Whitcomb: Countryside Protection; Down With This Duopoly; Building Early Equity; Working Waterfronts
Sunday, October 31, 2021
“The deepest world we share
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAnd do not talk about
But have to have, was there,
And by that light found out.’’
-- From “A Light Left On,’’ by May Sarton (1912-1995), who lived in New Hampshire and Maine
“Anglo-Saxons called November in Old England the ‘winde-monath’ and their descendants found the designation equally appropriate to New England after experiencing the late autumn’s wind behavior here.’’
-- From David Ketchum’s New England Weather Book
With frosts coming so late in the fall these days, browning foliage hangs on the trees for weeks and then drops out of a sort of fatigue.
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I was surprised to read of a neighbor on the East Side of Providence complaining about the sound of train whistles from more than a mile away. I’ve always found that mournful sound pleasantly haunting, evoking memories and the transience of our lives.
It was satisfying to see the wind strip off so many dead tree branches in last week’s storm.
We used to love that Halloween-centric, teeth-rotting candy corn, with its autumn-foliage colors.
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How nice that tiny Rhode Island, although in the Northeast Megalopolis, still has so many areas of rural (or at least exurban) countryside.
And a bit more will get some protection:
The Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission has just announced that the National Park Service has added the Beaver River Road Historic District in Richmond to the National Register of Historic Places, a list of properties whose historical and architectural significance makes them worthy of preservation. The commission notes that “the district’s three farms transitioned from 19th-Century subsistence farming to 20th-Century market farms, typical of agricultural trends in Rhode Island. The district includes 19th-Century vernacular dwellings and agricultural outbuildings. Together with the surrounding fields and landscape features, the farms form a compelling cultural landscape.’’
Gorgeous trees down there, by the way.
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“An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.’’
-- Michael Korda (born 1933), editor and writer
Coal-industry protector Joe Manchin, the West Virginia quasi-Democrat who, with Arizona’s big-donor addict Kyrsten Sinema, has been forcing Joe Biden and the Democrats’ congressional leadership to make nonstop cuts in their proposed New Dealish social-safety-net program, has complained that it would create an “entitlement society.’’ (So let’s get rid of Social Security and Medicare?)
West Virginia is arguably the nation’s leading entitlement state.
The Commerce Department reports that about 32 percent of West Virginians’ personal income last year came in government transfer payments in the form of retirement and disability benefits, medical benefits, welfare payments, veterans’ benefits, unemployment compensation and education and training assistance. This is the highest such percentage in the country.
The next most “entitled” state is also deep Red Mississippi, at 30 percent.
Both those states and most other Red states have populations that are poorer and sicker than most Blue states. That’s in part because of underfunding of education, health care, physical infrastructure, etc., in order to keep taxes low for the plutocrats who run the states for their own benefit.
They are adept at promoting pols who use such social issues as guns (for everyone!) and abortion, sometimes aided by ignorant and/or money-grubbing preachers wielding the weapon of their versions of Biblical literalism, to distract the voters and keep them voting against their own socio-economic interests. And keep public education as lousy as possible so the populace won’t know enough to challenge the 1 percent? Unfortunately, that’s bad for the states’ overall economy, especially as higher knowledge and skills are required for more and more jobs.
Whatever. As I’ve written before, the Dems would have done better to have only pushed through this year the very popular and somewhat bipartisan $1.1 trillion physical infrastructure bill (roads, bridges, trains, electric grid, etc.), which could have been easily enacted months ago, before pressing their social-safety-net expansion. That too big and complicated package started at $3.5 trillion but has been greatly shrunken to less than $2 trillion.
The physical-infrastructure bill, if enacted, could help the Dems gain enough congressional seats in the 2022 elections to then be able to get much of their social program passed. I don’t agree with everything in that program but some of it would indeed advance economic and social fairness. And that the bill would seriously address the menace of catastrophic global warming is admirable! But among other things, there should have been incentives to revive the stabilizing and wealth-creating force of families with two married parents.
Perhaps by the time that you read this (written last Thursday), the president and the congressional leadership will have pulled enough rabbits from hats to have gotten through a substantial part of their social program. But if they had postponed that, they would by now have been the political beneficiaries of the very popular, job-creating and overall-economy-boosting physical-infrastructure program, which is long overdue anyway. (I wonder if the current COVID-connected supply-chain and inflation problems would have been less if something like Biden’s physical-infrastructure bill had been enacted a few years ago.)
Then there’s the matter of taxes to pay for Biden’s New Deal. The idea of a “wealth tax’’ has been floated in this time of ever-expanding income inequality, in which fewer and fewer people have more and more economic and political power. Tempting, but it’s far too complicated to measure and tax assets, whose value of course is always changing. An administrative nightmare.
The idea was that people with $1 billion in assets, or $100 million in annual income for three consecutive years, would be taxed on how much such tradeable assets as stocks appreciated even if these folks don’t actually cash in (“realize” in financial jargon) these gains.
But that idea apparently died late last week.
Better to stick with raising income-tax rates and going after the hundreds of billions in unpaid taxes owed by various very rich people, because of a mix of tax fraud/evasion and taking tax loopholes to legally dubious extremes. Addressing this would require giving more staff and other resources to the IRS.
Meanwhile, let’s note that certain American billionaires have far more economic and political power than almost all our elected officials.
Down With the Duopoly!
The duopoly of the Republican and Democratic parties has led to corruption because of their ties to favored big-business lobbyists. And their primary elections increasingly favor the more extreme candidates, and hence those less likely to compromise to get policies enacted. America would do well to move toward a true multiparty system that would encourage coalition-building and compromise in public policies and move us away from the paralysis that besets national government.
This would include ranked-choice voting.
This refers to any voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to select more than one candidate (or other alternative being voted on) and to rank these choices in a sequence on the scale of first, second, third, etc.
The fear of being “primaried” by zealots who increasingly dominate primary elections in many states has led many otherwise responsible and competent candidates to cynically and cowardly express extremist views or to get out of politics entirely in disgust.
Even the very popular (to the general public), successful and competent Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, an old-fashioned New England-style Republican, has to worry about being primaried as so much of the national Republican Party (GOPQ) falls deeper and deeper into neo-fascism, lies, bigotry and conspiracies. Meanwhile, some Democrats all too often fall into extreme identity politics, which turns off many independents.
Back to Net Neutrality Please
A Trump-backed regulation in 2017 made it easier for big Internet service providers (with massive lobbying operations) to engage in the paid prioritization of service for the benefit of big corporate customers at the expense of small ones. But politicians and other officials in some states, including Massachusetts, are looking to get around this via new state laws.
The proposed Bay State law would bar that favoritism and be good for the economy. The Internet is more important in the techno-and-business-start-up-rich Bay State than in most states.
State Sen. James Eldridge noted:
“This was really a reaction to the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] reversal during the Trump administration that took away some of the net neutrality provisions put in place during the Obama administration.’’
Those old ‘Starter’ Neighborhoods
There’s a very useful article by Aaron Renn in Governing Magazine about how “poor neighborhoods” with lots of owner-occupied dwellings provided a springboard for people to enter the middle class. It sure beats massive, impersonal and often crime-ridden public-housing projects. An example would be those New England neighborhoods of “three-deckers” in places like South Boston. The owners often live on just one floor and rent out the rest of the building – a way to start gaining middle-class wealth.
But, as I’ve noticed in the U.S. cities where I’ve lived – Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Providence – public policies and changing social attitudes have eroded the benefits of this “starter housing’’ for years. Among Mr. Renn’s observations:
“The rise of zoning and ever-stricter building codes … played a role, especially in recent years, preventing the construction of traditional starter neighborhoods.”
“Changing zoning regulations to create more affordable neighborhoods in some of America’s most expensive cities would help establish platforms for upward mobility. …{But} other factors played into making these old neighborhoods what they were. They were high in social capital, characterized by intact married families, and populated with people who possessed the skills needed for building maintenance. These exist today in some immigrant communities, but less so in society at large.’’
(Ah yes, the collapse of marriage and the stability that went with it.)
Policymakers take note, particularly considering a housing-cost crisis that shows few signs of abating.
To read Mr. Renn’s article, please hit this link:
“One of the paradoxes of life is that the solution to every human problem contains the seeds of a new problem. ‘’
-- Former Maine U.S. Senator and diplomat George Mitchell
The ill-effects of overly rigid zoning reflect the law of unintended consequences. Sometimes the law can go in a different direction. Consider that while World War II caused more than an estimated 75 million deaths, it also jump-started such medical advances as the use of antibiotics that have saved the lives of many, many more than 75 million people and of course brought many advances in science and engineering.
Working Waterfronts
How much shoreline in Massachusetts and Rhode Island is devoted to “working waterfronts,’’ meaning such things as fishing and aquaculture, boatbuilding and maintenance and so on? I’ll wager it is tiny and getting tinier, especially as more and more land along the water is gobbled up by affluent seasonal and year-round residents. But these enterprises, using New England’s comparative advantage of a richly harbored coast, add to a healthy diversified economy.
Hit this link about an organization in Maine that seeks to preserve working waterfronts.
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MTX Group, a Texas-based consulting company, is getting as much as $3.5 million in Rhode Island tax credits for promising to create 125 jobs in Providence over the next five years. As with many company-luring deals by states, I’m skeptical that all these jobs will show up.
To hear the state Commerce Corporation’s discussion of this, please hit this link:
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As COVID-19 becomes endemic, will most people continue to adopt the habit so common in East Asia of routinely wearing a mask even when there’s not a pandemic underway? Could it become as much of a habit as strapping on your seat belt? Even in a country as cantankerous and hyper-individualist as Anomie America?
If only someone would invent a truly comfortable mask that doesn’t muffle voice as much as most masks do now.
But first, let’s see where the latest subvariant of COVID takes us.
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Another use for vacant malls and their big box stores: Indoor vegetable farms. Locally produced food! Much less shipping from far away.
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Probably no one in history has made as much money transmitting lies, misinformation, and disinformation as Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg.
Losses
RIP Dennis J. Roberts II, who died Oct. 20 at 80.
Denny was a distinguished public servant and civic leader, most notably as Rhode Island’s attorney general from 1979 to 1985. He was a rigorous prosecutor and all-around lawyer, representing a wide range of clients, from big corporations to nonprofit organizations to individuals. And he took on pro-bono work that included such unpleasant and difficult cases as serving on a review board in the wake of sexual-abuse scandals involving Catholic priests.
His family was sort of the Kennedys of Rhode Island. Consider that his uncle, for whom he was named, was mayor of Providence and governor and that his father rose to be chief justice. I suspect those examples were both assets and burdens – hard to live up to.
He was our very friendly neighbor, and he maintained his congeniality, knowledge, capacious memory, and good humor even in his last years, which were marked by very serious health and other problems. I came to think that Denny, who was always reading, would have been a happier history professor than lawyer, politician, and civic leader.
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RIP: Molly de Ramel, who died Oct. 24 at age 51 as a result of an accident at her home in Newport. Television journalist, writer, business person and civic leader, she was charming, funny, unpretentious, adventurous and very, very smart.
Icelandic Interval
Summer at Little Lava is Charles Fergus’s story of how he, accompanied much of the time by his wife and young son, lived in a little house in a volcano-formed landscape on the coast of Iceland, a place of great weird beauty. He tells us much about Icelanders, the island nation’s history and its astonishing geology and wildlife. But we also learn of his trying to come to grips with the gruesome murder of his elderly mother back in Pennsylvania by immersing himself in nature, especially by hiking virtually every day in challenging jagged and rocky terrain, interspersed with wildflowers, old pastures and dwarf woods.
I have only visited Iceland twice and only for a few hours each on a cheap flight to and fro Europe in 1974. But I found it then an entrancing place that seemed at the edge of world. It’s since been discovered by millions who want to swim in the Blue Lagoon, see molten lava spewing from the ground, and stroll the charming capital of Reykjavik, with its brightly colored houses.
I’d like to join them sometime.
There’s a nice quote in the book from an Icelandic poem (the nation has a rich literature):
“You have not lived until you have stayed awake a summer’s night in Iceland.’’
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