Whitcomb: Newport Demos; N.E. Group Effort; Gordon Sondland's Obit; ‘Wealth-Tax" Silliness
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Whitcomb: Newport Demos; N.E. Group Effort; Gordon Sondland's Obit; ‘Wealth-Tax" Silliness
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.’’
-- From “Thanksgiving,’’ by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)
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This would be a good week to look at David Silverman’s new book, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.
“Consider again the November trees which lift their arms to say that they have only temporarily yielded; that next spring they will again assert their determination to live. Those trees, like the frog now sleeping under the mud, are on our side.’’
From the “November’’ chapter of The Twelve Seasons, by writer and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970). He lived in Connecticut before respiratory problems led him to move to Arizona.
Maybe there’s more excuse this year for “Christmas creep’’ (which now starts at Halloween) because Thanksgiving comes late – on Nov. 28. And, hey, how do you “celebrate” Thanksgiving, except on Thanksgiving, with its dull-headache-inducing afternoon meal amidst some of the dreariest weather of the year. Thinking of that, I find my spirits rise when I see all the leaves finally off the deciduous trees. That means we’re that much closer to new leaves.
As for the hideous shopping orgy of the day after Thanksgiving. Why?
On to Memorial Day!
Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline and Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III (who’s running for the Democratic senatorial nomination) have come up with a version of an idea promoted by New England politicians of both parties over the years – binding the compact, densely populated region of southern New England closer together through cross-state agreements.
Messrs. Cicilline and Kennedy propose creating a federal-state partnership among Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut counties. They assert that their plan would bring in millions of dollars in new federal funding to the region. Who knows about that money, especially considering our anti-Northeast president? But more regional coordination is a good thing in any case.
The duo would create the Southern New England Regional Commission Act. It would spawn an organization similar to the Northern Border Regional Commission, which promotes economic development in adjoining parts of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. (By the way, the Dresden School District, created under the New Hampshire-Vermont Interstate School Compact, includes schools in Hanover, N.H., and just across the Connecticut River, in Norwich, Vt.)
Mr. Kennedy, in touting the plan for southern New England, alluded to the dangers of southern New England states cannibalizing economic development:
“Too often, we allow geographic, invisible borders to force competition between friends that ultimately denies partners the opportunity to unify in pursuit of shared interests, federal investments and economic growth.’’
The MBTA, for example, serves two states – Rhode Island and Massachusetts -- and there are plans afoot to tighten the partnership by dramatically expanding commuter rail service between the two states – expansion that looks to soon become an economic necessity because of ever-more-frequent car-commuter gridlock in Greater Boston.
I’ve often thought that Rhode Island is too small, and yet with an excess of municipalities, to be run efficiently as a state. But cross-state partnerships in southern New England can give it a better chance of success.
Regional Personalities
“People in the north-central Great Plains and the South tend to be conventional and friendly, those in the Western and Eastern seaboards lean toward being mostly relaxed and creative, while New Englanders and Mid-Atlantic residents are prone to being more temperamental and uninhibited,’’ according to a study published online by APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
I think that there’s something to this, though I might add “irascible’’ for New Englanders. And what do they mean referring to “Eastern Seaboard”? Isn’t New England there? For the region with the most crooked folks, I vote for the South, with its sweet-talking con men.
These studies are lots of fun but, of course, have marginal utility.
You Have to Plan With People
Hearing of the publication of Lisabeth Cohen’s new book, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, reminded me of cities I lived in or near over the decades, though it didn’t particularly remind me of Providence.
When I lived in Connecticut, in the early and mid-‘60s, Edward Logue (1921-2000) was already something of a national figure for his sometimes too confident efforts to push urban renewal in New Haven, where he was the city planner. He was determined to create a “slumless city’’ through assorted public-housing projects and a huge downtown mall. He did help save and/or improve some neighborhoods but overall he failed to turn around the city, home of very rich Yale University, of which he was an alumnus. Indeed, the city, run by the also “visionary” Mayor Richard Lee, continued to decline during their tenures, in part because of the destabilization caused by their tearing down of some lower-middle-class neighborhoods. Well aware of New Haven’s rising crime rate, I learned to walk fast through the city, whose train station I often used in the ‘60s.
In Boston, Ed Logue performed duties somewhat similar to what he handled in New Haven. He was an integral part of a huge effort to create what was called “The New Boston’’ in 1961-68. I worked in Boston as a reporter in 1970-71, when I saw much of his recent handiwork. The city, for so long down-at-the-heels, was starting to look better – in general – though some of the new buildings were/are cold and sterile-looking.
While Mr. Logue undertook some actions that led to evisceration of some neighborhoods – some probably worthy of evisceration, such as honky-tonk Scollay Square -- he learned from the social damage he inadvertently helped create in New Haven not to willy-nilly tear down some beautiful old buildings that could be repurposed, and he consulted neighborhood leaders more than he had in New Haven. But he also was one of those pushing to create Government Center as a Scollay Square replacement whose unfortunate centerpiece is the hideous City Hall Plaza, which planners have been trying to “fix’’ ever since.
When I moved to New York, Mr. Logue was there, working on big redevelopment projects.
Mr. Logue had some big successes in reversing urban decline in some neighborhoods, along with some abject failures. He found that cities are more complicated than even the smartest and most well-meaning city planner can imagine, and that while there’s a role for top-down planning, even involving what may be unpopular decisions (if only in the short term), old cities have physical and social fabrics that are easier to tear apart than to repair. So his belated motto became “planning with people.’’
What brought back some big cities, notably New York and Boston, more than planning and urban renewal, included the growing fatigue with car-based and “boring” suburbia, as well as demographic change, which brought lower crime rates and a growing percentage of single people. Then there were the multiplier effects of increasingly thriving industries in certain cities, such as technology in Greater Boston and finance in New York. Some cities became “hot’’ again.
As for Ed Logue, he spent the last part of his life happily living in rural, or maybe call it exurban, Martha’s Vineyard, amongst other refugees from urban angst.
Try to Transform a Town
One thing that any community should avoid is over-reliance on one or two big companies. Pittsfield, Mass., found that out when General Electric, which once employed 14,000 people at its facilities in that little city, closed most of its operations there, leaving economic devastation. Now, Pittsfield (the capital of the Berkshires) seeks a diverse collection of much smaller firms and is having modest success in turning around the city.
Jonathan Butler, the president and CEO of 1Berkshire, a business development group, told New England Public Radio:
“If we were to have another employer with 10,000 or 15,000 jobs come in, {to Pittsfield} that would scare me. I think that would scare those of us [who] work in economic development.”
I have strong memories of covering the 1970 elections in Pittsfield for the old Boston Herald Traveler. It then still had a thriving downtown, though you could sense slippage.
To read more, please hit this link:
Old New England mills (many of them beautiful, and built for the ages) and the towns that grew around them have become the subjects of a curious form of romance in recent years. So now we have poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist and former Connecticut deputy environmental commissioner David K. Leff out with a verse novel, The Breach: Voices Haunting a New England Mill Town, which studies the decline of such a community facing economic and an environmental crises.
To hear Mr. Leff talk about his book, and read from it, please hit this link:
What’s in There?
Happily, the bottoms of the Woonasquatucket and Providence rivers are finally being dredged of the sand and silt that have accumulated since the river-relocation project was completed, in the ‘90s. The water was getting too shallow for reliable use of small boats, most notably tourist-drawing gondolas. I wonder what heavy metals and body parts might turn up in the dredging, especially from two former local business sectors – the jewelry business and the Mafia.
Old and Poor
A new study ranks Massachusetts the worst in the country in the share of single people 65 and over who face “elder economic insecurity’’ – meaning that their income doesn’t always cover all their basic living expenses, such as housing, food, health care and transportation (the last of which, of course, would include going to buy food or showing up at medical appointments). New York and Vermont come next, like the Bay State because of the high cost of living there, followed by Mississippi, with its very high poverty rates.
Somehow this reminded me of the recent announcement that Woonsocket’s St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church (a parish founded in 1846) will close because its shrinking number of parishioners leaves the parish unable to maintain the building. Such churches used to function in part as social-welfare centers, taking care of needy people in their congregations, such as the old people in the UMass study. Now they’re closing at an accelerating rate.
The full flood of aging Baby Boomers still lies ahead. The private sector can’t take care of them all, and taxpayers and governments remain in denial about what it will cost to take care of them in a world of huge tax cuts and ever-deepening federal deficits. To read more, please hit this link:
Commerce and History
The main owner of the western end of Waites Wharf, in Newport, and the owners of The Deck restaurant, Riptides bar and Dockside nightclub on the wharf, want to demolish those establishments to make way for a 150-room waterfront hotel. Some people want to block the demolition with the argument that the buildings are somehow historically significant, which seems a stretch to me.
The bigger issue is whether it’s a good idea that even more of downtown Newport’s storied waterfront be blocked off by hotels and condos. And a longer-term issue is what rising seas, which already imperil the city’s Point neighborhood, might do to the likes of Waites Wharf.
Sea Warming
The warming of the seas, particularly pronounced in the Gulf of Maine, is reducing the kelp forests that are prime areas for the shelter of a very diverse range of sea life, including fish that we eat. And kelp has many other uses, such as in toothpaste, shampoos, drugs, food, and pharmaceuticals.
The kelp is being replaced by patchy low-shrub-like seaweed. This is not a good sign for coastal eco-systems.
Wacky Wealth Tax
“It’s the unspent wealth that is the source of all company formation, expansion, innovation. Abstinence once again fuels economic growth and the Democrats want to tax abstinence.’’
-- John Tamny, writing in Forbes. To read his essay, please hit this link:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and some other Democrats want to impose a “wealth tax’’ on some very rich people in the current Gilded Age, in which the plutocracy (much of it based not on work and innovation but on inheritance) now controls government and much of the rest of American society.
She’s crazy. Calculating and imposing such a tax would be fiendishly complicated and unreliable. A better way to make the rich pay more of a share of the cost of government, and to narrow a tad America’s yawning income-and-political-power inequality, is to raise marginal income-tax rates and estate taxes. Then there’s the all-too-often neglected approach of getting rid of the tax loopholes and other provisions in the federal tax code that overwhelmingly favor the rich over the poor and middle class, such as the fact that capital gains are taxed at lower rates than on wages and salaries.
Gradually bringing the federal tax burden on the wealthy up to, say, only half of what it was during the Eisenhower administration would go far to righting the listing federal fiscal ship.
And the shrinking IRS needs many more agents to uncover tax evasion by the wealthy, which has been allowed to run rampant for years – in large part because the very rich are the most powerful interest group, especially for the Republicans.
Dining as the Landscape Moves by
One of my fondest travel memories is eating in train dining cars, with most of my experience going way back to before Amtrak, on the likes of the New Haven, New York Central and Pennsylvania railroads. The food and service were remarkably good, considering the lines’ dubious finances and it was pleasant to watch the passing scenery through the window and brood. Compared to other modes of transportation, trains are good to eat on, read on, and, especially, brood on. And you can go for walks.
A drawback, or an allure, of the dining cars is that you sometimes have to share a table. Practiced train travelers learn how to determine whether the other person(s) wants to chat, or be left alone, and how to politely convey whether you want to talk. Decades later, I remember some of these conversations.
Sadly, Amtrak is ending traditional dining-car service on many overnight trains, starting with eliminating those east of the Mississippi, citing the desire by Millennials for more “flexible” and “contemporary’’ eating options. Another treasure of gracious living is derailed.
For a good overview of Amtrak’s current status, please hit this link:
Worth $1 million?
I feel a bit sorry for Gordon Sondland, the Portland, Ore., businessman who gave Trump $1 million with the expectation that would buy him a prestige post, such as what he got – the ambassadorship to the European Union. But, as usually happens with someone who links up with Roy Cohn’s (look him up!) protégé, he finds himself swimming in a sewer. Won’t look good on Mr. Sondland’s obit.
Transparency
One of the pro-Trump, Tea Party men who dominate the Facebook comments at the bottom of this column (you’d think we’re in Mississippi) inevitably accused me of “Trump Derangement Syndrome’’. Well, I think having a sociopath in the Oval Office is a tad unsettling for Americans in general but I don’t spend that much of my time thinking about it. After all, I can’t do anything about how Trump, the Russians, Facebook, WikiLeaks and the Electoral College have put us where we are. A heavy fatalism is in order these days. As America’s class, sectional and political differences, and Washington’s corruption, deepen, along with citizens’ ignorance of civics, I rather doubt that the United States will exist in 50 years. But perhaps the Millennials will clean up the wreckage left by the Baby Boomers just in time.
In any event, we’ve had a long run. Party on!
How 2016 Happened
As we head toward the 2020 election, every voter should read Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica And The Plot to Break America, by Christopher Wylie, who helped to found Cambridge Analytica, which politically weaponized data it had on more than 87 million people as we approached the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The company’s links with Facebook, WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence played a major part in putting Vladimir Putin’s boy Trump into the presidency and producing the Brexit vote in the U.K., also desired by Putin.
And the Russians are still at it.
Born on Third Base
To better understand how American society got us to this point, it’s worth reading The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by David Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School -- pretty elite himself! It’s about America’s self-perpetuating “meritocracy’’ aka, plutocracy, in which the wealth and social position of parents has gained ever-increasing importance in the economic and social success of their offspring: They’re born on home plate.