Bob Whitcomb’s Digital Diary: Animal Rights, Electoral College, and RI’s Jobless Rate

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Bob Whitcomb, Contributor

Bob Whitcomb

Happy lunacy; animal rights; keep the Electoral College; great dismal swamp; childless rich cities

Anomie (/ˈænəˌmi/) is a "condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals". It is the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community, e.g., under unruly scenarios resulting in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values.’’

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--- Wikipedia

Not everything in life is politics, thank God. Last weekend was golden here in southern New England, with the weather perfect for walking in burnished woods and looking across bays to the far shore. And the “Super Moon’’ was semi-spectacular on Sunday night, reminding us of our insignificance, although that big fat satellite wasn’t quite as “super’’ as promised. At least we can still see the moon in cities, unlike many of the stars we used to see that are now obscured by manmade-light pollution.

There are some local signs of kindness amidst the current rancor. Consider that Massachusetts voters by a wide margin backed a state ballot question that will set new rules on the size of the cages in which farmers can raise chickens, cows and pigs.

A new law will ban selling eggs in Massachusetts from hens raised in cages too small for them to spread their wings, meat from pigs kept in tight quarters—or pigs whose mothers were similarly confined during pregnancy—and veal from calves trapped in tiny crates before being slaughtered. The new law also bars Massachusetts farmers from using these torture chambers.

This will be a tough law to oversee.

Given the interstate nature of agriculture, it’s unclear how this will work out for Bay State farmers, who have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years because of the spread of local farmers’ markets and the “Locavore’’ movement. I hope that the idea spreads. More and more we learn that nonhuman animals are much smarter, and more intensely feeling, than we had thought. Even birds, let alone our fellow mammals. (Pigs are especially smart.)

But if only all “animal lovers’’ showed as much empathy for, say, the Syrians, many of them children, being killed every day by Assad, Putin and ISIS.

Increasingly the big changes in American life come from the coasts and then move inland, albeit slowly. This may be another example. Within 20 years, maybe even many Trump people will turn vegetarian as the research accumulates on how much we make other animals suffer.

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Now that the Democrats have lost another presidential election in the Electoral College although they won the popular vote, there are calls for closing the Electoral College and always giving the presidency to the popular-vote winner. (Of course, you’d need a constitutional amendment to make the change.)

Well, it feels better if the popular-vote winner also wins the Electoral College, which is what almost always happens. But there’s a very good reason to keep the current system.

The Electoral College gives disproportionate weight to smaller states because each has the same number of electors as the size of its congressional delegation. Each, regardless of its size, has two senators (including some that shouldn’t be states at all, such as Rhode Island).

If the system were only based on the popular vote, presidential candidates would spend virtually all their time in only five or six metropolitan areas with dense populations and would not feel compelled to travel to, learn about, and address the issues of, large swaths of our huge, crazy country. That wouldn’t be good preparation for the presidency, and it would hurt the health of our federal system, whose states, as Justice Brandeis said, are “great laboratories of democracy.’’

The victory of Donald Trump is unfortunate. But maybe there are enough checks and balances to retrain his worst impulses.

So what will this (so far anyway) ungenerous and erratic extreme narcissist, pathological liar, purveyor of business frauds, tax avoider, nonreader and sexual harasser do in office? Given his famous propensity to go with this gut, and his exciting lack of impulse control, who knows for sure? Can a 70-year-old change a lot?

One thing is sure, the public standards for personal behavior will fall further given the model of our new president. The acceleration of the decline of our civic culture may first show up in a big increase in tax evasion. Hey, if the new president doesn’t pay income taxes, why should we?

Some other guesses:

Despite the blather about “draining the swamp’’ in Washington, the swamp is likely to expand. The president-elect’s transition team is calling on the usual lobbyists and other insiders in putting together the Trump administration. So far, it sounds pretty much like a variant of the George W. Bush administration but maybe even more rife with special interests feathering their nests with goodies from powerful politicians.

What might be most alarming is Mr. Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon, the thuggish and cynical conspiracy-theorist head of Breitbart “News’’ and former Goldman Sachs (yuck) executive, as the new president’s senior counselor.

Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, a Republican opinion magazine, tweeted, “Is there precedent for such a disreputable & unstable extremist in [White House] senior ranks before Bannon?”

In any event, taxes will be cut mostly for the rich. The federal estate tax may well be killed, thus further solidifying the status and power of a plutocracy based on inherited wealth. Pick your parents ever more carefully!

The corporate-income tax will be cut – an honest move since in the end people pay taxes, not some inorganic beast called a company. It would be better if the corporate-income tax were abolished entirely, both to make America more internationally competitive and to reduce the political corruption that comes from corporate lobbyists trying to get special tax breaks. But of course, fiscal integrity would suggest raising taxes on rich people and/or cutting popular programs as offsets, which would be a nonstarter in GOP Washington.

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Infrastructure Repair

Mr. Trump, his fellow Republicans and Democrats all agree that America’s public infrastructure needs major rehabilitation – roads, bridges, train lines, public water supplies, etc., etc. So there will almost certainly be a huge public-works bill. This could end up employing (and presumably training) many, many people and act as an economic stimulus. Unfortunately, it will also presumably require borrowing vast quantities of money even as the GOP cuts taxes -- another opportunity to explosively expand the federal budget deficit and raise interest rates, perhaps putting us in a deep recession in a few years.

Our new leader will keep much of the Affordable Care Act because it has a constituency of millions of people. (My long-range forecast is that Medicare will be extended to all, replacing the nightmarishly complicated and costly current federal-state-private-sector mess.)

On foreign affairs: Mr. Trump’s positions on international matters (including trade) are far too incoherent -- so far -- to tell. As soon as he names all his foreign-policy advisers, we’ll be able to make some informed guesses.

The Trump campaign’s relentless lies and incoherence again revealed themselves in the last few days when the Russian government said, contrary to what the campaign had asserted, that members of dictator Vladimir Putin’s regime and the Trump team did confer during the campaign.

And Trump pal Newt Gingrich said about the president-elect’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it: "He may not spend much time trying to get Mexico to pay for it. But it was a great campaign device." Cynical enough for you?

Meanwhile, the Democrats continue their idiocy by leaning toward choosing a leftist Minnesota congressman, Keith Ellison, a Muslim, by the way, as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, rather than the far more realistic middle-of-road former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Mr. Dean as past DNC chairman helped lead the party to victory in 2008, and he understands the sort of people who switched to the GOP last week.

In another sign of idiocy, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, the son of immigrants from Guatemala, suggested Sunday he’d refuse to cooperate with the federal government if the Trump administration cracks down on illegal aliens in such so-called sanctuary cities as Providence even if it meant losing the millions of dollars in federal money that the city gets every year. In other words, he’d violate the law and perhaps send Providence’s fragile finances over the cliff. I hope that the City Council fends off this sort of move, an example of the “identity politics’’ that sent formerly loyal Democrats to the GOP last week.

He backtracked a bit Monday, but his position remains ambiguous. No borders, no country.

Whatever else happens, donations to the Clinton Foundation will plunge! The Clintons should have spent less time with their Davos pals and more time thinking about Dubuque.

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Couple less cities

Boston magazine has an article this month headlined “Boston Has Become a City Without Children’’ that speaks to the wider phenomenon of American demographic groups separating themselves more and more from each other. Boston, New York, San Francisco and other prosperous big cities are increasingly places for well-educated young adults, most of them unmarried and without children, and older richer people, most with dispersed grown children. When the young urban adults start to have children they tend to head for the suburbs and exurbs because the most prosperous cities have become too expensive.

This recalls the proliferation of communities marketed to older adults (usually 55 or over) where the absence of children is promoted as a good and soothing thing. And, of course, there are those gated communities for the rich and upper-middle class walled off from the rest of the citizenry so that they don’t have to be reminded of others’ bad luck, sloth or even obesity. I have been in them: They’re very pleasant indeed!

As the recent election dramatized, we’re more and more living in self-selected groups wherein we don’t have to deal with people in different circumstances. Not exactly a recipe for empathy, shared sacrifice and practical cooperation in a democracy.

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Rhode Island’s jobless rate continues to exceed those of Massachusetts and Connecticut. That’s because Rhode Island has still not transformed itself into the high-tech new economy that has made Greater Boston so rich. And perhaps it never will, although it could glom on to more of the business in and around the Hub –so near and yet so far! -- by better marketing its lower prices, convenience, shoreline scenery and such specialties as design.

Connecticut, for its part, has the great advantage of benefiting from the New York City money that washes into Fairfield, Litchfield and coastal parts of New London, New Haven and Middlesex counties. (And yet the Nutmeg State’s cities are generally disaster areas, though, thanks to Yale, New Haven is coming back.)

Culturally and economically Connecticut and New York now extend well into southern Rhode Island. The Ocean State should welcome this – it helps breaks up the provinciality and tribalism that has held it back.

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These are dark days around here – literally. All the more reason to switch New England to Atlantic Standard Time. As I noted a couple of years ago, Boston is so far east in the Eastern Time Zone that the earliest nightfall of the year is only about a half hour later than Anchorage, Alaska, which is a hell of a lot farther north than, say, Boston!

Atlantic Standard Time matches the time we already use in the summer, and moving to it would simply mean that in the fall, we wouldn’t have have to “fall back.” We’d keep the clock an hour forward all year.

Of course, without an adjustment the change would mean that kids would have to wait for school buses in the dark.

So open schools a bit later than now and let out the kids later, into late-afternoon light. It would only take a couple of years of prep work to make this change. Time to join our friends in Nova Scotia. And/or start popping St. John’s wort.

Bob Whitcomb’s Digital Diary: Animal Rights, Electoral College, and RI’s Jobless Rate

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Bob Whitcomb’s Digital Diary: Animal Rights, Electoral College, and RI’s Jobless Rate

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