Whitcomb: ‘Blue New Deal’; Thayer St. Demise; Merge School Districts?; Local Losers

Monday, December 16, 2019

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

View Larger +

Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“Even in the bars a businesslike set of the face keeps off

The nostalgic pitfall of the carols, tugging. In bed,

“How low and still the people lie, some awake, holding the carols

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

Consciously at bay. Oh Little Town, enveloped in unease.’’

-- From “December Blues,’’ by Robert Pinsky, a former U.S. poet laureate

 

 

“I have a terrible memory. I never forget a thing.’’

 

-- Edith Konecky (1922-2019), American novelist

 

xxx

 

The Christmas season reminds me of the seasonal extension cords lying everywhere in the house I grew up in -- to light the tree, the fake candles in  all the windows, a huge Santa Claus face and other displays. The floors in some of the rooms looked as if small snakes were occupying the place. For years, we didn’t stint on these displays. Then, rather suddenly, they didn’t seem worth the trouble. There were some mild shocks along the way, but no one was electrocuted.

 

xxx

 

There’s something soothing and dreamlike about snow falling around dawn, muffling sounds while creating an otherworldly glow. The charm then fades as you go out to clean it up.

 

 

View Larger +

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

‘Blue New Deal’

Of perhaps particular interest to New Englanders, presidential candidate and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposes a “Blue New Deal’’ to address the effects of global warming on the oceans, which take up most of the surface of the earth.  The warming of the seas from the excess carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere is causing more intense storms and ocean acidification, which damages coral reefs and shellfish. But in post-truth America, many don’t want to face the facts about global warming.

Her proposals, summarized in The Boston Globe, include speeding up permit approvals for wind farms and other offshore renewable-energy projects, such as generating electricity from waves;  barring new leases for drilling oil and gas offshore, and closing some existing ones, and encouraging investment in “regenerative ocean farming,’’ such as algae and seaweed farms.

As economic sweeteners, she would also require that federal tax breaks and subsidies for the aforementioned projects include having the companies pay prevailing wages and that the iron, steel, and cement used in their construction be from U.S. suppliers.

I got a chuckle out of her provision that permits for offshore wind farms not be blocked by complaints about aesthetic impacts. Of course, complaints from some affluent shoreline landowners that they didn’t want to look at wind turbines (though they think they’d be fine out of their view) have held up a bunch of projects.

Good for Ms. Warren for taking on this issue, in the face of the inevitable ridicule. I’d be astonished if she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, but she has performed a service in addressing ocean issues.

I would think that New England coastal and oceanographic research centers, such as the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic  Institution, URI’s  Graduate School of Oceanography, the New England Aquarium, the Mystic Aquarium and other facilities, could play big roles in any Blue New Deal.

To read more, please hit this link:

 

 

Slaughterhouse Future

The cattle industry may shrink dramatically in the next few decades, as man-made “meat’’ takes over. That would be good news for the environment and even better news for the cattle. Slaughterhouses are pretty scary places.

 

 

View Larger +

Newport's under performing Rogers H.S.

The Urge to Merge School Districts?

To hear this is in parochial/provincial Rhode Island was refreshing.  The Newport Daily News’s Laura Damon reports that at a meeting in Newport, Angélica Infante-Green, the newish state education commissioner, posed the question “why not?’’ to the question of whether the three school districts on Aquidneck Island should merge or at least create a unified high school. Good question, especially since the population is flat. It could be a move toward efficiencies that could free up more money for teaching, of all things, and require less for administration.  There are 47 school districts in tiny Rhode Island!

The paper also reported that the commissioner, who came to the Ocean State from New York, has learned “how parochial Rhode Island is’’ compared to Massachusetts.  The paper paraphrased her as noting that educators and  other stakeholders in the Bay State came together, invested and stayed the course, laying the basis for its public education success, but Rhode Island is “not putting education first.”

“Our kids are just as bright...we can do this but we have to invest, and it’s not just money, it is our support.”

Good luck to her!

To read more, please hit this link:

 

 

View Larger +

President Barack Obama

Afghan Angst

My take on The Washington Post’s superb series on the disaster that has been our war in Afghanistan can be boiled down to this:

After Sept. 11, 2001, we did the right thing in overthrowing the Taliban (if only for a while) and mostly destroying al-Qaeda in a few months, thus making a near-term repeat of terrorist attacks in America less likely. Since then we have stayed on, under G.W. Bush, Obama and now Trump, in an endlessly screwed up, corrupt, reactionary and violent country we didn’t and don’t understand, and tried to engage in a doomed duet of “nation building’’  and counter-insurgency campaign.

 

Think of the lives and trillions of dollars wasted in the Afghan endeavor. Yes, Afghanistan is a terrorist haven, but so are many other places, such as  our “ally’’ Saudi Arabia, whence came 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11; two were from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon and one from Egypt. So while al-Qaeda, which organized the attacks, was run from Afghanistan, none of the 9/11 crew were Afghans.

 

It’s so hard to admit we were wrong about such a long-term project.

 

 

View Larger +

2008 and Now

There are far too many variables to predict with precision the next recession. I’d guess it will start next year or in 2021 and have something to do with swelling debt levels. In any case, John Authers, writes in Bloomberg News about the intriguing parallels between now and 2008 in “Have We Really Escaped a Recession? Google It. Pessimism about a recession has evaporated after reaching a peak — just like it did before the financial crisis’’

To read it, please hit this link:

 

 

Volcker’s Long Shadow

Paul Volcker, the formidable former Federal Reserve Board chairman, who died last week, was a man of great integrity and independence, with a huge impact on the American economy. He squashed inflation, at the cost of two recessions, the first of which helped get Ronald Reagan elected president over Jimmy Carter. Mr. Volcker’s policies also helped  to widen income inequality and weaken the power of unions, membership in which was the entry into the middle class for many workers. Later in life, Mr. Volcker worried a lot about yawning income inequality and the decline in trust in American public and private institutions.

 

View Larger +

Thayer Street -local stores replaced by chains

Local Stores Move Out, Restaurants In

Chris and Jennifer Daltry opened a store, What Cheer Records and Vintage,  on Thayer  Street, on Providence’s College Hill in June  2012. “{T}here was a lot of optimism; there were still enough little independent places on the street,” Jennifer Daltry told The Brown Daily Herald’s Isabel Inadomi. But changes, such as tougher parking and a rent increase, led then to close in May 2017.

Chris Daltry noted: “This used to be a shopping district, and now it’s an eating district.’’ This is a situation replicated all over the country, as the Internet and big chains kill many small independently owned stores. It must be -- in general -- what the public wants, but it’s sad that we’re losing that local texture. Meanwhile, more than ever, people go out to eat.

To read Ms. Inadomi’s article, please hit this link:

Or read this, please hit this link:

 

 

More Wonders From Wood

The two most forested states are Maine and New Hampshire.  (The other New England states also have a lot of woods, some of them remarkably close to cities.) There’s tremendous unused economic potential in them as businesses work on making environmentally sustainable products from this organic material. Consider particleboard made from wood chips, and even particleboard held together with an adhesive that’s also made from wood.

 

A story on New Hampshire Public Radio described some of these products:

 

“{M}ass timber -- thick, strong wood panels made out of layers of lumber and sometimes woodchips. It's seen as a climate- and city-friendly alternative to steel and concrete’’…and cellulose, “a wood pulp so fine that researchers say its uses are almost endless -- it can feed 3D printers or make insulation, thicken paints and food, make car parts and cell phone screens, or even be used in medicine, to create synthetic bones and nerves.’’ It could become a major alternative to plastic, which is made from oil.

 

There’s also burning wood chips in “biomass’’ projects to generate electricity and for heating. Yes, that’s renewable energy – just keeping growing trees! – but this puts out carbon emissions, albeit from a New England-sourced carbon source.

To read more, please hit this link.

 

 

 

Let It All Hang Out

It was good to read that Charlie Kirk, 26, an avid Trumpist, spoke at the center of progressivism called Brown University on Dec. 11 and that there was no disruption. Especially at colleges, pretty much all views, other than incitement to violence, should be heard.

 

 

Driving to Bankruptcy

A dubious car-loan company called Credit Acceptance brings back memories of the sub-prime mortgages that helped bring on the Crash of ’08.

 

Hear “The Next Debt Crisis That No One’s Talking About’’ by scrolling down in this site:

 

 

 

The GOP’s Anti-Truth Power Drive

Christmas is a time for fantasies, and America is a fertile place for them. I thought of this while reading Garry Kasparov’s eloquent essay last week on the CNN Web site. Mr. Kasparov, a former Soviet and Russian citizen, is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and a former world chess champion. Among his observations:

 

“It was increasingly obvious back then {in the latter years of the Soviet Union}, even to communist true believers, that what we were being told didn't match the world we saw around us….Eventually the disparity between truth and lies became too great; life wasn't improving and more and more information was making it through the Iron Curtain.”

 

“….I'm a post-Soviet citizen; the country of my birth ceased to exist in 1991. We enjoyed less than a decade of tenuous freedom in Russia before Vladimir Putin launched its post-democratic phase. My ongoing attempts to fight that tragedy led to my exile in the United States. Now my new home finds itself locked in its own perilous battle -- a battle to avoid becoming the latest member of the post-truth world.’’

 

“…. Trump and his Republican defenders in Congress have followed his lead in declaring war on observed reality. Critical reports are ‘fake news,’ journalists reporting the facts are ‘enemies of the people,’ a phrase of Vladimir Lenin's, debunked conspiracy theories are repeated, and public servants testifying under oath about documented events are dismissed as Never Trumpers.’’

 

“Unable to change the facts, Trump and his supporters instead try to shift the debate into an alternate universe where the truth is whatever they say it is today. Trump repeats the same lies over and over, and it's hard to say which is more troubling -- that his followers don't realize that they are lies or that they don't care.’’

 

Trump has been fortunate that much of his fervent base much prefers watching Fox News and listening to right-wing talk radio to, well, reading and research.

 

I’m curious about how many of Trump’s congressional backers are simply cowards – afraid of being attacked by him if they dare criticize their boss – and/or have hypnotized themselves into some sort of runaway epidemic of thinking that their fuhrer will always triumph. Then there are the purely corrupt cynics, for whom tax cuts for the rich, etc., bring the promise of rewards for them from the Trump donor class – e.g., the Kochs, et al. In any case, they’ve chosen to put the interests of the Trump Cult over their country as they loyally parrot Russian propaganda. They are accessories to treason.

 

If Trump gets away with the treason involved in trying to get another nation to help him remain in power, God help us what he’ll try to do next, and what his successors will try. (Perhaps he has already gotten his pals the Saudis, as well as the Russians, to help him in the 2020 election.)

 

Many Americans don’t understand or appreciate what they have gained from democracy and from a system in which at least a modicum of integrity was demanded from leaders. That’s why they will probably lose democracy, and perhaps sooner than you’d think.   Of course, there are other ways in which large parts of the American population are living in Fantasyland, such as not thinking about how we’re going to pay for “The Silver Tsunami’’ of sick Baby Boomers, global warming and swelling private and public debt.

 

To read Mr. Kasparov’s essay, please hit this link:
 

 

 

View Larger +

President Donald Trump

Only Two Articles

A lot of people were surprised that House Democrats have bought forward only two articles of impeachment against Trump – the brazen abuse of power as evidenced in the Ukraine case and the brazen obstruction of Congress’s constitutionally mandated investigatory powers. After all, there’s his endless violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause in which he has used his office to further enrich himself and his mobster family, and his continuing collaboration with an American adversary – Russia – to keep himself in power. (Consider his efforts to sabotage the Mueller investigation into his campaign’s successful cooperation with the Kremlin to get himself elected in 2016, during which year he was also trying to establish a Trump hotel in Moscow.)

Meanwhile, I guess we’ll give a pass to Trump’s tax evasions, business and “charity’’ frauds, perjuries, money laundering and sexual assaults until after he leaves office – in 2025? Or will Ivanka take over then?

 

 

xxx

It’s amazing to me that the topic of letting people vote by email came up at recent Rhode Island Board of Elections meeting. Russian hackers would love that.

 

 

Crossings

The new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, which has won bipartisan support in Washington, may well be an improvement over NAFTA. But it will take a couple of years to know how well it’s working out for our economy. Still, I wish something could be done to make it faster and easier to cross the U.S.-Canadian border, which has become so much more awkward since 9/11. It used to be almost as easy as crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire. Things are far more fraught these days but I think that only a modest increase in U.S. and Canadian border officers would result in much faster crossings.

 

 

View Larger +

Florida Gold Coast Chronicles

As many New Englanders mull vacation escapes, or out-and-out permanent moves, to Florida in pursuit of warmth, tans (though they’re less fashionable these days than 40 years ago), shopping at 7-Elevens  or to evade taxes, I recommend two out-of-print books that remain very entertaining and almost clinically accurate about the snowbirds, con men, full-fledged mobsters, railroaders, land developers, socialites,  politicians, hangers-on, booms, busts, hurricanes, etc., that,  starting early in the last century, made that flat peninsula, and especially the “Gold Coast,’’ from Palm Beach to Miami, the now heavily urbanized place it is today. 

 

They are John Ney’s Palm Beach: The Place, The People, Its Pleasures and Palaces and Helen Muir’s Miami USA. Mr. Ney’s book is an often hilarious work of social description and analysis and Ms. Muir’s an impressively researched and drolly written popular history about that semi-tropical metropolis, wherein resided only a few hundred people in the late 19th Century, before the Florida East Coast Railway arrived.

 

Related Articles

 

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

 
 

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast

I want to follow on Twitter

I want to Like on Facebook