Whitcomb: Moveable Holidays; Propping up a Golf Course; Surtax Experiment So Far; Make It Physical

Whitcomb: Moveable Holidays; Propping up a Golf Course; Surtax Experiment So Far; Make It Physical

“On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

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of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.’’

-- From “For the Union Dead,’’ by Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

Here’s the whole poem:

 

 

"Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June."

– Al Bernstein (born 1950)  sportscaster, writer, stage performer and recording artist

 

 

“The mind that is not baffled is not employed.’’

-- Wendell Berry (born 1934), American writer and farmer

 

 

The moving of some national holidays, such as Memorial Day, over the years to create three-day weekends has obviously weakened their links to their historic origins. Memorial Day, for example, goes back to 1868, when Gen. John Logan, as founder of a Union veterans organization named the Grand Army of the Republic, set May 30 as the date to put flowers at the graves of soldiers killed in what remains our most lethal war, estimated to have left more than 600,000 dead.

 

(That a few Civil War veterans survived to the 1950’s, when I was a boy, always struck me as eerie.)

 

I suspect that the demand for three-day weekends is partly in response to how little vacation time Americans have compared to other Western nations. These three-day weekends have come to be mostly considered mini-vacations and shopping opportunities almost devoid of the sense of historical significance that can educate us – and even unite us, if only briefly.

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if the holidays were clearly set within their historical context? That’s what happened with Veterans Day, which in 1971-1977 was set as a Monday holiday. Veterans and other groups lobbied to return it to Nov. 11 –to mark Nov. 11, 1918, the date of the armistice that ended World War I. Indeed, when I was young, many of us still called it Armistice Day.

 

As vets from the days of the draft die off, and with our all-volunteer military, in which a much smaller percentage of the population serve than they did in the decades from World War II to the Vietnam conflict, fewer and fewer people think of our armed services and their sacrifices.

 

In the ’50’s, there was a  big Memorial Day parade in my town, and people like my father, who had been a Navy lieutenant commander in World War II, and his neighbors who were fellow combat veterans, most of whom had been officers, were asked to march in it, in uniform, of course. Most declined.

 

Those who had been enlisted men seemed more enthusiastic.

 

Hit this link:

 

Those little flags fluttering in the green cemeteries this weekend compel reflection.

 

xxx

 

Meteorological summer starts next Saturday.

 

Ah, the sounds of summer. The southwest wind rustling the leaves, the buzzing of a small airplane or helicopter a few hundred feet over the tree trunk you’re leaning against, the shouts of kids on the beach or on the street as they kick around a ball, splashes, firecrackers, the drone of lawn mowers. And the smells! Food grilled or fried, seaweed, honeysuckle, roses, gasoline, beer, gin and tonic….

 

 

Will They Be Teed Off?

More of this to come as global warming raises sea levels:

 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the Quidnessett Country Club, in North Kingstown, has broken the law by having a seawall built along Narragansett Bay without getting permission. Golf club designers understandably love to put golf courses along the water; it’s a real draw.

 

Of course, the club wants to keep parts of the club from eroding into the bay, but Mother Nature will win in the end, and much of the course will eventually end up in the drink. Meantime, the seawall will worsen erosion on each side.

 

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 prohibits installation of any structure in or over navigable U.S. waters unless the Army Corps has authorized the work, and Section 404 of federal Clean Water Act makes it illegal to dump fill, such as the rocks used in this seawall, without a federal permit.

 

It would be nice if the developer-friendly Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council were to make the club remove the seawall, but don’t hold your breath. This reminds me that the CRMC, rife with conflicts of interest, should have been abolished years ago. The state Department of Environmental Management, working when necessary with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, should be the only state agency with jurisdiction over this sort of issue.

 

 

Tax Tradeoff?

Massachusetts collected about $1.8 billion from a new voter-approved levy on rich residents through the first nine months of this fiscal year; the year ends June 30. That’s $800 million more than what the legislature and Gov. Maura Healey had projected for this revenue for all of fiscal  2024! The levy, which many call “the millionaires’ tax,’’ is a 4 percent surtax on personal income over $1 million.

 

The money is supposed to go to transportation (especially in fixing and expanding the MBTA, which, reminder, also serves Rhode Island) and education. A big question is whether those improvements, by making the state more competitive from a physical-infrastructure  and services standpoint, will more than offset the macroeconomic effects of folks taking their money to such tax havens for the affluent as New Hampshire, “The Parasite State,” with their much thinner public services.

 

Some businesspeople, for example, might decide that education and transportation improvements financed by the surtax will make the state enough of a better place to make money in the long term as to more than offset the increase in their income tax. Of course, for many millionaires and billionaires, any tax is too much; and they don’t need many of the public services used by the poor and middle class, including public schools, though I suppose they do like having, say, highways and airports.

 

We’ll probably know within a couple of years how this tax experiment is working out, and what the lessons might be for other states, especially in New England.

 

 

New Housing Here and There

Whatever the 30-story apartment building proposed for downtown Providence ends up looking like (the design so far looks banal), assuming that it’s built, we should bear in mind that addressing the region’s urgent housing needs will require building many small-scale (‘’unthreatening”?) projects as a way around the pull-up-the-drawbridge opposition in many communities.

 

A big question is to what extent state officials are willing to take the heat for overriding exclusionary local zoning rules. As for “affordable housing,’’ most people say, as they do with windmills and solar-panel farms, that they think it’s a good idea, if not near them.

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if some of our best architects came up with designs and materials for new ‘’affordable housing’’  that were so attractive as to reduce local opposition to its building?

 

 

 

 

It’s been persuasively said that Rhode Island General Treasurer James Diossa doesn’t know much about finance. But wait! He does know how to take fancy trips, far and wide, with some paid for by the taxpayers. WPRI notes that he has spent more than two months out of state since taking office last year.
 

Perhaps he should become a travel agent.

 

Remember GoLocal's tracking of his global trips as Mayor of Central Falls.

 

 

xxx

 

 

Many graduating medical students are avoiding residencies in states with the most rigorous abortion bans. Importantly, this includes people in all specialties, and not just those going into gynecology and obstetrics. They’re leery of practicing in states where “evidence-based medicine’’ is not always respected, and politics trumps (so to speak) all else.

 

This will exacerbate physician shortages in those states, especially in poor rural areas, and will be another factor, along with worsening weather in the South, that, in my view, will lead to an accelerating migration of people from Red States to Blue ones over the next decade.

Hit this link:

 

 

 

The Insatiable Bear

Russia is increasingly menacing NATO members around the Baltic Sea, even hinting that it might try to seize the Swedish island of Gotland. In support of its strongarm tactics, it uses its fleet of leaky tankers as surveillance vessels in the sea. Thus NATO must build up its defenses in the region to try to protect itself from Vladimir Putin’s megalomania.

 

How sad  (and expensive) that the West has to repeatedly take counter-measures to protect itself from a Russian tyrant. I’m sure that the U.S. Naval War College is war-gaming what might happen in the Baltic.

 

As with China’s threatening military exercises around Taiwan, aggressive expansionism is what dictatorships do.

 

 

Ideological Demands in Academia

The right wing greatly exaggerates the degree of “wokeness” in U.S. higher education, but there’s no doubt that the anxious, hyper-self-conscious drive to achieve “diversity, equity and inclusion’’ has gotten out of control at some institutions. The Washington Post gave a couple of examples in a recent editorial. They show an alarming focus on characterizing people on the basis of their ethnic, sexual and other identity and/or their  (real or fabricated) views on identity rather than on individuals’ intellectual achievements and ambitions.

 

It cited the MIT Communication Lab, which demanded that job applicants submit a diversity statement  as an “opportunity to show that you care about the inclusion of many forms of identity in academia and in your field, including but not limited to gender, race/ethnicity, age, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, and ability status,” and “it may be appropriate to acknowledge aspects of your own marginalized identity and/or your own privilege.” The Post also cited Harvard University’s Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, which asks applicants, “Do you seek to identify and mitigate how inequitable and colonial social systems are reinforced in the academy by attending to and adjusting the power dynamics in your courses?”
 

In other words, people are asked to take what are basically political stands when the emphasis in academia should presumably be to hire people on the basis of their knowledge of their specialties, their ability to teach undergraduate and graduate students, their potential to undertake important peer-reviewed research and their integrity.

 

Of course, the intense competition for academic jobs, especially at elite institutions, will lead some candidates to lie about their views of DEI-related matters.

 

Here’s The Post’s editorial:

 

 

 

Fair or not, DEI programs, along with such unworkable programs as “reparations” to Black Americans for slavery, and referring to a person as “they’’ in order to sound “gender-neutral” are potent ammunition for Trumpers.

 

 

xxx

 

“In every age of transition men are never so firmly bound to one way of life as when  they are about to abandon it.’’

-- Bernard Levin (1928-2004), English journalist

 

 

An irony of the high possibility that Trump and fellow far-right Republicans will take power after the November election is the role that past Republican policies have played in the anger and hatred that fuels the MAGA crowd. Consider the long wars started by the G.W. Bush administration in Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2021), paid for with borrowed money to keep taxes low for the political donor class. And look at the long-term damage from the Great Recession, caused in no small part by that administration’s disinclination to monitor and regulate the financial sector, letting toxic speculation take over.

 

Meanwhile, the failure of both parties to craft a much stronger system to slow illegal immigration has led to rapid demographic change that unsettles and embitters many white citizens, even as social media and demagogic radio and TV shows push lucrative conspiracy theories and polarization. Add to that inflation coming out of the COVID crisis and you’ve got a very sour stew.

 

We all have to determine when a candidate’s character is so dangerously low that we decide not to vote for him/her even if we agree with many of the candidate’s promised policies.

 

 

Meet in Person

I wonder if artificial intelligence’s disinformation menace – via bogus videos, audio, text, and still photos – might lead people to increase their physical in-person meetings and communicate more on paper instead of online, which, of course, is increasingly vulnerable to AI corruption.

 

The rapid spread of fraudulent replication of individuals’ images and voices is deeply disturbing. It’s being used by corrupt American political operatives (mostly on the far right) and by foreign enemies, especially the allied tyrannies of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. There will be an epidemic of this leading up to Election Day on Nov. 5.

 

While we’re at it, schools should start banning cell phones from classrooms. They erode learning. And you might say there’s too much communication of a certain sort among young people; let’s have more silence to be able to think.