Whitcomb: Ruggerio a Narcissist? Europe Needs a Divorce; Bezos Does His Boss’s Bidding

Whitcomb: Ruggerio a Narcissist? Europe Needs a Divorce; Bezos Does His Boss’s Bidding

 

“I believe it is peace for our time…Go home and
get a nice quiet sleep.”

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[British Prime Minister] Neville Chamberlain, after the Munich conference, dismembered Czechoslovakia at Hitler’s demand in 1938

 

 

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping
it will eat him last.”

—Various forms of this quote have been attributed to Winston Churchill.

 

 

“A triumph, yes, a veritable smash!
From Munich I convey peace for our time.
Great Britain’s safe from Hitler’s greedy hands!
Rejoice that all the British Empire’s lands,
Comprising every culture, race and clime,
Shall never be assailed nor bled for cash.’’

-- From “Peace for Our Time,’’ by Brian Yapko, American lawyer and poet

Here’s the whole poem:

 

 

“When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.’’

-- Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), Nigerian novelist, poet, and Brown University professor.

 

 

‘’Enemies to me are the sauce piquant to my dish of life.’’

-- Elsa Maxwell (1883-1963) American gossip columnist, songwriter, screenwriter, radio personality and professional hostess

 

 

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Ah, memory! So often, the further back you remember, the clearer it seems.  But what happened last week? And I wonder if technology’s letting us look up everything on a screen to confirm or correct memories erodes our mental discipline and recall.

 

I have often wished that my memory was less sharp about certain events.

 

Just who are those people in those yellowing photos from the ’50s? Family resemblance?

 

 

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So we embark on the year’s greening trail,  perhaps to be covered by wet snow in brief intervals but more brown than any other color for a while. It’s forever familiar and forever new, orchestrated by the return of redwing blackbirds, first the males, singing “conk-a-ree,’’ then joined in a couple of weeks by the females, and then by the spring peepers.

 

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The forecast for our meteorological spring, which started yesterday, is for warmer than usual. Of course, that was the forecast for this winter, which has turned out to be the coldest since 2014-2015. It’s complicated….

 

Still, a new study says that spring in Massachusetts has warmed by about 2.5 degrees in the last 55 years. Get ready for lots of woods fires in April.

 

 

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While driving to a business meeting in very low-lying Barrington, R.I., last Wednesday, I wondered what it would look like underwater in 40 or 50 years. Or perhaps they could build a dike along Route 114? There’s talk of it. For now, let’s hope that the town’s hurricane evacuation signs are up to date.

 

 

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If there is a strike at Dutch/Belgian-owned Stop & Shop, perhaps customers will start to look around more energetically for locally owned alternatives to that vast company and monopolistic Amazon’s Whole Foods. Even better would be if a group could get financing to start a new regionally controlled grocery chain to join Dave’s Fresh Marketplace, based in East Greenwich, R.I., and Market Basket, based in Tewksbury, Mass. Both are admirable.

 

 

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Rhode Island Senate President Dominick Ruggerio is 76 and has assorted health issues that have limited his ability to lead. But he refuses to step down. That reminds us of how such – narcissistic? – refusal to bow out can be disastrous. Joe Biden’s failure to leave in, say,  late 2022 or early 2023, after he got most of his legislative program through, and after he had promised to be a “transitional’’ president, was central in letting his criminal predecessor return to pillage. When he finally bailed out last July, there wasn’t enough time for a Democratic nominee to mount a successful campaign, though poor Kamala Harris did come within about 1.5 points of Trump in the popular vote.

 

Given the Democrats’ overwhelming control of the Rhode Island General Assembly, the incapacity of one of its two most important leaders (the other, of course, being House Speaker Josep Shekarchi) we enter the core of the lawmaking season is a serious matter indeed. That’s especially this year, with many federal programs skidded to be eviscerated and the potential for a recession.

 

Presumably, the southern New England states will try to coordinate their challenges to slashes in federal programs that affect them. Rhode Island’s legislative leadership should hire someone to camp out on Beacon Hill to see what Massachusetts legislators decide to do since the Ocean State will often have to follow their lead.

 

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What is it about life in America that leads so many people to turn to drugs, which foreign and domestic gangs armed with vast arsenals of ever more easily available American guns are pleased to provide?

 

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Companies of all kinds will try to have you do everything online – to boost their profits by, among things, saving them the cost of mailing paper bills. But everything online can be hacked and/or destroyed. Try to get a hard copy for everything you can.

 

 

Europe Must Divorce America

European Union leaders are coming around to the painful recognition that the U.S., now led by a traitorous gangster and Russian asset, has become so corrupt, erratic, and unreliable that it can no longer be a true ally. An alliance that for 80 years helped block Soviet/Russian aggression and promoted liberal democracy, human rights, a moderately regulated capitalism and other Western values seems kaput.

 

This relationship also nourished a transatlantic economic synergy that helped create and maintain long-lasting prosperity and wealth in Western Europe, America, and Canada.

 

Now let’s see if  E.U. members (minus Putin stooges Hungary and Slovakia) can create a European army and otherwise unify themselves much more than they have to confront growing threats from the east. The European Union has the wealth, technological infrastructure and population to do this. But does it have the will and organizational ingenuity to unite its members, all of whom are threatened in varying degrees by fascist Russia and its allied dictatorships China, Iran, and North Korea, to address this existential issue?

 

Meanwhile, in the U.K., many of those who voted for Brexit have deep buyer’s remorse and wish that their country could rejoin the EU.

 

This is also the time for the E.U.   to take big steps to reform/streamline its economic policies in order to attract companies and individual investors who may be increasingly leery of operating in a country run by a larcenous autocracy amidst frequent policy chaos.

 

Trump wants to bribe rich people, via his “gold cards,’’  to move to the United States. But even under a regime whose leading figures want nothing to do with poor people, even as they bamboozle them with “social issues’’ and worship wealth and power above all, they might find America too jarring, unpredictable and dangerous for their taste.

 

The U.S. dollar may not continue to be the strongest reserve currency.

 

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What a joke -- promising “security guarantees’’ in return for Ukraine giving up land seized by Russia and doing minerals deals! Ukraine got “security guarantees’’ from Russia and the West in the ’90s. When dealing with tyrants, “guarantees’’ are always worthless. The only “security guarantee’’ that is worth anything is that which can ultimately come out of the barrel of a gun.

 

 

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The cabinet meeting last Wednesday presided over by co-caudillos and co-sociopaths Trump and former illegal alien/ and still “on-the-spectrum’’ Musk (enriched by government contracts), was darkly funny because of the fearful supineness, seasoned with opportunism and greed, of members of the cabinet. But they had grounds for pleasure, too, since most people in the room are very, very rich and they’ve been promised big tax cuts – even as Musk warned that America was going bankrupt! The attendees, with their concierge doctors, etc., certainly don’t have to worry that the plan is to slash Medicaid and other social programs.

 

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The new/old regime wants to expand programs that move taxpayer money from public schools to tax-exempt private ones, whose creators are sometimes, not coincidently, MAGA types. This includes some “evangelical Christian’’ institutions where the kids may be indoctrinated in  “Biblical literalist’’  theologies that assert, among other idiocies, that God created the world around 4004 B.C.

 

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Amazonian Jeff Bezos’s decision to turn The Washington Post’s opinion pages into a right-wing mouthpiece, blocking other voices, isn’t surprising given his fear of Trump. It reminded me of the latter’s successfully using the threat of jail time for Meta/Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg if that Technobro Barbarian didn’t end fact-checking on Facebook. Since The Donald, in particular, and MAGA, in general, are cesspools of lies and disinformation (some from the Kremlin), it’s not surprising that Trump would make that threat.

 

Bezos, who contributed to his leader’s inaugural slush fund, knows he needs to suck up to him to preserve access to federal contracts for his other companies and fend off any anti-monopoly cases. Clearly, his fortune, estimated at $233 billion, is too small for him to buy groceries.

 

Here’s a rundown of companies that support Trump – almost entirely for  cynical reasons: