Robert Whitcomb: Glad Tidings for Tide; Let Things Get Really Bad; Bad Bet in Taunton?

Sunday, July 02, 2017

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“Happiness is a butterfly which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly may alight upon you.’’

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

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The old saw was that New England has virtually no sources of energy. Of course what that meant was no fossil fuel (except for tiny amounts of coal in parts of southern New England). But it does have lots of wind power,  good solar-power resources and not insignificant river-water power. The last helped make possible New England’s leading role in starting the American Industrial Revolution.

And, especially from Massachusetts Bay north, where the tides get progressively stronger and there are hundreds of estuaries,  New England has substantial tidal-power potential, too.  Tidal mills are usually placed in estuaries to take advantage of the swift currents there. And so it was heartening to hear Avery Brookins’s interview on Rhode Island Public Radio with marine conservationist Jonathan White. Mr. White is the author of Tides: The Science and Spirit Of the Ocean, about the promise and challenges associated with installing tide mills. To hear his interview, hit this link:

 

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Rhode Island General Assembly backers of even richer disability pensions for police and firefighters – a frequently abused benefit -- have been hard at work to get “illnesses sustained while in the performance of duty’’ added to these groups’ already very rich disability pension criteria. This bill, sponsored by legislators swimming in conflicts of interest on this issue, would mean that they could claim, for instance, cardiovascular disease – an extremely common ailment and the most common cause of death in America! – as a reason to get big, fat, tax-free disability pensions. Yet another raid on the taxpayers by a well-organized and politically powerful group.

 

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Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and now a fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University, had a tempting recommendation the other day in a Boston Globe column. Here’s an excerpt:

“As Trump intensifies his embrace of foreign tyrants and domestic plutocrats, these guesses {about how he might be removed from office before the end of his term} take on an aspect of hope. For the growing number of Americans who abhor Trump, the prospect of being rid of him is thrilling.

“It shouldn’t be. Our country’s long-term interest will be best served if Trump remains in office until 2021. That would be a shock treatment like no other for the American people. It will show us, through much pain, how dangerous it is to elect ignorant demagogues. That might allow future historians to see a four-year Trump presidency as a watershed in American politics, the moment when we realized the folly of our ways and began to repent. Backlash against Trump could produce a wave of support for policies opposite to his, including more restrained foreign policies and challenges to the power of wealth at home.

“The alternative could be a generation of rule by billionaires and Republican ayatollahs. Both groups would be thrilled if Trump were to leave office prematurely and give way to Vice President Mike Pence. Pence would be just as abject a servant of corporate power as Trump has turned out to be, but with the patina of respectability.’’ 

To read the Kinzer piece, read here.

 

 

Mr. Trump’s extreme corruption, ignorance, lying and pathological narcissism have been on the record for all to see for years but many of the citizens who have said that they found him odious him were too lazy  to vote last year. Maybe four years of a Trump banana republic will shake off their torpor.

 

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Gina Raimondo

The latest plan, one endorsed by Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, to help finance a new stadium for the Pawtucket Red Sox, isn’t all that different from earlier ones. In the end, the state would be on hook if the project doesn’t work  out because of future declining interest in baseball, problems in Pawtucket, business cycles or other reasons.

 

A covered stadium that could accommodate all sorts of sports and other events year round would have much more chance of long-term economic success  than the proposed uncovered one but the PawSox owners, although they are all rich, don’t want to pay for that. Who can blame them?

 

Would the economic benefits  of a new stadium  extend beyond a few blocks of the proposed stadium site?

 

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The Rhode Island budget for fiscal 2017-18 is probably about as fair and practical a one as you could get in the state’s current economic and political climate, if it ever passes. The  “free tuition’’ for Community College of Rhode Island students and the popular phaseout of the car tax are the most famous things in it. However, fiscal crises in the next few years could bring both to a crashing stop. All fiscal plans are tentative, with economic forecasts good for about a week.

 

While the car-tax phaseout probably won’t have much economic impact, the tuition deal might if it means more young  adults able to work in technology and other sophisticated sectors: That could make it easier for companies to expand in, or move to, Rhode Island.

 

The biggest complaint that Rhode Island employers have is that there aren’t enough well-educated and skilled workers. Of course, the long-term macroeconomic resonance of the CRRI program will depend on what the students actually study and how hard they study.

 

The chaos at the State House deserves its own column.

 

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In what could presage a horror movie, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, 70, commented the other day that another financial crisis like 2008’s was not likely “in our lifetime’’  because of banking and related reforms implemented in response to the crash.

 

Fasten your seatbelts when any leading figure in the money world says that things look safe. Consider the optimistic remarks of former Fed Chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke before the 2008 crash; Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Walter Heller’s projections  of steady growth and low inflation out to the horizon in the ‘60s, and famed economist Irving Fisher’s predictions, just before the Great Crash of 1929, that prosperity would continue indefinitely. The fact is that there are far too many variables in the world economy (and the universe)  to make such predictions. Among them: war (including the current cyber war being waged by Russia against  the West); disease, and natural disasters

 

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The Affordable Care Act needs fixing in several ways, especially in addressing the extreme risk-pool imbalance in the insurance exchanges: Younger, healthier people have little incentive to sign up for insurance because the penalties for not doing so are so small, while older, sicker, more medically expensive people  obviously do have such an incentive. The Senate GOP leadership’s healthcare bill would be a health disaster. Still, to be fair, when you deconstruct it, you discover it’s not really about health. It’s about a tax cut for rich people – the one thing that can unite the current version of the Republican Party.

 

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I noted a while back the proliferation of rabbits in Providence. Well, the same thing’s happening in Boston, including downtown. One Boston Globe reader suggested that  a partial explanation might be the use of less toxic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides in lawn and shrub areas these days. Will the population explosion lead to an increase in killing rabbits for food, albeit not at French levels?

 

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The pesticides used to kill mosquitoes also kill honeybees. As awful as mosquitoes can be, we must remember that we need honeybees to help pollinate plants – including the plants that we eat. And then there’s honey, used not only as a food but increasingly to treat wounds. So Douglas County, Ga., has just suspended its mosquito-control program, joining some other jurisdictions.

 

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Trump Speaking in Worcester in 2015

President Trump and his revenue-rapacious family are steering as much money as possible to Trump-connected enterprises to further enrich themselves using  the power  and attention accorded the presidency.

 

Mr. Trump et famille have long been known for, er, creative use of charitable donations for the betterment of his glitzy businesses.

 

Now we have another sleazy character, not coincidentally part of the Trump mob, making money off charities. I refer to Jay Sekulow, a Trump lawyer who’s been pulling money from poor people and sending it to a dubious (like so many “religious’’ organizations and con men, such as Pat Robertson) nonprofit called Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism. According to an investigative piece by The Guardian,  this scam has so far steered more than $60 million to Mr. Sekulow, his relatives and their businesses. Hit this link to read The Guardian’s story:

 

No wonder he’s working for Donald Trump. It’s hard to find anyone honest in the Trump orbit.

 

Some “Evangelical Christian’’ outfits, especially the ones who pitch on TV and radio, continue to be lucrative places for scoundrels preying on wishful-thinking suckers. They also do yeoman work for the Republican Party.

 

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If the Democrats want to make a big comeback they need to back off from the obsession with identity politics – e.g., the real or desired rights of the transgendered and other sexual-identity groups or this or that ethnic group – and focus on developing easily understandable positions that help as wide a range of people as possible.

 

At the heart of that  would be addressing the economic security and overall quality of life of low- and middle-income people in general. Think of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and not the Rainbow Coalition. Many Democrats are social conservatives and the party’s promotion of such very recent innovations as gay marriage and transgendered  bathrooms has unsettled them, pulling them away from the party that has traditionally  defended their socio-economic interests.

 

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And, of course,  they need to replace the senior leadership of the party – especially House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, 77. It’s long past time for fresh faces.

 

A sign of what the Democrats shouldn't be doing comes, natch, from California, where Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra has added Texas, Alabama, South Dakota and Kentucky to North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi and Tennessee as states banned for most California state-financed travel because of their policies regarding gays, Lesbians and transgendered people. Mr. Becerra huffed that Golden State taxpayers’ money “will not be used to let people to travel to states who chose to discriminate.’’

 

This sanctimonious order will hurt California by, among  other things, depriving it of many connections and information that would be good for its economy. And of course it discriminates against Californians who might need or want to go to those states. Idiotic!

 

 

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Thank you, European Union, for fining the near-monopoly Google $2.7 billion for illegally (under E.U. law) directing users toward its comparison-shopping site in order to maximize its ad revenues. Margrethe Vestager, the E.U.’s completion chief, said: “Google has abused its market dominance in its search engine by promoting its own shopping-comparison service {and thus its advertisers} in its search results and demoting its competitors’.’’

 

Given the power of Google’s lobbyists in Washington don't expect anything like this to happen in America.

 

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President Obama

Some of President Obama’s foreign policy was a disaster because of his wishful thinking and timidity, be it in the Mideast, Korea or the South China Sea. Consider how softly he addressed the Kremlin’s brazen cyber war on our political system last year. Dictators only respect those foes whom they consider as confidently  willing to use their power to retaliate against the dictators’ aggression. Mr. Obama, I think, believed that other leaders could be led by soft words to be reasonable and cooperative and/or he was simply afraid.

 

American companies are usually supine too. Consider that such Western tech companies as Cisco, IBM and SAP are agreeing to Russian demands for access to the companies’ security secrets  as condition for those companies to sell in Russia, despite the pleas of U.S. officials. This, well, treason, comes even as the Kremlin continues its online war this year against the U.S. and other Western democracies.

 

Russian authorities seek to get the companies’ source code for such security products as firewalls, anti-virus applications and encrypted software. As Lenin said; “The bourgeoisie will sell us the rope with which we’ll hang them.’’

 

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Three prominent journalists at CNN were fired last week for inadequately sourcing a story linking Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager and Trump confidant, to a Russian investment fund supposedly being investigated by the Senate. That is as it should be, although I doubt that we’ve heard the last about Mr. Scaramucci’s past activities.

 

One difference between the so-called mainstream media and Republican-Trumpian outlets as Fox News is that the former’s journalism is almost always much  more rigorous than Fox and  other Trumpian-style outlets. CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post, et al., make mistakes but they correct them. Fox, such allied newspapers as The New York Post and right-wing radio talk show people assiduously avoid making corrections or apologies, however erroneous their reporting and conspiracy theories.

 

Even many Trumpians, whatever their wishful thinking, tend to believe in a crunch reporting from the “mainstream media’’ more than from the likes of Fox News, let alone such operations as Breitbart News and the pro-Trump National Enquirer.

 

As for “the mainstream media,’’ note that the most watched cable news outlet is Fox and  two of the  top five newspapers in America are owned by the Republican propaganda organ News Corp. – The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. And the consolidation of the radio business has resulted in right wingers having far more broadcast radio outlets around America than the left or the middle. Listen to your car radio as you drive around America.

 

Meanwhile, I’m saddened by the decline of the quality of news reporting in one of my alma maters – The Wall Street Journal. While the news reporters used to report without fear or favor on activities of both Republican and Democratic administrations, now they usually shy away from looking into the dubious activities and those in the administration of Donald Trump, who is a close ally of News Corp. czar Rupert Murdoch.

 

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Seattle has raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, which has led to many restaurant workers earning less these days in that city because the managers have cut  their hours to maintain profit margins. But their real challenge will come from those proliferating electronic kiosks that let customers order their food with minimal interactions with employees.

 

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Progress on the Mashpee Wampanoags’ planned “First Light Resort and Casino,” in Taunton, has stopped because of a dispute over who has sovereignty of the land. That’s means at the least a delay in having to look at what would be a hideous-looking facility at which to lighten suckers’ wallets and further cannibalize the regional casino biz. Take a look by hitting this link: http://wpri.com/2017/06/28/proposed-taunton-casino-facing-another-roadblock/amp/

 

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Vast amounts of money are spent these days in illegal sports gambling but that may soon look like a pittance if  a case to be heard next fall by the U.S. Supreme Court results in full legalization of sports betting. Look for innumerable college basketball and football games to be thrown.

 

A federal law has banned state-authorized sports gambling in most states since 1992. The exceptions are Nevada, Delaware, Oregon and Montana, which allowed such gambling before the law’s enactment.

 

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Jean Lesieur, a French author (both novels and nonfiction),  journalist and former broadcast news executive, has written a very exciting and troubling book (still only in French) about the mysterious murder, on Oct, 12, 1964, of painter Mary Meyer, who had had an intense affair with President Kennedy. Unlike with most of the  women the sex-obsessed president pursued,  he seems to have been truly in love with Ms. Meyer.

 

The book, whose title translated into English is A Murder in Georgetown: A Counter-Investigation on the Death of Mary Meyer (published by Toucan) looks into whether Ms. Meyer was killed because she knew too much about certain CIA operations and the assassination of her lover. I predict that once the book is translated into English, Hollywood will come calling.

 

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