Robert Whitcomb: Worcester Wouldn’t Well for PawSox; Taxing Away the Little Guys? Racial Fire

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

View Larger +

Robert Whitcomb

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

 

--Lyndon B. Johnson

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

 

"The summer night is like a perfection of thought."

-- Wallace Stevens
 

Those who think that Worcester is about to grab the Pawtucket Red Sox should consider this news from the (Worcester) Telegram & Gazette.

Hit this link: 

“Massachusetts legislators told the Telegram & Gazette …{that} the {state} Legislature is unlikely to put public dollars toward a stadium for a private team. And even if a deal in Rhode Island that seeks to do that falls through, and neither city offers public money, staying in Pawtucket would likely be the shrewder move,’’ a stadium expert told the paper.

 

“All things being equal, Worcester is probably going to have to pay a higher subsidy to get them,”  said Victor A. Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross economics professor who specializes in stadiums. After all, the Worcester Metropolitan Statistical Area is only about half the size of the Providence-Warwick Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Pawtucket.  (Also, Worcester is not on the Main Street of the East Coast -- Route 95. Pawtucket is.)

 

“It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” Senate Majority Leader Harriette L. Chandler (D.-Worcester) said of the idea of the  PawSox moving to Worcester. ”(But) who’s going to pay for it?”

 

“The reality,’’ she told the paper,  “is that the Legislature has an established precedent of not putting public money into sports stadiums.’’

 

While Massachusetts has spent money for public infrastructure improvements associated with stadiums (most notably around Gillette Stadium, in Foxboro), that’s not the same as the millions that the PawSox wants from Rhode Island taxpayers to actually build a new PawSox stadium itself in downtown Pawtucket. The Boston Red Sox, by the way,  got no public money for its massive improvements at Fenway Park in recent years.

 

View Larger +

PawSox

The PawSox want $38 million in public money in Rhode Island to build a new stadium: $23 million from the state and $15 million from Pawtucket. The PawSox assert that the long-term loans from the public for the project would be repaid from the tax revenues that the new stadium generated and so wouldn’t hurt taxpayers. But of course, it’s impossible to know how well the team and stadium would do in coming decades, indeed how popular baseball, in general, will be.

 

Anyway, I continue to be very skeptical that the PawSox would go to Worcester. And I hope that they’ll stay in Pawtucket. Had a wonderful evening there a couple of weeks ago.

 

xxx

 

For years, Providence has used the offer of big tax-stabilization plans to try to lure big developers and other enterprises to the city, with occasional success. But at the same time, Providence commercial real-estate-tax rates remain among the highest in America. GoLocalProv.com has reported that the Lincoln Institute ranks the cities with the highest commercial rates as Detroit, New York, Chicago, Providence and Bridgeport, Conn., with “effective tax rates that are at least two-thirds higher than the average’’ of the 53 cities it surveyed.

 

Meanwhile, Boston ranks at 28th. Not exactly a competitive situation for Little Rhody!

 

Basically,  like many jurisdictions around America, Providence (and Rhode Island) do a lot of economic development by deal rather than by broad-based policies that treat all property owners equitably.

 

View Larger +

Downtown Providence

Thus in Providence, as GoLocalProv noted, “new projects are the ‘haves’ -- new, modern and heavily subsidized,’’  while businesses that have been in Providence without these “bribes’’ are in older, less energy- or otherwise efficient buildings and have to pay the very high commercial real-estate taxes.

 

Thus over time they have a big incentive to leave the city. These usually small enterprises don’t get the political PR of a sexy national company moving some employees into Providence but there are a lot of them, and the city suffers when they leave, usually quietly and with no news stories. This emphasis on preferential tax deals for “sexy,’’ high-profile tax deals at the expense of the much larger number of unfavored enterprises continues to destabilize the city’s fiscal condition.

 

And remember how often companies that get preferential tax deals decide to leave town with little warning.

 

It’s past time that the city and state implement major commercial property-tax reform. As my friend Gary Sasse noted in GoLocalProv: “Unfortunately, state policy appears to be directed at providing real estate developers with preferential tax deals while totally ignoring structural property tax reforms needed to make Providence truly competitive.’’

 

xxx

 

The violence in Charlottesville last weekend was a predictable outcome of the frustration of many white people, especially from poor and middle class backgrounds, who feel themselves threatened by our increasingly multiethnic society and an economy that no longer offers the sort of relatively secure jobs that many had once expected.

As to be expected, some angry, frustrated whites (especially men) look for scapegoats --  African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and some other “hyphenated Americans’’.  These whites not only share the all-too-human propensity to fear and hate people who don’t look like them; they also (erroneously) see the economy as a zero-sum game in which if another group gains, yours loses. Donald Trump, whom most of these angry people enthusiastically supported in last year’s election, cynically poured gasoline on this socio-political fire.

 

At the same time, we’ve got the confusion and anxiety associated with the breakup of family structures, with increasing numbers of children born out-of-wedlock. And millions abuse drugs to try to alleviate the anxiety related to this confusion and uncertainty.

 

All these things cross-promote social pathologies, including the violent racism in Charlottesville.

 

What, of course, makes things worse is bigots and demagogues /opportunists such as  Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and some other scoundrels stirring the pot with the help of  increasingly virulent media, especially social media and cable TV, feeding into a heavily armed “macho’’ culture that glorifies certain kinds of violence that have a long history.

 

View Larger +

KKK

Note that the KKK’ers, neo-Nazis and skinheads descended on Charlottesville to protest the proposed taking down of a statue of one of the most over-praised figures in American history – Robert E. Lee, a traitor and brutal slave owner who fought on the side trying to  not only maintain but expand into the western U.S. a brutal system held together by violence and the threat of it – slavery.

 

I do admit that he usually maintained an impressive dignity and decorum – in a triumph of style over content that helped create and maintain the romantic mythologies of “The Lost Cause’’ of the Confederacy. The neat gray uniform and his horsemanship helped the legend, too. He wasn’t the sartorial slob that U.S. Grant often was. And, yes, Jefferson and Washington were also slave owners, but much earlier than Lee and they didn’t fight for slavery’s preservation against fellow Americans. I can understand why many African-Americans react to statues of Confederate leaders as Jews might react to a statue of Hitler in Germany.

 

The sort of issues that expressed themselves in Charlottesville are particularly difficult in the United States because of its racial history, its ethnic complexity, its size and its federal system, which ensures a wide range of contradictory attitudes and policies across America. No other country in history has been so complicated. Danielle Allen, a political scientist at Harvard, put it well in a Washington Post column:

 

“The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multi ethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality, and economies that empower all have been achieved. We are engaged in a fight over whether to work together to build such a world. And even those who are, in principle, willing to build that world are fighting with one another, for instance, over issues such as how the compelling state interest in non-discrimination, confirmed by the Supreme Court decades ago, interacts with rights of association and speech.’’

 

Don’t look for things to get quieter anytime soon. As  Mississippian William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.’’

 

xxx

 

New Englanders are not unfamiliar with the phenomenon of rich people sealing off access to beaches in front of their big houses and estates. It’s outrageous that they do but the rise of an increasingly arrogant plutocracy means that we’re seeing more such seizures of the public commons. So it was gratifying to read about a victory, though perhaps a tentative one, in California, where a three-judge state appeals court has ruled that Vinod Khosla, a billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems, can’t block access to a popular strip of  beach south of San Francisco; he owns 89 acres behind the beach.

 

This may go up to the U.S. Supreme Court. God help us.

 

California has generally been much more supportive of the public’s right of access to the shore than have the New England states, where it has long been very difficult to get to the shore in many communities, in some places because of laws that go back to colonial days.

 

xxx

 

The EnergizeRI Act would tax distributors of fossil fuels to encourage everyone to move to clean energy. Of course, those companies would then pass on the cost of this “carbon tax’’ to consumers. But some of that money would then be rebated to individual residents and businesses. And, as Kevin O’Neill of The Conference Exchange wrote in the Providence Business News ( “R.I. can lead with carbon tax’’)  “25 percent of the carbon-tax revenue would be directed to energy conservation and renewable-energy projects.’’ I hope that this includes more charging stations for electric vehicles.

 

Obviously, Rhode Island could only do this if the other states in the region joined in at the same time. Still,  if they did, it could be major prod to making the Northeast much more energy-independent as we rapidly increase our use of renewables, be it solar arrays, land and offshore wind power, hydro (much from relatively nearby Quebec), geothermal, tidal power and other sources.

 

And the more energy-independent we are, the more prosperous we’ll be in the long run. Wouldn’t it be nice to stop sending billions of dollars a year out of our region to pay for polluting, global-warming fossil fuels and instead keep that money around here and create many jobs in what is now one of America’s fastest-growing sectors – renewable energy?

 

Meanwhile, a sign of the times: The largest municipally owned solar “farm’’ in New England came online last Thursday in Worcester. The $27-million, 25-acre Greenwood Street Solar Array, on what used to be a landfill, has 28,600 solar panels producing enough electricity to power 1,340 homes.

 

xxx

 

Not surprisingly, given the scare tactics used by managements, especially in the South, workers in a Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., voted against joining the United Auto Workers. As The New York Times reported, veteran employees at the plant make $26 an hour, “less than the nearly $30 an hour for similar autoworkers in unions at the major American carmakers – but almost twice the median hourly wage in Mississippi.’’

 

The usually successful efforts in the “plantation society’’ of the Deep South to keep out unions is one explanation for the fact that Southern poverty and other social pathologies are the worst in the nation. This has also resulted in the South (despite the complaints there about the “socialists in Washington’’ giving money to “welfare queens’’) getting a disproportionate share of federal assistance to partly offset the effects of anti-worker state policies.

 

Trade unions help the overall economy by expanding consumer purchasing power and improving workforce productivity by unions collaborating with companies in job training and retraining. Their decline has intensified income inequality and cut the wages of millions. But, again, managements have their workforces terrified. Perhaps it will take the stresses of something like the Great Depression to make industrial workers realize that they’re generally better off with unions. Or maybe a new wave of abrupt layoffs caused by automation will do the trick. Public-employee unions, with their huge conflicts of interest with elected officials, are quite another creature…. (By the way, I have been a union member and a corporate executive in my 47 years in the workforce.)

 

xxx

 

View Larger +

North Korea

On North Korea, the best  U.S. strategy would be:

 

Do not negotiate at all. Pyongyang would violate all new agreements as they have all past ones. Negotiation has made things worse by giving the regime more time and cover to develop its nuclear weaponry.

 

Do not bluster. Instead, quietly keep ‘em guessing. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,’’ as Theodore Roosevelt so famously said. Given Kim much less attention; like Trump he thrives on attention.

 

Put far more resources into sabotaging the Kim Jong-un regime at every turn, from stepped-up cyber warfare to getting more anti-Kim information into that police state, to tougher sanctions against their Chinese allies and other U.S. foes, such as Iran and Russia, that are helping the regime.

 

Give more military aid to South Korea and work more closely with that country and Japan to discourage North Korean aggression.

 

Be patient.

 

xxx

 

Here’s yet another observation on Amazon, which has been hiring thousands of people across America and a few hundred at its new distribution center in Fall River:

 

Those warehouse jobs are being taken by many people who might otherwise have been working in the thousands of stores being put out of business by Amazon. Those are people who would have been customers of nearby stores and restaurants and, because they were working in local stores (which paid local taxes) -- people much more likely to be civically engaged than those working for a gigantic global corporation most of whose buildings are gigantic warehouses far from town or city centers. Thus Amazon’s relentless expansion will accelerate the decline of local economies and local government.

 

But, as I’ve said, people love the convenience of dealing with Amazon, which will trump the attractions of local retailing in most places.  High-end stores, with intense personal service, in very affluent neighborhoods will be partial exceptions. As for the good PR Amazon gets from its hiring binge, that will fade as the geniuses in Seattle figure out more ways to automate its warehouses.

 

xxx

 

View Larger +

Boston, a top art city

Boston was one of the top 10 art buying cities in the U.S. last year, according to a new report by art marketplace Artfinder, the Boston Business Journal reported.

Hit this link:

 

The paper reported that “’Boston is young, cultural and creative, plus it has great universities” Artfinder CEO Jonas Almgren said in an email. ‘We also have a lot of artists in Boston, and of course our customer hubs tend to grow in places where we have thriving artist communities.’’’

 

So maybe more RISD grads will stay in our area?

 

But the total dollar value of art buying is and will remain much higher in New York than Boston!

 

Artfinder’s  surprising top 10 list of U.S. cities is below, with each number representing the number of art buyers per million inhabitants in 2016:

 

Tallahassee (1,303)
New Haven (953)
Anaheim, Calif. (842)
Tampa (789)
Raleigh, N.C. (770)
San Francisco (726)
Miami (620)
Austin (592)
Santa Monica, Calif. (578)
Boston (572)

 

Related Articles

 

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

 
 

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast

I want to follow on Twitter

I want to Like on Facebook