Whitcomb: Going to Ground Cover; Indefatigable Iftikhar, Biden's Big Win; Very Good Voke
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Going to Ground Cover; Indefatigable Iftikhar, Biden's Big Win; Very Good Voke
“The huge mammalian rocks in front of the lawn,
domestic between the grass and the low tide –
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTStephen has set his boat in one of the pools,
His hand the little god that makes it move….”
From “With Stephen in Maine,’’ by Stanley Plumly (1939-2019), an American poet
“I’m from Connecticut, and we don’t have any dialects. Well, I don’t think we have any dialects, and yeah, it’s very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail."
-- Seth MacFarlane (born 1973), American screenwriter, producer, director, actor and singer, best known for his work in animation and comedy. He’s an alumnus of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Looking at the parched lawns in the past few weeks reminded me of the environmental damage done by America’s post-World War II obsession with lawns, which has a lot to do with the explosion of suburban growth, subsidized by federal, state and local policies. Showing off your lawn has been a competitive sport.
Think of all that water and the toxic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides dumped on lawns to try to defy the cycles of nature! (Nature in New England wants woods, not lawns.) Of course, the chemicals in fertilizers and pesticides end up in groundwater, streams, ponds, and the ocean. Then there are the heavily polluting, gasoline-fueled lawn mowers.
Still, it’s easy to see the attractions of lawns: soothing green open space around houses, to look at and lie, sit and play on.
Anyway, it’s been gratifying to see more people replacing all or part of their lawns with various ground covers that require much less water and little or no chemicals. They stay green with little care. And you don’t have to mow them, just occasionally do some clipping, depending on the height of the plants. And birds much prefer ground cover, which provide much more food than lawns as well as shelter for some species. Okay, I know that some people don’t like squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks….
But Americans have been indoctrinated to have lawns. It may take years of further environmental damage amidst climate change to get many more of us to sharply reduce the space we devote to them.
You might enjoy this video:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/opinion/lawns-water-environment.html
New England has long had many birders – in the countryside, the suburbs and even cities. Indeed, it may be the birding center of America. The hobby pays off for the rest of us not only as a fun force for identifying and photographing birds, many of which are beautiful, but also, in the case of endangered species, helping to save them through publicity. Birders also monitor the local conditions of nature in general. They’re watchmen (or is it watchpersons?) of the environment as they wander outside with their binoculars and notebooks.
When I think of birds, I always remember a talk at my high school, in Connecticut, by Roger Tory Peterson, the famed American naturalist, ornithologist, illustrator and educator, about the centrality of birds in nature, and around the same time reading Silent Spring (silent because of the disappearance of bird song in many places) by Rachel Carson, about how pesticides were killing many creatures. The book helped lead to the creation of the EPA and the Endangered Species Act.
It seems hard to believe now that we blithely sprayed vast areas with DDT, dumped cancer-causing chemicals in the ground and water and used lead in most gasoline and house paint. (Yes, lead paint was popular because it lasted a long time on walls.)
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We installed a couple of bird baths a couple of months ago and so the drought has brought in a highly entertaining collection of fowl, much more agreeable to look at than the tiny and very fast bat that flew into our house a couple of weeks ago. Yes, they helpfully eat insects but….
The local economic impact of Breeze Airways setting up a “base” at Rhode Island T. F. Green International Airport (what a name -- after you’ve said it you might have miss your flight) is probably exaggerated by state officials, though it’s certainly another feather in the cap of the indefatigable Iftikhar Ahmad, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, and his colleagues, who have been working very hard to expand the airport’s services, which COVID has made a particularly laborious workout.
Remember that all promises by companies tend to be even more provisional than those by your friends and family, mostly because the economy and ownership can change fast.
I’d be more hopeful if the airline’s long-delayed nonstop service to the West Coast had finally started. Now it looks like that won’t happen until next year, apparently mostly because of staffing problems. And the airport is not yet really “international,” despite its name. But there’s lots of potential to market the ease and accessibility of cute, cozy Green compared to Boston’s congested and expensive Logan International Airport, including in getting frequent service to Europe. (Green’s “International” moniker reminds me of little colleges calling themselves “universities” to sound more important.)
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The exasperating problems of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority – line closures, equipment breakdowns, etc., etc., are Rhode Island’s problems, too, since Boston is the regional capital and depends on its mass transit to help maintain its prosperity. Lots of Rhode Islanders work in Greater Boston.
The problems go way back, especially dangerously deferred maintenance and outrageous sweetheart labor contracts that undermine staffing (another reason I usually oppose public-employee unions). Greater Boston is one of the richest places in the country and so could have fixed or prevented many of the T’s problems years ago.
In any event, the problems must be fixed in coming months because the regional economy and environment depend on it.
Meanwhile, Boston might have to consider some variant of “congestion pricing,’’ in which people driving into its very dense downtown during the busiest times of the day would be charged a fee (with revenues to go to mass transit). Some cities around the world have successfully implemented congestion pricing. But perhaps the expansion of remote work (Zoom, etc.) will make that unnecessary in Boston.
We Need Something Like This
There will always be a need for skilled tradespeople. Indeed, those jobs are generally more secure and pay better than most of what we used to call “white-collar jobs.’’
So our region would do well to encourage the creation of a school very closely modeled on the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, S.C., as part of the vocational-education options around here. I’ve mentioned the school here before.
The college's model is unique in the United States because it integrates liberal arts (including science) and the traditional building skills, with students choosing from among six craft specializations: timber framing, architectural carpentry, plaster, classical architecture, blacksmithing and stone carving.
Given the large stock of traditional/old buildings in southern New England, we seem ready-made for something like the American College of the Building Arts.
Take a look at the school’s site:
RIP, Joseph A. Doorley Jr. (1930-2022), who ably served as Providence’s fiscally careful mayor in 1965-1975 during a time of sharp decline for his city and many others. He always looked to promote the long-term health of the city through improving infrastructure and limiting labor contracts lest they threaten to bankrupt Providence, which they still do because of grossly irresponsible politically based decisions after he left office.
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Good news for public health and safety! Block Island’s Ballard’s Beach Resort has canceled its upcoming Roots and Rhythm Festival, which was set for Aug. 21, after a fight broke out there on Aug. 8. Ballard’s has long been infamous as a center of heavy drinking and associated trouble, which sometimes spills onto the adjacent ferries.
Get drunk on the ferry and then get drunker at Ballard’s!
Shaking D.C. Out of Its Paralysis
The complicated environmental, healthcare and tax bill about to be signed by President Biden is the first big step in showing that America is capable of getting serious about addressing the accelerating climate catastrophe. Our failure to act decisively before the bill had made our warnings to the world about global warming ring hollow.
Its incentives will dramatically expand the green-energy sector, reducing Earth-cooking CO2 and methane emissions and making the nation more economically competitive. Other countries, including our adversary China, are well ahead of us in much of the sector. It’s past time to encourage America’s traditional economic and technological dynamism to close the gap.
This much-shrunken version of the “Build Back Better’’ bill also makes some moves toward making the tax system a tad more equitable and, for many, health care more affordable.
Some corporate taxes will rise a little under the measure. But I would have preferred increases in personal-income taxes to pay for the services and physical infrastructure that Americans say they want. The very existence of corporate-income taxes (which many companies entirely evade) encourages corrupt lobbying. And as with rich individual donors, corporate campaign contributions are often just legal bribery. Further, in the end people pay taxes, not a creature called a corporation.
No wonder the late humorist P.J. O’Rourke called his book about the elected part of government Parliament of Whores. But then, the general public is just as corrupt.
One thing in the bill that will clearly make our federal tax system more equitable will be a major increase in funding for the grossly underfunded and understaffed IRS. Republicans have long sought to starve the agency, in part to please their individual and corporate donors. That’s one of the reasons for burgeoning federal deficits.
That paucity of resources has helped the very wealthy to evade taxes and otherwise game the system – at the loss of many billions in federal revenue a year that much less prosperous people (who can’t afford high-priced tax lawyers and conniving accountants) have to partly make up. Of course, the extreme complexity of the tax code fuels this inequity. Some sort of simple flat tax looks better and better! It would make the economy more efficient and productive and reduce stress, though lobbyists from all sides would never permit it to be enacted.
In any event, the 1 percent will be quite all right!
Meanwhile, America’s healthcare “system” will remain the most costly, inefficient, chaotic and fragmented in the Developed World, though the new law will, among other good things, reduce the financial stress of folks on Medicare – the most rapidly growing part of the population.
It will do this by letting Medicare negotiate prescription-drug prices (though that won’t go into effect until 2026) and cap beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket drug expenses at $2,000 a year.
And yes, as with most major legislation, goodies had to be handed out to hesitant legislators to get this omnibus through, especially to Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema – e.g., more federal drought relief for the Southwest -- and Sen. Joe Manchin -- e.g., a natural-gas pipeline for his state of West Virginia and less stringent rules for oil and gas infrastructure permitting.
And private-equity firms, who have been very generous to Ms. Sinema, will continue to get sweetheart tax treatment.
But then, both of these characters are barely Democrats. And Manchin’s pipeline is not the only present for the fossil-fuel sector in the measure, even though green energy is the star. Whatever it takes….
In a quote probably inaccurately attributed to the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898): “Laws are like sausages; it’s better not to see how they’re made.”
Besides this much stripped-down “Build Back Better’’ bill, the Biden administration has gotten into law the first major infrastructure legislation in decades to start to repair and improve our crumbling transportation and utility systems and a bill to reenergize our semiconductor sector. That industry is essential to the health of our economy and our national security. But in recent years, our Chinese adversaries have been taking us to the cleaners in it, and the COVID crisis has shown the sector’s vulnerability to international supply-chain disruptions. (Semiconductors, by the way, are an important New England industry.)
China is the largest producer of semiconductors, with 24 percent of the world's production, followed by Taiwan at 21 percent and South Korea at 19 percent. In 1990, the United States was responsible for the manufacture of 37 percent of the world’s semiconductors. By 2020, that had decreased to 12 percent.
Consider that the United States invented the industry! We need to bring much more of it home.
And what was the great long-term legislative achievement – as opposed to big but temporary bipartisan-supported COVID-related relief -- of the Trump administration? Huge tax cuts for the very rich, many of whom are Trump campaign contributors. Then there were cutbacks in environmental- and health-related regulations.
Indeed, it’s amusing how little important legislation (for the long term) comes out of the national GOP/QAnon Party, which is more interested in (smoke-screen) demagoguery via hot social-issue positions (guns for everyone, banning abortion, and attacking the non-menace of “Critical Race Theory,’’ etc.) than in governing.
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Meanwhile, back to energy: There’s more potentially good news about batteries to be used to get off burning fossil fuels.
The Electrek Web site reports:
“A research team from the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed a sodium-ion battery with greatly extended longevity. The findings, published in the journal Nature Energy, provide a promising recipe for a battery that may one day power electric vehicles and store solar energy.
“The researchers shifted the ingredients that make up the battery’s liquid core. That shift prevents performance issues that have caused trouble for previous sodium-based batteries.’’
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
-- Donald Trump in 2016
In the American legal system, a central idea is that “no one is above the law,’’ though the mobster and would-be Fascist dictator Trump has acted throughout his squalid business and political careers, and (sometimes entertaining) personal life, as if he is.
But now, the Justice Department, amidst much agonizing because of the inevitable firestorm from the fuhrer’s followers (and his comically cowardly and amoral Republican politician enablers), has shown in the FBI raid on Trump’s Palm Beach palace that it’s willing to actually try to enforce the laws against public corruption and threats to national security. It will be interesting to see which national security documents that Trump stole and took to Mar-a-Lago might have found their way to American enemies, such as Trump’s model leader, Vladimir Putin. Nuclear or other defense-related documents? For sale, or just gifts to friends? Useful for blackmail?
Or maybe Trump planned to sell them to some other players. He jumps at any potential grift he can, aided by his millions of sucker followers hypnotized by his glitzy act.
It bears noting that the raid was authorized by federal judge magistrate Bruce Reinhart, who took office in 2018 during the Trump regime, and conducted by a FBI run by Trump-appointed director Christopher Wray after a finding of probable cause that a federal crime or crimes were committed.
And note that the Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s sloppy handling of some classified records says there should be no comparing the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence with the case involving the former secretary of state, in which no charges were filed.
“People sling these cases around to suit their political agenda but every case has to stand on its own circumstances,” David Laufman, who led the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section during the Trump administration until 2018, told Politico.
“For the department to pursue a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago tells me that the quantum and quality of the evidence they were reciting — in a search warrant and affidavit that an FBI agent swore to — was likely so pulverizing in its force as to eviscerate any notion that the search warrant and this investigation is politically motivated.’’
Hit this link to read the entire Politico article:
And yet, because of Trump’s and his helpers’ endless lies and demagoguery, which would not have worked nearly as well in the days before the cesspool of lie-soaked social media and cable-TV, and before American schools eroded our culture by slashing the teaching of history and civics, the Fascist firestorm continues.
By the way, Trump last week invoked the Fifth Amendment and wouldn't answer questions under oath in the New York attorney general's long-running civil investigation into his infamous business dealings – dealings that have long led New Yorkers, who know the Crook From Queens the best, to avoid doing business with the mob known as the Trump Organization.
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She has since risen to an historical challenge.
By the way, despite Wyoming politicians’ anti-federal government rhetoric, no state relies more on funding from the federal government than Wyoming, where over 56 percent of the state's revenue comes from Washington D.C. And, the state has the ninth-largest difference between federal dollars received and income taxes paid. Blue States generally subsidize the Red States.