On March 11^th, an 8.9 magnitude devastated northeastern Japan, but the true impact of the damage may take months to realize.  The quake was the 5^th largest in recorded history, and was so powerful, that it shifted the Earth 4 inches on its axis.  The quake also triggered a tsunami, which crossed the entire Pacific to cause damage even in California, resulting in 1 American death here.  Even ignoring the many aftershocks, which have reached as high as 6.7 on the Richter scale, the enormity of this quake’s destructive power cannot be under-stated.

It is estimated that over 18,000 people have lost their lives.  Most of the deaths seem to be the result of drowning, as people were washed out to see by the powerful tsunamis that overran low lying villages and towns.  Many communities are still scrambling to find the missing; with some town’s reporting more than 10,000 people missing.  Japan is a nation that is no stranger to earthquakes, and as such has strict building code regulations and early warning systems to protect the people, but a disaster on this scale will put to ruin even the best laid out planning. 

If all of this weren’t enough, the quake has threatened the safety of several nuclear power facilities.  As a result of the quake, the nuclear power plants loss electric power needed to operate the cooling systems to control the reactor’s temperature.  Back-up systems were also damaged, and Japanese officials are currently in a race against the clock to prevent full-scale meltdowns, which would be an environmental disaster unlike any seen since the Chernobyl nuclear incident in 1986. 

America has pledged to help support Japan during this crisis, and already sent rescue workers and nuclear experts.  In regards to the pending nuclear problem, officials said they were beginning to get a clearer picture of what went wrong, and as one senior official put it, “under the best scenarios, this isn’t going to end anytime soon.”  The reactor operators have had to resort to using sea water to cool the reactors, and then forced to release radioactive steam into the atmosphere as part of an emergency cool down procedure.  Even if this procedure is successful, it will take more than 1 year of such cooling and steam releases to bring the situation back under control.  The alternative, however, is unimaginable, as a full meltdown of even one of the many affected reactors would release so much radioactive fallout, that it would likely circle the globe.  

So with so much going wrong in Japan right now, the world looks on and hopes for a lucky break, and hopes that this path of destruction will soon end.

For More Reading: 

Crises in Japan Ripple Across the Global Economy

Japan Finds Tainted Food Up to 90 Miles From Nuclear Sites

NY Times: Radioactive Releases at Fukushima Could Last Months

This post was researched and written by our news blog writer and pro bono attorney, James Ryan McNelis, J.D., M.P.A.

In 1848, the “Year of Revolution” began as unrest in France which toppled the royal government and created the Second French Republic.  This caused a cascading domino effect that stirred up revolutions, protests, and reforms across Europe as almost a dozen nations followed suit.  

In just the past month, we have seen protests in Tunisa and Egypt force the ouster of sitting Presidents.  The protests have engulfed the entire Mideast into a series of political and civil unrest, facilitated largely by electronic media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.  These protests are causing the existing governments to either fall or institute massive reforms with the hope that the people can be satisfied with such changes and accept the continuance of their leadership.  

The latest nation to experience these protests is Libya.  Libya has been under Muammar al-Gaddafi since 1969.  Gaddafi has tried to fight back against the protesters, even ordering his air force bomb protest rallies and large gatherings of rioting citizens.  Meanwhile, the government seems to be losing the battle to stay in power as their UN delegation has denounced Gaddafi as a war criminal and demanded that he resign his position.  

If this tide of change topples the Libyan government, it will further encourage protesting civilians in nations like Syria, Iran, and maybe even China to want more democratic forms of governance and a more profound respect for human rights.  One can already envision the “Tweets” and “Facebook Updates” asking other citizens, “If they can do it, why not us?”  

So, in closing, it appears as though the spirit of 1848 is alive and well, and bound to cement 2011 as the most revolutionary year in world history since 1848.   I suspect this historic development is being made possible because many of the world’s oppressed citizens are truly pondering the meaning of Robert F. Kennedy’s words, that “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why?  I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

For More Reading: 

Gaddafi Lashes Out As Power Slips Away

Arab World Protests Have Domino Effect

Age of the Sage: Revolutions of 1848

Economist: Libya Overview

On February 23^rd, the Providence School System issued 1,926 dismissal notices to every teacher within the school system due to concern of a looming budget crisis.  “This is beyond insane,” Steven Smith, the Providence Teacher’s Union President said in a response comparing this dismissal move to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

Providence Mayor Angel Taveras’ office says the notices were issued to comply with a legally mandated March 1 deadline for notifying teachers of changes to their employment.  Because the deadline is one month before the city’s budget is due, the move gives the district the flexibility to cut as many teachers as necessary.

The drama of wholesale teacher firings is not entirely new to the state. Last February, Rhode Island’s Central Falls School District announced that it was firing all 93 teachers and administrators at the underperforming Central Falls High School at the end of the school year as part of a school turnaround plan.  In May, after months of negotiations, the entire staff was rehired.

For More Reading: 

Providence Plans to Pink Slip All Teachers 

Central Falls Teaching Staff Fired

Central Falls Teaching Staff Rehired

Lost in last week’s wall-to-wall Cairo coverage was the beginning of a public policy debate that will impact our state and community. At the heart of this debate is how much federal money will come to the states and cities to support a variety of vital community programs.

A couple of weeks ago, Representative Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a 15 percent reduction in “non-security” federal funding. What constitutes non-security federal funding? Non-security funding includes, but is not limited to, K-12 education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Centers for Disease Control, food safety inspections, and a number of programs that serve low-income children, seniors and people with disabilities.

I suppose we should be grateful for Congressman Ryan’s restraint. A recent proposal released by the House Republican Study Committee advocated the reduction and freeze of such funding at 2006 levels. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), by 2021, funding for these programs would be reduced 42 percent below what is needed merely to keep these programs operational.

Such a proposal would not only decimate programs vital to the health and safety of our most vulnerable citizens, but by removing substantial purchasing power from an already weak economy, it would almost guarantee a double-dip recession.

During last year’s election, many candidates demagogued the issue of the economy and the budget deficit as a way to win votes. It worked and the republicans took control of the House of Representatives. Shortly after the election, during the so-called “lame duck” Congress, the Bush tax cuts were extended with bi-partisan support. This happened in spite of the CBO’s projections that only 3 percent of those receiving any business income would receive any real tax relief, that over $1 trillion would be added to the overall deficit, and that an extension of the tax cuts would increase the national debt to 95 percent of our Gross Domestic Product. The CBO projected that if the Congress failed to extend the tax cuts, the debt would increase “only” by 79 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.

Let’s be clear about what the past decade’s economic policies have wrought. The gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of Americans more than tripled between 1979 and 2007, according to Congressional Budget Office data. In fact, while the incomes of median families rose by 13 percent during the years of 2002-2007, the incomes of just the 400 wealthiest Americans multiplied by five times.

And thanks to recent proposed and enacted tax and spending policies, the rich will just get richer while the rest of us will fall behind. And none will fall further behind than our most vulnerable citizens.

Last year, the demagogue’s big issue was “earmarks.” Eliminate earmarks, they argued, and we’d go a long way toward eliminating waste and bloat in our federal government. If you’re not clear what they meant by earmarks, they often used another term - “pork.” By framing the argument as they did, they implied that earmarks were added spending that only increased the budget deficit.

Thus the demagoguery.

A brief, and apologetically simplistic, primer on earmarks: During the budget process, the Congress sets specific funding authorization levels for each budget item. Once the authorization is set, the Congress goes about determining how much money will actually be appropriated per item.

So let’s say Congress authorizes $1 billion for health clinics. Now let’s suppose as the Congressperson from Rhode Island, I obtain $50 million to fund health clinics in Rhode Island’s core cities. These clinics would focus on providing preventative care to the poor and aged. By so doing, the instances that these patients would need to access more expensive emergency room services and be hospitalized would be reduced. This $50 million would enhance the quality of life and reduce health care costs.

By earmarking that $50 million, I did not add one penny to the public debt. I focused this money on health care for discreet populations. And in so doing, this expenditure hopefully reduced costs and thereby saved money in the future.

No bridge to nowhere is this earmark. But that wasn’t what the demagogue wanted the voters to see. Nobody wants to fund the bridge to nowhere or the state-of-the-art library used by only 80 people. But by focusing on these types of expenditures, these demagogues ensured the diversion of the voters’ attention to worthless programs and away from worthwhile programs.

By lumping all earmarks under one aspersion, once elected they were free to eliminate them all, both the good and the bad.

Now they’re on to budget deficit/tax reductions. We saw democrats and republicans virtually trip over themselves last December to extend the Bush tax cuts. What this has effectively done was to balance the federal budget on the backs of poor people and those on fixed incomes.

The decisions in Washington permeate down to the states and through the states, to the cities and towns. With the State of Rhode Island facing a possible $290 million shortfall for the next fiscal year, with Recovery Act money all but drying up in 2012, and with the aforementioned proposed non-security spending reductions, policies and programs that we took for granted will either be so gutted as to be unrecognizable, or cease to exist.

I could go on about why this is so but you’ll have to wait until I write my book. The current working title is “The Lobbying firm of Dewey, Screwem & Howe, and the quest for the Public’s Gold.” Or perhaps, “PACman feasting at the expense of public programs.” Either way I’m sure it’ll be a bestseller.

But for now, we face more basic issues. What are our priorities? Where should we invest our public money? What is our strategy for investing our public funds? And should we prevent the select few from getting so much in order that a much larger group can get a little more? And should we rebalance our economy so that no one group disproportionately benefits at the expense of our middle class and those vulnerable in our society?

Add to those issues the question of how we reach out to help those who need a little boost. The point is we need to decide who we are as a society. What do we stand for? Do we stand for a society and culture that rewards the bluster and swagger of the rich and their agents, or do we recognize that often, by helping those less fortunate to take their place in society, we are also helping ourselves and our kids in the long run?

The coming debate is not so much about dollars as it is about priorities. We, all of us, must participate in that debate. We must inform ourselves about the issues, identify the empty promises, ask the tough questions, and make a real effort to come to consensus as to who we are and what we want to be.

It’s been decades since we’ve had a real serious discussion about what Aristotle would call “civic virtue.” Simply, it is a discussion about what it means to be a good citizen looking out for the good of the community.

I think about civic virtue while watching the demonstrations in Cairo. Thousands of people, at the risk to their lives and safety, stand to demand that their government be more open and responsive to the needs of all people. They do so not because they hate the government, but rather because they love their country.

We all should aspire to that same level of civic virtue.

This article was originally published in Geoff Schoos’ column, A Different Drummer, which can be found in the Cranston Herald.

On February 14^th, President Obama unveiled his proposed budget for 2012.  The $3.7 trillion budget focuses on investments in education, energy, and research; but also makes more than $1.1 trillion in deficit spending cuts over the next 10 years.  Among these cuts were reductions in Federal funding for low-income energy assistance, Pell grants, airport grants, clean water initiatives, and a reduction in military spending programs.  The bulk of Mr. Obama’s budget savings comes, however, from a 5 year freeze on discretionary spending, and his budget also provides for the elimination of the “Bush tax cuts” to the wealthiest of Americans.

Congressional Republican leaders responded unenthusiastically, calling the budget a job killing bill.  The Congressional GOP has sought to cut Federal spending by $100 billion in 2011 alone, but has been unable to find any consensus, even within their own party, on how to do so.  The GOP does, however, stand united in opposing any elimination of the tax cuts, and generally opposes any reductions in military spending. 

The current fiscal budget year has been operating without an agreed upon budget since last October, and this budget plan would likely not be passed as law until this September.  However, with record federal deficits, and a weakened economy, the battle over the budget, and which cuts and tax policies are to be pursued, is just heating up in time for the coming summer.

For More Reading: 

President Obama Budget Overview

Washington Post: Obama’s Proposed Budget

Since last year’s passage of the Health Care Reform law, Rhode Island business leaders have banded together to ask State officials to act quickly in the formation of the health insurance exchanges.  Federal law requires that every State form such exchanges by 2014, but business leaders have stated, “we can’t wait that long.”

The health insurance exchanges will allow the uninsured in Rhode Island, those who buy individual health insurance plans, and also small businesses to shop for health insurance plans on a State-wide affordable marketplace system.  By combining health insurance consumers from these 3 groups into 1 large purchasing pool, the costs of the insurance plans will be reduced due to the increased competition.

The local business leader’s calls have not fallen on deaf ears, as Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed and Republican Senate Minority leader Dennis L. Algiere have co-sponsored a bill to establish a quasi-public agency to administer such an exchange.  If passed into law, Rhode Island could be amongst the first States in the nation to create such an exchange, and be entitled to Federal subsidies to make health insurance more affordable within Rhode Island.

For More Reading: 

Business Leaders Seek Health Insurance Exchanges

Rhode Island to take 1^st Step to Create a Health Insurance Exchange

On Tuesday night, January 19^th, all 242 Republican Congressmen and 3 Democrats voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as the Health Care Reform Law, which was a centerpiece of Obama’s 2008 campaign, and signed into law last March.  The repeal effort, however, seems doomed as the Republicans will still need to force a successful vote in the Senate, and then find enough votes to over-ride an all-but-certain veto by President Obama. 

Many aspects of the bill have been debated for the past 2 years, and Democrats seem skeptical that the GOP is serious about any measure of health care reform as the GOP failed to produce a single reform bill in the 12 years they were in power from 1995 until 2007, six of which they had a Republican President to work with. 

So, in interests of furthering public debate, the following are the impacts the current law will have on you and your family:

• It bans annual and lifetime caps on coverage, thus giving families the freedom from worrying about losing their insurance unexpectedly if someone is in an accident or becomes sick.
• It prohibits premium increases by double digit percentages without a means of recourse.
• It prohibits insurance companies from discriminating or denying women health insurance merely because they are pregnant, and also prohibits insurance companies from refusing to provide coverage to children who are born with disabilities.
• It provides parents the choice of providing health coverage for a child after they finish school.
• It provides people the freedom to change jobs without worrying about losing one’s health insurance, or to even retire a little earlier without having to worry about losing one’s coverage.
• It expands coverage to seniors for preventative care.
• It gives small business owners the power of competing with large employers by providing small business tax credits to make employees’ health coverage more affordable.
• It increases the consumer’s purchasing power through competitive private health insurance exchanges, which will be created in 2014.
• It frees our children from the threat of out-of-control government debt and deficits by holding government accountable for its health care spending, saving $230 Billion in the next 10 years. Many of the savings come from decreasing the cost burden on taxpayers of the emergency care given to the uninsured, which is currently $60 billion a year.

Critics of the bill claim that the government cannot constitutionally mandate that people buy insurance from a private service provider.  They also dispute the cost savings.  So now the debate moves to the Senate, and Mainstreet USA.

For More Reading:

House Votes to Repeal Health Care Law  

Health Care Law Benefits

On Tuesday, January 4th, Lincoln Chafee was sworn in as Rhode Island’s 58th Governor, once again assuming an office that his father had previously held.  In his inaugural address, Governor Chafee pledged that he would rescind Governor Carcieri’s controversial executive order that implemented the E-Verify system in Rhode Island government.  Governor Chafee fulfilled this promise by issuing the order on the second day of his administration.

E-verify is an electronic registration database that requires employers to verify the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens.  Governor Chafee opposes the use of this system, stating, “however, well intentioned it may have been, it has caused needless anxiety within our Latino community without demonstrating any progress on illegal immigration…”  Governor Chafee believes resolving the problems of illegal immigration must be done at the Federal level.

Governor Chafee also called upon the General Assembly to work together to solve the State’s problems, and also to pass a bill allowing gay marriage.  In the speech he spoke passionately, stating that, “Rhode Island today must be as welcoming to all as Roger Williams intended it to be. Mark my words, these two actions will do more for economic growth in our state than any economic development loan.  Because good business is about treating people right, just as good government is.”

After the inauguration, Governor Chafee issued his 1st executive order, which binds all public servants to high ethical standards and professional principles.  He has also changed the management style of government by forbidding State workers to speak on talk radio as guests, while they are working.  This is a significant change from Governor Carcieri, who embraced talk radio as a major outlet for media exposure.

Governor Chafee faces a large budget deficit and a sluggish economic outlook as major hurdles in governing the State, and will need to work with the General Assembly to secure support for his appointments and policy initiatives. 

Chafee’s 1st Executive Order        Chafee Addresses General Assembly