Whitcomb: Plutocratic Princes Take Over; Fighting Local News’s Blues; Just Not Near Us
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Plutocratic Princes Take Over; Fighting Local News’s Blues; Just Not Near Us
“Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Yet you're my favorite work of art
Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?’’
-- From the 1937 song “My Funny Valentine,’’ with lyrics by Lorenz Hart and music by Richard Rodgers
Here’s a recording of the song:
“All progress is experimental.’’
– John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), American writer and political activist
“The less intelligent the white man, the more stupid he thinks the black.’’
-- Andre Gide (1869-1951), Nobel Prize-winning French novelist
In a couple of weeks, or before, you may start seeing tiny icicles on maple tree twigs, showing that sap is flowing again, even if snowstorms suggest otherwise. February is the snowiest month in the Northeast, in part because warm, moist air is moving closer.
Meanwhile, there’s been record heat in the Southeast. Hit this link:
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Citizens, by voting or not voting (which in a sense is voting), have made their choices and now will reap the whirlwind. As they do, they might consider what economists call “state capture.’’ That’s when rich private interests, in league with their political allies/servants, direct policy and control taxpayer funds for their own benefit and those of their political allies.
As many thousands of federal workers are forced out, non-rich Americans will find it ever more difficult to access public services they have relied upon, if those services even continue. But the rich, with their private servants, lawyers, concierge doctors, etc., will be fine.
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Artificial intelligence, being pushed by rapacious technoboys with powerful political connections, may do even more damage to American civic and political life than have social media.
Local News
Summer is coming! So it was good to learn that Newport has set up an online portal on its Web site to speed registration and to try to assure compliance with city rules for the City by the Sea’s hundreds of short-term rentals. Who knows how many there really are? In any event, the portal should smooth things a bit, and it might be a model for other resort communities.
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Of course, Rhode Island officials have striven to do anything in their power to keep the company, continuing the long tradition of focusing more on offering taxpayer-supported goodies to famous big companies than on improving the overall economic attractiveness of the state via an efficient and fair tax system, clear and simplified regulations, improving public schools and well-maintained public physical infrastructure.
In any event, senior executives of big companies aren’t romantics: They’ll move to any place that seems a better place for the companies – and their senior executives – to make more money and/or in some cases, places where senior execs would simply prefer to work. And companies’ promises to stay in return for special deals with states and localities are like snow on the sunny side of the street on an early spring day.
Boston is a lot sexier than Pawtucket.
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The Rhode Island Foundation and the Newport-based Van Beuren Charitable Foundation have launched a program to reinvigorate local news in the Ocean State. The implosion of local news media around America has been a disaster for civic engagement and oversight of governmental and private-sector power. The rise of social media and its taking of most ad revenue as it steals journalistic work has been the major culprit. But outfits such as GoLocalProv.com battle on to provide regional news.
No small part of the current political crisis in America is due to the decline of honest and rigorous reporting as much of it has been replaced by propaganda. Fox “News” led the way.
The foundations have announced that Press Forward has approved their application for a Rhode Island chapter. The goal is “to cultivate civically engaged and well-informed communities across Rhode Island by supporting diverse, reliable local news and information sources” and is part of a $500 million national initiative aimed at strengthening local news and information sources.
Keep ‘Em Out
Middle-class and affluent suburbs will often go to extremes to stop more housing from being built, especially housing for poorer people. This is in the face of an ongoing national housing-affordability crisis caused by inadequate supply. Lots of people simply want to pull up the bridge. My hunch, however, is that over the next decade that pressure will subside as fewer and fewer children are born, despite some right-wingers’ efforts to try to increase the birth rate, especially among whites, and a sharp decline in legal and illegal immigration. In a couple of decades, the U.S. population may be declining. Good!
Back to now: Johnston, R.I. There, Mayor Joseph Polisena is trying to block a proposed 250-unit apartment complex meant for lower-income people on 31 acres of vacant land. Instead he wants to take the land by eminent domain and build a nifty police-and-fire complex there, something that the politically powerful police and fighters’ unions presumably would like a lot.
You might think that 31 acres would be enough for both a public safety complex and an affordable housing project.
The mayor is fighting a state law that is supposed to stop towns from blocking “affordable-housing’’ projects if less than 10 percent of a community’s homes are deemed affordable. In Rhode Island, a home is considered affordable if it costs no more than 30 percent of a household's gross income. This includes the cost of rent, mortgage payments, heat and utilities.
Of course, local politicians and their constituents all say that they support the building of affordable housing – somewhere.
A certain personage (I promised last week I wouldn’t mention his name today) wants to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency and shift most of the responsibility for dealing with disasters to the states. Since most natural disasters (especially hurricanes and tornadoes) happen in Red States, this could save money for Blue States, which heavily subsidizes the Red States, if there’s a federal tax cut connected with it.
Foreign News
How sad that an old guy slathered with orange makeup has tried to present polite, disciplined, law-abiding Canada as some sort of enemy. No, fentanyl and illegal aliens do not pour over our northern border. But the threats from the White House are causing a harsh closing down of a boundary that when I lived fairly close to it in the late ‘60s you could cross almost as easily as driving into another state.
It was famous as the world’s longest unmilitarized border.
Check out:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/03/politics/us-canada-trade-fentanyl-fact-check/index.html
And who arms the drug cartels? We do. See:
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Looking forward to our cabanas on Gaza’s lovely beach -- to be developed by Prince Jared Kushner? -- along which every condo will have a view of the Mediterranean protected by the U.S. Navy and Palm Beach zoning ordinances—after the natives and the pesky unexploded ordnance are removed.
Here are some possible names (forwarded by my wife) of some of the facilities: Hotel Hostage, Terrorist Towers, The Underground Bar & Grille, The Tunnel Inn, Rubble Golf and Beach Club.
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Poor brave Ukrainian President Volodymyr! He says that the certain personage cited above must get “strong security guarantees” for Ukraine from Russia in any deal to end Putin’s horrific invasion.
A ”security guarantee’’ from such a dictator is worthless. I keep thinking of Hitler’s “security guarantees’’ for Europe at the Munich conference in 1938 when he started to dismember democratic Czechoslovakia as he prepared for World War II. The only thing that the likes of Putin respect is powerful countervailing physical force or the credible threat thereof.
Back in the ‘90s, Russia gave the newly independent Ukraine security guarantees, and Ukraine, as part of the deal, gave up its nuclear weaponry. It has regretted that for years.
Religious Leader, Philanthropist, Mogul
Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, the Aga Khan and 49th hereditary imam of the Ismaili sect of Shiite Islam, died last week at 88. His son Prince Rahim, a Brown University graduate, has been named to succeed him. There are an estimated 15 million Ismailis, though some Ismailis I have talked with say there are more; perhaps some find it wise to keep their heads down.
To say the least, this semi-monarch of the Ismaili Muslims (the most highly educated and worldly Muslim sect) was a memorable mix of a man. On the one hand, he oversaw an international philanthropy called the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) that mainly addressed health care, housing, education and rural economic development, mostly in the Developing World to help poor people. It operates in more than 30 countries and has an annual budget of about $1 billion aimed at promoting nonprofit development activities. He also had a particular interest in architecture, for which he endowed an international prize.
The Aga Khan was also an urbane billionaire and international entrepreneur/investor who led a life of immense luxury, with estates, racehorses, yachts, private planes and so on. The old-fashioned terms “jet setter” and “Café Society’’ come to mind.
In 2006-2013, while still an editor and a vice president at The Providence Journal, I worked on an AKDN project that set up a media school in Nairobi as part of the Aga Khan University. I was the “member secretary’’ of the “thinking group’’ that put together a very long report that established the structure of the school. (I often called myself “chief typist.’’)
I had some adventures, flying to meetings in Kenya, the Middle East, Paris, London, and Washington. In Nairobi, we stayed in a luxurious hotel partly owned by the AKDN. It has a large courtyard with a pool and verdant tropical vegetation. Sitting there, you’d sometimes forget you were only a few blocks from vast slums.
It was and is a dangerous city, in which strolls by foreigners are often discouraged, though I found it less menacing than some other cities I have walked in, such as Caracas and parts of Philadelphia.
It was a nice relief to get away once in a while from The Providence Journal, which like almost all newspapers, was being eviscerated by Facebook, etc.
I only once met in person the Aga Khan, whom we in the project referred to in emails as H.H., for “His Highness.” It was in a conference room in a Washington, D.C., hotel whose first floor seemed to have been swept clean of almost everyone for fear of an attack on H.H. by Sunni Muslim terrorists.
He entered the room with his arm in a sling from a skiing accident in the Alps. He politely and rather formally went around the room asking about Third World development and other matters, using honorifics, and taking notes. But my most vivid memory of the meeting was that he was accompanied by small and skinny servant wearing a kind of Nehru jacket who looked like the character “Mini-Me” in two Austin Powers comedies. This little creature seemed to be in charge of providing His Highness with tea.
My Aga Khan time had its exotic moments, at least to me.