Suffer the little children

March 8, A Conversation with Senator Whitehouse

 

Sponsored by the South County Social Justice Coalition

Sunday, March 8, 2026 • 2:00 PM
South Kingstown High School Auditorium

Wakefield. The quarterly meeting of the South County Social Justice Coalition will take place on Sunday, March 8, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. in the South Kingstown High School Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

This meeting is an opportunity to meet with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has represented Rhode Island since 2007. Senator Whitehouse has long been recognized as an international leader on climate change, being the only federal representative who attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil in November 2025.

His advocacy has also helped strengthen programs such as Medicare and Social Security, ensuring stability for millions of Americans. Senator Whitehouse places a strong focus on combating corruption in government, pushing for transparency, accountability, and reforms, particularly in the Supreme Court.

Alex Nunes, formerly of The Public’s Radio and now executive editor of The Westerly Sun, will moderate the conversation, followed by an open Q&A session, offering audience members the opportunity to engage directly with Senator Whitehouse on any issue.

The South County Social Justice Coalition is comprised of faith groups, individuals, and helping organizations who address issues of equity, diversity, access and support at any level in South County. The Coalition provides a weekly newsletter of local social justice events and resources. Quarterly meetings are intended to connect neighbors, activists and organizations, plus state leaders and Congressional representatives.

For more information about the South County Social Justice Coalition, please visit https://bit.ly/scsjc_website or email info@scsjcoalition.org.

House Speaker continues to push for more affordable housing in Rhode Island

Speaker Shekarchi announces his sixth package of housing bills

Steve Ahlquist

Rhode Island House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi announced his 2026 housing legislation package, his sixth since becoming Speaker in 2021. You can watch the video here.

“Our advocacy is working: Rhode Island is becoming a model for housing policy in other states,” said Speaker Shekarchi. “We’ve passed more than 60 new housing laws that are having real results. The creation of a new land-use court calendar reduced the backlog of pending cases by nearly half within its first year of implementation. It’s no coincidence that reducing red tape has led to a significant rise in building permits. In 2023, we had a 70% rise in building permits, the most in a single year since the Great Recession.

“But building takes time, and we are still trying to play catch-up for all the years that Rhode Island was dead last in the country for new housing starts. While Rhode Island remains a relatively affordable option for people moving here from other states, our own residents are too often priced out of the neighborhoods they grew up in. The sad reality is that there is a direct correlation between rising housing costs and increased homelessness. This winter alone, at least four people froze to death because they were unhoused. That is completely unacceptable. Until all of our neighbors have a safe place to sleep at night, this work must continue.”

The announced bills are:

• Infill subdivision for housing: Upon passage, this legislation would allow property owners in areas with water and sewer capacity to subdivide property for single-family residential development under certain limited conditions and requirements.
• Parking maximums: Upon passage, this legislation would establish maximum parking requirements for multifamily housing in areas accessible by public transit. It follows initiatives in other states in reducing parking requirements.
• Homeless Bill of Rights: Upon passage, this legislation would add a requirement to Rhode Island’s existing Homeless Bill of Rights that at least a 15-day notice be given to individuals/families affected by the disbanding of an encampment, subject to emergency and safety exceptions.
• SAFE bill: Upon passage, this legislation would enable cities and towns to allow Supportive and Functional Emergency units (“SAFE Units,” such as Pallet shelters) to operate temporarily during an emergency declaration. This legislation would enable cities and towns to respond quickly in the event of severe weather and/or natural or manufactured disasters.
• Single staircase: Upon passage, this legislation would amend the state building code to allow single-staircase construction in residential buildings up to four floors and 16 units, but the construction would remain subject to all applicable fire code requirements.
• Technical amendments: This legislation is based on feedback received by the Land Use Commission and various stakeholders, including local municipalities, developers, planners, and other advocates. The legislation seeks to clarify and amend the processes, terms, references, and requirements outlined in the Zoning Enabling Act, Low- and Moderate-Income Housing Act, and Subdivision Act.
• Vacant land/properties: Upon passage, this legislation would allow the adaptive reuse of state-owned vacant buildings by right. The legislation would enable the redevelopment/adaptive reuse of vacant municipal buildings into housing and also amend the redevelopment program to convert municipal schools.
• Commission to study and review the Condominium Act: Upon passage, this legislation would establish a commission to study potential modernization of and updates to the state’s Condominium Act, which has not been reviewed or amended in more than a decade.
• Affordable housing tax assessment and valuation: Upon passage, this legislation would impose limits on tax rates for new construction of residential rental units that include certain percentages of affordable housing in either new construction or adaptive reuse projects.

The legislation has also been influenced by two housing commissions established by Speaker Shekarchi. Some of the announced legislation would amend existing housing laws based on feedback from these commissions.

Helena Foulkes, candidate for Governor, rolls out her housing plan for Rhode Island

Proposed Millionaire’s Tax to build 20,000 new Homes and apartments

Housing is too expensive in Rhode Island, and it is holding our state back. One third of Rhode Island households are paying more than one third of their income toward housing costs.  We need results-focused leadership to build more homes and apartments that people can afford. Helena Buonanno Foulkes today released her housing plan designed to build more homes of all kinds, lower the cost of owning and renting, and protect tenants from being taken advantage of. 

“When I talk to Rhode Islanders, they tell me how much they love living here, but I also hear that the cost of buying or renting is making it harder and harder to stay,” said Helena. “Housing in Rhode Island costs too much because we lack adequate supply, and under this governor we’re 50th in the nation in new home starts. I will be a governor who will get shovels in the ground to build tens of thousands of new homes and apartments that Rhode Islanders can afford.” 

Recent reporting found that there is no community in Rhode Island where it is affordable to buy a home. The primary driver of the skyrocketing cost of housing is inadequate supply. Experts project that Rhode Island needs to add tens of thousands of new units for supply to catch up to demand. The General Assembly has done great work on housing in recent years, but what has been missing is executive leadership. Rhode Island still ranks 50th in the country in housing starts. Last year, Rhode Island added fewer than 1,000 new housing units, and the governor’s $120 million bond to address the housing crisis is expected to result in only 600 additional homes. 

Given the magnitude of the housing crisis, Helena Buonanno Foulkes is proposing an “all-of-the-above” plan to build thousands of homes and apartments quickly: dedicated funding, smart investments, less red tape, and a governor focused on making Rhode Island more affordable for everyone. 

The Rhode Home Program consists of: 

A Millionaire’s Tax for Housing

Last summer, Congress passed and President Trump signed a budget that drastically cuts the social safety net in favor of tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. Every millionaire in Rhode Island benefited from this ill-advised federal tax giveaway. Against this backdrop, Helena is proposing a millionaire’s tax to establish a billion-dollar fund to build 20,000 homes and apartments that Rhode Islanders can afford. Specifically, the plan calls for an additional 3% income tax on incomes of $1 million and above. Within eight years, the fund will have generated over a billion dollars, which will be used to leverage private, federal and philanthropic dollars to construct over 20,000 homes. 

Scandals Engulf Labor Secretary as She Guts Worker Protections

The wrong choice from the start

Jake Johnson

Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure as head of the US Department of Labor was further embroiled in scandal on Thursday after bombshell New York Times reporting revealed that her husband has been banned from the agency’s headquarters over sexual assault allegations leveled by at least two staffers.

The reporting landed on the same day that a group of Senate Democrats launched an investigation into Chavez-DeRemer’s policy moves at the Labor Department, accusing her agency of showing “disregard for workers’ lives” by “rolling back protections that keep workers safe and hobbling the agency that is tasked with overseeing worker safety.”

The sexual assault allegations against the labor secretary’s husband, Shawn DeRemer, were made by two women “as part of an internal investigation by the department’s inspector general into alleged misconduct by Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her senior staff,” the Times reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter and a police report.

Trump's global war against children

Cutting aid abroad and shredding the social safety net at home ensures more children will suffer and die

James Alwine and Elizabeth Jacobs for Common Dreams

Most of us understand that children are vulnerable, innocent, and must be protected and nourished. But too often in our country, and the world, that doesn’t happen—and now the US government is waging a global war on children.

It started with the closing of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), thus removing US humanitarian and development aid to people in the worst situations in the world. 

The cruel closure of USAID denied and continues to deny more than 95 million people access to basic healthcare and nutrition, leading to an estimated 1.6 million additional deaths in 2025, many of which were children.

The current administration also significantly weakened the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). These cuts, plus the closing of USAID, severely limit the international efforts of humanitarian organizations which work to control mother-to-child transmission of HIV. If funding for HIV prevention and treatment continues to fall, by 2040, an estimated 3 million children will contract HIV and nearly 1.8 million will die of AIDS-related causes.

As if that were not enough, the administration pulled out of the vaccine alliance Gavi, an international organization that has paid for more than 1 billion children to be vaccinated worldwide. This allows vaccine-preventable diseases to flourish among unvaccinated and vulnerable children. Many will be permanently disabled or die.

The administration has directed these closings of international programs overwhelmingly against Black and brown people who, according to the president, live in “sh** hole” countries. This is his program of “America First,” where “those” people don’t matter—where their children don’t matter.

Moral judgement aside, helping those suffering in other countries is actually in our best interest. Not only would this show some badly needed humanity and compassion, it is also the best public health approach to protect all of us from contagious diseases.

Bobby Jr. sez "eat real food"

News from the Onion

Community dinners in Westerly, 2nd Tuesday of the month

Parakeets Reveal a Surprising Rule for Making Friends

Bonding with your 'keet

By University of Cincinnati

Forming new relationships can be difficult, even in the animal world. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati discovered that monk parakeets introduced to unfamiliar birds tend to “test the waters” before deciding whether a potential companion is safe. 

Instead of approaching immediately, they move in gradually, becoming comfortable over time before engaging in interactions that carry a higher risk of conflict or injury.

The work was published in the journal Biology Letters.

Why Parrots Value Close Social Bonds

“There can be a lot of benefits to being social, but these friendships have to start somewhere,“ said Claire O’Connell, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

O’Connell conducted the study with UC Associate Professor Elizabeth Hobson, former UC postdoctoral researcher Annemarie van der Marel, and Princeton University Associate Professor Gerald Carter. She explained that many parrot species develop deep connections with one or two trusted partners. These pairs may spend long periods together, groom each other, or form reproductive partnerships. According to O’Connell, maintaining strong bonds such as these is often associated with reduced stress and higher reproductive success.

Kids and the elderly most at risk from erratic Trump vaccine maneuvers

Here are two articles with the details

From CIDRAP - Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, University of Minnesota

When confusion replaces clarity about vaccines, children pay the price

Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH and Sarah Despres

When the US government changes long-standing childhood vaccine recommendations, parents deserve clarity: what changed, why it changed, and what it means for their children’s health. Instead, the recent revamp of the US childhood immunization schedule was announced abruptly by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with limited explanation and evidence, and little transparency about how decisions were reached or how they are expected to improve health outcomes. 

Who needs science?

One thing, however, is clear: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. achieved his intended goal. He created even more confusion about and distrust in the use of vaccines. When purposeful confusion leading to doubt is the goal, the consequences show up quickly, not in abstract debates, but in pediatric wards, neonatal intensive care units, and grieving families.

Much of the public commentary since the announcement has focused on the remaining policy levers available to HHS to reduce access to vaccines, such as changes to insurance coverage, liability protections, or federal programs for under- and uninsured children. Those concerns are real. But they obscure a more immediate and troubling reality: vaccine uptake is declining, not because access has disappeared, but because vaccination itself is being steadily de-normalized through uncertainty, mixed messages, and the spread of inaccurate information coming from the political appointees at HHS. 

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. achieved his intended goal. He created even more confusion about and distrust in the use of vaccines.

$380 Million in Funding Cuts to One of the Most Successful US Public Education Programs

Trump's assault on bilingual education

By Jeff Bryant for The Left Chapter

You can use the same maps to chart funding cuts

Chicago schoolteacher Claudia Morales may have been reflecting the feelings of most Americans about life under the Trump presidential administration when she told Our Schools, “Every day, there’s yet another abuse. It’s scary. And it’s coming from our own government.” In her work as a bilingual program teacher and bilingual coordinator at Curie High School in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), she’s been witness to one trauma after another.

“First, there were the funding cuts the Trump administration made,” said Morales, referring to the federal government’s decision to withhold more than $4 billion in funds for public education at the start of the 2025-2026 school year. CPS was particularly hit hard by the cuts, with the district losing millions it had counted on to pay for staffing positions and programs.

“Then we had ICE invade,” Morales recounted, noting that the Archer Heights neighborhood, where most of her students come from, was one of the communities targeted by the federal government’s immigration crackdown. The Trump administration’s decision to rescind the protected status that prohibited immigration raids at schools and student gathering places, like bus stops and playgrounds, made her school’s largely Hispanic student population—many of whom are recent immigrants—especially vulnerable.

“And now this,” she concluded. “This” is the December 2025 announcement from Trump’s U.S. Department of Education, signed by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, to withhold some $380 million in federal funding that was previously granted to schools from the department’s full-service community schools (FSCS) program. The initiative provides support for the planning, implementation, and operation of the community school approach to school improvement. The community school approach transitions traditional schools from being strictly academic institutions into community hubs that provide student and family support services based on resources and voices of the surrounding community. The strategy is showing promise in improving student outcomes nationwide, but that seems irrelevant to current federal officials.

As a result of the funding cut-off to Chicago schools, according to Morales, Curie will lose money it needs to pay for tutors, after-school programs, parent education courses, and academic support for students who struggle with learning. These are programs and services parents specifically asked the school to provide, said Morales.

The loss of funding for in-school and after-school tutors will be especially damaging to the students’ academic achievement, according to educators at Curie.

Making America Vicious and Unwelcoming Whether You Live Here or Not

Don’t come here and don’t stay

Rebecca Gordon for the TomDispatch

During my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders that hit my inbox every morning, two stories drew my attention. 

Both had to do with the fact that human beings have always moved around this planet, beginning long before there were any countries or maps to display the borders where one nation ends and another begins. 

I was reminded of a decades-old song by the Venezuelan singer Soledad Bravo, “Punto y Raya”—“The Dot and the Dash”:

Entre tu pueblo y mi pueblo hay un punto y una raya,

la raya dice no hay paso el punto vía cerrada

“Between your people and mine,” says the song, “there’s a dot and a dash. The dash says, ‘No entrance,’ and the dot, ‘The road is closed.’” Bravo goes on to say that, with all those dots and dashes outlining the borders of nations, a map looks like a telegram. If you walk through the actual world, though, what you see are mountains and rivers, forests and deserts, but no dots or dashes at all.

Porque esas cosas no existen, sino que fueron creadas

para que mi hambre y la tuya estén siempre separadas.

And she adds, “Because those things aren’t real, they were created so your hunger and mine would remain separated.”

Two Immigration Stories

Two morning news stories brought that song back into my mind, along with the human reality it expresses. Both appeared in the New York Times (and no doubt elsewhere). The first reported that the “United States population grew last year [between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025] at one of the slowest rates in its history.” 

Such a reduction in growth was in large part due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. In 2025, immigration rates to the United States dropped by 50% compared to the previous year. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump’s vicious and deadly deportation efforts accounted for only about 235,000 of the 1.5 million-person net decline in immigration.

Much more significant were the barriers to entry created under Trump, largely through the influence of Stephen Miller, the man Steve Bannon has labelled the president’s “prime minister.” Those include the effective closing of our southern border to undocumented arrivals. The administration has also made legal entry to the US much more difficult in a variety of ways, including:

• Instituting a $100,000 fee to be paid by employers seeking to hire professional workers under an H1-B visa;
• Erecting barriers to foreign students, leading to a 17% drop in new ones enrolling in American universities;
• Fully or partially restricting entry by the citizens (including refugees) of 19 nations: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen (full restrictions) and Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela (partial restrictions);
• Pausing all asylum applications by citizens of any nation in the world, leaving a backlog of 1.4 million cases;
• Capping all refugee admissions at 7,500 per year, a reduction of 94% from previous limits (with the exception, of course, of white South African farmers).

Now we know where they went

Two re-scheduled Tomaquag Museum that were snowed out