Whitcomb: Trust Troubles; Take Their Money; Bank Roulette
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Trust Troubles; Take Their Money; Bank Roulette
“Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTthat the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. …”
-- From “Cartoon Physics, part 1,’’ by Nick Flynn (born 1960), poet, playwright and memoirist. To read the whole poem, hit this link:
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other.”
-- George Orwell (1903-1950), during World War II
“Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.’’
-- W. Earl Hall (1897-1969), Iowa newspaper editor
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Indeed, few experiences are as soothing (and cheap) as sitting out of the wind with the sun on your face for 20 minutes after several cold, wet days.
How many homeowners will brave the complaints of neighbors and join the annual “No Mow May’’ campaign, in which homeowners are asked to skip mowing their lawns during this lush month in order to help early-season pollinators? Closely cut lawns are deserts for bees, butterflies and birds.
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I’ve noticed that those driving the biggest and/or the most expensive (pretentious?) cars (probably most are bought on credit) are the least likely to slow down before crosswalks and let pedestrians cross the street.
A resilient society, political system and economy depend on high levels of trust. That is, one in which you can generally believe what you’re told and what you see.
But that trust has been ebbing, as lying and broken promises have become more acceptable in public and private life, especially with the rise of social media and far-right TV and radio networks. In those outlets, lie-promotion is part of the audience-building business model. (I’m not talking about those white lies in everyday life often aimed at making people feel better.) This reminds me of a nice man I knew who left his position as vice chairman of a big brokerage firm in New York because “A handshake deal doesn’t mean anything anymore on Wall Street.’’
And now we have the scary artificial-intelligence explosion, with which fake videos and texts are consumed by credulous people who are too lazy and ignorant to try to verify what’s in front of them. As they eventually realize that they’re being bamboozled all over the place, their trust in most everything implodes.
Raising the general trust level to where it was decades ago will be a long, painful process. Indeed, it may be impossible. It’s hard to believe now, but when I was in a boys’ high school many decades ago we often took exams without faculty members watching us. We’d write in the “blue books” in which we wrote our answers to the exam questions: “I pledge my honor as a gentleman that I have neither given nor received aid on this examination.” Faculty would come and go in the room mostly to be available if a student had a clerical or health problem.
How quaint!
Some folks are suing social media -- Canute-against-the-waves. For example, the administration of Providence Mayor Brett Smiley is having the city sue Meta, the parent company of the odious Facebook, as well as the manic, Chinese-owned TikTok and some other platforms. The city asserts that the tech companies are responsible for the “astounding number of adolescents [who] have begun to suffer from poor mental health and behavioral disorders” within the city.
This is a silly stunt. As awful as Facebook, et al., can be – they’ve certainly severely damaged our civic culture -- the First Amendment would seem to make such a suit dead on arrival. The only things that can minimize the sociological and psychological damage from these platforms is for responsible news media, parents, schools and honest public officials to constantly correct the untruths spewed by social media and other outlets. Artificial intelligence, of course, will make this tougher.
And don’t underestimate the corrosive role of the near-disappearance in many places of the two-parent family, a decline that started well before the rise of social media, in the misery of many young people.
Of course:
“When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.’’
-- Peter De Vries (1910-1993), American novelist and editor, especially known for his portrayals of suburban life
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"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results."
-- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Italian writer and diplomat
The National Assessment of Educational Progress tests show that knowledge of civics among eighth-graders last year fell for the first time since the federal government began testing children under the current system in 1998. The tests, also called The Nation’s Report Card, also showed a 5-point decline in average history scores.
The less citizens know about civics and history, the more political lies and demagogues flourish.
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It’s running out of time before the next recession. What can be done? For starters, the city should strive to keep the area around it clean.
But maybe it’s time for a new building.
Katherine Bergeron is being forced out as president of Connecticut College in New London because the college’s fund-raising (the euphemism is “advancement”) folks had scheduled an event, since canceled, at which she was to give a fund-raising talk at the exclusive Everglades Club, in Palm Beach. There was an uproar by some students and faculty because that club has, or at least had, a reputation of excluding Jewish and Black people. (Years ago, I knew some members from the Midwest, who were, as the old phrase went, “country club Antisemites.’’)
I’m sorry that President Bergeron didn’t give the talk because she could have raised a lot of money from rich folks at the club, some of which could have gone to more scholarship funds for poor kids so that they could attend pricey Connecticut College. That’s a respected liberal-arts institution that has long been, as with many old New England colleges, a place whose students are predominately from affluent white families.
The Everglades Club, founded in 1919, is one of many such “old money” organizations where people with similar backgrounds have long socialized with people they’re comfortable with because they look and talk like them. We can’t repeal that history, but most such organizations have made at least cosmetic efforts to reduce the impression of bigotry in the past few decades.
I can well remember when many WASP clubs kept out Irish and Italian Catholics as well as Jews and Blacks. In response, these excluded groups created their own clubs. However, in the past two decades, more and more of these organizations have become more ethnically -- but not economically -- integrated. But then, all old money started as new money, and if you can pay the fees….
Anyway, I suggest that nonprofits (but not necessarily the hyper-rich ones such as Harvard) grab the money where they can and use it to make their institutions – and society – fairer. We can’t retroactively change the past behavior of bigoted people, which means most people in varying degrees.
Ms. Bergeron was a music professor and dean of the undergraduate college at Brown University before becoming president of Connecticut College.
Casino Banks
Moral hazard: Lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences.
Too many banks have become highly speculative investment funds propped up by the Federal Reserve when the Fed is repeatedly forced to address financial crises created by the banks’ own rich executives. Many of these institutions borrow cheaply from the Fed against artificially inflated assets. And too many bank managements have engaged in sweetheart deals with favored customers, too many of whom were grossly over-extended considering such economic realities as, for example, the inevitable boom-and-bust cycles of the tech sector concentrated in California.
No wonder we have yet another banking crisis. Meanwhile, the biggest banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, et al. -- become bigger and bigger and thus even more “too big to fail’’ than they have long been as they absorb troubled small and mid-sized banks. In another 2008-style crisis, the taxpayers might have to bail out some of these behemoths, too.
It's obvious that we need more bank regulation. The loosening of rules under Trump was not helpful, to say the least. It’s also obvious that the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy, from the Great Recession to 2022, went on too long.
Oh for the old days when investment banks and commercial banks were clearly separated.
Pick Your Taxes?
Rhode Island state Rep. Charlene Lima said something silly about the proposed state “Equality in Abortion Coverage Act,’’ which she opposes. The measure would extend abortion coverage to Medicaid recipients and state government employees.
Ms. Lima, representing Providence and Cranston, asserted:
“The government should not force people to pay taxes for something they’re fundamentally against.’’
There are innumerable things funded by government that many citizens “fundamentally’’ oppose, such as, for example, defense spending. Too bad. If we’re to have a government at all, we must make people pay for it. At least in our messy quasi-democracy/plutocracy the people have more say over how their money is spent than they do in much of the rest of world, run by kleptocratic dictators. That isn’t to say that we don’t have powerful kleptocrats, too, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, whose sleaze seems bottomless.
Chaos would obviously accompany letting people pick and choose which public services they pay for.
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New Bedford officials are apparently moving away from the idea of rent control in the Whaling City. Rent control sounds nice, but in reality it can discourage the building of new, much-needed multi-family housing and lead landlords to scrimp on maintenance and renovations.
I hope that the extension of MBTA rail service to that city, assuming that it happens despite the current property-payment dispute between the city and the agency, leads to a housing-building boom there. Ditto Fall River.
Hit this link to the property-payment dispute:
By the way, New Bedford is fortunate to have two exciting and innovative museums – The New Bedford Whaling Museum and the New Bedford Art Museum.
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There are censorship efforts, some very sincere, some tinctured with politics, to protect kids from “inappropriate” publications in school and other libraries. But that’s in a world where hard-core porn is easily available to one and all on the Internet, though “parental-control’’ features can be of marginal help.
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Eventually, the mass murders with assault rifles that are so frequent in the Red States will start driving many people away, as will extreme weather and, yes, soaring housing costs.
Far-right billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel indicates he probably won’t be moving his operations from California to Miami after all. He says housing has gotten too expensive.
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We may never know for sure who launched the videoed drone attacks on the Kremlin last week, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were by anti-Putin Russians or, more likely, by the Putin regime itself as an excuse for it to commit even more brutal war crimes against Ukraine. The mafia state run by Putin has used lethal “false flag’ ’ attacks in the past as justifications for strengthening its tyranny.
One thinks of the fire set in the Reichstag, the German parliament, on Feb. 27, 1933. The new Nazi regime blamed it on the Communists, but it was likely set by the Nazis themselves as an excuse for giving Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers, which he used to crush opponents.