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61

Government’s Unsurprising Preferred Demographic

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Apparently for the first time, Bryant’s Hassenfeld Institute released detailed crosstabs from its most recent public-opinion survey. It’s interesting stuff.

Readers may have seen reports that Governor Gina Raimondo’s toll proposal is under water, with more people opposing it than supporting it. Republicans’ pay-as-you-go alternative is also under water, by even more, but the question may have caused that result with the phrase, “may take longer to repair the roads and bridges.” Given a list of four alternatives for funding infrastructure repairs, voters overwhelmingly support “reallocating state money to pay for the repairs,” 37.2% versus a toll-and-borrow plan’s 21.9%. In fact, people are even less supportive of pay-as-you-go with a truck toll (12.5%).

Particularly interesting, though, is the right-direction/wrong-direction question. Rhode Islanders are notably less optimistic than they were in September, although still a little more optimistic than last April. According to the newly available information in the latest poll, a large part of the “right direction” results come from people under 40 with household income under $25,000.

Tracing those groups through the other questions — especially measured by income — shows they tend to fall on what might be called the pro-government side. They are the least likely, for example, to support reallocating other money to infrastructure. They are the least likely to say “locally elected officials” are doing a “fair/poor” job (although more than half still say it). They give elected state officials the best marks.

When it comes to education reform, those with incomes under $25,000, they are the most likely to say principals need more authority, yet the least likely to say that the system has to “make it easier to deal with under performing teachers. (Perhaps they don’t see principals as the managerial employees who would handle underperforming teachers, but more like head teachers, themselves.) They are also among the least likely to support expanded school choice.

Not surprisingly, those with incomes under $25,000 are also the most likely to say that they are Democrats, as the only income group among which more than half of respondents say they are a member of a particular party.

That sheds some light, I’d say, on the state government’s preference for policies to make ours a “company state,” in which the government imports clients for itself, largely from other countries. It also seems relevant to an approach to economic development that places a premium on, as the Brookings Institution report put it, “coveted Millennials.”

The young and the least wealthy also made up the smallest groups in the Hassenfeld Institute’s survey. Many of the policies that our state government pursues can be explained if we assume that government officials want to change that.

63

Getting a Sense of Rhode Island First

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Brookings Institution scholars Bruce Katz and Mark Muro are on Newsmakers this week, talking about their new report giving tips to Rhode Island’s upper crust how to reinvent the state in their image.

That opening sentence is definitely contentious, but some of the things that the Brookings guys flew in from Washington, D.C., to say suggest that they believe the real fundamental questions that should be the right of every Rhode Islander to answer should actually be off the table.

For instance, Katz in particular attacks Rhode Island’s preference for smaller-level organizations, saying, “You’ve got a lot of parochialism here. It’s like 18th century government in the 21st century.” Stated without the insult, though, I think most Rhode Islanders would say that’s a good thing. The local-area distinctions are part of the state’s charm and ought to allow for more creativity in governance and economic activity.

Our problem is that insiders and special interests have sought to impose the 20th century progressive notion of the primacy of government, organized labor, and activists. That’s what’s killing our state. It prevents real diversity while locking in a sort of aesthetic parochialism. In other words, we can’t change the character of villages that the ruling elite like or take nest eggs away from established interests, and we can’t truly innovate in our lives… at least without persuading government to let us.

Such centralized social restrictions relate to Brookings’s repeated suggestion that Rhode Island (by which they mean the insiders and special interests) has to figure out “what we’re good at.” Even without access to its underlying research, it appears that the report should have concluded that Rhode Island government isn’t really allowing its people to be good at anything. Rather, they found a few very small niches that aren’t completely stultified — perhaps because of a localized connection to the insider system or simply based on the strength of a few individual personalities — and lumped them together so they’d fit in boxes that could conceivably be called “industry sectors.”

That’s not identifying unique capacities of the state; it’s reinforcing the principle that the very things that are actually holding Rhode Island back are the basic qualities that can’t be changed, leaving them only to be worked around. Indeed, mechanisms such as insider contests to hand out awards and grants for innovation are custom designed to ensure that nothing can happen without special interests’ say so.

Reading through the report, one can’t help but wonder if the progressives at Brookings looked at Rhode Island, saw the unavoidable consequences of their political philosophy, and layered on nearly 200 pages of analysis and proposals seeking some fancy policy maneuver that will escape the trap of reality.

64

Something Like a Conspiracy of the 1%

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In one of those coincidences that I would call suspicious if I were absolutely sure nobody would take me seriously, my hard drive crossed the line to bad on the very day the Brookings Institution released its $1.3 million study of Rhode Island’s economic condition and prospects (via WPRI’s Ted Nesi).  These days, an unexpected computer failure is not unlike returning to my office to discover that corrupt and thuggish secret agents gave the room and files a quick-and-dirty look-through for some information they mistakenly believe I have implicating the Commander in Chief in a scandal that even the mainstream media couldn’t ignore, which is to say that I’m still putting things back together.

That said, I’m overdue for a post, and I’ve wanted to note a theme to which I’ll return in more detail in the Brookings report.  It initially appears on the very first page of text and pops up amid all of the analysis and jargon throughout:

Which is to say that Rhode Island—a small state in a large nation in a fiercely competitive world—is facing an existential choice about its future. Are the state’s business, civic, university, and government leaders prepared to think deeply and act decisively as their predecessors did in order to meet profound uncertainty with innovation and ingenuity? Or will they merely make the best of slow decline?

The italicized text tells Rhode Islanders who Brookings’s real audience is, and the audience determines the recommendations.  Unless I’ve missed it as I’ve read the report while waiting for the bars to reach 100% on computer diagnostics programs, the report’s authors do not once ask, or advise their audience to consider, what Rhode Islanders want their state to be.  We are irrelevant.  Worse, we’re widgets.  We need to be repackaged and reprogrammed for the benefit of the right kind of companies.  Our neighborhoods have to be redesigned in order to attract the “coveted millennials” whom the authors see as the spring blossoms of “coolness” and “hipness” (not to say “grooviness”).

As I said, once I’ve lifted all of my virtual filing cabinets off the floor and hung the digital pictures back on the walls, I’ll go into more detail, but there may be no better evidence that the next step in the progressive plan is intended to bring government and the industrialists back into alignment, coming full circle since the days of the robber barons, in order to assert their authority over us all and to protect their own power and interests.

66

Progressivism Begets Income Inequality

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The Providence Journal had an odd little leak from the forthcoming Brooking Institution study that may give hints about the focus of the study, but that definitely illustrates a point about the progressive, government-centric way in which the state has been governed for decades:

The Brookings Institution think tank says Providence had one of the largest income gaps in the country in 2014, according to Census data it analyzed.

The top 5 percent of earners in Providence made 15 times what the bottom 20 percent did, ranking it No. 5 in income inequality among cities nationwide.

Broadening to the entire Providence metro region, the ranking slips to 14th, which isn’t much of an improvement.  If this is a clue for what to expect from Brookings, then one can presuppose that the progressive think tanks suggestions are going to point Rhode Island in exactly the wrong direction.

This progressive, top-down model, in which the smaht people tell the rest of us how to live and how to structure our affairs puts the elite at the top, selling its plans and benefits to those at the bottom, with those in the middle targeted for forced compliance.  The reason is simple:  As a matter of basic politics, the people in the middle are the group from which real opposition to the elite can come — economically, socially, and politically.

The aristocracy in control of the state therefore has incentive to either to draw people into their fold or to push them toward the bottom, while ensuring that those at the bottom never rise to the middle.  Thus: income inequality.

67

Why the New Shadow Government Is Bad

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Rhode Islanders need to understand how Raimondo’s shadow government will operate and how it represents the systematization of the corrupt insider culture for which the state is already known.

69

Checking In on the Beginning of Rhode Island’s End

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A couple of months ago, I actually received a prank call from somebody with a Massachusetts number joshing me over the fact that my personal Web page hadn’t been updated for over five years.  Such things happen to low-priority projects.  Family, work, and general life maintenance take time, never mind community involvement and writing.  String enough of those things together, and the wave keeping you from updating an unused Web page can last for years.

But the call nagged at me, mostly because I know there are other Justin Katzes out there in the world with whom I’ve sometimes battled for various social media accounts and such.  If one of them owned justinkatz.com and left it doing nothing at a time when I would have had a good use for it, I’d have been annoyed. So, feeling guilty, I’ve been putting a little time into redesigning the site and adding content.

As I’ve gone back through the archives of this site to remind myself what the past year has been like, I came across my post the day after the House held its record-short budget debate.  In light of various issues in the months since — notably incidents of hiring in the governor’s office (and the just-about-explicit involvement of legislative leaders in that deal making), but also things like the toll debate and the new role of the Brookings Institution in RI government — my conclusion at the end of that post was a bit more on-point than I’d have liked:

And now, our elected representatives have decided to stop pretending that anything meaningful happens outside of the back rooms, where insiders make deals.  …

Pretending at least requires a surface agreement about how the system ought to work.  When that consensus dissipates, it represents a fundamental change in the kind of government we have.  We know from history that the system we had (past tense, now) has proven to be the only one that can expand (or even sustain) freedom, prosperity, opportunity, and equality for any length of time.

We’re in a new era.  Fear the next one.

With the mildly anticipated Brookings Institution report on how the government can reshape our state to fit a central plan due for release next week, we’re about to enter the next phase of that new era’s settling in.  Time to get busy; people need to know what’s happening and to understand that there is an alternative.

70

More Chief Officers Several Steps Removed From Accountability

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A few weeks ago, I wondered why the lead marketing officer for the state government of Rhode Island would be hired by and work through the quasi-public Commerce Corporation.  Now, WJAR’s Patricia Resende reports that the state’s new “chief innovation officer” will operate under a non-profit organization that’s affiliated with Rhode Island College:

[Richard] Culatta will work out of Rhode Island College’s Office of Innovation, which is financially supported by the Rhode Island College Foundation. The Office of Innovation is expected to be the core driver behind the state’s efforts in innovation.

“The role of the Chief Innovation Officer will be about opening up government and using data to solve problems,” Raimondo said in a release. “We need new approaches, both in the way government operates and in the types of businesses we attract and nurture here.”

As the foundation’s Web page emphasizes, it is “a separate entity” and “the primary source of private support to the college” (emphasis added).  At the beginning of December, Resende reported (strangely) that Culatta was headed to Rhode Island for a high-level job with the state that hadn’t yet been defined.  Now, Patrick Anderson reports that Culatta’s cabinet-level position will come with total annual compensation of $237,600 plus benefits.

Few Rhode Islanders would dispute that their government is a drag on the state, but one must question the wisdom (and the constitutionality) of establishing a shadow government for critical functions.  I’ve asked the governor’s office from where the money for this position will actually be coming.  Budget documents for the current fiscal year show a $98,000-per-year chief innovation officer housed in the Secretary of State’s office that was not in last year’s budget, but it isn’t clear whether that is a different position.

More imortantly, Rhode Islanders should be wary of all of the pieces that Raimondo is putting into place (perhaps with advance knowledge of the blueprint that the Brookings Institution has developed for redesigning our home).  When the armada of non-profits, quasi-publics, private partners, and government agencies is fully assembled, with a plan to dictate Rhode Island’s future development, voters may have little recourse for stopping it, especially with the nearest election two years away.

71

The Tip of the Public Manipulation Iceberg

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Katherine Gregg has more on Rhode Island state government’s spending to promote itself and spin its programs to the public in today’s Providence Journal:

Rhode Island taxpayers paid upward of $6,234,093 last year to private companies that do “communications and marketing” for state government in Rhode Island. The “quasi-public(s)” paid another $617,555 to consultants, and expect to pay $987,216 for salaries for their in-house public-relations staff.

That’s on top of the $4.3 million for in-house public relations people.  But this is all just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the government’s efforts to get the public to accept its expansion.  After all, if you’re going to include the payment for the Raimondo administration to design its RhodeWorks logo, why not also include the $50,000 the state paid for a predictably positive economic projection from REMI?  For that matter, part of the $1.3 million study the Brookings Institution is currently conducting in Rhode Island will be instructions for how the Raimondo administration can bring agencies, private organizations, and private companies into line with the government’s agenda.

If we opened the net wide enough not just to catch people with the phrase “public relations” in their job description, but all of those activities that have as their goal the persuasion or manipulation of the public, you’d catch not only REMI and Brookings, but GrowSmart, the RI Foundation, and many other organizations known and unknown.  The bill wouldn’t be a few million dollars per year, but tens of millions or more.

This is an inevitable consequence of an expansive government that has its fingers in every activity and massive, indecipherable budgets.  The worst part is that we’ve all fallen asleep on the job when it comes to tracing and pushing back against the manipulation.

73

Government Built on the Principal-Agency Problem

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Writing on the quagmire of President Obama’s foreign policy, Richard Fernandez introduces a term that describes very well the challenge I observed on Friday, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and in Rhode Island:

To understand how defeat can be winning  recall the old principal-agent problem. “The dilemma exists because sometimes the agent is motivated to act in his own best interests rather than those of the principal.” Even though the people might gain more by “winning” if the political class can do better by “losing” then they lose.

The Wikipedia entry to which Fernandez links for a quick explanation places at the core of the dilemma the fact that the agent (say, a corporate board) has an advantage in information over the principal (e.g., shareholders).  The board can better see the conditions of the investment and may find itself in a position in which recommending one path would pay off for the shareholders, but cost the board.

In the case of government, the asymmetry of information certainly exists, but the greater problem is the asymmetry of power.  In theory, of course, government agents must convince voters that public actions are in their best interest, which is an information issue, but the government has the advantage that direct consent is not immediately necessary, so its persuasion can be done post facto.  ObamaCare would never have won a national referendum, but imposing it and then manipulating asymmetrical information has kept it lumbering along.

The Greenhouse Compact failed in Rhode Island because it came to a vote of the people, while RhodeMap RI insinuated its way into law and now can continue based on the false information that it’s simply sitting on a shelf, or the even more obvious stratagem of changing its name.  Remember that Governor Raimondo used a refinancing gimmick to produce the $80 million needed for part of her plan without the requirement of public consent, and some of her wealthy backers are helping to fund some of the planning stage, perhaps with reinforcement from the Boston Fed.

Decisions are being made that will affect every part of your life in Rhode Island.  You still have time (theoretically) to change the people making the decisions or to take their authority away for specific actions.  Many have already concluded that the only way to escape their authority is to leave, although the disinclination to stand up against them does not bode well for the hope that their approach won’t spread around the country and the world.

74

So Much Study of a Top-Down Economic Program Already Under Way

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There sure are a lot of folks who want to offer Rhode Islanders helpful advice on how they should give government, non-profit, and business leaders expanded resources and authority to make decisions for all of us.  First came a group of wealthy Gina Raimondo backers and their hired think-tankers at Brookings, and now, according to Kate Bramson in the Providence Journal, the Fed wants to get in on the action:

The Boston Fed’s team will collaborate with an unspecified number of Rhode Island cities and towns to use national research it conducted to help struggling communities recover economically, said Tamar Kotelchuck, director of the Boston Fed’s Working Cities Initiatives.  The program in Massachusetts has tackled workforce development, community development and education initiatives in six cities, but it’s too soon to say exactly what the focus might be in Rhode Island. Kotelchuck said it’s likely that workforce development will be one area of focus here, but others may emerge after more study.

Funny how everybody’s got the same basic blueprint:

Working Cities research has shown several factors help cities maintain or recover their economic stability — including collaborative leadership, the role of anchor institutions, investment in infrastructure and the extension of benefits to the entire community. But “collaborative leadership” — the ability to work together across sectors over a sustained period of time with a comprehensive vision — was found to be most crucial.

That passive voice — “was found to be” — is instructive.  “Found to be” by whom?  A quick look through some of the materials on the Boston Fed’s Web site for this initiative reveals that “collaborative leadership” is actually one of the goals of the project.  It isn’t surprising, therefore, that the organization would find it to be crucial.  This report, in particular, brings around some familiar verbiage:

Most importantly, [in the comparatively few places that have succeeded in making the transition from distressed to revitalized,] public officials, private sector employers, and nonprofit institutions need to coalesce around a long-term vision and collaborate for a sustained period of time in implementing broad-based revitalization strategies.

Translation: Insiders agree on a vision for the whole community and use the levers of government, non-profits, and business to make sure the people don’t disrupt the plan.  This is precisely the vision that Brookings has articulated, and the mechanisms that the Fed suggests read like the menu of the programs that Governor Raimondo and the General Assembly have empowered the state’s new Commerce Secretary to implement, using $80 million of our money claimed through a fancy refinancing deal.

In addition to the similarity of all of these plans note something else:  Raimondo began implementing it before the all this high-profile studying had begun.  Anybody who thinks this initiative begins with the actual people of Rhode Island, our needs, and our hopes and dreams is being profoundly misled.

 

75

A Familiar Strategy for Manipulating the Public

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This sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

This massive effort is laid out in a new report — “Private Interests and Public Office” — by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute. For the past year, E&E Legal used state and federal public-records requests to uncover whom the White House worked with to promote its environmental agenda, especially its newly unveiled “Clean Power Plan.”…

This sort of political advocacy requires money, so the governors’ offices reached out to Michael Bloomberg, the Rockefeller family and other wealthy liberal benefactors. They especially focused on Steyer, who was preparing to spend $100 million promoting environmental issues in the 2014 election.

I’m thinking, specifically, of the Raimondo backers who are funding the forthcoming Brookings Institution study.  When they say they’re trying to get everybody “on the same page,” what they mean is that they’re using their resources and access co-opt the missions of the public and private sectors to further their ideological (and/or self-interested) agenda.  By definition, it’s a conspiracy.

Yet, if anybody attempts to organize an opposition, they are put forward as the greedy schemers, through the news and entertainment media that are cooperating with the government-driven ideologues.  As they say, control the language and the narrative, and you win the social war, even if most of what you say is false and utter intellectual nonsense.

P.S. — If you’re wondering, yes, the EELI report does mention Rhode Island, albeit only once.  Of course, it would probably go without saying that Rhode Island’s two most recent governors would be on board with a scheme to boost green-energy special interests and give government greater control over society.

76

Gina’s Gleichschaltung

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Ed Driscoll recalls a Jonah Goldberg column from 2010, and it makes me think of Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo and the Brookings Institution:

Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren’t evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism. But there is a liberal Gleichschaltung all the same. Every institution must be on the same page. Every agency must advance the liberal agenda.

And this is where the Catch-22 catches. The dream of a nimble, focused, problem-solving government is undone by the reality of hyper-mission creep. When every institution is yoked to an overarching philosophy or mission, its actual purpose can become an afterthought.

Here’s Bruce Katz, of Brookings, talking about the study on which his institution is currently working for the benefit of the Raimondo Administration:

“I think in most parts of the U.S. it’s still, the government does this, the corporations do that, the universities are somewhere else,” [Bruce Katz, the nationally-known head of the Metropolitan Policy Program] said. “In the successful places around the world there’s a seamless interaction between all these different sectors, and if they’re all on the same page – then that’s when you get the bigger returns. So it’s not just the policy … it’s this foundation of collaboration.”

Unfortunately for the central planners, this is a pipe dream.  Just look at Stephen Beale’s article on GoLocalProv, today:

The Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families is riddled with severe financial problems and shoddy record keeping, leading to running deficits, a potential misuse of funds, and violation of state purchasing regulations, according to a state audit.

The problem isn’t only that a government in which unity of purpose is paramount hinders each organization or agency from fulfilling its own unique purpose, but also that the purpose of the whole collective stops being to solve problems and starts being to support the collective.  As I suggest in Beale’s article, the people who do the stuff of government know that the folks at the top, including those who are elected, are on their side and reluctant to raise questions about the whole big-government enterprise; they also know that like-minded people have a lock on those offices.

Under such circumstances, belief in the principle of central planning becomes the first requirement for employees, and the first objective of any process to catch and stop bad management becomes not catching and stopping bad management, but preventing incidents from making people think society might have other ways to solve its problems.

77

Rhode Island Is Making Its People Miserable

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I’m pretty sure I’d seen Gallup’s well-being ranking of the states before, but I hadn’t taken a close look.  Coming across it, yesterday, I did so, and it’s kind of depressing.

Rhode Island is 37th, overall, which looks good because we’re so used to being in the bottom 10, but that result is due to the fact that we tend to feel that we’re in good physical health (14th) and have a middle-of-the-pack sense of financial security (27th).  However, where we do poorly is telling:

  • The finding that we’re 45th for “liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community” certainly jibes with constant commentary in letters, comment sections, and social media that many Rhode Islanders are either looking for a way out of the state or feel like they should be.
  • Being 49th in our sense of purpose — liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals — could have a lot to do with how difficult state and local governments make it to accomplish anything.
  • And our dead-last 50th ranking for “having supportive relationships and love in your life” could be a combination of having lost so many fleeing friends, family, and neighbors and feeling as if the entire state is working against us.

Honing in on the state government and its orbiting establishment isn’t just a peculiar bias, given my political occupation and interests.  Via her Twitter feed, WPRO reporter Kim Kalunian recently directed attention to a WalletHub analysis that places Rhode Island as the 41st most happy state — that is, the 10th most unhappy.  In keeping with the Gallup results, Rhode Island was a bit better (37th) for both “emotional & physical well-being” and “work environment,” but suffers (45th) under “community, environment & recreational activities.”

In short, Rhode Islanders’ misery isn’t something growing from our wealth, health, or psychological tendencies.  It’s something that somebody else is doing to us (or, rather, in the case of government, something that we’re doing to ourselves by means of the people we allow to walk all over us).

My saying this will surprise no one, but crony jobs in business regulation, new tolls and taxes to hide borrowing, government subsidies to struggling sports franchises, and fancy refinancing schemes to support an economic development slush fund are not going to fix the problem.  Governor Raimondo’s plans to use Brookings Institution findings to push Rhode Islanders into conformance with a government-driven economic plan is only going to make matters worse.  What we need is for legislators to stop doing so horribly on the Freedom Index.

Get out of our way.  Let us live our lives.  Ultimately, that’s what the pursuit of happiness is all about.

78

Wall Street and a Political Showdown

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Ed Driscoll kicks off an Instapundit post noting the Wall Street panic over the possibility that Donald Trump might actually win the Republican nomination, quoting from a Politico article by Ben White (emphasis Driscoll’s):

The latest frightening broadside for the Wall Street class came on Sunday when Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that executive pay in America is “a complete joke” and promised to raise taxes on “the hedge fund guys.” In a statement sent to POLITICO on Monday from his campaign, Trump relished in the attacks from Wall Street, singling out both Bush and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, another favorite on Wall Street.

At this point, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that the best thing Wall Street can do to help Donald Trump is to be vocal in their fear of him.  As Driscoll goes on to point out, by the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, Wall Street had disconnected itself from both the Republican Party and the American Main Street.

It serves progressives, liberals, and the media (forgive the repetition) to attempt to disguise the fact that the Democrat Party has become the party of the rich investor class (see: Raimondo, Gina), but over the last seven years, vocal observation of that reality has been expanding across the political right and center and the realization thereof is surely quietly permeating much of the left, too.  (A big clue, for some years, has been when the stock market has responded well to bad employment news and badly to good employment news because of the likely effect on the Federal Reserve and interest rates.)

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment has proven itself to be almost completely disinterested in championing conservative causes — or even just Main Street causes — when doing so would involve political risks imposed by the news media and a lawless president.

The political game isn’t even creating the semblance of working for the great majority of taxpayers and voters, so those taxpayers and voters are going to be increasingly willing to take risks with their votes.  Even blowing up the status quo would be preferable to letting the noose continue to tighten.

A wise observer would have some fear that the establishment will respond by rushing for the golden ring of a political system in which there is absolutely zero chance that they can be voted out of power, but for those of us who’ve been watching the slow advance toward that outcome for years, a showdown sooner than later would be a hopeful turn of events.

79

Rhode Island’s New Political Reality a Disturbing Joke

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How about some review?  Under Governor Gina Raimondo (D):

  • The governor’s big economic development plan is centered around an intricate refinancing deal that essentially allows her office to borrow around $80 million without taxpayer approval.
  • The State Police has issued a heavily political report attacking the Republican mayor of Cranston (i.e., the governor’s electoral competition).
  • A bridge near the law office of the Speaker of the House was mysteriously closed down in the middle of an infrastructure debate for work that was of questionable necessity.
  • The governor’s toll-and-borrow plan for infrastructure is another way to borrow millions upon millions of dollars without ever having to win approval from Rhode Island taxpayers.
  • The quasi-public Commerce Corp. is acting like a Gina Raimondo PAC.
  • Wealthy political donors to Raimondo are “independently” funding a D.C. think tank to advance the governor’s policies, with clear cooperation from her office.
  • The Dept. of Transportation has hired a marketing firm to help it push Raimondo’s infrastructure proposal.
  • The DOT is also becoming a difficult place from which to receive documents requested under open records law.
  • Ultra-insider Richard Licht’s son landed a high-paying job with the Commerce Corp.

I’m sure there’s more that I’ve forgotten, but new to the list is the hiring of recently retired state representative Donald Lally to an $87,057-a-year position with the Dept. of Business Regulation, which (along with the Commerce Corp.) is under the direction of Raimondo’s Commerce Secretary, Stefan Pryor.  Despite the befuddlement of John Marion, one of the leading experts on RI ethics laws, Lally claims that revolving door provisions don’t apply to him because he technically works for the governor and is just on loan to the Dept. of Business Regulation.

The sick joke comes at the end of Stephanie Turaj’s report about Lally’s hiring, when the former rep explains his motivation as follows:

“I have two children, a daughter finishing up at the [University of Connecticut] and I have a son who’s a sophomore at the [University of Rhode Island] in business,” Lally said. “I’d like to give them the opportunity to work in Rhode Island if they wanted to. I wanted to help out and do my part.”

Well, if Mr. Lally wants to ensure Rhode Island–based work for his children, building his connections within state government seems to be about the only certain way to do so.  Any other parents who wish to do the same better get with the Raimondo program.

80

REMI and the 14% Solution

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Projections using REMI to estimate the effects of doubling the sales tax illustrate the economic thinking that will go into the results of its review of Raimondo’s toll-and-borrow infrastructure scheme.

82

To Whom Is Central Planning Useful?

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Ted Nesi is striving to keep the forthcoming Brookings Institution report about Rhode Island as an open question.  That’s an understandable — responsible — approach, considering that the fact of the study was just announced and it’ll be the better part of a year before there are results to report.

That said, I’d encourage Rhode Islanders to push their assumptions one more step and question those, too.  Here’s Nesi:

Hopefully the $1.3 million being spent on the report – paid for by foundations and a few wealthy Gina Raimondo supporters – will at least buy some robust new data about the state’s present economic condition.  Beyond that, the onus will be on Brookings to show why this report’s recommendations will be more useful than those in all the reports that came before it. … They could provide a useful service if they tell it like it is.

The question is:  A useful service to whom?  Somehow, I don’t think the people funding the report are planning to offload some of the market research expenses from private businesses and individuals.  That means the report will mainly be useful to the wealthy, powerful interests who are taking it upon themselves to contrive a detailed direction for the whole state.

And it’s not even just the state.  Consider another item from Nesi’s Saturday column:

Also on the topic of economic development, Congressman Joe Kennedygave a noteworthy speech last month that called for local leaders to start thinking beyond the borders of their two states. … His idea, he said, is “about starting to rethink the way we pursue economic development on the South Coast. Leveraging the assets and strengths of this region in a comprehensive, collective way. Treating Fall River, New Bedford, Attleboro, Taunton, Tiverton and Providence not as isolated silos, but as a combined economic force.”

Who will make decisions for this “combined economic force”?  In Tiverton, for example, residents just blocked a major development along Route 24 next to the Sakonnet River Bridge; a year ago, they played a large role in reversing the push for tolls on that bridge.  Next year, they’ll likely decide yea or nay on a casino on the border (with early indications giving the better odds to yea). One can disagree with any of these results, but the opinions of local residents ought to have more sway than the state government’s, let alone the demands of some regional coalition or authority.

Yeah, maybe lightning could strike for Southern New England, and (despite its historical record of corruption) the machinations of influential people could create a global dynamo.  If that’s the vision, though, how could a few hundred people in a high school auditorium be permitted to wield a veto?

83

Slipping Totalitarianism Quietly Through the Back Door

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At the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, we spent quite a while — more than a year, anyway — looking into the the plans behind RhodeMap RI and related planning documents like Land Use 2025.  The better part of the challenge was that the whole thing was designed to look like benign “we’re just talking, here” activity.  It was like a friendly community game of croquet, but with intimidating guards standing around ready to unleash such powerful weapons as accusations of racism and conspiracy theorizing.

It’s beyond dispute, now, that the movement is national (if not international) and is at the very least incidentally (if not deliberately) concerned with eliminating vast swaths of our freedom, particularly those having to do with property rights.  And it was always obvious that the intent was to keep the real import of the plan from being widely known until the trap was pretty well set.

This, too, appears to be national in scope:

The key exchange comes between 1:21:08 and 1:23:59 on the video. In response to a question from [Brookings Fellow Richard] Reeves about what “getting serious” about housing policy would mean, [Urban Institute VP Margery Austin] Turner cites [Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH)], arguing that the rule could bring “incredibly important” changes to America. Slyly, she acknowledges that AFFH isn’t so much enforcing the original legal obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing,” as it is changing our understanding of what that obligation means. (In other words, AFFH is stretching a directive to prevent discrimination into a mandate for social engineering.) Turner then says that it would take decades for AFFH to fully transform society along the lines she desires. (I’d add that the rule won’t take nearly that long to gut local government in America.)

What’s interesting is that when Turner finishes her discussion of AFFH by saying that the rule “sounds very obscure, but I think it could be hugely important,” Reeves breaks in and says: “Perhaps it’s important to keep [the AFFH rule] sounding obscure in order to get it through.” (In other words, to get the AFFH rule enacted before public opposition and congressional Republicans can block it, we’ve got to keep its existence and importance quiet.) At this point, the audience laughs sympathetically. Then Reeves adds: “Sometimes obscurity is the best political strategy, particularly in this area.”

As the infamous Jonathan Gruber put it, with regard to enacting ObamaCare, “the stupidity of the American voter… was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

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