September 30, 2008
From the gov's office:
Today at the netWORKri One-Stop Career Center in West Warwick, Governor Donald L. Carcieri announced the Industry Skills Development Initiative, a $3.3 million collaboration among public agencies and private industry designed to raise the skill levels of Rhode Island workers in strategically
selected, high-growth industries.
The initiative, funded by the Governor's Workforce Board Rhode Island, targets the Information Technology, Hospitality, Construction and Marine Trades industries through a multi-prong strategy:
* to improve the skills of the current workforce and to grow the availability of skill-specific training
* to improve industry outreach to current jobseekers
* to engage the next generation of workers in industry-related learning
opportunities
* to build awareness of industry-specific career opportunities and career
ladders among the general public.
The local workforce investment boards-the Workforce Partnership of Greater Rhode Island and Workforce Solutions of Providence/Cranston-have contracted with four industry partners to enact this multi-prong strategy on a statewide level. The four partners-the Rhode Island Hospitality Association Education Foundation, Building Futures/Providence Plan, the Rhode Island Marine Trades Association and Tech Collective-are among eight preexisting industry partners that have been collaborating with the Governor's Workforce Board for the past two years to identify workforce skill gaps.
"There is a critical need to address the skills gaps with Rhode Island workers," said Governor Donald L. Carcieri. "This initiative is a step in the right direction, and I commend the Governor's Workforce Board for aggressively addressing the skills mismatch and getting people into good paying jobs. I also commend the industry partnerships for actively participating in the solution. We cannot solve the problem of skills in Rhode Island without the help and support of business."
September 30, 2008
State Senator Josh Miller is rasing concerns about the wind farm project announced by Governor Carcieri last week.
“While the General Assembly has fully supported developing renewable energy projects in Rhode Island, I am concerned that Governor Carcieri has unilaterally moved Deepwater Wind to the front of the line when major questions remain about their experience and background. I am troubled by the lack of disclosure from Deepwater Wind’s CEO about his financial relationship with First Wind,” stated Senator Miller.
“Furthermore,” he added, “I am uncertain who will actually purchase the power produced by this project and I am worried that either no project will get built, or that ratepayers or taxpayers might get left footing the bill because of an undefined revenue structure.”
Since the Governor’s announcement of the State’s intent to partner with Deepwater Wind, concerns have been raised about the company and its ties. First Wind, located in Newton, Massachusetts, is one of the principal financial backers of Deepwater Wind. First Wind changed its name from UPC in May of 2008. ....
Senator Miller issued a letter today to Governor Carcieri requesting specific and detailed information related to Deepwater’s relationship with First Wind.
The letter asks the Governor to respond to the following questions:
1. Under what unilateral authority is he granting exclusive ocean development rights to this firm?
2. Since the state does not operate an energy distribution service, how can the Governor’s office claim that the state will “purchase” the power produced? Is the state of Rhode Island getting into the competitive power business? If so, under what authority?
3. Does the Governor’s office believe the Deepwater Wind project can sell power in Rhode Island without approval of the Public Utilities Commission?
4. With the veto of the 2008 Rhode Island Long Term Renewable Energy Contracting Act, what is the means to guarantee the involvement of a distribution company to actual receive and transmit the energy that is produced?
5. Does the Governor’s office believe the Deepwater Wind project will gain approval from the Public Utilities Commission to sell power to National Grid without first winning a competitive bidding process? If yes, is the administration proposing to circumvent the consumer and competition safeguards embedded in Rhode Island’s General Laws and regulations? If no, what happens if Deepwater Wind does not gain approval from the Public Utilities Commission to sell power to National Grid?
September 30, 2008
While the Providence Journal routinely reports on layoffs at other companies, it has yet to report on its own forthcoming axing of 30 news employees, which is due to take effect October 10.
These economic layoffs are thought to be the first in the paper's lengthy history. As a result, the ProJo's "In Her Shoes" women's initiative is said to be on hold, and there is talk -- unconfirmed at this point -- that the paper may close its remaining bureaus in Rhode Island.
Three full-time reporters are being let go:
-- Cranston reporter David Scharfenberg (who happens to be the son of the late Kirk Scharfenberg, a much-respected editor at the Boston Globe).
-- Brandie Jefferson, who is currently detailed to projo.com.
-- East Bay reporter Meaghan Wims (who happens to have once been an intern here at the Phoenix).
The ProJo was going to cut another reporter, but her job was saved when bigfoot baseball writer Sean McAdam decided to decamp for the Boston Herald.
At least two management employees are losing their jobs: section editors Karen Maguire of the North edition and Jean Plunkett of the West Bay.
Twenty-five part-time news employees are also being laid off, including such individuals as Linda Henderson, the ProJo's librarian, and Laura Meade Kirk, who has been with the Journal for more than 20 years.
I placed calls to each of the people mentioned in this post who are being laid off; they either declined comment or didn't return a telephone message.
September 30, 2008
One wonders how the fiscal crisis will hurt small businesses in Rhode Island. The cause seems unrelated in this instance, though, and the BDH has the story of how the venerable sex shop is history.
A locked door, a dark, almost bare interior and a large sign reading "Space for Lease" in red letters. Today, that's all that greets visitors and customers to what was once Wickenden Street's popular sex store, Miko Exoticwear.
The shop closed this July after a "mismanagement" of funds by the store's manager - who had quit shortly before then - made it impossible for the business to remain open, owner Jeff Gellman told The Herald.
Gellman said that some bills that he thought had been paid had, in fact, not been paid - what he called a "side-effect" of mishandling and not a cause.
"You delegate someone to run the company and they're not paying the bills," he said. "It was mismanaged."
Gellman first started Miko in 1993 on North Main Street, selling lingerie, sex toys, gifts, books, videos and accessories. Last year he decided to move the store to 268 Wickenden St. - a location with a better layout and greater proximity to Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. College Hill students made up almost 30 percent of the store's customers, The Herald reported in March 2007.
Apart from being a store, Miko also included a resource center where classes and workshops were held to promote healthy sexuality.
September 30, 2008
The estimable Fund for Community Progress has a benefit set for Thursday in which former ProJo political columnist M. Charles Bakst will be roasted.
This year’s roast is Thursday, October 2, at OUR NEW LOCATION:
The Radisson Airport Hotel, Warwick, RI.
The roast theme is: Salute to the Independent Man
Join us as in honoring Providence Journal columnist M. Charles Bakst
Karen Adams, WPRI12 news anchor, is emcee.
For more information : 401-941-7100 or info@fundcp.org
Reception with cash bar at 5:30
Buffet dinner at 6:30
Roast at 7:30
Cost is $65/person.
September 30, 2008
Dean Starkman, a one-time ace scribe on Fountain Street, has an early post-mortem on the role played by the business press in our current fiscal crisis.
Some excerpts:
For the business press, there are only two options when considering what has happened here, neither particularly good. Either the business press institutionally provided appropriate arms-length scrutiny of the financial-services industry, including investigative work, opinion, analysis and rigorous beat reporting that provided decision-makers, including readers, with fair warnings of the coming collapse, and it was ignored, or it didn’t do the work in the first place. We know that the answer is some combination of the two. But, if we accept the foregoing logic, then best case for the business media is that what it writes doesn’t matter, in which case, why bother?
4. As journalists, we have to believe journalism matters. Therefore, there is a high probability here of journalistic failure.
5. The current generation of business reporters is probably the best-educated and most sophisticated ever. Everyone knows it entirely capable of providing the needed scrutiny and requisite skepticism, if properly directed. So it seems we have a leadership problem.
6. That said, it is undoubtedly true that the ranks of business journalism have been thinned of its most experienced hands due to the media’s financial troubles, and investigative reporting has become the domain of a surprisingly small elite. There has been a price paid for this. Again, this is an issue for business media leadership.
September 29, 2008
When it comes to the Red Sox getting far in the post-season, it doesn't inspire confidence that J.D. Drew, Mike Lowell, and Josh Beckett are ailing.
Then again, says Mazz:
It's worth noting that in Beckett's 27 starts this season, the Red Sox actually had a losing record (13-14). Behind Lester (22-11) and Matsuzaka (23-6), the Sox were a stunning 45-17. Teams like the Brewers would not be in the postseason today were it not for the contributions of their ace -- in Milwaukee's case, CC Sabathia -- but we probably cannot say the same for the Red Sox.
September 29, 2008
Action Speaks!, the compelling annual discussion series at AS220, returns this Wednesday (5:30-7), with a focus on race in America. The first installment this season will examine this event from 1910:
Racist biologist Charles Davenport creates the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
An American prelude to Hitler or to the Human Genome Project...perhaps both?
Eugenics was a global movement popular in the United States at the turn of the last century. Proponents believed that knowledge about hereditary genetics could be used to cultivate better human beings. They promoted ideas like “fitter family” contests, government-supported sterilization, and laws prohibiting anyone who was “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying. Eugenicists were suspicious of groups they feared posed a threat to the purity of the native-born stock. Bad people, right? Not so fast. Although eugenics inspired some of Hitler’s most deplorable actions, many progressives, religious leaders, and academics initially endorsed the movement. In the past though, right? Again, not so easy...how about our current interest in using gene technology to make decisions about who should and shouldn’t be born? Isn’t this a form of engineering the future? Eugenics in the context of history, science, culture, religion, philosophy, and politics--the idea of normative and links to today's search for genetic perfection.
Featured Guests:
Lundy Braun, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University. Braun’s research focus includes the history of the global circulation of knowledge about race and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as, race, genomics, and health inequality.
Wendy Kline, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. Kline is the author of Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, a history of the eugenics movement.
Diane B. Paul, Professor Emerita in the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she directed the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Values. Her research has focused on historical and policy issues in genetics.
September 29, 2008
With the ProJo bleeding news jobs, blogs and bloggers have a more important role to play in Rhode Island.
Yesterday's Sunday ProJo had some good stories, including Jennifer Jordan's report on the state's shrinking support for higher education and Mike Stanton's dispatch on John Cicilline and his $75,000 bad check. Yet with fewer staffers, Rhode Island's statewide daily will do less and less.
So here's to the left and the right of the Rhode Island blogosphere, which continue to flesh out news and views hereabouts.
RI's Future's Matt, for example, has an on-point critique of the City of Providence's questionable development approach for the waterfront along Allens Avenue.
[T]he most interesting thing to come out of the meeting was evidence that the city's mixed-use vision has been driving away industrial businesses who have wanted to locate on Allens Ave:
However it turns out, this debate has already cost the city business, said commercial real estate agent Frank Jacques, who has been trying to market the 12-acre lot at 434 Allens Ave.
He said that in the last year, he had two businesses lined up — "written offers, with deposits" — looking to use the property, before they both pulled out.
The zoning debate is what made them run, he said.
"The comments we received, unsolicited, is that they didn't want to get embroiled in the debate we're having right now — rezoning."
And over at Anchor, Andrew has long-form interviews with GOP congressional candidates Mark Zaccaria and Jon Scott.
Andrew concluded part of his exchange by pointing to the utility of the blogosphere in a democracy. He's exactly right.
September 29, 2008
Former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who is credited with helping to introduce "triangulation" into the political lexicon, will be the special guest during a fundraiser this evening (6:30 pm, Westerly Yacht Club) for Mark Zaccaria, US Representative Jim Langevin's Republican opponent.
With unbounded optimism, Zaccaria's campaign says that Morris . . .
will give you his analysis of just how the Second District Race could come down to the wire, and what might happen when it does.
Since his fall from grace during the Clinton years, Morris has been columnizing. One of his latest pieces (written with Eileen McGann) floats the view that John McCain could get a bump regarding the unpopular bailout.
The Democrats and our politically-challenged president have failed to appreciate the difference between spending and lending. Treasury Secretary Paulson can be excused for not realizing it. Politics is not his thing.
But John McCain must realize the crucial distinction and must use his leverage to stop a taxpayer-funded bailout, insisting instead on loans and insurance.
If McCain stands firm, the Democrats will either have to pass the bailout package on their own, without Republican votes, and rely on Bush's signature on the bill to provide a fig leaf of bipartisanship - or they will have to cave in and pass the Republican package.
Either way, McCain comes out ahead.
September 26, 2008
In writing a few years ago about the shrinking commitment of TV news to political coverage, I noted this prevalent belief in the broadcasting community:
"If we had five minutes of politics at six o'clock consistently for one year, our ratings would plummet and we'd go out of business," says a Providence TV reporter, who asked to not be identified. "A lot of people think this is boring. It wouldn't take too long before they're going to stop flipping on at six o'clock. People just aren't that interested, and there's no way we can make them interested."
Yet isn't the problem one of definition?
[Media activist Paul] Taylor notes that political campaigns are inherently important since they can have a direct bearing on the things -- health, wealth, security, environment, education, and so on -- that people care about. The dramatic elements of character and plot make campaigns compelling, and the audience gets to choose the ending. "Yet somehow when all of these elements are tossed into the broadcast-media blender, the whole concoction comes out as 'ratings poison,'" Taylor notes in outlining the Alliance for Better Campaign's pitch for free air time. "This is not merely a failure of politics; it is also a failure of journalism."
Now, as Variety reports, comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live are reaping some big bucks from their focus on politics:
"SNL" has experienced a hefty bump in the Nielsen polls this election season, boasting a 50% gain over last season’s first two episodes.
And it’s not the only beneficiary of this year’s bitterly waged presidential campaign. Comedy Central’s "The Daily Show" is coming off its most-watched week in history, averaging 1.9 million viewers last week — up 28% from last year.
Of course, last year, the world hadn’t yet heard of Sarah Palin, and both Barack Obama and John McCain were considered longshots for their respective party nominations.
A year later, the U.S. is in the midst of a presidential campaign that many have described as unusual and unexpected — in other words, perfect fodder for "SNL" and "The Daily Show," not to mention Comedy Central’s "The Colbert Report" and HBO’s "Real Time With Bill Maher."
September 26, 2008
A local bright spot amid all the bleak economic news is the growth of RISD and its potential as a creative and economic incubator.
Tomorrow marks the grand opening of the art school's new $34 million Chace Center, which Greg Cook describes in this week's Phoenix. Peter Kadzis puts it in context.
As part of the same package, I talk with John Maeda, RISD's impressive new president.
You pointed to a recent auction of works by the artist Damien Hirst in noting art’s enduring value, even at a time of international economic upheaval. Rhode island, when it made stuff, used to be a prosperous place. So what lessons does the enduring value of art offer as Rhode Island continues to struggle with economic development?
Well, one of my favorite places is the country of Italy — Rome, Milan, Venice. You should never dig in your backyard, because you’re bound to find something. And once you find something, they’ll actually come in and not let you live there anymore because there’s something. You dig this much into your soil, you’ll find an ancient rune or something great. By the same token, I think Rhode Island’s the same way.
If you dig a little bit in the history, there’s something really fascinating about what’s there. And I think it’s about making that into the new equity of what Rhode Island stands for. It’s like seeing The Beverly Hillbillies — you know, Texas tea?
That’s the goal, the equity of this cultural kind of revolution, industrial revolution, that happened here. And that has to be activated, has to be made the voice of Rhode Island. Because right now, as we know, the world is about natural resources, exploiting natural resources. We don’t have oil — we have culture. That’s the asset that’s here, so I want to be able to activate that asset. And that can lead to economic prosperity, because we have what’s authentic and real here.
September 26, 2008
Saul Kaplan of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation and Andrew Dzykewicz, the governor's energy czar, join Tim White, Arlene Violet and myself to talk about the planned off-shore wind farm and related topics. The show will be broadcast Sunday, at 5:30 am on Channel 12, and at 10 am on Fox 64.
Also joining us is Christine Lopes, the departing head of Common Cause of Rhode Island.
September 26, 2008
So says CNN.
September 26, 2008
Beth made a post at the Dose yesterday about an anti-drug war event at Brown:
The Brown University chapter of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy ( SSDP) sponsored a lecture last night featuring Jeffrey A. Miron, libertarian economist and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University. Mr. Miron is the author of Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition; his particular focus last night was contrasting the libertarian approach (complete legalization of all drugs) with that of liberals (some marijuana is okay sometimes, but the other stuff should be controlled). Coming from the basic libertarian stance that the government should not be involved in your choices as long as third parties are not harmed, Miron made a compelling argument for complete legalization (at which time he thinks he’d like to try it!). He was smart, funny and persuasive; big ups to Greg Anderson for organizing this interesting event.
Well and good, right?
Well, it got me to thinking about the length of this discussion. It was about 20 years ago, as a young reporter for the AP in Boston, that N4N covered a drug-legalization debate between Alan Dershowitz and Frank McNamara, then the top federal prosecutor for Massachusetts.
In an unusual twist, McNamara subsequently resigned after falsely accusing Bill Weld, who would go on to become governor of the Bay State, of smoking pot.
Meanwhile, all this time has gone by and we're basically still having the same debate.
