Gerald Carbone
Gerald Carbone (independent) ran for election to the Rhode Island House of Representatives to represent District 22. He did not appear on the ballot for the general election on November 8, 2022.
Biography
Carbone's professional experience includes working as a self-employed writer, researcher, and speaker. He earned an associate degree from Bradford College in 1980, a bachelor's degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1982, and a master's degree from Brown University in 2013.[1]
Elections
2022
See also: Rhode Island House of Representatives elections, 2022
General election
General election for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22
Incumbent Joseph Solomon Jr. defeated David Stone in the general election for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22 on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Joseph Solomon Jr. (D) | 56.1 | 3,034 |
 | David Stone (R) | 43.7 | 2,363 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.3 | 15 | ||
| Total votes: 5,412 | |||
 = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Gerald Carbone (Independent)
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22
Incumbent Joseph Solomon Jr. defeated Zakary Pereira in the Democratic primary for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22 on September 13, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Joseph Solomon Jr. | 67.2 | 993 |
 | Zakary Pereira | 32.8 | 485 | |
| Total votes: 1,478 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Republican primary election
Republican primary for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22
David Stone advanced from the Republican primary for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22 on September 13, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | David Stone | 100.0 | 344 |
| Total votes: 344 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Campaign themes
2020
See also: Rhode Island House of Representatives elections, 2020
General election
General election for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22
Incumbent Joseph Solomon Jr. defeated Gerald Carbone in the general election for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22 on November 3, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Joseph Solomon Jr. (D) | 52.2 | 3,570 |
 | Gerald Carbone (Independent) | 46.9 | 3,213 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.9 | 62 | ||
| Total votes: 6,845 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22
Incumbent Joseph Solomon Jr. advanced from the Democratic primary for Rhode Island House of Representatives District 22 on September 8, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Joseph Solomon Jr. | 100.0 | 1,022 |
| Total votes: 1,022 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Gerald Carbone did not complete Ballotpedia's 2022 Candidate Connection survey.
2020
Gerald Carbone completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Carbone's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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Carbone has completed a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, and in 2013 he earned a master's degree in Public Humanities from Brown University. He and his wife, Mary Preziosi, have lived in Warwick for 20 years.
- Acting on the COVID crisis: Roll back the corporate and high-earner tax cuts, delay the final phase out of the car tax, tap the "Rainy Day Day" fund. This qualifies as a rainy day. Restaurants, small businesses, and the people who work in them need help now.
- Immediate action on Racial Justice: Establish a commission to survey diversity in municipal hiring, and make state funding contingent on fair hiring. Hold truth and reconciliation hearings. Injustice for one is injustice for all.
- This sounds trite but is important: Change House Leadership. This race is a referendum on the leadership of Speaker Mattiello. My opponent supports it. I do not.
Single-payer health care. US companies, municipalities, and workers cannot afford healthcare. The national government must fund it.
Reproductive rights. I favored the Reproductive Rights Act. A woman's decisions regarding her pregnancy are not the state's business.
Curbing the power of the state's public employee unions. I was a steward and contract negotiator for the Providence Newspaper Guild. I respect collective bargaining rights. But history shows that one-party states dominated by public employee unions come to bad ends. I was appalled when public employee unions obtained through legislation "evergreen" clauses in union contracts, a key provision that state and municipal agencies should have granted only through negotiation, if at all. The general assembly gave away a key bargaining chip in exchange for votes. I will use my negotiating skills for taxpayers.
Luther was Rhode Island's first labor leader, castigated by the powers of his day for his crusade for the 10-hour day.
Higginson was a "radical" abolitionist who tried to bust open the cell holding Anthony Burns after Burns was legally captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Nearing was an economist who warned against the excesses of "warfare capitalism."
The views of Luther and Higginson hardly look radical now. I still consider Nearing's economic theory as radical, but I follow his examples of growing food, a vegan diet, and debt avoidance. I disagree with his public embrace of Soviet Communism though, to be fair, even the Communists kicked him out of the party. I am an economic agnostic. Any "ism" is only as good as its leaders, thus Soviet Communism was doomed from the start. A well-regulated "People's Capitalism" of the type the US practiced from the 1930s to the 1970s grew a strong middle class, though public policy largely confined economic growth to white males. Ultimately it's best to build public policy not on economic theory but on a value system that prioritizes the common good.
These people whom I look up to were all white men, probably because I identify as a white male. Race is an artificial construct designed to justify the trans-Atlantic slave trade. There is one race, the human race; but even artificial constructs such as race have real effects on people's lives. A key reason I admire Higginson is his commitment to using his status to actively campaign for abolition and racial justice. He put his life on the line when he volunteered to lead the Civil War's first unit of Black troops, not the famous Massachusetts 54th but the 1st South Carolina.
Elected officials must be intelligent. Intelligence takes many forms, but whether a person is book-smart or trade smart, he or she must be able to understand the underpinnings of a bill, and to extrapolate the consequences of a particular piece of legislation.
Elected officials must be good communicators, able to listen, summarize, and explain to diverse group of people, from their peers in the State House to the various groups within their constituencies. My 25 years as a journalist helped me develop the skills to listen, analyze, and explain to readers the salient points of public policy proposals.
In order to understand a culture, it is useful to know its creation story. Western Civilization's creation story is found in Genesis. It says that "God gave man dominion." That sense of dominion is key to understanding events and empires that shaped our culture. Potentates used this to justify the "Doctrine of Discovery" that they used to colonize people on this side of the Atlantic. It's useful, if not flattering, to understand this about our culture.
In the Old Testament, I love the eloquence of Ecclesiastes. I include the King James translation of his writings with my favorite fiction, poetry, and playwriting: the last paragraph of "The Dead," with Yeats's "Second Coming", with "Hamlet." I admire the wisdom of Ecclesiastes even though my fundamental philosophy is much different: he is a fatalist: "that which was done is that which shall be done" while I am an existentialist, a believer that existence precedes essence, that I create meaning as I make choices, that history is not teleological but is created by agents acting on choices. But there is beauty, eloquence, and logic in his arguments, and Pete Seeger wrote a helluva good song out of Ecclesiastes' words.
"A year," he said. Then, to be kind, he added, "Or two. Or three. Who knows?"
So I set my sights on three. I was a 16-year-old with a single goal: Live to be 19.
The five-year survival rate for the kind of sarcoma that I had as a teenager is 16 percent. I looked at the doctor's three options: do nothing and die; amputation of my right arm; or grueling chemotherapy with little chance of success. I chose a fourth, a clinic in Switzerland that had good results in treating some cancers through injections of mistletoe, a synthesized drug called Iscador.
When I reached 19 it seemed incumbent upon me to set a new goal, a longer term one. I enrolled at Bradford college where one of my favorite writers, Andre Dubus, taught small writing workshops.
On our first day of class Dubus asked, "Why do we write?" I thought I knew the answer to that one: We write for immortality, so our words will outlive us. Dubus pondered that, thoughtfully tugging his beard. Then he said: "I don't think we write so we will go on living after we're dead; we write so we won't be dead while we are still living."
His words rang true. In order to write well we have be curious, adventurous, to be engaged. We have to pay attention to our lives and times, to be aware. I did not develop into a fiction writer, I built a career writing non-fiction, work that required analyzing, probing, listening, living.
I do not know whether I survived cancer because of the mistletoe, a misdiagnosis, or a miracle. My mind reminds open to all three.
Writing about, and participating in, government boards and commissions will be beneficial to me as a legislator, but any intelligent person who pays attention to basic civics and current events could also serve as an effective legislator. In some cases, too much previous experience in government is more of a hindrance to good government than is too little. Entrenched incumbents sometimes lose flexibility, and do things a certain way only because they've always done things that way, even when times have changed and rendered some of the old ways anachronistic, or worse.
Besides being a brilliant campaigner, Senator Calkin proved to be a good, effective senator. She reached out to let her constituents know which bills were coming up for a vote. She also asked for our opinions on them, proved to be a good listener, and voted her conscience, for what she felt was right, even when that meant bucking the senate leadership.
Senator Calkin is a legislator who reads and understands the text of bills, and votes on whether they work for the common good without excess regard for how the senate leadership wants her to vote. Besides responding well to legislation drafted by others, she sponsors her own bills always with the goal of improving the lives of the majority her constituents.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2020 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on September 30, 2020
