Whitcomb: Car Dependency and Poverty; Trump Treason Triumph; ‘Unique’ Truck Tolls; Newport Art Fair?

Monday, July 23, 2018

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“The geography of car use tracks with income and wealth: Car-dependent places are considerably less affluent. Metros in which a higher share of people depend on their cars to get to work are poorer, and those where more people use transit or bike or walk to work are considerably more affluent. The share of commuters who drive to work alone is negatively correlated with both wages and income. Conversely, in more affluent metros, a higher proportion of commuters use transit, walk, or bike.’’

-- From “How Cars Divide America,’’ by urbanist Richard Florida, in citylab.com. To read his article, please hit this link:

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For superb overviews of the staggering treason and other corruption of Trump and members of his gang, foreign and domestic, please hit these links:

And, this link:

Of course, many Americans are sick of the Trump-Putin story. I am too! The president, like most narcissists, gets boring. But patriots shouldn’t avert their gaze from the growing threat to national security and our democratic system posed by Trump, Putin and their American helpers.

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The legal fight over the new truck-toll system that recently went into effect in Rhode Island is very interesting -- indeed it might end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. American Trucking Associations (sic) is suing to end the tolls, calling them unfair because the only class of vehicles whose owners must pay the tolls are large commercial tractor-trailers.

I hope that the state wins. These vehicles do the lion’s share of damage on Rhode Island’s roads and bridges.

The state says:

“The RhodeWorks bridge tolling program is a unique approach to repairing bridges by tolling only specific types of tractor trailers. The tolls collected at each location in Rhode Island will go to repair the bridge or bridge group associated with that toll location.’’

That the program is “unique’’ might be its legal Achilles heel. Singling out certain classes for taxation can be legally problematic. But I admire Governor Raimondo for being willing to take the heat in having Rhode Island finally seriously address its terrible transportation infrastructure problems, with the economic woes that accompany them. She has shown vision on that and on some other crucial problems, particularly reform of Medicaid and education, especially in pushing job-training. And Rhode Islanders are paying lower taxes than they would be without her courageous leadership of state pension reform, although some local pension systems remain in perilous state.

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Matt Brown, Democratic candidate for Governor

Matt Brown, who is battling – from the left – Gina Raimondo for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, has an interesting idea from rock-ribbed Republican North Dakota. The Rough Rider State has a state-owned institution called the Bank of North Dakota that takes deposits from individuals as well as some state tax revenues and makes loans only to North Dakota businesses. Keep the money and its economic stimulus at home! Started in 1919, the bank remains a very popular institution in that notably wind-swept jurisdiction.

Most states deposit almost all their money in big out-of-state banks that make vast profits from investing that money around the world and give their executives gargantuan pay packages.

A research trip to lovely Bismarck, N.D., would seem in order.

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It remains surprising how little information has come out about Worcester’s pitch to lure the Pawtucket Red Sox to Massachusetts’s second-largest city, especially since Rhode Island Governor Raimondo signed a bill last month aimed at helping to finance a new stadium for the team at Pawtucket’s Apex site.

No one hereabouts seems to know what Worcester and the Commonwealth have in mind, and how much information has been transmitted to the team owners.

At the same time, news reports point to the Kraft/Patriot family’s intensifying interest in building a major stadium for professional soccer (called variations of “football’’ in most of the world) in Boston for their New England Revolution team. Makes sense. Soccer has become ever more popular in America in the past few years. I was struck by how many bars and restaurants had World Cup games on their TVs in the recent competition, won by France. Within a couple of decades soccer stadiums may become more important sports venues here than stadiums for baseball and American football (concussions, anyone?)

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I was chatting the other day with Bobbie Lemmons, who runs the estimable Atelier Newport gallery in that city. She suggests that Newport should host an annual art fair, given the burgeoning number of artists in the city and the local art community’s many outside links, especially to America’s art-market capital – New York – but also around the world. An art fair could become as big an event as the city’s famous music festivals.

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Alex Beam had a fine July 12 column in The Boston Globe headlined “Is it any surprise that Donald Trump’s son knows {retiring Supreme Court Justice} Anthony Kennedy’s son?’’ They did business together when Donald Trump Jr. (a crook like his father), representing the Trump mob’s over-leveraged real-estate empire, was getting savior loans from Deutsche Bank via banker Justin Kennedy when the latter worked there. Deutsche Bank may be the most corrupt large Western bank, specializing in money laundering, among other species of sleaze. No wonder the Trumps turned to it.

Mr. Beam cites the “Nomenklatura’’ – the term used during the Soviet Union to mean the replicating class of rich bureaucrats in that officially “communist’’ country. (Mr. Beam’s late father, Jacob Beam, was U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.)

We have something like that in America, with social mobility close to the bottom of developed nations -- and getting worse as a self-perpetuating plutocracy steadily expands its wealth and thus its political power. Our political system includes massive gerrymandering, dark campaign money and an antiquated Electoral College that help keep a ruthless minority in power. P.J. O’Rourke’s phrase “parliament of whores’’ comes to mind.

Thus, unto generations, the offspring of the likes of Trump and Justice Kennedy remain in what Mr. Beam calls the “magic circle,’’ the walls around which get higher and higher. As the son of an ambassador and graduate of Yale, Mr. Beam knows the zoology of privilege well.

Combine all this with falling inflation-adjusted wages (see below) and you have a recipe for social disorder and new kinds of demagogues.

Things will get worse: The Trump administration said that the Treasury Department will no longer require certain tax-exempt groups to disclose the identities of their donors to the Internal Revenue Service. The aim, of course, is to hide the identity of donors, foreign or domestic, that help keep Trump and his congressional cultists in office. Did the Kremlin write the Treasury’s new rules?

Mr. Beam noted:

“Critics in the so-called Free World denounced the nomenklatura system as symptomatic of the sclerotic social organization that brought Soviet-style socialism to its knees in 74 years, a pretty brief run in the scheme of things. In recent years, the phrase ‘American Nomenklatura’ has entered our vocabulary, as we realize how power elites in the United States perpetuate themselves, often to the detriment of our collective interests.’’

Consider Brett Kavanaugh’s background. He’s a creature of the Washington, D.C., “swamp’’ that Trump said he’d drain, rather than doing what he’s done – fill it to overflowing.

Kavanaugh’s father was a lobbyist for the cosmetics industry, for which he fought health regulations of the Food and Drug Administration and was very well compensated for it, earning $13 million in his last year before retiring. This may have something to do with the son’s favoritism toward big business and dislike of regulation. His mother is a former Maryland state judge.

Brett Kavanaugh honed his social and intellectual skills, and thickened his Rolodex with innumerable influential contacts, at private Georgetown Preparatory School, Yale College and Yale Law School. As with most successful lifelong careerists, he knows how to be very charming.

He can be expected to do everything possible to please his fellow “magic circle’’ members in his new job.

To read Mr. Beam’s piece, please hit this link:

As one wag remarked: “If you want to live the ‘American Dream,’ move to Canada or Denmark.’’

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Wall Street

Investors are crossing fingers that the orgy (fueled by tax cuts) of stock buybacks by companies, much of it financed with borrowed money, will continue to substantially offset the selling caused by Trump’s trade wars, higher interest rates and the falling real wages of most workers. Since senior executives receive much of their compensation in company stock, they have a lot of incentive to pump up the price of the stock as much as possible by instituting buybacks – and cash in before the next crash.

This news came in last week: The Labor Department reports that median weekly earnings fell 0.6 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars in the second quarter from the year-earlier period, making it the third consecutive quarter in which inflation has exceeded wage growth.

This comes as household and corporate debt set new records.

I suspect that the economic expansion that began in 2009 will have an exciting end, maybe more so than 2008.

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Electricity ‘’microgrids’’ with small-scale solar-power and wind turbines, rather than big utility-scale facilities that spawn controversy, may become the big thing in green energy as technology and equipment make them more cost-efficient. There’s an example on tiny Appledore Island, in the Isles of Shoals, off New Hampshire.

There, amidst the screeching seagulls, reports The Concord Monitor, the Shoals Marine Lab, run by the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University, has mostly gotten off the diesel-powered generator it has long used and moved to solar energy, supplemented by a wind turbine. The electricity is stored in batteries, whose capacity has steadily improved in recent years even as they’ve become cheaper. The lab used to burn more than 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel a summer, Ross Hanson, the head engineer of the lab, told The Monitor, but “The last two summers that’s been about 1,500 gallons. We’re on track to probably cut that in half’’ with an upgraded solar system.

An ongoing challenge: Cleaning the bird poop off the solar panels: To read more, please hit this link:

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Ruminate on an article in The Stamford Advocate about how nature is fast reclaiming the Twin Lakes Swim & Tennis Club, in Stamford, foreclosed and abandoned in 2008, with its “14 acres delivered back to the whims of nature.’’

The newspaper’s Francis Carr Jr. reported:

“In the parking lot, dragonflies flit among clumps of wildflowers growing through cracks in the asphalt. Farther on, where the swimming pool used to be, broken piles of rebar-laced concrete and stacks of wooden debris rise from thickets of thigh-high grass. Here and there, an overturned deck chair or a rusty old grill evoke the site’s leisurely past. Someone has spray-painted ‘RIP Twin Lakes’ across the roof of a vine-covered outbuilding.’’

The description reminded me of the crumbling dairy-farm buildings in the town I grew up in the ‘50s -- buildings that had been abandoned only about 20 years before as these small farms became uneconomic. The roofs were sagging and vines were extending themselves through broken windows.

That, in turn, reminded me of the late and eerie Robert Frost poem called “Directive,’’ parts of which I’ve quoted before. It starts:

“Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm

And in a town that is no more a town.’’

To read the whole poem, please this link:

Our structures will erode, decay and disappear sooner than we might think.

To read Mr. Carr’s piece, please hit this link:

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President George H.W. Bush

How much better off America would be if George H.W. Bush had defeated Bill Clinton in the 1992 election and thus maintained the tradition of moderate Republicanism. His defeat left a vacuum for right-wing fanatics and con men like Newt Gingrich to fill. They’ve dominated the party ever since and led us into disastrous wars and a financial crash.

Which reminds me that Republicans used to be strong advocates of environmental protection, going back to Theodore Roosevelt. Consider that GHW Bush signed the Clean Air Act into law in 1990. This forced big restrictions on fossil-fuel (mostly coal) emissions from Midwest power plants – emissions, carried east by prevailing winds, that caused acid rain that devastated forests and bodies of water in the Northeast. The rain became 100 times more acidic than normal. Precipitation acidity in the Northeast has fallen as much as 80 percent since the law went into effect.

Of course, the coal industry loudly complained, as it continues to do when people try to stop its mountaintop removal and poisoning of streams in Appalachia.

The Clean Air Act is one of the great U.S. environmental success stories, as is the cleanup of Boston Harbor, on which I enjoyed sandwiches on lunch boats during summer jobs on the waterfront back in the ‘60s. The water was toxic but the water-cooled breezes were appreciated on our inner-harbor voyages. My cynical fellow passengers would have been surprised to learn that the harbor would become as clean as it now.

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President Donald Trump

Social-media users and others should beware of fake “local news’’ sites set up by Putin’s people to pump up discord and promote their neo-fascist friends in the Republican Party, including Trump the Traitor.

The Russians are now hard at work trying to steal the 2018 mid-term elections, just as they stole the 2016 election to install their man in the Oval Office. They’re not only doing this through disinformation campaigns but they’re also hard at work trying to invade state voting systems.

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From the movie Casablanca:

German Major Strasser: “What is your nationality?’’
Rick Blaine: “I’m a drunkard.’’
French Captain Renault: “That makes Rick a citizen of the world.’’

To paraphrase Tolstoy’s famous line from Anna Karenina about “all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way”: All crazy families are crazy in their own way.

I'm referring to psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell’s just-published memoir Because I Come From a Crazy Family. Hallowell, the author of the bestseller Driven to Distraction, about attention-deficit disorder, grew up in a family with a psychotic father, alcoholic mother, abusive stepfather, and two “learning disabilities’’ of his own. It’s a sometimes harrowing, sometimes funny and almost always engaging saga featuring what Dr. Hallowell calls the “WASP triad of alcoholism, mental illness and politeness.’’ Actually, of course, the WASPs aren’t the only ethnic group with that triad. Beyond Hallowell’s very personal tale, theazHa;;thjetje book is a primer on what happens in the mental-health trade, from medical school on.

Most of the book takes place in New England, with colorful side trips to Charleston and New Orleans. GoLocal readers will see many familiar scenes.

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“I bring out the worst in my enemies and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.’’

-- The late lawyer and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn, who started out as an aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

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“Perhaps ironically, identity politics is both more powerful and efficacious for Republicans (and rightwing populists more generally) than it is for Democrats, since the former are more homogeneous.

“As long, therefore, as politics is a fight between clearly bounded identity groups, appeals and threats to group identity will benefit Republicans more than Democrats, which is presumably why {Trump adviser} Steve Bannon infamously remarked that he couldn’t ‘get enough’ of the left’s ‘race-identity politics’’. ‘The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em ... I want them to talk about race and identity … every day.”

-- From “Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left,’’ by Sheri Berman, in The Guardian. In other words, the left should focus on economics and present its candidates as patriotic Americans who seek justice and fairness for everybody.

Hit this link to read the piece:

Whitcomb: Car Dependency and Poverty; Trump Treason Triumph; ‘Unique’ Truck Tolls; Newport Art Fair?

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Whitcomb: Car Dependency and Poverty; Trump Treason Triumph; ‘Unique’ Truck Tolls; Newport Art Fair?

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