Question of the Week: How will strife between women activists and Rhode Island’s dominant political party spill into 2020? Thanks for stopping by for my weekly column. As usual, your tips and comments are welcome, and you can follow me through the week on the twitters. (One quick program note: TGIF will take a post-Thanksgiving break next Friday, so this column will return on December 6.) Here we go.
1) A renewed clash between women activists and the Rhode Island Democratic Party was probably inevitable. Progressive women were still irked about the 2018 endorsement controversy, and new bylaws consolidating the party’s control over fundraising and campaign activity sparked a new outcry. Add to that reports of heavy-handed behavior during a state party meeting this week, not to mention an exchange involving lobbyist Stephen Alves, a former state senator from West Warwick, and the level of conflict has climbed to a new level. While a political party’s desire to control its caucuses is not unusual, critics like Rep. Moira Walsh (D-Providence) rap what they see as hypocrisy. “We keep being told by party leadership that they want … differences of opinion, they want people to feel comfortable articulating their own opinions, but then we’re deliberately told that we’re not allowed to have an opinion,” Walsh said on Political Roundtable this week. The Women’s Caucus responded to the bylaws dispute by creating a new independent group, the Rhode Island Democratic Women’s Caucus, while vowing to remain active in the caucus within the party. So will the tension between the activists and Democratic establishment spark the election of more female legislators in 2020? That will depend on the strength of individual candidates and campaigns. For his part, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello can point to how he let the state’s abortion law come to the floor in 2019 – a move that has made him a top target for anti-choice activists. Mattiello spokesman Larry Berman contends that the speaker has a good story to tell on women’s issues. Among other things, he points to Mattiello’s support for laws mandating complete insurance coverage for masectomies, expanded contraceptive care, and increased paid sick leave; the elimination of taxes on female hygiene products; expanded affordable child care; expanding the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse; and a permanent budget stream meant to address domestic and dating violence.
2) Former Vice President Joe Biden is due in Providence this Sunday afternoon for a fundraiser at the East Side home of Sally Lapides and Art Solomon. Contribution levels run from $500 to $2,800 …. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will keynote the annual meeting Monday of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce.
3) Since first winning election in 2016, Rep. Moira Walsh has carved a profile as one of the most candid members of the General Assembly. She frosted leadership by speaking to the ProJo about the culture of drinking on Smith Hill. After winning her second term last year, Walsh continues to call it as she sees it – a contrast to the prevailing tendency of reps to avoid offending legislative leaders. Because of this, Walsh is unlikely to get her own bills passed in the General Assembly. On Bonus Q&A this week, she said she was bound to face tough sledding in the legislature: “As a general rule, the room up there is not designed for single mother waitresses to be able to make it up there. There are a lot of fiery hoops and obstacles that are put in the way to make it nearly impossible for somebody like me to make it up there. So I had promised my constituents early on that I wasn’t there to pass legislation. I was there to fix the building.” As a Democrat, Walsh said, she was offended by how Rhode Island’s minimum wage ranks low in New England, by how some Democrats vote against same-sex marriage solemnizations, and by how prior to 2019, Rhode Island lacked its own law protecting Roe v. Wade. Walsh said her constituents appreciate it “whenever I come out and talk about the corruption at the Statehouse or the misuse of funds.” Asked what she specifically meant by ‘corruption,’ Walsh pointed to how $1 million was destined for the practice of Cranston chiropractor Dr. Victor Pedro (deleted after it became controversial), at a time when lawmakers wouldn’t support half that much for a program meant to reduce chronic homelessness in Rhode Island.
4) An exclusive from my colleague Nadine Sebai: Fall River is revising its approach to record-keeping after a public records request revealed a pattern of questionable spending by Jasiel Correia, the city’s former mayor.
5) As a young reporter in northern Central Massachusetts, I got an education in the extent to which Americans pay attention to the news. The Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s, involving the secret sale of U.S. weapons to Iran, to fund counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua, was a major embarrassment for the Reagan administration, and it led to the prosecution of people like Oliver North. Yet when I asked people outside a supermarket in Leominster about the story, as part of a man on the street feature, they were largely uniformed or uninterested. So with President Trump playing a starring role in a seemingly ceaseless cascade of controversies, how are Americans viewing the impeachment process in Washington? There’s no road map for this one, as Scott MacKay notes. Earlier this week, ahead of some dramatic testimony, there were indications that most people had already made up their minds. Looking ahead, as NPR’s Philip Ewing notes, “The marathon of testimony in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry this week confirmed that the Ukraine affair, like so many earlier subplots in the era of President Trump, boils down to two big questions: What do the president’s words mean? Can the president do what he did?”
6) Gov. Gina Raimondo’s one-year term as chairwoman of the Democratic Governors Association is fast drawing to a close. While the fate of an RI GOP ethics complaint related to IGT remains in play, the governor must be pleased with Democratic wins in other states. As DGA Political Director Marshall Cohen wrote in a recent memo, “While many Democrats have struggled to win in ‘Trump country,’ the DGA has had unprecedented success. We’ve now won 9 states President Trump carried since 2016. And in 2019, we proved that Trump was no silver bullet for Republicans running, even in the reddest of states. We went toe-to-toe with Trump, his rallies, and his political operation and won – twice. Left with few options after our effective negative framing of the Republican candidates, in Louisiana and Kentucky our opponents and the President himself tried making it a referendum on national politics. What they ignored, and we focused on, was that a gubernatorial race is local and not national. We always say that Governors races are different. Voters care about their local schools, their healthcare, their roads, and their jobs. Voters want to know their Governor is on their side and focused on the issues that matter to them. From outperforming in Mississippi to winning in Kentucky and Louisiana, we have given national Democrats a blueprint for beating the Trump machine and winning back red-state voters.”
7) The Providence Journal is now owned by Gannett, the name for the new entity created by the merger with GateHouse Media. Company officials are downplaying talk of expected newsroom layoffs throughout the realm. CEO Paul Bascobert tells The New York Times that strong local journalism is “the engine that has gotten us to the place we are today, and that’s the engine that’s going to carry us forward.” But this is just the latest iteration of ownership for the ProJo, and each ensuing change has led to buyouts and layoffs. Back in the day, the Journal wasn’t perfect, of course, but local ownership invested heavily in the newsroom. By the late ‘90s, Texas-based Belo was running the show, and publicly traded newspaper companies raised the focus on short-term returns. By the time when GateHouse and its parent, New Media Investment Group, came on the scene, things were even farther afield; New Media is externally manged by an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group, a global investment firm bought by the Japanese giant SoftBank in 2017. In other words, bankers are running the show, and they don’t care about covering the East Providence City Council.
8) Former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy is returning to Providence on Tuesday, December 3 for a mid-day fundraiser in support of the run by his cousin, U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts, for U.S. Senate. Contribution levels range from $500 to $2,800. Patrick Kennedy now makes his home in New Jersey. His decision not to seek reelection in 2010 set off a chain reaction in Rhode Island politics, opening a path that, among other things, landed David Cicilline in Congress.
9) A trio of labor leaders — George Nee, president of the RI AFL-CIO, Patrick J. Quinn, VP of 1199 SEIU New England, and Nancy Iadeluca, Rhode Island Director, UNITE-HERE 26 – say Gov. Raimondo was on the right track when she tried to make large employers pay for Medicaid use by their employees. Here’s an excerpt from their op-ed: “In 2018, Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon received $24 million in compensation, while CVS CEO Larry Merlo got a stunning $21.9 million, and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan took home a staggering $22.7 million. Clearly these companies can afford to pay more to ensure the people who work for them have access to quality affordable healthcare. Access to affordable, high-quality healthcare is, and ought to be, a fundamental human right. But the hard-working people of Rhode Island, especially the people struggling to make ends meet in the service economy – people like home healthcare aides, food service workers, janitors, clerks and cashiers – should not have to see their tax dollars used to subsidize corporate greed. We encourage elected leaders of Rhode Island to generate revenue in 2020 by addressing this loophole benefitting large for-profit corporations. We also hope the Governor again proposes policy which calls on corporations paying low wages to contribute to the stabilization of Medicaid programs from which they benefit. Our union members are eager to campaign, both at the State House and across Rhode Island, for passage of this important measure.”
10) Joseph R. Paolino Jr. is concerned about the state’s plan to sell the Shepard Building in downtown Providence, a development that would force URI to move its presence from the former department store building bounded by Washington and Westminster streets. Paolino, who worked on the renovation of the previously vacant structure as part of Bruce Sundlun’s team back in the day, sees that as an investment still yielding dividends for downtown. Brenna McCabe, spokeswoman for the state Department of Administration, said plans call for the sale of the Shepard Building in fiscal 2021, after next June 30. The state is expected to realize between $10 million and $15 million from the sale of multiple priorities. “URI is currently pursuing other locations, and RIDE is slated to move into the William E. Powers building at One Capitol Hill, Providence, as early as April 2020,” McCabe said. “This is one of many real estate recommendations that came out of last year’s proposals from the Governor’s Commission on Government Efficiency. One of the Commission’s primary charges was to make a strategic assessment of the State’s real estate and lease holdings, and to deliver recommendations to the Governor that make more efficient and effective use of State real estate assets and leases.”
11) Back in 1999, Jason Gay (now of the Wall Street Journal) traveled to the Pacific Northwest to report on an anti-globalization gathering for the Boston Phoenix. If I recall properly, the headline on his cover story, with a dramatic image of a clash, was: “Seattle was a riot.” Former Rhode Islander Chas Walker was also in Seattle for that tilt. This week, he offered his own take on the fallout, via an op-ed in The Boston Globe. Excerpt: “The problems that the Seattle protesters highlighted haven’t been fixed — they’ve gotten worse. The examples are numerous: the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 people laboring in the supply chain of retailers like Wal-Mart; the poisoning of Flint, Mich.’s, water supply five years ago and the system’s continued disrepair; the wildfires ravaging California, while its privately-run power grid collapses; the fact that three billionaires control more wealth than half of the country, with one report showing that the median net worth of Boston’s black families $8; and on and on. These disasters are not bugs. They are features of an economy whose primary function is to generate profits for those at the top rather than meet the needs of humanity.”
12) Media Notes: Speaking of op-eds, I like how the Globe is occasionally asking a series of informed observers to share their takes on a subject, in this case climate change …. The Public’s Radio has received a $102,000 grant from the Champlin Foundation to fund new bureaus in Newport and Westerly – thank you! …. Don’t miss Ethan Harley’s farewell column at the Warwick Beacon. Excerpt: “This column is about how an appropriately-named local newspaper in Warwick provided me with a shining opportunity to start over again, and rebuild my love for the profession in a way that I wouldn’t have thought possible. The Beacon not only saved my professional life, it saved me personally at a crucial point in my life where I really didn’t know what the next step should be.”
13) The latest report by the Costs of War project at Brown University finds that American has spent more than $6 trillion on counter-terroism efforts since 9/11. “The numbers continue to accelerate, not only because many wars continue to be waged, but also because wars don’t end when soldiers come home,” Catherine Lutz, co-director of Costs of War and a Brown professor of international and public affairs and anthropology, said in a statement. “These reports provide a reminder that even if fewer soldiers are dying and the U.S. is spending a little less on the immediate costs of war today, the financial impact is still as bad as, or worse than, it was 10 years ago. We will still be paying the bill for these wars on terror into the 22nd century.”
14) Read all about it: the state has submitted its new rules and regulations regarding medical marijuana. According to Commerce RI, which oversees the state Department of Business Regulation, “These regulations set forth a transparent process that will create equal opportunity for all qualified companies seeking to enter or expand in Rhode Island’s medical marijuana market. The regulations also take additional steps to protect public health and public safety and ensure strong oversight of licensees in this rapidly changing industry.The public will have 30 days to provide written feedback on the proposed regulations. A public hearing will take place at 11 a.m. December 6 at Rhode Island College, Gaige Hall, 600 Mt. Pleasant Ave., Providence, RI 02908. The submission includes regulations that will establish a completely impartial process for the licensing of six new compassion centers in six geographic zones throughout the state. A blind review of applications coupled with a randomized selection process for all qualified applicants will ensure a level playing field. To qualify for the randomized selection process, applicants must establish that they are free from conflicts of interest, have no competing interests in any other medical marijuana businesses in Rhode Island and demonstrate a thorough understanding of regulatory requirements through a completed application.”
15) Some pre-Thanksgiving thoughts from Scott MacKay: “There is no easy solution to our national woes. Yet there is a modest idea that could help young people from diverse backgrounds blend. That would be a national service program that would allow young Americans to serve their nation and communities while also getting out of their red state-blue state comfort zones.”
