Whitcomb: R.I. Paper Chase; Mob Boss World; Privatizing Social-Service Fraud; AI’s Crime Lies

Whitcomb: R.I. Paper Chase; Mob Boss World; Privatizing Social-Service Fraud; AI’s Crime Lies

 

“The rest

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is dark and light together tolled

against the boundary-riven

houses. Against our lives,

the stunning wholeness of the world.’’

From “January,’’ by Betty Adcock (born 1938), American poet

Here’s the whole poem:

 

 

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“And even though it's snowing, violets are growing
I know why and so do you.’’

 

From the corny song “I Know Why (And So Do You),’’ popularized by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the 1941 movie Sun Valley, Idaho Serenade, which helped promote winter sports.  I first saw the film in the winter of 1971 in my  hotel room in Jackson, N.H., where I was covering the search for and rescue of two ill-prepared climbers on Mt.  Washington for the old Boston Herald Traveler.

 

 

“My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.‘’

– Frederick the Great (1712-1786), monarch of Prussia

 

 

“Oligopoly, plutocracy, kleptocracy: All things that are good for a shareholder. “

– James J.  (“Jim”) Cramer (born 1955),   flamboyant American television personality focusing on Wall Street, author and former hedge-fund manager.

 

 

Those Old Newspapers

Rhode Island has a very rich history, to say the least, and a lot of it can be seen in the state’s hundreds of years of newspapers, most of them tiny.

 

The Rhode Digital Newspaper Project aims to make the Ocean State’s historic newspapers freely available online. The Providence Public Library and the Rhode Island Historical Society, as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, have undertaken an extensive newspaper-digitization project. This will result in a wealth of Rhode Island’s historical newspapers being digitized and widely available through the Library of Congress Web site for the first time. What a boon for historians and the general public.

 

Take a look:

https://rinewspapers.org/

 

Such projects encourage us to take the long view, and make us less susceptible to the anxieties of the present. Nothing lasts!

 

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All those tossed Christmas trees needn’t go to waste.  For example, they can be made into very good mulch or dumped whole on hillsides to reduce erosion.

Winter around here can be tedious, but every once in a while, when there’s bright early-afternoon sunshine, no wind and about 40 degrees, it can be exhilarating.

 

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New York’s new congestion-pricing system for traffic in Manhattan has been working very well, despite Trump’s efforts to stop it. Might Boston try a similar program? It would be good for the regional economy, mental and physical health and the environment.

READ HERE

 

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GoLocal didn’t ask me my opinion beforehand, but I certainly agree with its selection of mostly nonpartisan government reformer and brilliant systems expert Ken Block as its “Man of the Year."

He’s a statesman and a local and national treasure.

Hit this link:

 

 

A More Brutal World

The Nazis cited their demand for German Lebensraum (“living space”) in their invasions, especially of Eastern Europe. What’s old is new again….

 

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake {Tapper of CNN}, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.’’

 

That’s Stephen Miller,  probably Trump’s leading Fascist adviser, talking about his leader’s plan to seize Greenland from our fellow NATO member Denmark, that small but vibrant democratic nation. But how long will America, a nation that co-founded NATO out of our enlightened self-interest – including economic -- and our formerly shared Western values centered on democracy and human rights, remain a member?

 

Everyone in the world is entangled in various ways. We can’t seal ourselves off behind our weaponry.

 

This is the ideology that the remarkably creepy (ask people who knew him before his rise to power) Miller promotes: Power for the sake of power and self-enrichment by those inside the regime as those outside it suck up to it, mostly because of greed and/or fear.

 

The ideology opposes defending human rights and doesn’t see the value to the regime of alliances based on shared humane values. But while this approach is lucrative for its members and others who benefit from it – most of whom are very rich --- the effect is to deprive America of the democratic allies we will need in an increasingly brutal world dominated by dictators Trump would like to be one of. (Thank God he’s almost 80….)

 

And the Trump foreign agenda gives such ruthless regimes as China and Russia even more of a pass for aggression.

 

In any event, the regime (which includes other members of the Trump crime family), as with its attack on Venezuela to control its oil, threatens to expand its looting of another nation’s natural resources by seizing Greenland and destroying NATO in the process. Isn’t it odd that the overwhelming majority of people living on the world’s largest island oppose being taken over by Trump and his thugs? As for the kidnapped Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, Trump would govern America the same way that Maduro’s brutal kleptocracy ran Venezuela if he could get away with it. Is he getting there?

 

By the way, exploiting Greenland’s mineral wealth has many dangers, as this scientist warns: READ HERE

 

But then, plenty of Americans support Trump’s lawlessness. They like the idea of strongman rule because they believe, or want to believe, his lies that he’s doing it for them, without having to deal with the delays and layers of process and review required in a real democracy or republic.  But they’ll miss those quaint means of government if a complete dictatorship takes over, forcing them to take orders with no say in the matter. Indeed, they’ll be told to shut up – or else. Something to think about as we mark America’s 250th anniversary this year.

 

Meanwhile, it would be very good indeed if  Cuba were to cast off its Communist dictatorship, but not via a U.S. invasion and all the entanglements that would create. Is there a plan to deal with Cuba’s economic collapse because of the cutoff of Venezuelan oil? Will hundreds of thousands of Cubans try to flee to Florida?

 

Partly a Privatization Problem

I suspect that something like the social-service fraud scandal in Minnesota can be found in other states, including Red ones, which tend to be more corrupt than Blue states. Don’t look for the Trump regime to do much investigating in, say, Louisiana or Mississippi.

 

The Minnesota case has gotten more attention in large part because much of it has involved Somali-Americans, and Trump hates them, as he generally hates dark-skinned people and the countries they come from.  (An exception is made for the dusky Kash Patel, of Indian descent, the impressively incompetent  showboat FBI director— latest example, he screwed up the Brown shootings case by putting out to the  media the wrong suspect.)

 

The chaos connected with the pandemic made everything worse, as did former high school teacher Gov. Tim Walz’s shortcomings as an executive, however generally honest he may be. (COVID helped elect Biden in 2020, and its effects -- inflation and swelling immigration -- brought back Trump in 2024.)

 

It’s rich to hear Trump allege that Minnesota is corrupt, considering that he is the most corrupt president in American history by far.

 

But I think that at the heart of such scandals as Minnesota’s is that far too much of such services has been in effect privatized. This has been part of a long campaign by Republicans to shrink government by getting rid of public employees and replacing them with owners and employees of a multitude of companies, many of them small, and some very politically connected.

 

Their activities are much more difficult to oversee than public agencies, and so some of these vendors feel powerful incentives to loot welfare systems for maximum profit.

 

Of course, many people being served by social services have very complicated and unpredictable problems, and the confusing and sometimes contradictory local, state, and federal regulations make social services a very difficult, if essential, sector to operate in, even without corruption.

 

In Western Europe, whose people are generally less corrupt and less avaricious than Americans, well-supervised public employees provide most social services. 

 

 

Artificial Intelligence as Lie Machine

In the Brown University shootings, surveillance images taken by private security cameras in the campus area were manipulated by AI and put out on social media and elsewhere, misleading the public and undermining law enforcement’s ability to do its job.

 

AI means that everyone must be ever more wary of images on the electronic media – a sector that hosts an ever-expanding swamp of sociopaths. Very sadly, especially for our rapidly eroding quasi-democracy/plutocracy,  public trust is disappearing. Print on paper is much safer than stuff on screens because it can’t  be so easily manipulated.

 

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I’ve often thought that the practice in recent decades of building gigantic “presidential libraries,’’ such as the monstrosity going up in Chicago for Obama, and I’m sure what will be an even more hideous one for Trump in Miami, has strengthened the acceptance of the sort of imperial leaders that the Founding Fathers opposed.

 

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Weekly check on public lies: READ HERE