Whitcomb: Drainage Dilemma; Build That, and They Will come; Dining and Sleeping to Montreal

Sunday, September 11, 2022

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“In the first of the black fall drizzles,

in a morning when world’s-end seems to hover….

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“It is the time of year

when hawks rush down the pass where you live,

But the heat last weekend held them

northward….’’

-- From “After Labor Day,’’ by Stephen Lea (born 1942), a former poet laureate of Vermont

 

 

“No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.”

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

 

 

“{M}illions will now be mourning something more intimate and more precious: the loss of someone who has been a permanent fixture for their – our – entire lives. Her death will prompt memories of all that has passed these last 70 years, and all those others who we loved and lost. There is grief contained within grief. Today we mourn a monarch. And in that very act, we also mourn for ourselves.

-- Jonathan Freedland, in The Guardian

 

 

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Queen Elizabeth PHOTO: New Zealand Archives

One of my earliest clear memories of television is watching a slightly grainy black and white film of Queen Elizabeth II being coronated in 1953, which showed us the power that the medium would have in covering world news.

 

The Queen was a fixed point of graciousness, duty, and stability in a world that often seemed about to descend into chaos.

 

 

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Providence last Monday PHOTO: Jim Taylor

 

Let’s hope that the severe flooding last Monday on such major roads in Greater Providence as Routes 95, 10, and 6  lead to audits of potential highway-drainage dangers. It’s obvious that some drains should be cleaned out pronto (before the next tropical storm?) and, presumably, some should be bigger. And in many places, flooding is worsened by the numerous nearby acres covered by asphalt parking lots off which water pours into all sorts of inconvenient places. That problem would be lessened if more parking lots were paved with permeable surfaces, such has been done, for example, at the University of Rhode Island’s main campus, in Kingston, or, for that matter, if more mass transit reduced the demand for parking lots.

 

(Set up rowboat racks along Route 95?)

 

One thing that seems clear from the data is that more weather extremes are here, and our elected leaders need to explain to the voters/taxpayers why we must spend a lot more money to make our physical infrastructure more resilient than we might have thought necessary only a few years ago.

 

Prepare for some hefty bond issues.

 

 

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Helena Foulkes PHOTO: Campaign

Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate Helena Foulkes has an intriguing idea: a $250 million “blue jobs” bond issue in 2024 to elevate the Ocean State’s under-promoted marine-related sector, in which the state should have a big comparative advantage. This would, of course, include offshore wind power, but other ocean-related industries, too, and seed money for startups.

 

The idea is to do for Rhode Island’s “blue sector’’ the sort of thing Massachusetts has done to promote its world-famous biotech sector.

 

 

 

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It’s ridiculous that the candidates for Rhode Island governor and lieutenant governor can’t run as a formal team, as do presidential and vice-presidential candidates. If a governor suddenly leaves the scene during his/her term, most people would want a basic continuity of the policies of the governor they elected.

 

 

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Proposed Tidewater Development PHOTO: Developers

What Works

When looking at plans for a soccer stadium and associated private-sector stuff along the Seekonk River to be subsidized by state money, I keep thinking of how public officials are usually not very competent to negotiate with business people, who tend to take them, and thus the taxpayers, to the cleaners.

 

I think of how the focus should be on providing attractive public infrastructure that can both improve our quality of life and boost the local economy,  and not on deals with individual companies and investors. Good physical public infrastructure by itself can draw business to an area.

 

Consider how much people love to be along water. Creating more parks, boating facilities and other amenities along the Seekonk River in Pawtucket should be a focus of the state and city’s role in boosting the local economy, not complex private-public projects.

 

 

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CVS Logo

Bigger and bigger

I suppose one can usually take some pride when a huge locally based company grows even bigger, but Woonsocket-based CVS Health’s agreement to buy Dallas-based Signify Health for $8 billion raises some unsettling issues.

 

Home health-care-focused Signify provides health-risk assessments and value-based care and has a network of more than 10,000 clinicians across America and proprietary analytics and technology platforms.

 

Would CVS’s takeover of the company give CVS too much pricing power? And would there be conflicts of interest involving Signify’s contracted clinicians and CVS pharmacies?

 

Let’s hope that regulators, including the Justice Department’s  Antitrust Division, look at this deal very carefully. Some companies are getting too big and powerful.

 

 

Making Tracks for Montreal

What a neat idea! For years, government officials and businesspeople in New England and Quebec have talked of running an overnight sleeper train, with dining and club cars and even entertainment, from Boston to Montreal, via southern Maine, and then up through New Hampshire’s the White Mountains and Quebec’s Eastern Townships.  Now, spearheaded by a Quebec organization called Fondation Trains de Nuit, the initiative is gaining speed, although the service probably couldn’t start until 2025-2026.

 

A couple of hundred million dollars would probably be needed to bring the proposed route, all owned by private railroads, up to passenger-rail standard, but studies suggest it could be successfully marketed. For one thing, it would connect two large and dynamic metro areas (good for the economies of both); for another, projections are that the service’s tickets would cost considerably less than ones to fly, and perhaps most alluring, it would offer a fun,  romantic and low-stress route through scenic terrain. And fewer young people these days want to drive.

 

 

College Cutbacks

Much of the college-affordability problem is many states’  (especially Red ones) slashing of public money for public colleges and universities for the past few decades, driving up tuition and fees. Meanwhile, the expense has driven many students away from liberal arts and into technical and business courses, where the young people hope that they’ll earn enough money to pay off their debts.  Increasingly, the mission is to turn young people into workers, if not necessarily into good citizens.

 

URI has been one of the states that has strenuously sought affluent out-of-state applicants whose families can pay full freight, helping to offset the effects of low state support. URI has a very attractive main campus, is between the two big metro areas of New York and Boston, and has won increasing recognition for some of its academic programs. So it’s been remarkably successful in its out-of-state recruitment efforts.

 

The decline of a liberal-arts education is corrosive. A healthy democracy needs lots of people broadly educated in the humanities,  social sciences and sciences to foster creativity, curiosity, innovation, skepticism and informed citizenship. And take a look at the biographies of many highly successful people in business and technology: Many majored in liberal-arts subjects.

 

Quasi-vocational higher education, while much needed, has its limitations.

 

Here’s a  Forbes view of aspects of this issue:

 

 

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U.S. Supreme Court PHOTO: USSC

Packing the Courts

I’m impressed by how successful the GOPQ and its Fuhrer have been in putting members of the far-right-wing Federalist Society (a subsidiary of the Republican Party)  in the federal courts, where they can protect and promote their views,  their leaders and certain big-business interests.

 

Consider Judge Aileen Cannon,  a Trumper. She, to the dismay of most legal scholars and other expert observers, but to the joy of the MAGA mob, has granted Trump’s request to name a “special master” to review documents, many of them illegally taken from the White House by Trump and his gang,  seized by the FBI in its search of the fetid swamp called Mar-a-Lago during an espionage investigation. And she ordered the Justice Department to stop using the stuff in its probe pending whatever the special master decides.

 

Trump named Cannon to the federal bench in 2020. She’s been a right-wing ideologue at least since 2005, when she joined the Federalist Society at the age of 24.

 

(Cannon also oversaw a criminal case involving a Florida man named Paul Hoeffer, who threatened to behead Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y). Federal prosecutors sought a three-and-half-year prison sentence for Hoeffer but Cannon gave him 18 months.)

 

Trump, by far the most corrupt – indeed depraved --  president in American history, has  long been  shielded from punishment, including by his corrupt attorney general, William Barr. Imagine being able to have a lackey judge stop the government from an investigation based on copious and widely publicized  evidence of probable cause that crimes were committed! An honest and able judge would tell a defendant and his/her lawyers challenging a law-enforcement search to make a post-indictment, pre-trial motion to suppress evidence from a search.

 

(Even Barr told Fox News that the ruling “was wrong,”  “deeply flawed in a number of ways” and that the government should appeal Cannon’s, er, unusual ruling.

 

Trump’s adult life is rife with stuff that would have gotten most of us long jail time, or, many years ago, the gallows.

 

In general, Trump’s judicial nominees have not been known for their high intellectual and moral caliber but rather for their right-wing ideology and political loyalty. The question in Cannon’s case is how much of her outrageous ruling is based on her incompetence and how much on her ideology and loyalty to Trump.

Yet again, Trump is treated as if he’s above the law. I doubt that any of the original Federalists would have liked this.

 

 

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Putin PHOTO: Kremlin News Service

A Good Cartel

Herewith is a brilliant way to reduce Russia’s oil revenues, much of which is used to murder Ukrainians in Putin’s war there and to conduct other kinds of war against democracies:

 

Have the G-7 group of industrialized democracies create a cartel to set price caps on Russian crude oil at below the world price but above the cost of production. This would be instead of imposing a total embargo. The cap plan would be alluring even to countries that haven’t so far joined Western sanctions against the Kremlin.  The cartel would be able to enforce the plan because of Western firms’ command of insurance needed for Russian tankers. Coverage could be denied to any tankers carrying oil above the cap.

 

As you’d expect with such a thug, Putin has made dire threats against countries that might join in the scheme but he’d probably have little choice but to go along with it. He needs any oil money they can get.

 

Having said this, will the West  (especially Europe) and its allies, including Japan, have the fortitude to go through a dark cold winter with little or no Russian fuel as they strive to replace it with fuel from elsewhere and with inadequate nuclear, wind and solar power?  Will they succumb to the temptation of appeasing the dictator, and in so doing encourage more aggression?

 

There’s a lot of pain coming in the form of very high energy prices but Putin’s assaults could be a long-term economic and environmental blessing by accelerating the move away from Earth-heating gas, oil and coal while weakening fossil-fuel-financed dictators like Czar Vlad --  if the West displays patience, courage and ingenuity. A victory for Russia in Ukraine would be catastrophic for the security of the West and its allies.

 

In any event, the crisis calls for increased military aid to Ukraine to end Russia’s invasion as soon as possible.

 

 

Tough and Opportunistic

Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss,  was branded “The Iron Weathercock’’ for her seeming opportunism as the political market changed. She was a member of the slightly left-of-center Liberal-Democrats before joining the Conservative Party and went from an opponent of Brexit before the 2016 referendum that narrowly approved it to supporter afterwards. Her nickname is a play on that of the late Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was called “The Iron Lady’’ for her usually unyielding adherence to her political principles.

 

Truss’s fierce ambition and ability to change course might recall Boris Johnson, but she lacks his entertainment value and perverse charm. Indeed, she lacks any charm, perverse or not. But that she detests Putin is to her credit.

 

She’ll have her hands full dealing with an extreme energy crisis and associated inflation, a recession (exacerbated by Brexit), and a major war in Europe. Sadly, she’s enamored of trickle-down economics – tax cuts for the rich, etc. – which may make things worse but will please the affluent people in southern England who are the heart of her party.

 

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Do our local political candidates have a special blindingly white paint with which they paint their teeth for rictus smiles for campaign photos?

 

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How many acres have been deforested to provide paper for Providence mayoral candidate Brett Smiley’s relentless campaign flyers?  Is this turning off some voters?

 

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By not voting, you’re voting.

 

 

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RIP, Chip Young.

He was a superb spokesman for Save The Bay and an all-around environmental advocate, an often very funny (if a tad too often slipping into the grotesque) commentator on life around here, a great athlete (despite an always threatening heart problem) and a memorably cheerful character. He died at 72 on Aug. 24.

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.


 

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