katkevich of FANG, who was handing out flyers to people in the room. The flyers ask “Did you know?” and answered, “Sheldon Whitehouse supports the massive fossil fuel power plant proposed for Burrillville.” After their brief interaction Bamberger returned to her seat and Katkevich resumed handing out flyers.

Among those standing with signs I recognized Sister Mary Pendergast of the Sisters of Mercy and Burrillville resident Kathy Martley.

Senator Whitehouse came out in support of the CREC power plant in an interview with Ted Nesi. In the interview Whitehouse cited support from environmental groups for his stance, support that subsequent investigation has revealed does not exist.

The #ResilentPVD event today is part of a three day series of “charrettes, workshops, and community meetings to explore how Providence’s infrastructure, buildings, and neighborhoods can prepare for the impacts climate change.” An impressive array of sustainability experts from across the country are in attendance. There is a report expected on Wednesday.

Mayor Jorge Elorza introduced Senator Whitehouse as the state’s foremost climate champion though some in the audience were audibly agitated by that designation, with someone commenting that “He supports the fossil fuel plant in Burrillville!” Whitehouse was not visibly disturbed by the protesters, though he seldom looked their way as he spoke.

FANG and BASE are planning to protest at the RI State House Tuesday evening during Governor Gina Raimondo‘s State of the State address Tuesday evening. Governor Raimondo has also been a vocal champion of the CREC plant, as has Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello.

In a short interview with Ted Nesi, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, widely considered to be the most environmentally conscious member of the US Senate, threw his support behind Invenergy’s Clear River Energy Center in Burrillville, a power plant to be run on fracked methane.

Whitehouse said, “Rhode Island and a large part of Southern New England are on the wrong side of a couple of gas pipeline choke points, with the result that at certain times costs soar in Rhode Island because the choke point creates a supply-demand imbalance which causes prices to soar, and in other states that’s not happening.

“I don’t think it’s valuable from Rhode Island’s perspective to make Rhode Islanders pay high winter gas prices when it doesn’t change the overall complexion of the gas market. So I am not objecting to that particular plant, because it’s a choke point issue.”

When Nesi asked Whitehouse if he’s received any blowback  for his refusal to oppose the plant, Whitehouse said,  “Some. There’s a small group of people who would like to have me change my position.

“From the larger environmental movement – the Save the Bays and the League of Conservation Voters and the Nature Conservancies and all that – there’s no blowback whatsoever. They understand the difference between the national and the local concern.”

So do Save the Bay and the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) really support Whitehouse’s position on the new Burrillville power plant as the Senator implies?

Not quite.

I asked both Save the Bay and the League of Conservation Voters for comments on what Whitehouse said. Neither group came close to backing the Senator up.

Seth Stein, National Press Secretary for the League of Conservation Voters, said, “LCV does not have an RI state league partner. We focus on Federal policy, and do not generally weigh in on local politics in states where we do not have a state league.”

Topher Hamblett, director of policy at Save the Bay, said, “Save The Bay has not taken a position on the project (we’re focused on a host of Bay issues). On development projects like this we usually evaluate potential impacts to water resources, wetland systems and Bay/coastal eco-sytsems.”

Save the Bay’s executive director Jonathan Stone wrote, “Save the Bay has not taken a position on the plant. On energy development proposals like this we always evaluate impacts on water quality, wetlands habitat, public access, and other impacts on the health of the Bay and coastal Rhode Island.”

Burrillville is not positioned near the Bay.

Given that two of the three groups that Whitehouse named have no position on the project, and the third group, “the Nature Conservancies and all that” doesn’t specify any particular agency, it appears that Whitehouse’s answer was intended to minimize the importance of local opposition to the power plant, not honestly appraise the support for natural gas infrastructure expansion that exists in the wider environmental community.

One nature conservancy that does have a strong position on Invenergy’s plans is one that will be directly impacted by the plant. The Burrillville Land Trust, has been granted intervenor status in the process to determine the power plant’s fate and has filed a motion to shut the application process down.

So none of the environmental groups that Whitehouse implied would support him, do. Instead, we have wide ranging opposition to the plant from a host of groups that understand what is at stake in allowing Rhode Island to continue to depend on fossil fuels for its energy.

The Conservation Law Foundation, the Burrillville Land Trust, Burrillville Against Spectra Expansion  (BASE), Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG), Fossil Free RI, Rhode Island Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Green Party of RI, Occupy Providence and the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats have all come out against the plant.

In his interview with Nesi, Whitehouse cavalierly dismissed the concerns of local environmental groups, and could name no environmental groups that support his position.

If Whitehouse is truly the Senate’s climate champion, we are all in serious trouble.

In his paper Elorza demonstrates a good deal of knowledge about the so-called new atheism, quoting extensively from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, but he also mines popular works of science, such as Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. This is all part of an effort to “engage the literature from various scientific disciplines and reveal the extent to which religious claims have been successfully debunked by science.”

Elorza claims that there “are four views of God that cover the entire spectrum: the theist, deist, atheist, and what I call the memist view.” The deist position is that God is a creator who set the universe in motion and currently plays no active role in the universe. This means, says Elorza, that there is no “scientific” difference between being an atheist (one who denies the existence of god) and being a deist. “…the disagreement between deists and atheists is of no consequence,” say Elorza.

A theist god, however, is more problematic. “The theist believes,” says Elorza, “that God is not only the spark that gave birth to the universe but that He has also intervened in the natural world and has violated the laws of physics since the point of creation.” This is the god that Elorza maintains cannot exist, and is disproved by science.

The last kind of god Elorza discusses is “memist.” “Based on the concept of the meme,” says Elorza, “the memist God resides entirely in the minds of its adherents.” For a definition of this kind of god, Elorza turns to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, and James’ definition of the divine, “…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” The memist god, it seems, is the god in our head, and this is the one kind of god that is unquestionable real, because it is located within our minds, as a concept. “While the existence of both the deist and theist God can be called into question, the memist God most certainly exists!” declares Elorza.

Elorza seems to be arguing for the legal status of methodological naturalism, (a term he does not use in his paper) which is a requirement when engaging with the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is the assumption that miracles will not happen when scientists engage in experimentation, because science is the study natural laws, and miracles are by their supernatural nature violations. Differentiating between a theistic and atheistic world “is possible because a world with a theist God is fundamentally different than a world without one. In particular, a world without a theist God is one where natural phenomena may be understood as a gradual process over time. However, a world with a theist God that violates the laws of physics produces a world with ‘ontological discontinuities.’”

Still, Elorza’s ultimate conclusion is that the elimination of the theist god from secular society and laws does not diminish religious protections. “While the memist God would have all of the powers to prescribe a moral code as would the theist God, religious groups might object to the memist God on the grounds that it does not have a divine source. Since it is contained entirely in the human mind, it may be believed that its stature is comparatively diminished in relation to either the deist or theist God. However, I argue that even though it does not have a divine origin, religious adherents should take solace in the fact that this should not diminish its level of constitutional protection.”

In other words, even though science can show where your belief in god has come from, and even though there is no good reason to believe in your god, your belief is constitutionally protected.

Now this all sounds very much like the kind of paper an atheist might write. But when confronted about this paper by Ted Nesi during a televised debate with Democratic primary challenger Michael Solomon, Elorza backtracked. (.)

Ted Nesi: You wrote in a 2010 law review article that, quote, the evidence shows that it’s overwhelmingly unlikely that the theist God exists. Therefore, you wrote, it’s Constitutional to teach in public schools that, apparently, the God of Christianity and Judaism does not exist. Why do you believe that, and would you seek to implement that in the Providence public schools?

Providence Mayoral Candidate Jorge Elorza: No, absolutely not….This is a 60 sixty page article, and it’s a special definition of what the theist God means. Effectively, I wrote this article because there are a number of quote-unquote angry atheists arguing that since evolution has proved true…God doesn’t exist. And I wrote this article to combat them and say that look, you might be right on this small slice, but everything else that God entails remains intact…I don’t seek to have this be taught in the public schools. This is a hypothetical that I laid out over 60 pages in an academic article.

TN: But you did write it’s unlikely that the theist God exists…Do you believe that yourself, or are you saying this is what those scientists believe?

JE: As narrowly defined, within that article, then yes, I believe that. But that’s a very special definition. There is so much more to what God entails.

Why did Elorza mischaracterize his paper? “I wrote this article because there are a number of quote-unquote angry atheists arguing that since evolution has proved true…God doesn’t exist.” Yet the only kind of God that Elorza allows in his piece is one that exists in human minds, one without any external reality or divinity. Bringing up the “angry atheists” comes off as a dodge, and an insult to atheists. The only people Elorza mentions as being angry in his paper are theistic parents. “…in order to teach, over the objections of angry parents, that the theist God does not exist, the issue must be a well-settled scientific principle.”

The truth is that being an atheist is seen as a career killer for politicians seeking public office. The American Humanist Association’s Maggie Ardiente claims that 24 members of Congress have privately admitted to be atheists. However, if these politicians are outed, they will deny being atheists. Pew has pointed out that atheists are near the bottom (with Muslims) of the popularity poll with voters.

With public attitudes like these, it makes sense that Elorza might want to distance himself from his paper, which is a shame, because the paper really does argue for the kinds of religious and conscience protections the first amendment guarantees.

If Elorza is elected mayor of Providence, he would be the the highest ranking openly atheist elected official in the country.

But of course, he would first have to be open about his atheism.

And why shouldn’t they? It has become clear that nobody (that matters) is going to challenge them in public. I have done everything I can think of to get some influential progressive to call out this egregious betrayal, this shocking example of outright treason. The result so far?

[SFX: Crickets]

The unspeakable must be spoken

For the 22 years I have been politically active in Rhode Island, I have watched the progressive movement struggle to move forward in difficult conditions. In case you missed it, the road to the top of the mountain goes up quite steeply until you get to the very, very top.

The single greatest challenge from a public relations viewpoint has been the persistent fallacy that Rhode Island is already a “liberal state.” This decades-long fraud has been made possible by a state Democratic party dominated by conservatives and a progressive opposition that refuses to call it like it is. All of these fraudulent Democrats would become Republicans if Rhode Island could elect enough actual Democrats to run them out.

We’re not going to do it until we say, loudly and repeatedly, “These people are not Democrats; they are Republicans. You can tell by the fact that they say and do all the things that Republicans say and do.”

The “we” that needs to say these things is not a radical intellectual leftist, writing on a liberal blog. It is members of the Progressive Caucus speaking to reporters when they reach out because…how does this person qualify as a Democrat?

Twenty years ago, the idea that a reporter would question the liberal bona fides of a Rhode Island Democrat would have been a laugh line. But read the very first sentence of this excellent piece by Ted Nesi. To my knowledge, Ted is the first reporter to come around to what has been obvious to me since forever. These Democrats are not really Democrats.

When Mattiello spewed this Getting to 25 vomit last week, I reached out to Ted. “How can this go unchallenged? Why doesn’t someone call state party officials or progressives to get pushback?”

His response sickened me. He referred to his previous reports and expressed surprise that progressives didn’t seem to care. Certainly, writers on this blog have written about this repeatedly, so one can only assume that Ted is implying that more newsworthy sources have refused to address this issue.

This is the problem, people, not the solution.

Don’t bring a pickup truck to a tank fight

It is long past time for the progressive movement in Rhode Island—and I mean YOU, elected officials—to make it unequivocally clear that the state Democratic Party must be routed. Not reformed, routed.

It is absolutely true what the RI GOP says. The RI Democratic Party has ruined this state. What makes this hard on everybody is the lack of clarity on the simple, obvious, but counter-intuitive fact that the Democrats that ruined this state are actually Republicans.

Until we have the collective strength to make this argument in every press outlet in the state, it is unreasonable to expect any result other than the one we now have.

…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?

In response to the popularity of televisions and the Internet, Ted Nesi, of WPRI, posed this idea on Twitter: “TV and Internet arguably have more in common as media (info via screens!) than papers & Internet.”

It caused me to pause and reflect about the barrier to use for each of these four sources of news. I think the commonality all three of the rising news sources (television, the Internet, radio) is that you can get them regardless of whether you want to get them for news, and it never has to be a conscious decision.

Virtually every audio system you can buy comes with a radio, they appear in your car, and prior to the rise of MP3 players, radios were installed on every portable audio device. You can listen to music on a radio or fill your ears with news.

Television isn’t as readily available as the other two, but it’s still virtually everywhere, from bars and restaurants to your home. And it’s easy to switch from reality television, to (more) scripted entertainment, to music, to news. Even within a single channel there can be a diverse range of programming.

The Internet is sort of like television and radio in that it tends to have specialized sources for specific genres, but those genres include everything you could ever want. You want to see a dog riding a skateboard? Check. Read up on what that guy you met in college like one time is doing in Malaysia now? Check. No other medium comes close to the diversity and range of the Internet, your all-in-one stop for everything there is under the sun (and everything that avoids direct sunlight as well). Furthermore, the Internet is now virtually everywhere, thanks to smartphones and wi-fi.

And now this brings us to the poor plight of the newspaper. Here’s the thing, newspapers have to be a major network, and in print, and at least a day behind everything else. Furthermore, unlike television, radio, and the Internet where you can just stumble across news, newspapers don’t have that advantage. Few people just “stumble” across a newspaper (well, maybe the Phoenix). You tend to have to make a conscious decision to go get a newspaper, whether its from your front step or the box. And though they often contain sections related to entertainment, culture, lifestyle, etc.; their name says it all. They’re a “newspaper” and its primary purpose is to deliver news to you.

The point here is not to disparage newspapers. It’s to point out that by their very design, newspapers are disadvantaged in simply getting to their consumer in a way other mediums aren’t. Until the Internet became widely available and used, newspapers were doing just fine. Now, their place in the media landscape is shifting so rapidly that their very future no longer seems assured. That said, despite these disadvantages, they have managed to continue beating radio, which of all media has the lowest cost barrier for consumers.

New Ted (Siedle, of Forbes) wrote a post on Thursday saying Raimondo is recklessly investing Rhode Island’s pension fund. Old Ted (Nesi, of WPRI), to borrow a phrase, fired back on Friday. New Ted has since posted twice to accuse Old Ted of having a soft spot for Raimondo and – much more pointedly – accusing her of having a soft spot for Wall Street.

From Forbes.com on Saturday:

The fees related to conservative investing range from 1 basis point (one one-hundreth of a percent) to about half a percent. The high-risk alternative investments you have steered the pension into charge exponentially greater fees—fees of about 2% plus 20% of profits or more. Do the math and you’ll agree, the fees the pension will pay have skyrocketed. Mushroomed. Ballooned. Soared.

That’s good for your Wall Street pals, no-so-good for workers participating in the pension. It’s a little difficult to reconcile your opinion that the state’s pension system can’t afford to pay workers the benefits they were promised but, on the other hand, it can afford to pay Wall Street’s wildest gamblers one hundred times greater fees than it has in the past.

Tell Rhode Islanders precisely how much the fees have increased under your leadership (or give me copies of the money management contracts so I can) and let’s see how they feel about it.

Then yesterday:

Raimondo’s overhaul or reform of the state pension will, in the years to come—long after she’s moved on to higher political office, turn out to be disastrous for taxpayers and state workers, in my opinion. Hail Mary passes and other high risk gambles rarely succeed and, even if they do, are not appropriate for pensions thousands of state workers depend upon for retirement security.

New Ted publicly offered 22 questions for Raimondo to answer about how she has managed the state’s the money. Anyone want to bet her answers, or at least political statements tangentially related to these questions, will appear on Old Ted’s blog?

Today on Twitter I asked him why he didn’t include either Angel Taveras or Ernie Almonte’s perspective when he reported that Gina Raimondo, Gordon Fox and EngageRI all disagree with the governor’s tack.

Yes, Raimondo, Fox and EngageRI are important players in this debate. But so are Almonte and Taveras, both of who had publicly weighed in defending Chafee by the time Nesi posted on the issue. WPRO had Almonte on Wednesday morning and RI Public Radio had a post on Monday saying Taveras thought, “the state should seek a settlement to a challenge by a series of unions to last year’s pension overhaul,” wrote Ian Donnis for RIPR.

Here’s the exchange we had on Twitter:

There’s an interesting – and small – mix of conservatives, moderates and populists who seemingly aren’t supporting Gordon Fox’s effort to be re-elected speaker of the House. His detractors from the left – Reps Scott Guthrie of Coventry and Spencer Dickinson of South Kingstown – have a disdain for pension cuts in common.

Guthrie may seem like the smartest progressive at the State House if and when the pension reform lawsuit gets decided. The retired Coventry fire fighter has long contended that Rhode Island was breaking a contract with its employees by changing the deal. As for Dickinson, I like him a ton, but I won’t be calling him a progressive until he can better support civil liberties. Unlike Guthrie, Dickinson doesn’t support marriage equality.

There’s a similarly diverse coalition that nominated Fox, reports Ted Nesi. Rep. Edith Ajello is the most influential progressive legislator in the House and Rep. Doc Corvese is the single biggest detractor of the liberal agenda in the chamber. Lady MacBeth, what some progressives jokingly call the religiously anti-abortion Rep. from Cumberland, also seconded Fox’s bid.

By the way Scott MacKay chastised the ProJo for buying into the hype that Fox’s reelection as speaker was in any doubt. Sometimes in journalism it’s hard to separate a good narrative from actual real life events and consequences; doesn’t mean both aren’t newsworthy.

Rhode Island has the fourth most student loan debt in the nation … so let’s all focus on how our corporate tax rate is causing our economy to sputter…

Jack Reed is right: Liz Warren should be on the banking committee. There was an excellent quote by MIT prof Simon Johnson in an excellent piece in Sunday’s New York Times about the optics of not doing so for Democrats: ““Not putting her on banking would make the Democratic Party look like a creature of Wall Street, which, by the way, it is. But they don’t like to be too explicit about it.”

Here’s how Patch not-so-subtly shills for Walmart in a story posted to most sites in RI (emphasis mine): “Shoppers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island will have to wait until after Thanksgiving to take advantage of Black Friday sales at retail giant Walmart.”  (Or you can !)

Speaking of Patch, the company reports it cut costs by 30 percent in an effort to become profitable. Local editors have seem their freelance budgets literally disappear and some are being asked to take on second sites, like Joe Hutnak who now oversees both Johnston and Smithfield Patch. No wonder they gush about Walmart … they share the same business model!

Puerto Rico is moving closer to becoming our 51st state, says the ProJo editorial page. I’m sure the GOP would prefer the Bahamas or Bermuda…

Twin River is hiring! Reason enough to be glad that full casino gambling is coming to the Ocean State … though I wish Newport was getting table games too. The City-by-theSea could have had one of the classiest and coolest destination resort-style casinos in the country. Twin River, on the hand, might be able to compete with the other regional gambling parlors that will soon be sprouting up all over New England…

Speaking of Newport …. did you hear that Carolyn Rafaelian, Alex and Ani designer, owner and founder, bought Belcourt Castle. On one hand, it’s pretty cool that Rhode Island’s most successful businesswoman will own one of the state’s most well-known mansions. On the other hand, old Newport miss the Tinney family, who were kind like the Adams Family of Aquidneck Island! Trivia: Rafaelian won’t be the first jewelry designer to call Belcourt home!! In the late-1980’s it served as a sort of haunt (pun intended) for local artists…

On this day in 1974, Karen Silkwood dies in a mysterious one-car accident on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter and a union organizer about the nuclear plant where she worked and was poisoned with plutonium.