Whitcomb: Beacon Hill is the Boss; Nukes Look Nice Again; Ignoring History
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Beacon Hill is the Boss; Nukes Look Nice Again; Ignoring History
“We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths….’’
-- From “Diving Into the Wreck,’’ by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), American poet and essayist
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“Here are the instruments of the makers,
their testaments of gears and wheels.
This is where men and women are called
to the daily stations of common task….’’
-- From “Sunday Factory,’’ by W.E. Butts (1944-2013), a New Hampshire poet
“Religion and its adherents, contrary to assertions that the faithful are beleaguered by the aggressions of secular society, have obtained extraordinary privileges well beyond their tax-exempt status.’’
-- Mike Lofgren, American author and former Republican congressional aide
“I just wanna lie on the beach and eat hot dogs. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
— Kevin Malone, fictional character in the TV series The Office, played by Brian Baumgartner
This is a reflective Father's Day for those children who never saw theirs and for those who saw them every day for years but had no idea who they really were.
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We’re in what must be the thickest vegetation of the year. It will thin out a bit in coming weeks as the heat intensifies, the freshness of late spring becomes a memory, and we’re tempted to become indolent. The next big show comes in October.
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This involves jettisoning the current system, which bases a financial institution’s state taxes on the value of its property, payroll, and sales, and letting Citizens et al. use only sales to calculate their state corporate income tax. This would give Citizens an effective $7.5 million tax cut in this year alone.
Would Citizens move its headquarters (and perhaps some other operations, too) out of state, say to the Boston area, without the break? Maybe eventually, which would be a disaster for Rhode Island.
The painful fact is that Rhode Island must try to be competitive with its much bigger and richer neighbor and so is at the mercy of what Bay State policymakers decide in economic matters.
Much of what constitutes states’ economic-development policies is simply paying big companies to stay.
Here’s another “reality bites’’ example.
Massachusetts apparently will soon give nuclear energy privileged status in state-approved contracts for “clean energy,’’ joining solar, wind, hydropower, hydrogen and whatever newer sources may come along, such as tidal and wave energy and, in what would be the biggest boon of all, though years away, energy from nuclear fusion. (Current reactors use fission).
For many years, especially since the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the Chernobyl disaster, in the Soviet Union in 1986, anti-nuclear-power sentiment has been strong in New England, and there are now only two nuclear plants left in the region, the Millstone Nuclear Power Station, in Waterford, Conn., and Seabrook Station, in Seabrook, N.H.; there used to be seven. Still, Millstone and Seabrook provide a hefty 20 percent of the region’s electricity, most of which is generated by natural gas.
If Massachusetts and the five other New England states are to achieve their goals of getting off fossil-fuel energy to generate electricity, not only will they need to keep Millstone and Seabrook running, they may also need to start the laborious process of planning and building new, if smaller, nuclear plants. A big issue will continue to be what to do with long-term radioactive waste from fission plants; nobody seems willing to take it.
That’s one reason why everyone hopes for a breakthrough by Massachusetts engineers in achieving commercial-scale fusion energy, which doesn’t produce long-term radioactive waste. That would be a world-historical development!
Read:
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Suburbia and exurbia need more “microtransit’’ – networks of small vans carting people around areas not served by such major mass-transit routes as those of MBTA and RIPTA. They could be run by collaborations of local governments, local non-profits and the larger local employers; they would especially serve the growing part of the population that’s old, as well as low-income people.
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Such a program would have some things in common with the federal program in which medical students are paid to attend medical school and train with a military residency in return for their commitment to practice medicine in the armed forces for a few years.
And this one on becoming a military physician:
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Watch an ongoing battle in New Bedford as some residents complain that further gentrification/spiffing up of the colorful city’s antique core, via a proposed downtown Business District, will make it unaffordable for those who grew up there accepting, and even enjoying, its old relaxed grittiness. The battle will only intensify when MBTA service from Boston starts (officials assert!) this summer.
The very rich very have done very well under the Biden administration. So why are some moguls, most notably now Wall Streeters, backing Trump? Well, a certain level of amorality pushes things along. Oh, never mind, call it “realism.’’
It’s obvious that they expect to get from Trump even lower taxes and less regulation than they got under his first regime. Lower taxes mean even more moolah with which to buy/build 20,000-square-foot mansions, yachts, private jets, etc., and with which to acquire more lobbying (bribery) power on Capitol Hill to even further enrich themselves, in a seemingly endless cycle.
But, as with the big German businessmen who backed Hitler in return for huge government contracts, they might get more than they bargained for. Trump is an erratic and deeply malevolent narcissist who ruthlessly plays favorites and seeks to ruin those who oppose him. No matter how much sucking up they’re prepared to do, the moguls might find life very unpredictable and often unpleasant once when such an emboldened would-be dictator is in the White House.
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Wallet Hub reports that the 10 states with the highest debt-repayment delinquencies are all, except Delaware (number 7), bright Red states, with Mississippi number 1. (There are a lot of poor people in southern Delaware, which was a slave state.)
In an Historical Vacuum
With disinformation by crooks and tyrants pervasive and getting worse by the day because of social media and now, especially because of artificial intelligence, Winston Churchill’s 1940 remarks about the Nazis come to mind:
“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’’
Why is the far right popular in Europe? The biggest cause is immigration – an almost impossible issue since much of the Third World wants to live in the First World -- which arouses much fear and resentment. But there’s also that few Europeans remember what far-right and outright fascist governance was actually like, and the Baby Boom generation, which heard tales of its horrors from their parents, is now very much on the exit ramp.
And too many people forget how much they gained in the post-World War II era from social-democratic programs that eliminated much poverty and created the world’s highest living standards by many measures.
Demagogues peddle simple solutions (usually including attacking groups with relatively little political power) to difficult problems, which appeals to people made impatient by the arduous and complex back-and-forth compromises necessary to sustain a democracy and a regulated free-market economy.
Many Europeans and Americans are sleepwalking into an abyss.
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Putin is brilliant! He’s using African migrants and students as cannon fodder on the front lines of his invasion of Ukraine to try to reduce the number of native Russian casualties.
Some of Hunter Biden’s woes in recent years might have been predicted. He was traumatized by a car crash when he was very young that killed his mother and sister and badly injured himself and his brother, Beau; Hunter suffered severe traumatic brain damage in the accident. Beau, a Delaware politician whom Hunter seems to have revered, died in 2015 of cancer that may have been caused by exposure to burn pits in Iraq while he was an Army officer.
The drug addiction (most dangerously to crack cocaine) and gun possession mix -- that got Hunter convicted of lying to a licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on a firearms application form, and illegally owning a gun. Consider his easy purchase (apparently with a lie on a form) of a gun in a country swamped with firearms, in no small part because of Republicans’ intimate relationship with the very lucrative gun-making industry and the marketing of paranoia that goes with it.
(Donald Trump, recently convicted on 34 felony charges in New York City, has admitted to New York officials that he had not surrendered a gun he has in Florida but that was registered in New York. It is a federal crime for someone convicted of a felony -- federal or state -- to possess a firearm or ammunition.
(I wonder how many millions of guns are owned illegally in America.)
Also common – indeed standard human nature in the public and private sectors – was Hunter’s successful, for a while, efforts to profit from powerful connections. In his case, it was in foreign deals fueled by the fact that his father, Joe, served as Barack Obama’s vice president. Hunter didn’t have to name drop!
It’s clear that Hunter was effectively insane and out of control during the core of his addiction. It’s rather surprising that he’s still alive. It’s also pretty clear that someone with a lower profile in drug-and-gun-soaked America might not have faced the perjury charges that may send him to prison. In any event, his upcoming tax-evasion case looks even more menacing to him.
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The erosion that won’t stop on Newport’s Cliff Walk may eventually destroy the whole hyper-popular and very-expensive-to-repeatedly-repair tourist attraction as the seas keep rising. Maybe then, Rhode Island can follow the lead of New Hampshire, which put up signs in Franconia Notch pointing up to where the rock face known as the Old Man of the Mountain was before it collapsed, in 2003; the Old Man’s profile, of course, is still the official symbol of the Granite State.
Painful Sunday Morning
It used to be that pretty much all hosts on radio and TV had to have strong and smooth (even soothing) voices, and some familiarity with diction and grammar. A pleasant baritone for men and an agreeable alto for women were preferred. In America, a mild upper Midwest accent seemed to be the norm for announcers; in Britain it was a Home Counties accent.
But there’s a multitude of voices on the radio now. I suppose that’s good, though sometimes things can get out of hand, such as at NPR on Sunday mornings.
That’s when the very chatty Ayesha Rascoe is on, with a voice so harsh and grating that it hurts the ears of many listeners, who turn it off. And her diction and grammar are a mess.
(I used to hear that male radio announcers back in the ‘50s were encouraged to smoke to give them a deeper, richer voice.)
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Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether’s (1936-2022), 1974 book, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, seems more timely than usual now.