Whitcomb: COVID Testing-Delay Border Crisis; Democrats’ Home Movies; Newport Trees; GE’s Implosion
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: COVID Testing-Delay Border Crisis; Democrats’ Home Movies; Newport Trees; GE’s Implosion
the bass line of a pavane played from great distance.
Michael calls my name, suggests a drive. And so
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTwe head down River Road in my old convertible.’’
-- From “The Last Dusk of August,’’ by Aleda Shirley (1955-2008)
“Quinnipeague in August was a lush green place where inchworms dangled from trees whose leaves were so full that the eaten parts were barely missed. Mornings meant 'thick o' fog' that caught on rooftops and dripped, blurring weathered gray shingles while barely muting the deep pink of rosa rugosa or the hydrangea's blue. Wood smoke filled the air on rainy days, pine sap on sunny ones, and wafting through it all was the briny smell of the sea.”
― Barbara Delinsky, from Sweet Salt Air, a novel set on the Maine Coast
“Technology giants were understood not as hardy sprouts but would be treated instead with princess-and-the-pea levels of delicacy, thanks to a superstitious fear that it might all be brought to grief by, say, forcing companies with hundreds of billions in share value to tolerate an employees’ union, offer a minimum wage adequate for a decent life, or pay tax proportional to their reliance on public goods.’’
-- Thomas Greene, in “Why Trump Is Likely to Win Again,’’ in Medium. Hit this link:
The slightly dimming light, more than the slowing falling temperatures, hint that summer is fading. So do the arrival of asters, those flowers of late summer and early fall of many colors (some appropriately funereal) whose most noticeable member is goldenrod in the fields and along the roads. Goldenrod, by the way, supposedly has health benefits.
Of course, especially with kids going back to school so late, if at all, this year the season seems increasingly out of joint and unpredictable.
The biggest problem on the Ocean State side is getting test results within those 72 hours, in time to leave the cramped, crowded prison cell known as Rhode Island. Most of the results are still not available within that frame, which makes them worthless to many people, such as those who need to attend a just-scheduled business meeting.
It’s economically urgent that the Ocean State speed up test-results reporting. Rhode Island and Massachusetts are tightly economically integrated. Their separation by COVID is a disaster. I have a pretty good idea of how very complicated, difficult and stressful all this is for state officials but reconnecting the two states ASAP is urgent.
Well, there’s always Connecticut!
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I hadn’t been downtown for several months. I arrived at what used to be the rush hour, but traffic was eerily light that beautiful morning, as it has been since March. I was saddened to see the nearly empty businesses -- offices, stores, etc. – some of which were new, having opened only recently, before the pandemic. The only traffic gridlock, if you want to call it that, was the line of cars of people waiting in vehicle lines in the garage, under the supervision of Rhode Island National Guard personnel. These folks, in their camo uniforms, were mostly very polite and helpful, although a couple were gruff (who can blame them?) The air was foul from all the idling vehicles.
In any event, I got the report (negative) Saturday morning. So, within 48 hours. Progress!
Lemonade From Lemons
This might be the most significant news around here lately. Cambridge-based Synapse Energy Economics has done a study, commissioned by the State of Rhode Island, that concludes that new solar arrays on already-developed land such as parking lots and brownfields could power many, many Rhode Island homes. With malls and some free-standing big-box stores closing, there will be more and more such available space on abandoned parking lots. And, of course, there are plenty of flat roofs available. It beats chopping down more trees or building over old farm fields to make space for more rural solar farms.
Watch below.
Regarding my friend Will Morgan’s recent GoLocal essay on ugly, banal, sterile and too-big new buildings in Providence that mar old neighborhoods’ sense of comfort, intimacy and long history: I wonder if the buildings he denounces, some of which are truly hideous, will be among the last such structures to go up for a long time because the economy, which had already faced some big hurdles (e.g., trade wars, burgeoning corporate debt) before COVID-19, seems likely to stay slow for years to come.
In any event, I wonder why so many new buildings are so ugly when for similar costs, they could be presentable.
To read his essay, please hit this link:
The battle between Rhode Island House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, a Democrat, and Republican Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung for the House seat in Cranston now held by the speaker continues to be the most entertaining political fight in the state. Consider the ever-ingenious Ms. Fenton-Fung’s Candyland-like game board showing some of Mr. Mattiello’s alleged misdeeds!
I miss the now old-fashioned over-the-top hoopla of national political conventions, though it’s been a long time since they decided anything important. (The “smoke-filled rooms” where some candidates used to be picked were long, long ago.) The regular conventions were fun for the delegates, fun for the journalists and often fun for people watching them on TV, as we did, on hot summer nights. Heavy drinking was not entirely unknown at these events.
And sometimes there were exciting speeches, such as Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s effort to get Adlai Stevenson nominated at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in the defense of liberty” speech, and even Nelson Rockefeller’s denunciation of extremism, also at the 1964 GOP convention, as the galleries tried to shout him down. Then there was Ronald Reagan’s stirring speech at the 1976 Republican Convention.
Online stuff doesn’t quite make for a very exciting show. But the video roll call of the states and territories in the Dems’ convention last week was often very entertaining. Lots of it was shot outdoors, to give a sense of the famous geography/geology/meteorology of some of these places. And we’ll long remember the plug for Rhode Island calamari. Some of the videos looked and sounded rather like amateurish home movies, but that added to their charm.
In any event, viewers got a colorful and engaging look at the nation’s geographical and human diversity (economically, socially, racially, occupationally and clothing-wise). The roll call could have been a production disaster, but while it might have been a nightmare to put together, the final product was a success.
We’ll see how the GOP does with its online convention next week. I wouldn’t be surprised if it includes some delegates proudly holding rifles – key part of “The Base”! Trump, as a former “reality TV’’ star will do whatever he can to hype it.
The Boston Globe reports that 17 executives at Mass General Brigham, the “nonprofit’’ Boston-based hospital group that used to be called Partners HealthCare, earned more than $1 million in 2018, says the company’s latest public filing, led by David Torchiana, M.D., who resigned as chief executive the following year.
He was the winner, with total compensation just under $4 million, down from $6.1 million in 2017.
America has one of the worst health-care systems in the Developed World -- that is, if you want to call our chaotic federal-state, public-private arrangements a “system.’’ Measure it by medical outcomes compared to other advanced industrial democracies (if you want to call the United States a democracy) and it’s at or near the bottom. It should be said, of course, that because America is such a huge, hyper-diverse federation, its health-care results can only very roughly be compared to those of other nations.
The leaders of its “nonprofit” and for-profit health-care organizations are by far the most highly paid of their tribe in the world. That says something about America these days.
To read more, please hit this link:
Newport Trees
At the Heritage Tree Center in Newport can be found a “Ginkgo biloba Green Legacy Hiroshima tree,’’ an offspring of one of the few ginkgo trees that survived the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, on Aug. 6, 1945. That and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, on Aug. 9, led to Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II. My father, a naval officer, was in the western Pacific on a destroyer at the time as part of the preparations to invade the Japanese home islands, an invasion that probably would have been very bloody. Like his fellow service personnel, he was greatly relieved to have avoided that while recognizing the nuclear horror.
He briefly ended up in the occupation force on the big northern island of Hokkaido, which he said “looked a little like New Hampshire with volcanoes.’’ The leaves were turning.
Newport has many beautiful trees, favored by its mild climate, but my favorites are the beeches.
Real Offices Won’t Die
The office you leave your home to go to work in will not die, and indeed will stage a comeback when the COVID crisis fades. Many kinds of work are much more productive when people can collaborate in the same physical space. Sharing space encourages idea-sharing and esprit de corps. The experience of the past few months has vividly shown the strengths and weaknesses of Zooming and Skyping job work.
Kremlin’s ‘Antifa’ Ploy
The Russians won’t stop trying to again throw the U.S. election to their boy Donald Trump. Hey, it worked last time. The latest is manipulating the Internet in order to imply that Joe Biden’s campaign is linked to a site called antifa.com. There is no such connection.
Antifa (for “anti-fascist’’) is the name given to an inchoate group of leftist opponents of what they see as America’s move to fascism (a move for which there’s considerable evidence). There is no formal organization called Antifa. And Biden is no left-wing extremist; rather he is another moderate Democrat along the lines of Harry Truman who has often crossed the aisle to do deals with the GOP. Indeed, many “Progressives’’ folks dislike him for that.
The Russians, at the order of the cold, murderous dictator Vladimir Putin, are mightily laboring to sow as much division and rage as possible in this election year to help re-elect Trump, who is putty in their hands because of blackmail, business interests or both. They’re injecting as many lies and bogus conspiracy theories as they can into our body politic.
To read more about their “Antifa” scam, please hit this link:
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Meanwhile, I see that Putin’s people have poisoned long-time Russian democracy advocate and Putin foe Alexei Navalny. As of this writing he was in a coma. Putin is a well-experienced murderer.
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While voting for Trump is not good for the middle class and the poor -- his policies overwhelmingly favor him and his rich friends -- he especially fuels support by rousing his voters’ resentment toward, and hatred of, a nebulous “elite’’ that the Trump tribe thinks looks down at them. (Think of Hillary Clinton’s foolish remarks about the “Deplorables” in 2016.)
This is even though Trump’s Republican Party represents what is by far America’s most powerful “elite’’ -- the politically engaged right-wing plutocracy, which owns a lot of politicians.
Even though many Trump backers’ socio-economic self-interest may lie with the Democrats, their social resentments can, er, trump that.
The Democrats for a long time have been pathetic at pushing the resentment buttons that would get their potential voters to the polls.
But voting for Trump by certain big investors and businesspeople is cooly rational: He’s cut their taxes and reduced regulations (some of which needed reduction) and will do even more of that if he remains in power by hook and crook.
Speaking of regulations, I think again of a quote, sometimes attributed to Robert Frost, but apparently a paraphrase by John F. Kennedy of words by the conservative English writer (especially as a highly entertaining essayist) G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936):
"Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.’’
xxx
Meanwhile, I quote here a distinguished lawyer and teacher who’s in a private e-mail group I’ve participated in from time to time. It was instigated by the unforgiveable (to me) recent defiling of a statue in San Francisco of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the author of Don Quixote, which might be considered the first novel. My correspondent writes:
“Trump, his supporters and their demonstrating foils on the left have much more in common than any of them would care to admit. They are uneducated and, even worse, prize their ignorance. I suspect that may be the hidden key to political polarization today. Prior generations had to be able to read and compose to be exposed to, and exchange, opinion. Today, all you need be able to do is turn on a TV to find your favorite flavor of fulminator. If you can master a computer keyboard, you can be any fraud you elect to be and traffic in any alternative reality you fancy. And if you can key up illiterate rant with a limited number of characters on your cell phone, you can be president.’’
Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann, memorably describes how one of America’s oldest, biggest and most celebrated companies started taking wrong turns under its charismatic (and probably over-rated) CEO Jack Welch and his successor, Jeff Immelt, and ended up much less profitable, smaller and weaker.
This is superb corporate history, with the right mix of historical context and big picture stuff and anecdotes that add spice to the tale of very smart, but sometimes very wrongheaded and arrogant, execs making disastrous mistakes as well as, to be fair, achieving some surprising successes. Overpriced acquisitions and mountains of debt played a big role in the burgeoning woes of the conglomerate, along with dubious creative accounting, which some have alleged verged on fraud.
It’s a sort of a mystery story: How could such a huge and diversified company get into such trouble?
By the way, from all the negative news about GE in the investment community in the past couple of years, you might not remember that it remains a very big company. Last year, GE was ranked among the Fortune 500 as America’s 21st-largest firm as measured by gross revenue.
New Englanders in particular will want to read about the very human reasons that the company moved its headquarters to Boston after many years in Fairfield, Conn.