Whitcomb: Leaf Blower Hell Is Coming, Honoring the Coast Guard; ‘Free’ Transit Experiment
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Leaf Blower Hell Is Coming, Honoring the Coast Guard; ‘Free’ Transit Experiment
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women and Champagne and Bridge)
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBroke and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge and Women and Champagne)
-- “On a General Election,’’ by Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), Anglo-French writer
“My memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck even when I’m doing nothing more than playing fish in the daylight with children.”
-- Lorene Cary (born 1956), American author and educator
The downpours that many of us enjoyed last Tuesday started a heartening revival of green on the ground and on trees, where the torrents washed the dust from our long and intense drought. It seemed a sort of second spring.
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Hit this link to read about the impact
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Given the Coast Guard’s age – it was founded in 1790 – and sometimes exciting activities, it’s surprising that such a museum hasn’t yet gone up.
Think of its maritime security work (watching for enemy submarines, etc.), search-and-rescue and anti-crime activities (against smugglers, bootleggers, etc.).
Then there’s chasing drunk weekend boaters.
Semi-Tropical Splendor in L.C.
Sakonnet Garden, a hidden and exotic creation in Little Compton, R.I., created by a couple of friends of ours, has some semi-tropical plants that, with a little protection during coastal southern New England’s shortening winters, seem to thrive.
That makes me wonder if we’ll see many more semi-tropical plants along the coast even within the lifetimes of people who are now middle-aged as the climate continues to warm, though some of the plants might still need burlap coats to protect them from cold winds in January and February.
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There’s nothing new about drunkenness and brawls at or originating from Ballard’s on Block Island! It’s been going on for years. Its most dangerous aspect is that it’s next to the ferry.
Never waste a crisis?
The MBTA’s month-long Orange Line train shutdown to do dangerously overdue repairs and maintenance, while a royal pain for many, is also providing some transit experiments that may pay off in the long run as examples for Greater Boston and beyond.
That includes fare-free rides on shuttle buses deployed during the shutdown, which are pleasing many commuters, or at least reducing their irritation.
Travelers are also pleased by some “free” (i.e., partially subsidized by the region’s taxpayers) rides offered on the T’s commuter rail system. The agency is requiring passengers to only show a Charlie Card to ride the commuter rail system inside zones 2, 1 and 1A. And Bluebikes is providing free passes through the Orange Line shutdown, thanks to subsidies provided by HYM Investment Group, which is building the Government Center Garage project in the heart of downtown Boston. (Actually, I’ve taken quite a few MBTA commuter trips to and fro Boston in the past few years during which no conductor asked to see tickets, at least in my car. Bad management.)
Could fare-free public transit, with the accompanying reduction in highway congestion (with the road repair and law enforcement that go with it), more than offset the loss of fares by improving local business efficiency and productivity and quality of life? Those qualities might boost property-tax and state sales-tax income-tax revenues. The Orange Line shutdown may provide some hints. Of course, the environmental benefits would be much more obvious.
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Can tenants of developers who benefit from the tax-stabilization agreements beloved and local government leaders in Rhode Island and elsewhere also benefit? Seems fair to me. The TSA’s are offered, of course, to try to lure jobs.
Watch the courts to see if some of these tenants can grab some of these benefits.
Whatever you think of the Biden administration’s sprawling plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student loans per person and make other changes in the complex student-loan system – too much, not enough? – it’s important to remember how the student-loan mess got so bad.
These include colleges and universities (with overpaid executives) hiking their tuitions way more than general inflation (in part because states cut money for higher education); higher college enrollments caused in part by the misleading idea that most people should go to college, and, until the pandemic, very slow earnings growth except at the top. Then there’s the dearth of vocational education in well-paying trades that would let people more quickly pay off their loans.
Policymakers should think more about these things going forward.
I doubt if the Biden plan will fuel a lot of inflation but I’m made uncomfortable by the idea of letting a lot of people skate away from debts that they had promised to repay. It discourages discipline and planning. And some of those to be helped by the Biden plan have personal and family financial resources that would allow the debtors to pay off their loans fairly readily.
And what about those who didn't go to college or who already paid off their loans?
But then, publicly subsidized goodies are a crazy quilt and often unfair. Consider the tax code and how it favors capital gains over earned income and gigantic bailouts for Wall Street operators in crises that they themselves caused.
In any event, the loan-forgiveness program will reduce the anxiety of millions of people.
Before the Gate Comes Down
We’ve been through several big housing-price booms and busts over the past half-century. You can see the current price boom ending as real-estate agents, desperate for their 6 percent commissions, send lots of promotions to current homeowners in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods to put their homes on the market. The agents pay particular attention to older homeowners (ages are public records) whose age (and relative decrepitude?) may have made them more likely to want to sell and downsize. (We get a lot of these pitches.)
The agents (calling themselves the ugly term “Realtors”) try to do as many sales as they can before a recession.
To the Highest Bidders
Secret “Dark Money,’’ from very rich people, most of it going to pump up the GOPQ with the aim of making the extremely rich even richer and more powerful, has been flowing like Niagara since the far-right-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, in effect, put America on sale to the highest bidders in its Citizens United ruling, in 2010.
The latest example:
Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics mogul, has arranged for a new “nonprofit” group called Marble Freedom Trust to get $1.6 billion from the sale of Mr. Seid’s company to use to promote extremist “conservative’’ candidates. (Whenever I see the word “Freedom”’ in the name of such a group, I ask “freedom” for whom?)
The money is already being pumped into the current mid-term election campaigns and in continuing efforts to pack state and federal courts with judges who further consolidate the hold that plutocratic campaign contributors have on much public policy.
Marble Freedom Trust is the creation of right-wing extremist/influence peddler Leonard Leo, who has innumerable links with GOPQ donors and politicians.
And in the time-dishonored tradition of too many of the very rich avoiding paying taxes to the country whose public services and physical infrastructure helped make them rich, the sale was apparently structured to let both the “nonprofit’’ group and Mr. Seid avoid paying taxes on the proceeds. It’s not publicly known what sort of fees Mr. Leo now earns in his efforts to make fat cats fatter in a country with the Developed World’s widest income inequality.
But I suppose if I were the cynical advertising director of a big media outlet I might well be happy with the prospect of all that revenue coming from Mr. Leo’s propaganda empire in campaign ads.
Who killed Putin propagandist Daria Dugin via a car bomb in Moscow? She’s the daughter of crazy “philosopher’’ Alexander Dugin, who wants (like his beloved leader Putin) to reestablish the Russian Empire, in all its tyrannical glory, and who has created a following abroad, including in America, of those who say they hate the practices of the “decadent West”. His political views are a bizarre mix of Stalinism and the Czarism of “Holy Russia.’’
Ms. Dugin was an enthusiastic proponent of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as is her father.
Of course, the Putin regime has blamed the killing on Ukrainian security services. And yet Putin himself could have had her killed as an excuse to further tighten his dictatorship and redouble his assault on Ukraine. He and Soviet leaders have used false flag attacks before as excuses for invasions of neighboring countries and to suppress dissent at home.
One thinks of the fire in the German parliament building (the Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933, which the Nazis, who had recently come to power, blamed on Communists, but which Hitler’s people were probably responsible for. He used the fire as a pretext to suspend civil liberties on his way to total power.
On the other hand, the Daria Dugin killing could have been perpetrated by brave anti-Putin Russians. Maybe we’ll never know.
Gay Rights and Gum
Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, has announced that the city-state would repeal a law that criminalizes sex between men but emphasized that gay marriage was not on the agenda in a place known for its traditionalist views.
“We need to find the right way to reconcile and accommodate both the traditional mores of our society, and the aspiration of gay Singaporeans to be respected and accepted,” he said. He knows that Singapore, a major financial and trading center, would be wise to show more respect for its homosexual minority (many of whom are affluent) but its permanent residents tend to be socially quite conservative. Tricky!
A famous Singapore law that won’t change soon.
The sale of chewing gum in Singapore has been illegal since 1992, with, since 2004, an exception for certain therapeutic situations -- e.g., dental issues and anti-nicotine-craving gum – after approval by a healthcare professional. It’s not illegal to chew gum in Singapore, but it is against the law to import it and sell it, apart from the aforementioned exceptions.
Singapore hates litter!
Seems a tad onerous but….clean is nice.
This reminds me of a high-energy cousin of mine, a merchant banker, who was based in Singapore for a couple of years and couldn’t wait to move to much grittier, louder and more colorful Hong Kong. He called Singapore “very boring.’’ Or too clean and orderly?
Reunited by Death
God knows that the World Wide Web has produced many horrors. But every once in a while, you get something nice from it that would have been unavailable before Timothy Berners-Lee invented the monster, in 1990.
For example, a colleague of mine from my International Herald Tribune days, in the ‘80s, died recently at 97. At about the same time, someone told me about an IHT alumni group on hated Facebook. I joined it and was immediately drawn into anecdotes about our late colleague, Arthur Higbee, a foreign and war correspondent, a calm and charming editor (who almost never took off his tweed sports jacket) and not a bad piano player, too. But more than that, I was brought up to date on the doings of other former co-workers who are very much still alive but about whom I haven’t heard for decades.
For ancient reasons, a bunch have connections with the Stonington, Conn., area, which has long drawn publishing types – in journalism, book publishing, poetry, novel writing, advertising and so on – some of whose characters I’m familiar with. So I connected with a couple of them, too, as a result of the Higbee post-mortem meetings.
I wish I’d done all this much earlier.