The Valley Breeze is a notable standout in local journalism, with observable quality and dedication. Indeed, the fact that its chief editor, Ethan Shorey, spends hours each week actually delivering the paper has a back-to-our-roots feel that one can’t help but admire and encourage for the paper’s peers.
But zooming out to the whole industry, rather than that one example, the romance shouldn’t obscure big underlying problems. I have in mind these comments from Shorey:
“If we lose local news coverage, we’re doomed,” Shorey said. “People need to realize that having someone in the community, it connects people. It holds government accountable.”
“If we’re not there, nobody’s telling the story,” he added.
I don’t know how many people still buy that image of reporters’ being a connective tissue in the body politic. Yes, the gathering and dissemination of information is an important institution in a community, but it’s become too obvious that journalists pick sides, sometimes in proportion to their involvement with the community.
Shorey is correct to note that if journalists aren’t there, nobody’s telling important stories. For many of us, however, the experience has been that they often let some stories go untold, while amplifying others, for apparently political reasons. It is very easy — even to the point of being subconscious — for them to adjust the degree to which they hold government accountable based on which party or group happens to be in control.
In Tiverton, for example, elected officials are trampling all over the rights guaranteed under our town charter, but the only way anybody will ever know about it is if those of us in the opposition do the work of investigating, explaining, and promoting the facts. That’s partly our responsibility, to be sure, but the contrast with local journalists’ excitement at having someone to hold accountable for nothing when we held a narrow majority of one of the governing bodies is impossible to miss.
I won’t claim to have conducted a study of the matter, but my impression in my neck of the woods is that a sizable portion of the community has simply stopped paying attention to — and contributing to — local media for that reason. The market for local journalism is small enough, as it is, without deciding that a much of your addressable community is simply not worthy of consideration while the other side isn’t deserving of scrutiny.
This atrophy is moving up to the statewide media, too. Every now and then, a news organization may make some noise about increasing its demographic diversity, but that’s an ideological move, not a market-driven one. I’ve seen no evidence that any of the major papers or networks is interested in taking steps to attract and reassure people who don’t share their left-moderate-to-progressive beliefs. There’s no outreach. There’s no dedicated beat or columnists. Nothing.
In fairness, they have reasonable concerns that key players and sources of information in the state might shut them out if they break ranks. But that goes right back to the dubious pretense that journalists are some sort of guardians of the people.
If the suits decide that they can’t take that risk in order to gain access to deplorables’ money (or the advertising their attention could sell), that’s their prerogative, but insisting that “people need to realize” their importance doesn’t address the reason they may be doomed.
Featured image by Roman Kraft on Unsplash.
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If you’re only a casual observer of legislation and/or labor law, you might find news coverage of Rhode Island labor unions’ study on “wage theft” confusing. The study is about misclassification of workers as independent contractors, yet the rhetoric is about “wage theft.”
Are those the same thing? It’s an important question, because the push is to make “wage theft” a felony. Moreover, obscuring the terms does a disservice to business owners and their advocates, because their opposition to the legislation looks like it’s either missing the point or inhumane.
Neither Patrick Anderson, in the Providence Journal, nor Edward Fitzpatrick, in the Boston Globe, addresses the confusion. Worse, Fitzpatrick buys so thoroughly into the union word game as to call misclassification a “type of wage theft.”
Fitzpatrick is not, let’s say, being very accurate. Legislation submitted by Attorney General Peter Neronha last year uses the term, “wage theft,” only in its brief summary, where it explicitly excludes misclassification: “wage theft or misclassification” (emphasis added). In actuality, the more-inflammatory phrase is never defined in the law.
The unions and journalists are, in other words, giving away the next step in their advocacy. The most consequential aspect of Neronha’s bill is arguably that, for the first time, it incorporates the “misclassification” section into the “violations” section (which is where “wage theft” would be, if it were anywhere). Doing so is unnecessary for the purpose of the bill and, honestly, confusing, indicating that either the bill was sloppily drafted or is merely a step in an already planned roll-out.
Absolutely nobody is saying that employers should not be penalized for deliberately withholding pay their employees are due. That is “wage theft.” Job classification is a different matter altogether.
For years, I worked alongside tradesmen who were indistinguishable from the other employees on the crew, but they were independent contractors. For their own reasons, they preferred that arrangement. It can give them more employment flexibility, for one thing, and they can often negotiate for higher hourly pay because they are saving the employer various expenses and costs imposed by government.
That is not “wage theft,” unless we’re considering the government to have a claim on all “wages.” Ahh… maybe we’re getting closer to the spirit of the bill.
Here’s the bottom line: Unions want the labor market to be rigid and uniform so that they can rely on political connections without having to compete for contracts as they sell negotiation services, contract defense services, and government lobbying services to workers. In the private sector, that suite of offerings doesn’t sell well, in part because more-nimble, more-flexible competitors can underbid the union shops to customers.
The legislation that the unions, Neronha, and apparently mainstream journalists support is simply part of an effort to make it more difficult for private-sector companies to continue practices that are working for them, for their customers, and for the men and women who ultimately perform the work. The activism is becoming urgent as it becomes increasingly apparent that the future of work looks a lot more like independent contracting than mass-organized unionization.
In those terms, this is precisely the approach — protecting established special interests — that we’re seeing wreak havoc in healthcare, both with nurse shortages and with hospital-merger controversies. We have to stop falling for the tricks.
Featured image by Scott Blake on Unsplash.
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That’s a detail that I hadn’t seen reported until Dennis Prager mentioned it in a recent column:
“‘We’re uncomfortable in our own locker room.’ Lia Thomas’ UPenn teammate tells how the trans swimmer doesn’t always cover up her male genitals when changing and their concerns go ignored by their coach…
“‘It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,’ one swimmer on the team told Daily Mail … Lia has told her teammates that she dates women.
So, the young women on the team are trapped. Their discomfort being naked around a biological male who is attracted to women doesn’t matter; indeed, it’s a sign that there’s something wrong with them that needs to be reeducated away. The woke culture steals their voice and silences them, making them afraid to speak out lest “potential employers will Google [their] name[s] and see commentary about things [they] said.”
The rest of us should remember one thing: This is not the end. The woke Left must always be finding causes. Once this is tolerated, they’ll move on to the next outrageous cause, the next nakedly obvious refutation of reality, and force us to comply.
Reality will assert itself. How much damage that does to us all depends how complicit we were in the denial.
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Patrick Tyrrell and Anthony Kim summarize a recent study of the effect of enhanced unemployment on the job market:
If common sense and reports from thousands of employers weren’t enough, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper found conclusively that paying people not to work during the COVID-19 pandemic was why many of them remained unemployed.
Well, nothing’s real anymore until some academic conducts a study, at least when Democrats and the mainstream media branch of their party want it not to be real.
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Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha isn’t wrong to be concerned about a lack of competition in healthcare in our state, but our selective acceptance of market forces is going to start killing Rhode Islanders:
Attorney General Peter Neronha on Thursday rejected the proposed merger of Rhode Island’s two largest hospital groups and joined a federal lawsuit to block the deal, in a stunning move that throws the future of the state’s most powerful health care institutions into turmoil. …
The attorney general cited four key factors that drove his decision: the negative effects of a lack of competition on costs, care, and workers; the financial weakness of the merged organization; a lack of specifics from Lifespan and CNE about how they would achieve the stated benefits of the merger; and an inability to mitigate the concerns through regulations or approval conditions.
Neronha argued that if the merger was approved, “nearly all Rhode Islanders would see their health care costs go up, for health care that is lower in quality and harder to access, and Rhode Island’s health care workers would be harmed.”
One gets the sense the appeal to consumers is mostly cover. A large, powerful hospital group would have more leverage against the labor unions, the politicians, and the regulators. Approving the merger would result in a net reduction of insiders’ power, which is the one thing they cannot allow.
That is not to say that the merger is desirable, but observers should consider that the market forces pushing toward consolidation and merger may be sending us a signal about the way the Ocean State manages itself. In December, I suggested that the nurse shortage was merely an early indicator of a deeper problem — a first warning. The puzzle of managing our hospitals is a second.
We shouldn’t accept the attorney general’s assertion about competition unless elected officials are going to go another step, to questions about underlying causes. They are creating the conditions that are making it difficult for healthcare organizations to remain fully staffed. They are creating the conditions under which competition in healthcare cannot emerge naturally.
This observation applies not only in healthcare but across all industries and activities. Over the next decade, we’re likely to see accelerating examples of these crises as the private sector seeks ways to continue to function in our overbearing state and insiders clamp down on threat to their immense power.
Featured image by Adhy Savala on Unsplash.
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Perhaps the key detail to be found in the report and interactive tools that the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC) just released is to be found at the top of its associated infographic. As shown in the featured image of this post, although Rhode Island is the 18th state in the country for per capital government revenue, it is 13th for per capita spending.
In short, spending is not the problem in Rhode Island.
Thus, putting aside some nods toward “equity,” RIPEC’s recommendations are generally related:
- “constrain the growth in total spending”
- “control[] the growth of spending on social services and income maintenance”
- “at least slow the growth of public safety expenditures”
The exceptions, on which RIPEC wants more spending, are “natural resources and parks and recreation”… just because. (One suspects the nature of RIPEC’s core constituency plays a role, here.) The others are higher education and transportation, because Ocean State spending trails the nation in those areas.
Put it all together and the general theme is familiar. Rhode Island imposes an incredible burden on its people, and its people get a poor return on their investment. Activists cannot say that taxing and spending is insufficent. It’s simply not factually true.
Rather, we’re failing because we’re poorly run, and we’re poorly run because special interests own the Democrat Party, and the Democrat Party owns the state. That is why political insiders have to work so hard to find ways to divide and deceive us. (RIPEC’s genuflexion in the direction of “equity” is disappointing for this reason.)
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A government activist’s comment related to a Rhode Island–specific report on climate change brought something to mind:
The planet “is warming, it has been warming. The last two decades have been the warmest in the history of climate records,” Kenneth Kunkel said.
This assertion made me wonder what the update was on the 15-year pause in global warming that Monique wrote about ten years ago. It doesn’t take much searching to find that the charts saw a significant jump shortly after that post, followed by what appears to be another pause, overall.
The ratcheting nature of these changes is odd, and while there may be explanations, they aren’t all in the service of the narrative of doom. Maybe the planet can absorb some of the effect for a while, before some system is overwhelmed. Or perhaps new sensors came onboard, finding more warming. I recall a grassroots investigation, when the blogosphere was ascendant, of the sensors finding that at least some of the recorded increase had to do with changes to the immediate environment of the sensors themselves (nearby pavement, for example).
In any event, causing immediate harm to the people of Rhode Island isn’t going to turn the curve around.
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Tacia MC Truss raises an excellent point, here:
Pro tip… when ever a troll won’t leave your feed alone, know that the rest of the antifa scumbags are tweeting and they want to keep you occupied with distractions. See how this works?
The point can be expanded. If the best use of your time at a given moment is to reply to the lunatic statements of left-wingers on social media, you can be sure there are constructive, cooperative things you’re not doing to advance your own cause.
I absolutely sympathize with those who cannot resist a retort when somebody like far-left Rhode Island Senator Tiara Mack issues yet another obviously flawed proclamation on Twitter. As she keeps issuing them day after day, however, in the face of constant opposition, we have to realize that she’s getting something out of it, whether pointing to the opposition’s heat to motivate her allies or keeping us watching her game, not our own.
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Policy decisions can obviously increase or decrease the amount of poverty in a society. Socialism, for example, is absolutely devastating and has repeatedly proven to result in misery and starvation. That said, the following pair of tweets from Atlantic writer Clint Smith gets reality precisely backwards, and in a way that is important for everybody to understand:
Many people continue to understand poverty as a failure of individual people rather than a failure of a society to care for those with the least resources. People are not poor because they deserve to be. No one deserves poverty. Those experiencing it deserve empathy, not vitriol.
Poverty is a policy choice. It is the result of a history of policy decisions made over the course of centuries that have extracted resources from some communities and placed them in others. We know how upward mobility has been facilitated for some, and has been kept from others.
A relatively minor critique would be that Smith should be a little more circumspect in his language. Poverty can be a failure of individual people, but it does not have to be. Sure, you can always find some “ism” or system to blame no matter how gratuitously a person refuses to do things that would keep him or her out of poverty, but at some point, for some people, it’s reasonable to assign individual blame.
But the big inversion is Smith’s entire implied theory. He imagines, it seems, an idyllic past in which poverty did not exist that has since been corrupted by selfishness and greed. Unless he means that families struggling to survive each day did not perceive themselves as poor because it appeared to be the natural state of humanity, Smith’s vision is an ahistorical fantasy.
Economics is not a zero-sum game.
You alone in the world will struggle to survive. A few of us working together and diversifying our activity will grow our little economy and generate freedom and security, increasing in proportion to the number of us who can manage to cooperate. Insisting on communal property has been tried, and human nature ensures that some participants will always take advantage of it, leading others to devalue the cooperation and reduce their own labor.
Similarly, when independent communities (e.g., tribes) begin to interact, human nature ensures that some will find it easier to “diversify” into the role of taking by force what others have produced by labor. People who think like Clint Smith may believe they’re defending the peaceful villagers, but they’re actually becoming the interlopers. They aren’t (usually) raiding neighboring communities with violence, but they are weaponizing false narratives on the political battlefield in order to pillage, and their behavior will have the same result as the free-riders in a closed community.
Poverty, as we think of it now, is the natural state of humanity, which society can alleviate — and nearly eliminate — in direct proportion to its degree of cooperation. Founding activism on an economic theory of oppressors and victims, with the former “extracting resources” from the latter, is poison to cooperation. It is, therefore, a policy choice to generate more poverty.
Featured image by Adriaen van de Venne on PubHist.
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You know you’re dealing with greedy special interests most concerned with maintaining their own position when you read something like this, emphasis added:
The plan has the support of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, the Rhode Island School Superintendents’ Association, the National Education Association Rhode Island and the Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership at Bryant University.
The plan calls for attaining universal pre-kindergarten in five years, and supports Gov. Dan McKee’s $300 million bond proposal for school construction. It would also prevent districts from losing per-pupil state aid due to pandemic-related declining enrollments, also included in the governor’s budget.
Before and during the pandemic, local districts tolerated and even encouraged harmful policies that have caused long-lasting harm to the lives of tens of thousands of Rhode Island children, and now they want to force taxpayers to backfill the slender crack by which accountability can still affect the system: the loss of funding that goes along with driving families away from your failing schools.
Nobody who signs on to this plan can possibly be putting students first. (Who’s funding Bryant’s Hassenfeld Institute, anyway?) They aren’t even putting public education, as an abstraction, first. It’s all about the money.
Everything in “the plan” is about money. The most clever piece (although its cleverness is minimal) is the idea of making education “an enforceable right” in the state’s constitution, but that’s nothing more than a mechanism to ensure that these same special interests can block parents and other voters no matter what they manage to accomplish through democratic means.
The insider “experts” will just tell judges (appointed by the special interests’ boughten politicians) that reforms will harm the “right to education.” In fact, they’ll say, the only way to improve things is more money for special interests.
At what point do people begin to catch on? Or rather, at what point do enough people catch on at the same time that they don’t come to the obvious conclusion that the only solution is to get out of public schools and probably the entire state?
Featured image by Clayton Ewerton on Unsplash.
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