Deborah Gist Leaves RI

With no celebration or jubilee, Deborah Gist has left her position as Commissioner of Providence Public Schools.  During her tenure, Ms. Gist was known for a variety of neoliberal policy decisions that had a negative impact on students and teachers under her command.  Whether it was union busting the faculty with teacher evaluations, cramming students into crowded classrooms by closing down troubled schools, enforcing a culture of conformity with Common Core and standardized testing, or committing her own form of academic fraud by playing funny with the statistics on her Ed.D dissertation, Gist was a politician who used the Ocean State as a Petri dish for bad ideas, bad policy, and bad leadership.  Her exit is a welcome gain for all those capable of independent thought.

Say NO to XO

XO Cafe, located at 125 North Main Street in Providence, has been reported by reliable sources to be engaged in a variety of wage abuses and malfeasance towards the staff.  Located on the historic East Side and adjacent to the Providence Art Club, owner John Elkhay is not exactly starving.  Sources close to the situation have also indicated that Mr. Elkhay this evening is hosting several legislators involved in the effort to raise wages for tipped workers in Rhode Island, providing yet again that the Democratic Party is just as corrupt as the Republicans.  Until Mr. Elkhay cleans his act up, avoid XO Cafe.

OPINION: Race, Sexuality, and Gordon Fox

Today the Providence Journal featured a story on the front page about the sentencing phase of the Gordon Fox trial and how a barrage of letters are inundating Judge Mary M. Lisi, who will sentence the former Speaker of the House later this week.  Fox plead guilty in March to wire fraud, bribery and filing a false tax return and, as part of his plea agreement, could face three years in prison.  As part of this putsch, Joh DePetro, the despicable right wing political talk radio host on WPRO with his own bizarre trail of malfeasances, has launched a campaign to have Fox sentenced to the maximum in the name of sending a message to corrupt politicians everywhere while simultaneously plagiarizing Spider-Man with his 'great power comes great responsibility' line.  I always had a sneaking suspicion that DePetro was a comic book villain, but this is just too much.

Now there is no doubt that Fox is guilty, he admitted it.  But let's be clear on exactly what he did.  He took a few kickbacks to grease the rails for a bar on Thayer Street, paid some personal expenses, and helped rescue an abused dog with high-cost veterinary bills.  Buddy Cianci beat a man with a fireplace log and got probation.  Fox's malfeasances were crimes, yes, but let's be clear, they were essentially victimless.
The reality is that we never saw such a campaign for the maximum sentence when Buddy was being brought down for turning Providence City Hall into a criminal enterprise.  Why is this now happening with Gordon Fox?  What could perchance be the difference between Cianci and Fox?
There are two big issues, race and sexuality.  Fox, despite the fact he looks Armenian, is in reality African American, his father was Irish and his mother Cape Verdean.  He is also the first openly gay man to reach the level of Speaker of the House in not just Rhode Island but American history.  In short, Fox had the audacity to be a double minority, whereas Cianci was a Silver Lake-derived Italian with not a minuscule number of connections to Federal Hill.
What can really be said for this?  Let's begin with race.  I oftentimes try to emphasize the findings of the March 2007 paper THE EFFECTS OF SKIN TONE ON RACE-RELATED AMYGDALA ACTIVITY: AN FMRI INVESTIGATION, published by the medical journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, when in discussions about race and racism.  In that study, participants were placed in an fMRI machine and shown a series of images.  The first several were relaxing images of babies, puppies, all sorts of visual comfort food.  However, when they were shown the image of a black man, every subject, both white and black, showed the amygdala response, colloquially known as the 'fight-or-flight' response.  There is something culturally hard-wired into people to fear black men, which no doubt has some connection to the DePetro deluge.  And let's not make any mistakes, this is not an isolated incident, in February Rep. Joseph Almeida, also black, was brought to court for a campaign fund misappropriation charge.  It is open season for black politicians on Smith Street.
And then there is the other naughty behavior, Fox is gay.  Not only that, he's out of the closet and married to a hairdresser, which is about as homosexual as you can be unless you are Provincetown incarnate.  When he oversaw the passage of the gay marriage bill into law at the General Assembly, he had the audacity to exchange kisses with his now-husband on the rostrum, sending the uber-Catholic religious fanatics into a fit of hysterics and screaming 'First sodomy in the State House, next the Governor will be performing abortions in her office under the Soviet flag!'  (Oh, wait.)  Don Carcieri, the Governor who oversaw the 38 Studios debacle and was militantly anti-choice, has yet to even be indicted for the Schilling boondoggle.  Can you say 'double standard'?
Ultimately this instance is a very important teachable moment about racism and homophobia in the Ocean State.  I cannot endorse what Fox did, but at the same time, it is not exactly rocket science to see how ridiculously bigoted John DePetro looks.  Then again, you'd have to be a deaf, dumb, and blind kid to miss that one.

ISIS Comes To Warwick (UPDATED)

Today the quiet neighborhood of Governor Francis Farms became the center of a federal-level investigation as state and local police, as well as members of the FBI, investigated a house on Aspinet Drive linked to Usaama Rahim, a African American Muslim killed yesterday in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston by police.  Rahim, whose older brother Ibrahim is an imam at the Oakland, California Lighthouse Mosque and earlier Masjid Al-Quran in Dorcester, was said by police to be carrying a "military-style" knife.  However, the brother of the deceased claims that his brother was on the telephone with his father at the time he was confronted at a bus stop beside a CVS Pharmacy, hoping to create a record.  The authorities claim that the deceased had recently become radicalized by ISIS via the internet and had been under surveillance for some time.
Police Commissioner William Evans later convened a meeting with local civic religious leaders, including Boston Imam Abdullah Farooq, and screened a copy of the security camera video.  Farooq said that he felt the video was inconclusive and described it as vague while also saying that the deceased was not at a bus stop, was not shot in the back, and he appeared to be approaching the police officers.
This is not the first brush with violence linked to Islam for Rhode Island.  It is known now that a man from West Warwick was perhaps involved in radicalizing Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was killed in the manhunt for the two assailants after the 2013 attacks.  The elder Tsarnaev also was married to a woman originally from North Kingston.  However, the wind blows both ways on this account.  On September 12, 2001, Providence Police responded to a tip and arrested Milford, Massachusetts resident Sher J.B. Singh at the Amtrak station over alleged connections to terrorism, even though Mr. Singh was in fact a Sikh, not a Muslim.
UPDATE, JUNE 3, 10:16 PM: Information has yet to be forthcoming about the exact nature of the investigation.  However, Glenn Greenwald over at The Intercept has posted this great commentary piece about the situation:

Even the police’s version of events, if believed, raises all sorts of questions. They say Rahim was under “24-hour surveillance” by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, and were monitoring him for at least two years. When they approached him, they had no arrest or search warrant, but instead simply wanted to question him. When they did so, he pulled out his knife, and when he refused to put it away and walked toward them, they shot and killed him…  What was their intention in approaching him this way? Were they wearing uniforms, and — supposedly believing he was an ISIS operative eager to kill police — did they do anything to make him feel threatened?

Voter Initiative Against Stadium Now Live On FaceBook

As reported last week by Bob Plain at RIFuture.com, Sam Bell, head of the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats, has begun spearheading a petition to get an initiative put on the ballot that would prevent “the stadium from being built on the part of the I-195 land designated a public park, and it forbids Providence from providing any special financial treatment for the stadium, including tax breaks”, as Bell told Plain last week.
Now the campaign has taken its next step, having become a FaceBook group called Providence Campaign Against the Stadium Deal.  This writer would be remiss to not admit that I was involved in forming the group, but the onus now sits on the shoulders of others in the community who can get involved in collecting signatures.  Parties interested are invited to click the link above or contact Sam Bell at swbell11@gmail.com.

Pride Month Begins in RI

June is LGBTQQI Pride Month nationwide and Providence is no exception.  On Friday, June 5, 2015 at 5:30 pm, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza will participate in a Rainbow Flag Raising ceremony at City Hall to officially mark the beginning of Pride Month in the Ocean State.  Parties interested can click here for more information.

Celebrations of LGBTQQI Pride date back to 1970 in New York City, where a group of activists held a march to commemorate the one year anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a multi-evening series of confrontations between New York Police and disenfranchised youths.

#SaborLatinoRI Holds Taco Mania!

Rhode Island Latino Arts, in collaboration with Rhode Island Food Fights, will celebrate Latino Heritage Month from September 15-October 15, 2015 with a month-long culinary exhibition event, Taco Mania.  For the cost of a book of tickets or a passport, patrons will have to opportunity to visit participating venues and receive two tacos.  As of this printing, twelve restaurants are already involved, with a list to be finalized by July 1.  Founded as The Hispanic Heritage Committee Rhode Island in 1988 by Marta V. Martínez, the organization has sponsored Hispanic heritage celebrations since 1989 while promoting pride in the immigrant population, encouraging second generation engagement in Latino heritage, and reaching out to non-Latinos to foster understanding of major contributions of their neighbors.  In 2013, the organization was re-named Rhode Island Latino Arts in celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary.
Parties interested in registering for this event or obtaining tickets can do so at its FaceBook page or by clicking here.