During her time as governor, Rhode Islanders periodically would hear rumors that Gina Raimondo had the backing of powerful financial interests. Indeed, she typically received the large majority of her campaign donations from people with out-of-state addresses. As I asked in 2017, what were they buying with their money?
At the time, the answer seemed likely to be access to Rhode Island government money, with a longer-term investment in an up-and-coming Democrat. Given recent headlines involving Andy Moffit, the husband of the now–Commerce Secretary for Joe Biden, the question begins to have an East Asian feel:
A venture capital firm backed by the Chinese government is a major investor in an artificial intelligence company that counts Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s husband as a top executive, a potential conflict of interest as her agency works to counter China on the world stage.
Danhua Capital, based in California but established with the financial backing of the Chinese Communist Party, is one of the main funders of PathAI, an artificial intelligence firm that employs Raimondo’s husband, Andy Moffit, as its chief people officer.
That isn’t all, however. Before PathAI, Moffit worked for McKinsey & Company, which Jack Butler describes as a career attraction for “the morally uncertain products of our higher-education system who emerge from said system sure primarily of one thing: that they should be telling people what to do” — like “knock it off.”
McKinsey, too, has some disturbing Chinese connections:
… outside of the U.S., McKinsey has helped to facilitate the economic rise of China, in a manner beyond even the mere investment and engagement of other American companies with Chinese business. According to the New York Times, “In China, it has advised at least 22 of the 100 biggest state-owned companies — the ones carrying out some of the government’s most strategic and divisive initiatives.” One of McKinsey’s Chinese clients helped construct that nation’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, an obvious military venture. And perhaps most shocking, a few years ago some McKinsey employees attended a corporate retreat in Xinjiang Province, riding camels and relaxing in high-class resorts just a few miles away from Uyghur concentration camps.
Butler’s source doesn’t say whether Moffit was among those recharging their batteries in proximity to Chinese slave prisons, but it doesn’t much matter. How deep the Commerce Secretary’s connections to the communists go, however, does matter. If the answer is that they go no deeper than is typical for people of her social class and political party, that matters even more.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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This is worth remembering, especially because so many people charged with keeping an eye on things want to forget it:
[Open full post]We found out about the 14,000 abandoned Americans almost two months ago, of whom the State Department only shows 900 exfiltrated thus far. We also knew that the US had abandoned tens of thousands of Afghan allies in Joe Biden’s haste to retreat from Afghanistan in August, but we didn’t have an exact count. The Wall Street Journal reported last night that State now estimates that number to be 62,000 …
This figure does not include family members of those interpreters and other workers who supported US efforts in Afghanistan. The true number of people at risk of reprisals from the now-ruling Taliban (or others) may well go into six figures. And that also doesn’t include the 13,000 Americans — citizens and legal permanent residents — that remain stuck behind Taliban lines months after Biden’s bug-out.
Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert visited the men being held in prison for involvement in January 6 and released a report of their findings.
That this isn’t a subject of interest much more broadly is mind blowing. In fact, much of the commentary I see treats it as somehow inappropriate of Greene and Gohmert to show any concern at all.
Here’s a simple test: if you’ve locked these folks away in an area of your mind that you don’t want to know about, they are every bit political prisoners, with all the fascistic connotations of that term, to you.
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Memory is hazy, and I missed early punk by about a half-generation, and I couldn’t quickly find the clip, but I remember seeing a punk rocker being interviewed on a mainstream television show, looking very much the emaciated junky and saying, essentially, we have control over your children. Even not being a parent at the time, something was chilling about the assertion.
Part of what made the punk movement different was that it discarded the aspirational part of revolution. They weren’t trying to push people past standards and norms to free them for a higher existence. To some extent, the very notion of a higher existence was just another version of oppression. The corruption and destruction was the point.
I thought of that image upon reading Charlie Jacobs’s account of “rescuing [her] daughter from her transgender fantasy”:
During that same time period, my daughter went through Teen Talk—a Manitoba, Canada-based program that says it provides “youth with accurate, [nonjudgmental] information” on “sexuality, reproductive health, body image, substance use awareness, mental health, issues of diversity, and anti-violence issues”—at her public school.
She came home with a whole new language. She and all her girlfriends discussed their labels—polyamorous, lesbian, pansexual. None of the five girls chose “basic,” their term for a straight girl.
Now, I was worried.
She distanced herself from her old friends and spent more time online. I checked her phone, but I was not astute enough to know that she had set up “appropriate” fake social media accounts for my viewing.
An older girl showed romantic interest in her. I barred that girl from our home. I learned later that she had molested my daughter.
Programs like Teen Talk have infected our schools and other institutions. Many of the practitioners, no doubt, think they’re freeing children for a higher existence, but I wonder whether the corrosive punk attitude hasn’t simply been so thoroughly absorbed by mainstream culture taht it doesn’t recognize its own ends.
People there are who would read Jacobs’s account and reinterpret her deep concern for her daughter and wishes for her wonderful future as, instead, some sort of pathological need to control. Perhaps they have so little sense of even the possibility of controlling their own lives that they project this pathology onto others.
Featured image by Michael & Diane Weidner on Unsplash.
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Sometimes I have to wonder whether I’m one of only a few people in the state who read about the policy doings of legislators and the governor and see the wall-to-wall violations of good government… and propriety.
The waves of borrowed cash that the federal government has injected into the veins of our incompetent and corrupt system for distribution have kicked up a disgusting mire:
Including money going directly to cities and towns or specific uses, Rhode Island has received $2.6 billion total from the American Rescue Plan. Of that, the $119 million is being drawn from a $1.1 billion largely State Fiscal Recovery Fund the state can use with relatively few strings attached. Rhode Island is one of the few states that haven’t tapped their Recovery Fund accounts.
For just about every other person who engages in commentary on these matters, the outrage is that the state has taken so long to get the money out, but the real outrage, as far as I can see, is the very idea that anybody would hand a collection of politicians, bureaucrats, and their special-interest satellites all this money with the instruction simply to spend it.
Has America gone crazy? Even a glimmer of common sense would scream out that this is something that you just don’t do. Even if you couldn’t write an editorial articulating the reasons, you know that it’s just wrong.
Well… for certain subsets of the variable “you.”
The examples that Patrick Anderson lists in his above-linked article are both pitiful in their limited scope and varied in the ways that they are objectionable.
Bonuses for childcare-workers sound nice, but the history reveals the problem. A few years back, the state threw struggling labor unions a bone by beginning to allow them to unionize independent contractors whose only commonality (other than occupation) is that their clients receive government subsidies. Now, they’re an organized special interest, and the public has no way of knowing whether the money is really justified or just a gimme to make the union look good.
Grants to small businesses might help, here and there, but spreading them out in relatively inconsequential amounts ensures that, for most of the recipients, they won’t act as a boost to the next level of operation, but just a little bit of a cushion in the near term. And the fact that one-fifth of the money will be distributed not based on need, but purely on the skin color of the business owner, continues the Democrats’ gross racism.
Meanwhile, a supplement to a recent affordable housing bond does nothing to address the underlying causes of the problem and locks valuable property into this wrong-headed approach for decades. Meanwhile, it raises the question of why the state isn’t doing things that any family would do with a massive windfall of money, like paying off debt.
Rhode Island’s civic problems may be too pervasive to fix until they lead to calamity, but if there is to be any hope, we need to stop and listen to our common sense as often as we can.
Featured image by Bermix Studio on Unsplash.
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One part of my diagnosis of Rhode Island’s problems is that it’s just not big enough for opposing factions to build up and keep each other honest in state-level government. Pushback against the New York governor’s mask mandate at the county level brough that to mind:
At least 13 counties in New York state are telling newly-tapped Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul that they will not be enforcing her mask mandate on private businesses — and some of the county leaders are letting their displeasure over the “dictate” be known.
According to the New York Post, Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus ripped Hochul, telling the governor he opposes “using Gestapo tactics and going business to business and asking them if they are enforcing masking.”
Of course, we don’t have county governments in RI, and the municipalities are all very close and very dependent on the state government, so resistence generally has to come from outside of government.
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Rhode Island Republican House Minority Leader Blake Filippi lays out the simple steps of his argument that Democrat Governor Dan McKee is acting outside of his authority by continuing the COVID state of emergency:
A thread on the lawlessness of @GovDanMcKee’s emergency powers:
§30-15-9 used to allow the Governor to declare an emergency with no end date. A state of emergency was ended by the Governor, or by the House and Senate both passing resolutions to end it.
In 2021, Republicans and many of our Democratic colleagues sought to limit the duration of emergencies.
We included language in the budget that limited emergencies to 180-days, unless both the House and Senate passed resolutions extending it.
The state of emergency declared by Governor Raimondo effectively terminated upon the passage of the budget in June, 2021 (absent several executive orders that were allowed to continue until 9/1/21).
Rather than obtain House and Senate approval to lawfully continue the state of emergency, on 8/19/21 Governor McKee declared a “new” state of emergency due to the Delta variant, ostensibly giving himself another 180 day period to legislate via executive order.
Delta is a variation of COVID-19.
Delta cannot constitute a new emergency under which the 180-day limitation may be ignored.
Otherwise, the COVID-19 emergency may be continued in perpetuity by declaring a new emergency every time it mutates, thus nullify the 180-day law.
There is extensive precedent whereby courts are reluctant involve themselves in emergencies – they leave it to the Governor and the Legislature to battle it out.
Unfortunately, the House and Senate have failed to rein in the Governor’s abuse of emergency authority.
Left without judicial or legislative remedies for this lawlessness, the People’s remedy is civil disobedience and the ballot box in November.
Of course, our civic system is so tilted, the ballot box isn’t going to be much help on this particular issue.
I’m inclined to be a little harder-edged than Filippi, here. The situation reminds me of a time I was playing Dungeons & Dragons at summer camp and the dungeon master allowed me to use my third wish on a magic sword to renew my wishes over and over. (He probably should have made that decision contingent on a roll of the 20-sided die, or something.)
Legislators should have known (and some probably did) that the new 180-day limit would have to be very well defined in order to be absolutely final. All McKee has done, essentially, is to shift from ordering the emergency continued every 30 days to ordering it renewed every 180. It’s a word game that a free people would find insulting if they were paying attention and cared about their rights.
Be that as it may, the real source of this abuse of our rights is not the ability of the governor to extend an emergency, but the clouded thinking about what emergency orders are for. They should only apply to situations when the legislature simply can’t be convened in time to address a major danger to people in the state. Managing a virus over years, months, or even weeks should not be eligible no matter how many executive orders the governor pulls out of the magic bag he received as a gift when the dungeon master took the sorceress out of the game.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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I’m more or less with Stephen Green on this question:
I really want to catch the omicron variant, and the sooner the better. …
The best part? That Israeli study showing that a combination of natural immunity plus vaccination is the best protection against some nastier variant.
I already got the shots. Now science is telling me I can add natural immunity without risking my cherished indulgence in food and drink?
We’re built to catch bugs, fight them off, and then mutually adapt with them to coexist. Treating any variant of the virus as if it is as deadly and unknown as the original actively does harm. If it is still the case that Omicron has killed nobody, why are we sweating it?
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When people in government are pushing for new programs, especially programs to extract money from the economy, it’s crucial to remember all the little unforeseen events — inconveniences, errors, and so on. The fact that nothing ever works as perfectly in real life as it does on paper is why voters and taxpayers ought always to have a baseline skepticism.
Truck toll gantries in Rhode Island are supposed to only be charging big trucks, but the NBC 10 I-Team learned that hasn’t always been the case.
Hundreds of people in passenger vehicles have been getting erroneously charged, including Lori Messier of Warwick.
At a minimum, this sort of automatic tolling adds a general need to keep an eye on your statements. It’s another thing. And although the state is trying to track all of these people down pro-actively, the cost of their time skims off the value of the program in the first place.
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The Omicron count has begun in Rhode Island! One:
The case was detected in a woman in her 20s who lives in Providence County. The individual recently returned to Rhode Island from New York and had previously completed their primary vaccination series. She did not receive a booster shot, according to the health department.
Two:
RIDOH said that the second case was not something that was surprising to them, given it’s presence in the region and it’s transmissibility.
No, it’s not surprising at all, and from information coming in from around the world, Omicron brings to life the truth of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s catchy phrase about having “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Running counts spread fear. A constant flow of stories about government mandates and means of preparation signal that the population should be afraid.
Something very similar is happening with threats about school shootings. In November, Coventry High School went into a panic over a snippet of conversation overheard in the hallway. In that case, a student was actually charged with a crime for no reason that’s been adequately explained to the public.
In Woonsocket, a 16-year-old was charged with “disorderly conduct” for an unspecified shooting threat on social media, although the police found “no credibility to the posting.” Melanie DaSilva inadvertently introduces humor in the way she ties the Woonsocket case to a recent story out of Barrington:
Officials have been dealing with a wave of social media shooting threats in recent weeks, including Barrington High School where R.I. State Police and the FBI have joined the investigation.
In Barrington, the message was written on the wall in a girls’ bathroom, which I suppose is an older, more-traditional form of social media — long a source of one-liners, put-downs, threats, and offers of questionable services. The latest incident (though I hesitate to elevate these things to even that level of description) was in Tiverton, which mixed the bathroom threat in a girl’s handwriting with a social media post. The superintendent, Peter Sanchioni, seems to have the proper attitude:
“This is not a credible threat at all,” Sanchioni said. “We’ve analyzed it a million different ways. We know our students. There’s been no treats made directly by anyone in our school system, so we believe (Thursday) will be just like today, another day of education in a very safe educational setting.”
The growing volume of this “nationwide trend,” as the Newport Daily News article calls it, could have less to do with students’ behavior than that of school staff, police, and the news media. Every bit of scrawl on the wall of a school bathroom or comment in the hallway that makes a splash on the statewide or national news makes the “trend” seem like more of a story, even if such things are common and inconsequential.
Featured image by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash.
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