Whitcomb: And With No Vaccine? Moving Money Around in a Crisis; Another Pension Deal
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: And With No Vaccine? Moving Money Around in a Crisis; Another Pension Deal
somehow heightens it, Route 1’s course from Maine
to Florida Interstate-strangled, this narrow
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTstretch in Virginia wasted as a riverbed
drought-hushed. Remains of gas stations, diners,
and motels litter it, and here, July, long
month that had meant their greatest thriving,
offers itself again to the decades’ abandonment…’’
-- From “Elegy in July for the Motel Astra,’’ by Claudia Emerson (1957-2014)
“Happiness does not dwell in herds, nor yet in gold.’’
-- Democritus, circa 420 B.C.
“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.’’
-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
We ought to be thinking about how we’d live with the virus for years. After all, it usually takes years to develop a virus vaccine.
We can’t try to impose six-foot social distancing or face masks forever; humans are social animals. As it is, now that we’re in the midst of the pandemic, a substantial minority of Americans, in the sort of denial and wishful thinking encouraged by the Trump regime, refuse to follow any guidelines. This minority makes it nearly impossible to stop the pandemic in the United States.
Of course, everybody will have to decide for themselves the costs and benefits of following the standard public-health guidelines for a pandemic without a vaccine.
Barring a vaccine, we’ll have to accept that we’ll just have to wait for herd immunity, achieved by most people being infected, to stop the pandemic. And for now, if we’re responsible, calmly waiting in lines at stores and other public places six feet apart. That’s the sort of thing that most living Americans, famous for their impatience, have never had to tolerate until now. Indeed, we’re all getting new lessons in the usefulness of patience and fatalism.
The White House, for all its corruption, incompetence and lies, is quite right that America “will have to live with’’ the virus for the foreseeable future.
COVID-19 will seriously sicken, and kill, only a small percentage of the U.S. population, but that may still mean millions of people over the next few years. And we have to accept the tradeoff costs of reopening in sectors, especially schools, where the social, intellectual, economic and, yes, physical and mental health costs of not mostly physically opening exceed those of staying mostly physically closed. “Remote learning,” for example, is a disaster, especially for younger students.
As we wait, there are other things we can consider doing, besides social distancing and face masks, that can help save people from getting very sick from COVID-19: For example, lose weight! Obese people are particularly vulnerable to this virus. And America is the Empire of obesity.
I wonder how much the U.S. birth rate will fall because of the pandemic. Social distancing indeed!
Who would want to be a governor now!? Consider Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, who has come under pressure from small business and Lt. Gov. Dan McKee (who seems to be running for governor) to step up state help for small businesses slammed by the pandemic. Large, very profitable, and sometimes politically connected and lobbyist-rich enterprises seem so far to have received disproportionate shares of federal COVID-19 money meant for small business across America.
Saying that “small business is the backbone of America’’ is an old favorite of politicians but of course, in practice, it’s the big ones that are favored, especially since the federal government in recent years has pretty much stopped trying to limit monopolies and oligopolies.
The Governor is holding back some federal relief money for small enterprises because the state faces a huge budget deficit caused by the pandemic. But under federal relief rules, states aren’t supposed to use the money that they’ve gotten from the Feds to plug budget holes! The governor is hoping that the Feds will soon come up with money to help states and localities address these COVID-caused budget nightmares. With an election looming, the Feds probably will come through.
"We’re putting the final touches on our proposal," she said of her new plans for small businesses.
"It's most likely going to look like small grants to various small businesses who qualify, something for say restaurants to buy supplies...dollars in the hands of businesses," the governor said. In any event, many, many small enterprises are dying across America because of the pandemic.
The Governor is trying to reduce the big cuts in public services, and increases in taxes, that seem inevitable in this mess. She and other governors will make plenty of enemies as they move money around in the crisis.
Meanwhile, I admire how the state and localities are creating such detailed plans on how to reopen schools, but of course, much depends on the course of the pandemic. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said:
“Planning is everything, the plan is nothing,’’ meaning you need to layout possibilities, options and the general direction you want to go but reality tends to pot-hole and twist the straight route you had hoped to take and you must improvise.
Even as Rhode Island’s state government faces a disastrous financial situation, the Democratic leadership of the General Assembly seems determined to hand a new plum to part of one of its most important constituencies – public-employee unions. This is the sort of thing that happens when the public is distracted by other things.
The legislature plans to hand big disability pension payments to retired (and they tend to retire mighty early) firefighters who get any cancer, with the presumption that the disease is caused by their occupation. A disability pension for firefighters in Rhode Island is about two-thirds of pay, tax free, for life.
Many, many people, in all occupations, get cancer, and with a wide range of causes, genetic, environmental or otherwise. You can get cancer from smoking cigarettes, being out in the sun too much, drinking excessively (which can cause liver cancer) and just bad genes.
This provision, which seems to be a done deal that the governor will accept, will cost taxpayers dearly over the years.
Not surprisingly, many neighbors of East Providence’s 18-hole Metacomet Country Club aren’t happy. The club has been bought by a developer, Marshall Properties, that puts up, among other things, strip malls. Most of the neighbors have liked having all that lovely green space next to them and want to keep it that way. But the developers have suggested that they might put a hotel, stores, apartments and townhouses, offices and assisted-living housing there. Many East Providence residents who don’t live near Metacomet might be happy if the tract were thus developed, bringing in lots of new property-tax revenue.
Maybe the neighbors who most strenuously oppose redeveloping the park-like tract should pass the hat and buy all or part of it and turn it into some sort of a private nature reserve bigger than the 52 acres (35 percent of the tract) that the developers have offered to set aside for open space. After all, the neighbors have been the people most benefiting from Metacomet.
Brooks Brothers, that venerable clothier (founded in 1818) has filed for protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Act. The proximate cause was the loss of business caused by COVID-19, but it has also suffered from a long decline in sales of more formal business/office wear, both because offices are more informal than they used to be and because even before COVID more and more people had been working from home, where it’s acceptable to be something of a slob. And, more generally, we’ve lost the sense of occasion represented by being well dressed.
Brooks stuff has generally been too pricey for me but I have fond memories from many years ago of buying their tough blue Oxford button-down shirts on sale. They lasted for years.
Tropical Storms Move North
Tropical storms off the East Coast are forming and strengthening farther north than they used to. That’s because the ocean water south of New England is warming as part of man-driven global warming. Tropical storms’ main source of energy is the warm moist air over warm ocean water.
Watch out southern New England!
Inspiring Words and Bad Behavior
It’s important to differentiate between the inspirational value of the ideas and words of American luminaries represented in statues and other public displays, and their actions. Don’t minimize the words just because of the flaws of the speaker and writer. And hypocrisy makes the world go round anyway.
Thus, while Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, his words in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence have helped lead people to new conceptions of human rights. While in writing that “all men are created equal’’ he really meant “all white men who owned property,’’ over the years his words took on a universal applicability and resonance.
We should accept the complexities of history.
On other statues (not the American Founders): Move to museums (if the statues are truly fine art and not just political kitsch), but don’t destroy, statues of the traitors who were Confederate generals, etc. – most of which were erected long after the Civil War in the Jim Crow era and the fraud known as “The Lost Cause’’ in the old Slave States. Change the names of the military bases named after the Confederate traitors. As for statues of the likes of ambiguous figures such as Columbus, etc., if it’s good art, keep ‘em where they were. But, as I’ve suggested before, hire sculptors to make statues of neglected heroes to put in the mix, thus enriching the public’s understanding of history.
By the way, there are no public statues of Hitler in Germany…
Another study indicates that Blue States are generally much better places to live than Sunbelt Red States (unless you really hate winter). Consider WalletHub’s most recent ranking of the 10 safest and 10 least safe states in America as measured by 53 indicators. The 10 safest, in order of safety, are: Maine, Vermont, Minnesota, Utah (Red State but with all those civic-minded, charitable and clean-living Mormons), Wyoming (Red State with very low population density), Iowa (Purple State), Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
The 10 most dangerous, from worst to less worse: Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida (Purple State) Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
The most dangerous states have high poverty levels, generally poor public education and very loose guns laws. But the political leaders of these states have tended to be adept at using social issues, including racial tensions, gun rights and abortion, to distract much of the population from policies that hurt them.
This reminds me that in 2004, historian and journalist Tom Frank published an entertaining book called What’s the Matter With Kansas about the art of getting people to vote against their own economic self-interest through promotion of “populist,’’ “anti-elitist’’ conservatism. This has served to benefit the real American “elite’’: the plutocracy, such as the Kochs, whose leaders are adept at suckering Americans to give the plutos big tax cuts and environmental and other deregulation. Unfortunately, few suckers read the book: They were too busy watching Fox “News’’ or listening to Limbaugh.
To read the WalletHub story, please hit this link:
New England Science vs. Pandemic
The economy may or may not recover soon from the pandemic, but in any case, New England’s role as a world center for health-related science will probably continue to grow. Indeed, the search for a vaccine for COVID-19 and new treatments for that and other illnesses, old and new, will tend to accelerate this growth. It’s a bit macabre to say so, but New England’s economy could benefit from COVID-19.
That’s not to minimize the damage done to other important regional sectors, especially higher education, and of course the region’s universities do a great deal of life-sciences research. It’s complicated.
Just look at the plan by life-sciences company IQHQ to buy the 26-acre headquarters and campus of GCP Applied Technologies, in North Cambridge Mass., for $125 million. GCP makes chemicals and construction materials.
The Boston Globe reports that the “once light-industrial area is rapidly transforming into a hub for labs and housing. It’s one of several areas around the region that are drawing tech and life science companies looking for cheaper or roomier alternatives to {Cambridge’s} Kendall Square.’’
To read The Globe’s story, please hit this link:
This is, of course, the sort of business that Rhode Island is trying to get, especially for the land freed up in downtown Providence by the moving of Route 195.
Wild Neighbors Thrive
I’ve never seen so many rabbits and squirrels in our urban residential neighborhood as in the last few months. But then, it’s a place with lots of freshwater, including from irrigation systems that go on even when it’s pouring rain, lots of food, including our vegetable gardens, and few natural predators (loose cats and the occasional coyote and red fox among them). And after years of not seeing them, I noticed a revival in the chipmunk (cuter than squirrels) population.
And I think I saw a parrot in a tree the other day. An escapee or migrant?
Certain wildlife seem to do better amongst people than in the wild. They’ve become expert opportunists.
We’re in a Cold War with an expansionist China, which has been taking advantage of weak and confused U.S. foreign policy since the Obama administration. But acceptance of this war, if the Nov. 3 election brings better leadership, could be good for America by prodding us to ramp up our science and technology, as happened in our long Cold War with the Soviet Union, and take much stronger measures to protect us from Chinese industrial espionage and theft. Of course, we’re also in a Cold War with the Soviet successor, the ruthless and disciplined Russian dictatorship of Putin that has such a mysterious hold on Trump. But China is a far more fearsome threat because of the size of its economy and population.
Competition with a China that we have learned wants to overtake and even dominate us can make America a stronger country.
Yep, Yawn, That’s What He’s Like
Regarding Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man:
The facts in Mary Trump’s book, which is due to be for sale starting Tuesday, about her sociopathic Uncle Donald would not surprise many New Yorkers, who have watched and suffered (especially his vendors) from his depravity for decades. But I doubt that the president’s cultists, especially in Red/Former Slave states, will be swayed. They wanna believe in him and they’d rather watch television than read anyway.
I wish that the press would stop giving so much coverage to Trump since most of what he says is a lie. But then, the news media have over-covered presidents and under-covered the rest of government, such as Congress and agencies, for years because it’s easier to report on, and dramatize, one person. This over-coverage has worsened in the past 20 years with the huge layoffs of journalists.
Time for COVID Sanitariums?
The wonderfully researched, illustrated and entertaining Sun Seekers: The Cure of California, by Lyra Kilston, focuses on Southern California, but also offers a wide look at the development in Europe and America of sanitariums, some simple, some luxurious. There people would be sent in the late 19th century and, especially, in the first third of the 20th century, to be treated with sunlight and fresh air, in sometimes very bizarre attempts to cure, or at least slow, their tuberculosis. TB was then probably the leading cause of death in Europe and the United States. It would take penicillin to vanquish it. There were some sanitariums in New England, but Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, was the most prominent place for TB treatment in the Northeast.
The book combines a history of modernist architecture, natural medicine (crank and otherwise), nudism, vegetarianism and other isms and a cast of colorful characters,
including proto-hippies. The book is rich with quirky stories, and has an unusual design, including running some type on yellow pages -- to represent the sun? I thank my friend and neighbor, Friedrich St. Florian, the very distinguished architect and teacher, for lending me his copy.
“Take the cure’’ and pick up a copy.