Whitcomb: Unfair to Small Brewers; Stopping Your Shopping? Gutting Agencies That Serve Us
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Unfair to Small Brewers; Stopping Your Shopping? Gutting Agencies That Serve Us
“Aren’t graveyards and battlefields
our most efficient gardens?
Journeys begin there too if the flowers are taken
into account, and shouldn’t we always
take the flowers into account? Bring them to us.
We’ll come back to you. Peace will come to you.’’
-- From “A Brief History of Hostility,’’ by Jaamal May (born 1982), American poet
“Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.’’
-- Theodore Roszak (1933-2011), American historian and novelist
“There’s folks ‘ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.’’
-- George Eliot (pen name of novelist Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) in Adam Bede (1859)
It’s pleasant to watch dirty old roadside snow piles slump, shrink, and vanish as life below pushes up.
We are living in a dystopia, characterized by the exit of critical thinking and the embrace of “post-fact’’ fantasies amidst relentless disinformation campaigns. It will get worse.
New technology has caused much of the dystopia. Consider the irony of cell phones. While they connect us more easily than ever with people far away, they can act to distance us from people who are close by, even in the same room. Highly profitable (for tech companies) algorithms are created to make them addictive for many people and they and their siblings, computers, are perfect for spreading lies.
Complaints, complaints, complaints! But spring will come, some year.
This is the sort of anti-small-business stuff that needs to go: There’s a Rhode Island law (backed by the Teamsters and the liquor-store lobby) that bars microbreweries from letting customers take home more than two cases of beer. Pour this law down the drain.
I hope that gimlet-eyed analysts such as my hero Ken Block frequently go through state regs to find the ones that should be fixed or killed. There are too many regulations and laws that unnecessarily restrain trade, slamming the general public while protecting special interests from competition.
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The company can be tough. It has refused to sell the Eastside Marketplace building on Providence’s East Side, which it closed last year; it fears new competition. It wants to force customers to pile into other, less convenient Stop & Shops, all of which require almost all customers to drive there; Eastside had quite a few patrons who would walk to the store. It was too bad when, in 2014, the store went out of local control when Rhode Island businessman and civic leader Scott Laurans sold it to Ahold.
All of this may make people of a certain age lament the disappearance of most neighborhood grocery stores, perhaps forgetting that their stuff was generally more expensive than the supermarkets’ and, of course, the products on offer were much more limited.
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Mostly because of the failure to build enough housing to meet demand, Providence is reportedly the most unaffordable metro area for renters in America, and Austin is the most affordable.
As the population ages and income inequality worsens, we’ll have more and more need for apartments rather than houses.
And read how the slowdown in American mobility slammed housing affordability and how to address that. READ HERE
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I drove to a poor part of Fall River, once the world’s cotton-textile mill capital, last Tuesday to see (and, most importantly, to hear a little bit) an audiologist with an operation in one of the Sagamore Mills. The trip reminded me yet again of the mellow beauty (especially at sunrise and sunset) and the solidity of the city’s 19th-century stone mill buildings, which might last for hundreds of years more.
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Eversource Energy has broken ground on a new underground (!) substation in Cambridge. The 35,000-square-foot substation will be buried 105 feet beneath Kendall Square (an international biotech center) as part of the company’s Greater Cambridge Energy Project (GCEP). Once completed, the electrical underground station will be the largest in the United States.
The project will “step down” electricity from power lines to a lower voltage to let homes and businesses use it. Building the station underground helps the company address concerns in the dense city over aesthetic impact and fire prevention and liberates the land above for various forms of development.
Hit this link for more information:
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The University Orthopedics palace on Kettle Point, in East Providence, offers such a spectacular view of Providence and Narragansett Bay that some patients there may briefly forget their medical problems.
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The signage at the famous, or infamous, roundabout in East Providence at the eastern end of the Henderson Bridge remains dangerously confusing despite many months of drivers’ complaints. Roundabouts are supposed to make things safer and easier, at least once you get used to them.
It’s so easy to fulminate about public servants. Right-wing pols, whose fans are heavily concentrated in the old Slave States, the biggest beneficiaries of federal programs, love to do so. They depend on their followers being too lazy to look for the facts behind their assertions. Then, when programs they like are slashed, they might briefly turn off the Fox News, Newsmax, and Twitter lie machines and whine before popping another beer to wash down some more lies.
Welcome to the Trump/Musk/Vance/Putin cesspool.
One is that the federal workforce is bloated. For one thing, it never was, given the responsibilities it was given, demanded by the public, over the years in an ever larger and more complex society. For another, federal employment as a share of the population has generally been falling.
READ ABOUT THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES
Trump and his crew want to slash federal employment primarily to give more big tax cuts to the very rich, who help run his show for their own benefit. They have never had it so good in this country since the First and Second Gilded Ages (1870-1910 and 1922-1933) and as a group -- – there are notable individual cases of billionaire public spiritedness and generosity -- have never been so selfish. Of course, most of the very rich, especially the far-right ones, complain about taxes, no matter how luxurious their daily lives, how powerful they have become, and how many mansions and yachts they can show off.
But federal taxes are relatively LOW compared to other rich nations’ taxes. That explains, in part, why the national debt has been swelling for so long, along with the fact that voters want expanded programs even as they try to avoid paying for them. In any event, the fact is that at least the top 10 percent of income earners should pay more in taxes to help pay for the programs that Americans claim to want and/or need.
Trump et al., of course, are willing to further explode the national debt with more tax cuts, which will come this year. Here is who pays the taxes.
The fairest levy is obviously the estate tax, which is remarkably low. Here’s what Theodore Roosevelt said:
“The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities {in terms of political and other power} which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and … a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”
Yes, one reason that some people work so hard to build up their enterprises and fortunes is to leave money to children and other people and organizations. It’s a good incentive. It’s a question of degree.
Current federal estate tax rates put in place in 2017 range from 18 percent to 40 percent. The estate-tax exemption amount, currently $13.99 million per individual, is scheduled to “sunset” at the end of 2025 and revert to the pre-2017 level, which is an estimated $7 million per individual (adjusted for inflation). But Trump and congressional Republicans will not allow that to happen. That’s good news for the folks whom the late Providence Mayor Vincent Cianci and other wags liked to call “The Lucky Sperm Club.’’
Here’s a diverting article about membership in that club:
Of course, another aim in slashing the federal workforce is to gut the regulatory agencies charged with fighting fraud and other corruption in the private sector. The Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau are but three examples of agencies created to fight the sort of sleaze that harms the public, say by the corrupt Trump Organization, crooked bankers and crypto thieves. Such fraud, often married to out-of-control financial speculation, helped cause the Great Depression and the Great Recession.
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Of course, there are “waste, fraud and abuse” wherever there are people in this world of sin and woe. But it is the “fraud and abuse’’ in the private sector that led to creating regulatory agencies in the first place. Considering the size of federal programs, it’s remarkable how little “waste, fraud and abuse” there are by people working within the agencies. That’s even as crooks outside them try to scam taxpayer money via the agencies, whether it’s through, say, fraudulent medical claims or bloated military contracts.
Corrupt private-sector companies and individuals with big federal contracts, such as none other than Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest campaign contributor, comprise the real “deep state.’’ The effective privatization of much of the federal government is increasingly dangerous to honest government, and it drives up costs.
One of the first things that Trump and Co-President Elon Musk did was fire the federal inspector generals. IGs are charged with investigating and auditing agencies to prevent “fraud, waste and abuse’’ in their operations and interactions with citizens, as well as promoting efficiency and effectiveness as the agencies try to carry out their duties.
The co-tyrants certainly don’t want pesky ethics folks watching what’s going on in Musk-Trump-run agencies.
(I myself have only worked in the private sector, in small businesses and large. My encounters with public employees have almost all been pleasant. They were knowledgeable, patient and good-humored. Indeed, generally far more helpful than people in such huge private enterprises as health insurance and computer and online services, if you’re lucky enough to get through to anyone in them.)
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The Republican Party traditionally, at least rhetorically, supported maximum localities’ and states’ control over things that most affected those jurisdictions. But that was before it became a fascist -- not a “conservative’’ -- party whose leader, a creature of bottomless corruption and narcissism, believes that he has carte blanche to interfere whenever and wherever his whims, hatreds, jealousy, insecurity and all-around power lust take over him. Thus it is with Mango Mussolini blocking New York City’s new tolls to reduce vehicular congestion in Manhattan and upgrade Gotham’s mass transit. This is partly simply to stick it to his native city where, despite creating a big, glitzy – and fraud-soaked company -- he has never felt worshipped.
The dishonor of Republicans too cowardly and opportunistic to speak out against this depraved man will be a permanent stain on American history.
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The endless MAGA complaining about trans people (about 1 percent of the population) and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which affect a tiny proportion of the American population, is a smoke screen for plutocratic economic programs that hurt most Americans.
Meanwhile, white men continued to be the most favored constituency.
Here’s the latest on public attitudes in DEI. It may surprise you:
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Perhaps in the fullness of time, and if the First Amendment survives the current regime, we’ll discover what sort of Trump Organization business deals with the murderous Putin dictatorship are part of our traitor-in-chief’s betrayal of Ukraine, which we have supported because it was in our national security interest. That betrayal is grossly undermining the West, including us, by destroying European trust in America and encouraging further Russian aggression and Chinese aggression, too.
Speaking of the First Amendment, many organizations and individuals are already censoring themselves for fear of angering the regime. I wonder how much courage there is out there. Probably not much.
Meanwhile, the regime has been suppressing some key information about bird flu and other health threats. But you can find a lot of information via such organizations as the American Medical Association.
And to get around the suppression of climate and other environmental information, check out the Public Environmental Data Project:
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Silicon Valley, in the San Jose-San Francisco region, spawned so much technology in large part because high-tax California (and federal defense and other contracts) paid for what was the world’s greatest public university research complex.
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Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel, The Way We Live Now, about business greed and dishonesty in London, could have been fairly easily adapted for the way we live now. Human nature doesn’t change….
It remains a great read.