The Rhode Island Saga, Post 4
Watching their comfortable surroundings erode and darken, the heroes of the Rhode Island Saga head out in search of answers and to see whether they can do something with their unique, but undefined, gifts to turn the trends around. To them, restoring the balance of cooperation and individual liberty is the obvious solution. Maybe all that’s needed is for people to be engaged in conversation and reminded of the hope and magic that permeates the kingdom.
So, they arrive at the Marketplace. They’ve been there many times with the kindly couple who raised them, but in the past it always seemed like a friendly, bustling place of adults doing grown-up things. Now the heroes can’t shake the feeling that people are behaving as if controlled by invisible forces.
In business analysis, which I’ve adapted from Michael Porter’s Five Forces analysis, the challenge at this stage is to determine what leverage various groups have with the business. In a market with a wealthy client base that has abundant options, customers will have a great deal of leverage, for example, and the business must plan around it. Similarly, if the product relies on resources that few suppliers can procure, then those suppliers will have the leverage.
Naturally, the first step in such analyses is identifying whom to include in each group, and that stage will be a little more challenging, here, because we’re translating business categories into socio-political categories. Customers are relatively straightforward to translate, as the people the heroes need to persuade — in a word, voters. Competitors are also easy to identify, as the parties and political movements opposed to the heroes’ program.
But who counts as suppliers for a movement? Who are the non-competitors, who offer alternative products? Who are the entrepreneurs who might enter the market with new variations of the service? And then how much of a challenge will each category present to the heroes?
These are big, challenging questions, so we’ll have to take them up in individual posts.
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Namely, he uses the methods of the Left, and the Left hates him for it. Read CBS News’s explainer on the issue at hand:
Presidents do have sweeping authority to declassify records, but there is a process that is normally followed.
Generally, a president’s instructions to declassify documents are first written down in a memo, typically drafted by White House lawyers, which the president would then sign. Relevant agencies are usually then consulted and when a final decision is made, the document would be marked, with its old classification level crossed out, and stamped, “Declassified on X date” by the agency in question.
“Generally,” there is a process “that is normally followed,” but legions of hostile journalists and talking-head lawyers cannot point to documentation of that rule. (Presumably it exists even if they think it does!)
Should Trump have followed the traditional process? Certainly, but progressives do this sort of thing all the time: When it is convenient, they throw away the process that everybody had previously agreed existed in order to do what they want.
As much as I’d prefer adherence to expectations, the overarching principle that the rules have to apply equally is true on the higher plane, as well.
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“Permanently enjoined” – in a methodical, 90+ page ruling, federal district court Judge William Smith has turned thumbs down on Rhode Island’s truck-only tolls, noting that they are discriminatory, that they do not “fairly approximate use of the facilities” and that they violate the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.
Click here for an excellent description by Coalition Radio’s Pat Ford of the legal arguments of the case when it finally hit the courtroom in May.
It’s important also for us to to remember the travel of the “arguments” for the necessity of tolls themselves: they’ve gone from from DANGER! DANGER! BRIDGES ARE GOING TO FALL DOWN IF WE DON’T TOLL TRUCKS! when they were proposed seven years ago to “I like surpluses” earlier this year [Governor Dan McKee responding to Pat Ford’s spot on question about whether truck tolls should end in view of all of the infrastructure money that Rhode Island is sloshing in] with a stop to do unnecessary major repairs on at least one high traffic/high toll volume bridge along the way. Umm, really? If the condition of Rhode Island’s bridges in 2016 was such a hazard to the motoring public, why haven’t we been repairing bridges from worst to first? Why are we undertaking MAJOR REPAIR JOBS on BRIDGES THAT DON’T NEED IT?
Now Rhode Island is “permanently enjoined” from tolling only trucks. There has already been some hand-wringing about “how will we replace that revenue??”, leading to speculation that tolls could be expanded to all vehicles.
Couple of things. First of all, RIDOT Director Peter Alviti has repeatedly downplayed the significance of truck toll revenue, noting either that it is only 10% of RIDOT’s budget and/or only 10% of the Rhodeworks program. Excellent. So it won’t be a hardship for RIDOT to do its job without it.
Secondly and far more importantly, Rhode Island’s per lane mile spending on state-owned roads was sixth highest (page 34) BEFORE the revenue from truck tolls or the tsunami of fed infrastructure money.
Sixth highest per mile spending and Rhode Island had – say it with me now – “some of the worst roads and bridges in the country”.
Fast forward three years and many tens of million dollars in truck toll revenue and the situation has actually worsened: as of January of this year, Rhode Island has the second worst highways in America and, as of February of this year, Rhode Island had the third worst bridges.
It’s like there’s an inverse relationship between how much money Rhode Island spends on its infrastructure and the quality of it. The more we pay for infrastructure, the worse it gets.
The numbers don’t lie. Rhode Island’s bad infrastructure is not due to a lack of revenue. So it decidedly will not be solved by the addition, resumption or [edited] expansion of any revenue source.
[Featured image by DEX Studios.]
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Monique has been a contributor to Anchor Rising for over ten years, was volunteer spokesperson for the citizens advocacy anti-toll group StopTollsRI.com for three+ years and began working for the Rhode Island Trucking Association as a staff member in September of 2017.
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… is how true believers come to the conclusion that the way to advocate for the environment is to cause an event that leads to thousands of people sitting in idling cars.
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Social media is pretty humorous, today. After the Cranston library’s lawyers prevented it from cancelling the Independent Women’s Forum event last night (although it appears to have decided never to rent out rooms to any outside groups again) and police prevented disruption, the progressives are congratulating themselves on not censoring or disrupting the event. By their own spin, they can never lose.
Is anybody falling for it besides them?
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If people have to bring in the police to protect themselves from you as you advocate to deprive them of their Constitutional rights, maybe they aren’t the hateful ones.
(These progressives will not only applaud persecution of people with whom they disagree; they’ll feel self-righteous while doing it.)
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee and Foulkes
- McKee and Kalus
- Kalus and DeSantis
- Martha’s Vineyard and immigration
- The media and the Democrats
- Progressives and the election
Featured image by Setyaki Irham on Unsplash.
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The links are profuse and not worth culling, but on social media, progressive fascists are agitating to disrupt and have cancelled an event the Independent Women’s Forum is presenting at the Cranston Public Library tonight. The library released a statement that states the legal facts, but perhaps with a bit too much hesitance for the point to be clear:
The Cranston Public Library has a longstanding practice of allowing private groups to book and use library meeting spaces. According to the American Library Association, “publicly funded libraries are not obligated to provide meeting room space to the public. If libraries choose to do so, such spaces are considered designated public forums, and legal precedent holds that libraries may not exclude any group based on the subject matter to be discussed or the ideas for which the group advocates.”
To put a finer point on it, use of a public space is a civil right recognized under the United States Constitution.
What we’re seeing is an important reminder that woke progressives do not value civil rights. If you disagree with them, you have no rights. In short, they are the fascists we’ve been warned about.
Their claim of “tolerance” is vanishingly thin, because they insist that it does not apply when it comes to any matter on which they declare tolerance intolerable. As they take a controlling hand in government, we can be absolutely sure that they will persecute, imprison, and destroy anybody who disagrees with them to prominently.
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In American folk legend, blues musicians could stroll out on a country road and meet the devil at the crossroads, where they could trade their souls for musical mastery and all the rewards that come with it.
Going back to Christopher Marlowe’s play, The Death of Doctor Faustus, and probably before, the primary moral lesson of such tales is that the bill always comes due. Someday, you’ll be watching that last perk of success move away dissipate in the fog, and all that remains will be the obligation of paying for it for the rest of eternity.
Naturally, these stories lose much of their power as people increasingly deny that their immortal souls exist. No bill comes due if you’re only deteriorating matter when all is said and done. The light goes out either way, and darkness is darkness. There is, however, another cost to the devil’s bargain, and Rhode Island’s governor, Dan McKee, put it on full display on election night:
#ICYMI: An interesting moment as Democratic challenger Helena Foulkes tried to call Gov. Dan McKee during his speech to supporters.https://t.co/0MI0vMynyF pic.twitter.com/7VWrMa9RNN
— WPRI 12 (@wpri12) September 14, 2022
When one of his opponents in the primary — Helena Foulkes, a highly accomplished woman — called to concede just as McKee began speaking into the microphone to declare victory, McKee shot an annoyed look at his staffer — Eva Mancuso, herself an accomplished woman — and waved her away, saying, “hang up on them.”
The moment was incredibly telling. It should have been an easy win for him: take the call, graciously accept the concession and compliment the opponent on a race well run, hang up, and explain to your audience that Democrats can, should, and must come together to achieve their goals. Instead, he belittled his opponent and his staffer, both, and in the emotional moment showed his true character.
Why would he do that? My interpretation is that he felt like this was his moment, and here was this troublesome lady, who’d had the gall to compete with him and bring up unflattering facts as part of the campaign, trying to edge in on his spotlight.
The thing is: It wasn’t his moment. It was the devil’s moment. The success was not his own. The critical factor for his victory was selling his soul (and giving away taxpayer money) to special interests, most notably Rhode Island’s extremely powerful labor unions.
The other striking image of election day was McKee standing with Patrick Crowley — arguably the most vicious radical union activist in the state for the past twenty years — who was holding a McKee sign outside of a polling place.
.@GovDanMcKee is out here in Rumford with supporters, including @PatCrowley401 and @Steph_DeSilva and @mayorbobdasilva. He says he wants to keep RI’s momentum going pic.twitter.com/n45d3cUyPM
— Brian Amaral (@bamaral44) September 13, 2022
Until very recently, McKee was a target of the likes of Crowley based on his introduction of mayoral academy charter schools when he was mayor of Cumberland. The unions, especially Crowley’s National Education Association, despised that move. But that was before McKee went out to the crossroads.
As if the divine power wishes to put a fine point on this observation, Foulkes appears to have won the election-day vote. With a single precinct left to report (in Providence, where third-place Nellie Gorbea has the lead), 26,605 people went out to the polls to vote for Foulkes, but only 26,403 did so for McKee. Without the blessing of the labor unions and the get-out-the-vote and ballot harvesting benefits that come with it, McKee wouldn’t have won.
He’d be the guy who barely edged out a radical kid with no experience or qualifications in the race for lieutenant governor and then became governor only because his predecessor left the job to go national. From his perspective, that moment on primary night was huge validation for him… except it wasn’t. Getting into a position where your soul is valuable enough to sell is not a success.
Rhode Islanders should expect McKee to get worse, not better, as he moves into the general election (against another accomplished woman, Ashley Kalus) and, if Rhode Island is unfortunate, back into a governor’s office that he will then think he deserves.
Featured image from WPRI video on Twitter.
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Remember when nobody cared that the Biden administration was dropping off illegal immigrants across the country in the middle of the night, including in Rhode Island?
You don’t have to look very hard to see that the Democrats and mainstream media are playing you.
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