Whitcomb: Republic of Racket; Warmer Than You Thought; Repelling Roads
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Republic of Racket; Warmer Than You Thought; Repelling Roads
“I will go down to the Last Chance Saloon, drink a gallon or two of gin, shoot a game or two of dice and sleep the rest of the night on one of Mike’s barrels.
You will let the old shanty go to rot, the white people’s clothes turn to dust, and the Calvary Baptist Church sink into the bottomless pit.
You will spend your days forgetting you married me and your nights hunting the warm gin Mike serves the ladies in the rear of the Last Chance Saloon.
Throw the children into the river; civilization has given us too many. It is better to die than it is to grow up and find out that you are colored.
Pluck the stars out of the heavens. The stars mark our destiny. The stars marked my destiny.
I am tired of civilization.’’
-- From “Tired,’’ by Fenton Johnson (1888-1958)
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‘’Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.’’
-- Will Rogers (1879-1935), American social commentator, burlesque performer and actor
"Russia always had luck. The tsars slaughtered their own people, established the stupidest and most ignorant laws, embroiled themselves in the riskiest of wars, set unreal political goals, and the foolish always became the wise, the reactionary the progressive, and defeat was changed to victory."
-- From The Polish Complex, by Polish novelist and film director Tadeusz Konwicki (1926-2015)
NOISE
America is a noisy place, often painfully so. But many people seem to like that.
The other night, six of us went to a Mexican restaurant in Providence called Dolores. The food was pretty good, though the service was a bit slow because of what appeared to be the staffing shortage that bedevils many restaurants. Always a tough business, but much more so in the Age of COVID.
It was a painful meal for us. The bass-heavy background music made it very arduous to try to hear what people across the table were saying. The next day, our ears still hurt from two hours in the racket.
And yet the place was packed on that Monday evening. You could see customers shouting to each other, but most were smiling. My hunch is that for many people in our culture of cacophony, a noisy place signifies excitement and somehow evokes the happy idea that they’re where the action is – that they’re not missing out.
Since the last two generations have grown up amidst increasing noise – rock music, etc. – that’s more and more difficult to escape – perhaps quiet makes them nervous.
Meanwhile, the gasoline-powered leaf blowers shriek from dawn to dusk, polluting the air and driving away the birds and indeed many walkers who try to avoid the racket, the fumes and the grit by finding other routes. And drugstores have automated bad music.
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Warming Trend
Most New Englanders seem to sense, based mostly on anecdotes, that the climate is warming. The data show that vividly.
Our region is one of the fastest warming parts of America, with Burlington, Vt., showing the biggest increase in average winter temperatures in the past half-century– 7.1 degrees – with Concord, N.H., heating up by 6 degrees and Portland, Maine, by 5 degrees. Providence rose by 4.4 degrees but, curiously, Boston only by 3 degrees, below the national winter warming of 3.3 degrees.
Oh, yes. Many New Englanders, especially during the Putin-provoked international energy crisis, may be happy that the milder winter than usual predicted for this one might restrain their fuel bills, though they’ll be bigger than last winter. But that doesn’t mean we won’t have cold snaps and snowstorms, during which data deniers, out of comforting ignorance, will crow that the assertion that global warming caused by burning fossil fuel is a scam of evil, commie elitists. (By the way, to get a big snowstorm there must be warm moist air in the Atlantic south of our region.)
The rapid warming means such changes as more heat-loving bugs moving into the region, harm to such crops (some fruits trees, maple syrup, etc.) that depend on cold winters for their growing cycles, and damage to such seasonal industries as skiing. Of course, a warmer New England also extends the region’s summer-resort season.
While climate change may reduce your winter heating bills, it also raises your summer air-conditioning bills – that is, until we have a major increase in the share of electricity generated by renewable energy and not natural gas. Don’t hold your breath. Our use of gas and oil will continue to increase for years; we depend on it.
The effects of climate change are scarier in other parts of the country, particularly in the Southwest, which is rapidly running out of water.
Will such places as New England and the Great Lakes states draw millions of climate refugees from the South and West seeking milder temperatures and reliable fresh-water supplies? We’ll start to know over the next decade.
A lot of bad stuff will come out of states promoting the drug business to get revenue to try to avoid honestly raising taxes to pay for public services. Legalizing marijuana sales brings in a lot of dubious people, as do casinos, another way for states to get revenue without raising taxes. (Casinos tend to draw heavily on poorer and sometimes desperate customers.)
Consider Gerry McGraw, president and CEO of Rhode Island’s largest “compassion center,’’ and hyper-materialistic showoff, selling millions of dollars of marijuana annually. He has been a founding member of the National Cannabis Industry Association since 2011.
According to Rhode Island State Police documents, McGraw and his wife, Elizabeth, made more than 1,000 phone calls with Dino Guilmette — an individual with strong ties to La Cosa Nostra who is now facing multiple drug charges.
City neighborhoods across America should pay homage to Frank Sargent (1915-1998), a moderate Republican governor, who in 1972 halted plans to extend Interstate 95 from Canton, Mass., to Boston’s South End with “the Southwest Expressway’’. The year before, he had canceled the “Inner Belt’’. That was to be a six-lane, limited-access highway to be plowed through parts of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge and Somerville. (I covered the very accessible and salty Mr. Sargent when I was a reporter in Boston, in 1970-71.)
He also was one of those pushing to change federal transportation-funding laws to allow some of the money that would have been spent on yet more roads to go instead to public-transit agencies such as the MBTA, which, with all its flaws, is a reason for Greater Boston’s prosperity.
His actions, in the face of intense lobbying by, among other economic interests, construction unions, helped preserve some of the best things about Boston’s quality of life –the number of its vibrant neighborhoods and parks – and acted as a model for other states and towns and cities, and even for the highway-expansion-obsessed federal government.
Frank Sargent, an expert in public works, came to realize that building new highways, and widening existing ones, attracts more vehicles while usually ruining the areas they run through.
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This group hides behind ads that portray the opposition to the wind turbines as being led by fishermen quite reasonably worried about how the installation of the turbines and underwater cables might hurt their business. And indeed, these wind farms will inconvenience them, though mostly in the installation process. They may also be good for some kinds of fishing.
In fact, the heavily federally subsidized fossil-fuel biz wants to squash competition.
Hit these links:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/climate/texas-public-policy-foundation-climate-change.html
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I wrote in last week’s column that we should get rid of the Jones Act, which mandates that all vessels moving goods between U.S. ports must be American-built, -owned and -crewed.
I would have done well to mention that the law hurts our still tiny offshore-wind industry because parts imported from Europe must be assembled on land here and then delivered to the offshore sites, which are deemed second U.S. locations, like a port. Thanks, Dennis Duffy, for pointing this out.
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German fascists, partly inspired by our very own QAnon and the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, have been plotting to stage a coup via a violent attack on the German parliament. Nutty stuff, or really ominous? The plotters reached out for help from fascist Russia, which asserts that it didn’t provide any.
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Swapping U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner, who has been held in a Russian prison on an absurd cannabis charge, for the vicious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout (aka “Merchant of Death’’), who has been held in an American one, for, among other things, conspiracy to kill Americans, is a lousy trade. Putin may find the expertise and connections of Bout, with his close ties to Russian military intelligence, very useful, including in the dictator’s war on Ukraine.
It’s a relief that Sen./Rev. Raphael Warnock narrowly defeated the ignorant, violent, pathological liar, hyper-hypocrite but sometimes charming Trump protege Herschel Walker in last Tuesday’s Georgia runoff. Still, it’s disturbing that he won 48.6 percent of the votes. But then, Georgia is in the South, where education levels are even lower than they are in most of America.
Most of the about 1.7 million people who voted for Walker voted against their own socio-economic interests, but give the GOP/QAnon credit, they’re damn good at harvesting resentments, hatred and celebrity! They’d better be: They’ve got a lot of money riding on it.
The chaotic former football star (whose legal home is in Texas) was backed by tens of millions of dollars in secret money at a time when many people rarely read, and get their “news’’ from very lucrative far-right TV, radio and Web sites’ lie machines. Yes, Raphael Warnock’s campaign also got piles of money in his winning campaign for re-election. The right-wing Supremes opened the floodgates of secret and not-so-secret campaign cash from powerful organizations and individuals with its corrosive Citizens United ruling, in 2010.
Still, you’d think these voters would have a little more self-respect.
Why would the Georgia GOP/QAnon, encouraged by Trump, put up somebody as embarrassing as Herschel Walker? Easy: Billionaire and millionaire campaign donors knew he’d do exactly what they asked if he got elected: Vote to cut their taxes and eliminate pesky environmental, health-care and other regulations.
It’s staggering how low the bar has become for political candidates in much of the country in recent years. Blame the lazy voters and the general coarsening of society that’s been going on for decades.
D.C. Detective Story
“The front group archipelago designed to capture the Court for dark-money donors did not spring into existence out of thin air. It had a history. A bad one.’’
Rhode Island U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s new book, written with Jennifer Mueller, is both maddening and entertaining as a kind of droll detective story with plenty of mordant humor. It’s called The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court.
The key tool in this takeover is the Federalist Society, which despite its dignified name, has as its central mission placing in the federal courts, via its affiliate, the Republican Party, judges who will expand the wealth and power of already very rich individuals and corporations.
Consider that Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett are present or former members of the society. This organization, by the way, promotes “originalism,’’ in which members claim to be able to mind-read what the drafters of the Constitution were thinking back in the late 1780s, when we had slavery, only men with property could vote, corporations, as we know them now, didn’t exist, and the right to bear arms as part of a “well-regulated {state} militia’’ in what would come to be the Second Amendment was protected in a time of muskets and flintlock pistols.
The New Press’s summary of the book dovetails with what I took from it and hearing Mr. Whitehouse talk about the book at the Providence Athenaeum. The summary includes:
“The scheme utilized the Federalist Society as an appointments turnstile, spent secret millions to support the nominees, orchestrated an ‘amicus brief’ signaling apparatus, and propped up front-group litigants to ‘fast-lane’ strategic test cases to the friendly justices.
“Whitehouse finds the same small handful of right-wing billionaires and corporations running operations that he likens to ‘covert ops,’ ultimately enticing the Senate to break rules, norms, and precedents to confirm wildly inappropriate nominees who would advance the anti-government agenda of a small number of corporate oligarchs….
“The Scheme pulls back the curtain on a powerful and hidden apparatus that has spent years trying to corrupt our politics, control our courts, and degrade our democracy.’’
Whether or not you agree with Senator Whitehouse’s conclusion, the book is a hell of a read. It could even be a movie.
By the way, unlike all other American courts, the Supremes have no code of ethics.