Whitcomb: Snow; Federal Hill Noise Machines; New Age of Sail; Wall Street Occupies Washington
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Snow; Federal Hill Noise Machines; New Age of Sail; Wall Street Occupies Washington
“I have a hangnail, and my heart is ...
What? What's that? What's that you say?
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTYou say today is .............. Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play!"
-- From “I Cannot Go to School Today,’’ by Shel Silverstein (1930-1999), American writer and cartoonist
“I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.’’
—Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), movie star
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
-- From Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (born 1960), American historian
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Likewise with snow. We love it as kids but as adults we tend to think of it mostly as a big inconvenience. But encourage kids to enjoy its glittery beauty and fresh-faced fun (until the stuff gets old and grimy) -- making snowmen, etc. It’s something to help offset the darkness of early and mid winter. Let them collect joy while they can.
Last Tuesday night, there was a tiny bit of very dry snow that looked like the fake snow used on TV and in movies. Nature imitating art!
Providence City Council President Rachel Miller is pushing a really bad proposed ordinance that would allow Federal Hill restaurants to let more musicians play (loudly) there, with amplification indoors and out. In short, it would turn more restaurants into nightclubs. That would scare away many customers seeking quiet meals as well as tourists who might want to stroll along colorful Atwells Avenue.
Don’t people want to be able to hear their tablemates while having dinner?
And, sad to say, loud music tends to attract nasty people, some violent. Federal Hill has attracted quite enough of them in the past few years, as all too often a culture of cacophony has been embraced there. On some nights, the Providence Police seemingly don’t have the resources to adequately address this mess, exacerbated by such things as the effective (and stupid) legalization of marijuana. Ah, crowds of drunk and/or stoned people!
Shipping by Sail
I mention this in part because New England has such a sailing tradition.
There’s a small but growing move to bring back sail for cargo ships, to reduce fuel costs and the ocean shipping’s sector’s carbon footprint. This could become a big deal over the next decade. A total of more than 100,000 ships transport more than 80 percent of products in world trade.
Tech advances are making mostly wind-powered vessels more economically attractive these days. They’re supplemented by engines to navigate in very narrow waters and when the wind fails. Note the mechanized systems for raising and adjusting sails, giant carbon-fiber masts, light aluminum hulls, highly computerized navigation systems and steadily improving wind forecasting. At the same time, giant rigid sails are being installed on what had been totally engine-powered vessels as power supplements.
Clarksons Research says a total of 165 cargo ships are either already using some wind power or will have wind systems installed. Maritime painters loved making pictures of clipper and other big sailing vessels. Now they have new dramatic images to play with.
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As New England’s winters generally get shorter and warmer, I wonder when localities will start pushing back a lot more on ski areas’ increasing use of water supplies to make snow. The current drought has heightened concerns about this use for what is basically a sport for a small number of affluent people. There’s also concern about erosion. And the engines used to make the snow are big fossil-fuel emitters. That’s rather ironic since the emissions add a little bit to the global warming that’s starting to hit the winter sports sector hard.
At the Providence College men’s basketball team’s game last Tuesday against Provo, Utah’s
Brigham Young University, PC students repeatedly chanted, “F-- the Mormons.’’ Whatever moral guidance the kids were supposed to get at that Catholic school doesn’t seem to have entirely set in.
But you could see this embarrassment as a sign that some colleges, intentionally or not, all too often put their alleged academic and cultural missions in the shade as what has become, in effect, their professional teams take the spotlight above all else. PC, and many other institutions, sometimes seem more like colleges attached to professional sports teams rather than the other way around.
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‘’Giving Tuesday” last week raised some much needed funds for charities. Thanks, givers! But what would raise a lot more is changing the Trump tax “reform” of 2017 that made it much less attractive for people who aren’t rich to get a tax break for donating.
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The murder in Manhattan of Brian Thompson, the CEO of the insurance division of the huge UnitedHealth Group, and said to be a nice man, has created some sick jokes. The company, which would hugely benefit from MAGA’s Project 2025, is well-known, or you might say infamous, for frequently denying coverage of assorted illnesses and injuries despite patients’ and physicians’ pleas and is a big player in the Medicare Advantage sector, which has been a notable taker of taxpayer money compared to traditional Medicare.
Thompson and two fellow executives at the company were accused of insider trading in a lawsuit.
As we move into what might be a four-year (or more) constitutional crisis, financial-sector moguls are about to get even more political power as Trump names private equity, hedge fund and venture-capital moguls, some billionaires to high positions across his regime. The scary thing about these organizations is how secretive and little regulated they are compared to “old-fashioned’’ commercial and investment banks, retirement funds and brokerage accounts, etc.
(Wouldn’t it be nice if someone who had run a factory instead of manipulating money got a high-level job in a presidential administration? Wall Street and Big Tech own America.)
The most important of these nominees is probably the hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent, named to be Treasury secretary. And note that Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and the slimy Donald Trump Jr. have been heavily involved in venture capital.
Billionaires are expected to take key posts across the administration. Indeed, being a billionaire who has given lots of money to Trump is a major criterion for the job. Also a key asset is looking good on television. After all, the only money the daddy-financed guy ever made before running for and winning the presidency (which has been a gold mine for him and his family) was from a TV “reality TV’’ series.
As William A. Birdthistle, a lawyer and former high Securities and Exchange Commission official, noted in a New York Times article, private-equity firms, hedge funds and venture-capital firms avoid the registration statements, quarterly reports and other mandatory disclosures meant to protect investors.
You can be sure that Trump’s appointees will do everything they can to further enrich themselves by pushing to break down the legal barriers that have until now mostly prevented these barely regulated and sometimes dangerously speculative investments from moving into unrich Americans’ traditional investment vehicles, especially IRA’s and 401(k)’s.
Further, given the highly speculative nature of private-equity firms (some of which have taken over, looted and destroyed many previously fine companies), hedge funds and venture-capital funds, to let them seize even more of American finance increases the chance of another crash, which would probably be worse than the speculation-caused one in 2008 that launched the Great Recession. Meanwhile, hold on as the unregulated crypto market, which lures global scoundrels, surges – until it implodes….
The general public would pay the price as the billionaires who cause the next crash would skate free, as in 2008. It’s the great American tradition of socializing the risks and privatizing the profits.
The Pardoners Tale
Of course, Biden shouldn’t have pardoned his son, however much he might have feared the criminal-rich Trump regime would persecute Hunter, who has long been an albatross for the Biden family. It further promotes the idea that the powerful and those connected to them are above the law, an idea promoted by the fascism-fancying U.S. Supreme Court in their ruling that their leader, Trump, could pretty much do anything he wanted.
Of course, the hypocrisy from the MAGA mob on this is predictably loud. They were fine with Trump’s (a criminal himself) pardon of such sleazoids and/or crazies as Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort.
By the way, meet Trump’s nominee for ambassador to France, New Jersey real-estate mogul Charles Kushner, father of Trump son-in-law and Saudi business partner Jared Kushner. Charles Kushner was convicted in 2005 of assisting in the filing of false tax returns, retaliating against a witness in the case against him and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. Kushner devised a scheme to retaliate against a witness and her husband by having a prostitute seduce the husband and covertly filming them having sex.
(He was prosecuted by then U.S. attorney Chris Christie, a Republican, who later was elected New Jersey governor and ran twice for the GOP presidential nomination.)
About half of American voters have essentially told us that they don’t care much or at all about morality or ethics in public life or the preservation of democracy. Eventually they will care but it may be too late to do anything about it.
It’s hard to see how any of this will get better. We must live with it.
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I wonder what might happen if, as was done briefly by South Korea’s president, Trump declares martial law in order to jail his political enemies and squash the free media.
I also wonder how many Americans are engaging in self-censorship to avoid the wrath of our would-be dictator.
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Trump joked (?) to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Canada could become the 51st state. This reminds me of when the Orange Caudillo offered to buy Greenland (lots of mineral wealth there!) from Denmark.
While Canada has some big flaws, such as not contributing nearly enough to NATO defense, when it’s compared to the uncontrolled greed, exhibitionism, class divisions and status obsessions in the U.S., Canada looks like a pillar of decency. New Englanders are lucky that it’s next door (buffering the occasional Arctic outbursts headed our way) and not part of the U.S.