Whitcomb: Holiday Intensity; Panic in Pawtucket; Stoned While Driving; ‘Riskiest Moment of Our Lives
Monday, December 25, 2017
Many people probably have stronger memories of Christmas than of any other time of the year; the prospect of another one brings out a mix of emotions.
There’s the year you might have been stuck at an airport in a snowstorm, or skidded into a tree in an ice storm. The lost luggage that held presents. There’s the year someone might have had a few too many drinks and got in a loud argument, or worse. There’s the Christmas that closely followed the death of a loved one. Or soon after someone lost a job and so felt anxious and cramped and unable to put on a full holiday show in the great retail rally of America.
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But then there is the joy of seeing the joy of children and grandchildren wallow in the festivities, yes, including materialism as well as the good cheer that adults try to at least summon up. There are the presents you really like and will use. Indeed, you’ll remember them for years, such as the perfect tool set or a painting. And a holiday dinner that shines with happiness and humor all around the table. Best is the knowledge that the days are no longer growing shorter and you’ll soon have a new year in which to try to reform yourself – again.
Two of the most famous American Christmas songs – “White Christmas’’ and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’’ – are essentially melancholic and express longing for perfect Christmases that never existed and never will. But then Americans may be better at longing than any other people – “the green light, the orgiastic future’’ and all that. And Christmas, in varying degrees, is about longing or maybe call it wishful thinking.
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Among the silliest political assertions of recent years is that there has been a “War on Christmas’’ in which Americans have been allegedly discouraged from saying “Merry Christmas’’. Baloney. This is yet another piece of demagoguery put out by the likes of Fox “News’’ and their allies in the very lucrative right-wing religion racket. No one’s being punished for saying “Merry Christmas.’’ Further, there’s nothing new, or intrinsically “politically correct,’’ about saying “Happy Holidays.’’ When I was a boy in the ‘50s, amongst avid Protestant and Catholic churchgoers, I often heard that greeting. And many of the “Christmas cards’’ we received said “Season’s Greetings’’. The “War on Christmas’’ is a crock, but it probably has led some suckers to send money to multimillionaire TV evangelists.
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As has happened to many people who bought a Christmas tree too early and/or failed to keep its bottom in water, the big Christmas tree in the Rhode Island became severely dried out and was falling apart. It had to be replaced. So did a big one in Rome. For future Christmases, why not go with a big metal tree and spray it with pine scent. It’s increasingly a man-made world: Embrace it and save a tree.
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There’s something very desperate and sad about Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien’s idea that the Rhode Island General Assembly should consider letting the old mill town finance the entire public part of a PawSox new-stadium financing deal. The bonds to be sold would supposedly be paid off by letting the city use all the state sales and income tax revenue to be generated by the ballpark for that purpose.
Thus the city would be glued to one company, whose fortunes in coming decades are impossible to predict with any precision. (Will Minor League baseball be popular in 10 years?) Of course, whatever such a financing agreement says, if the tax revenue doesn’t meet expectations and thus Pawtucket can’t cover the debt, the state would have to come in to try to save the city – again.
I wish that Pawtucket officials would spend more time trying to find ways to leverage for economic development the coming Pawtucket/Central Falls train station, which will link the old mill city more closely with booming Greater Boston, and less time obsessing about the PawSox as if it’s the only game (so to speak) in town. Better to lure and/or keep dozens of small companies that rely so much upon just one with very rich and mobile out-of-state owners.
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Rhode Island “Medical marijuana’’ dispensers have taken in a total of some $27 million in retail revenues so far in 2017, reports The Providence Journal (“Regulators worried by glut of cultivation,’’ Dec. 20). How many of the customers are actual, sincere patients seeking relief from severe or at least chronic pain and how many are just gaming the system for the simple pleasure of getting stoned is unknowable. In any case, it’s not particularly comforting to know that some of those many motorists driving erratically as they text may also be high. It can only get worse; the state hasn’t shown that it can regulate this booming new drug industry.
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So the current version of the GOP, aided by extreme congressional gerrymandering and the peculiarities of the Electoral College, has their new tax law, which especially benefits, among others, those rich folks who voted for it on Capitol Hill. As for President Trump, the law seems brazenly tailored to maximize the advantages for himself and his dubious family and enterprises in real-estate development.
We’ve been down some similar roads before, albeit not bordered by such self-dealing. In 1981, President Reagan pushed through big tax cuts, some of which had to be undone, most notably in ’82, ‘83 and ’84, to deal with the rapidly widening federal deficit.
After the very deep 1981-82 recession, the economy thrived through much of the ‘80s, before ending in the recession of the early ’90s. The main movers: The Federal Reserve Board quelled inflation, the price of oil plunged and a big economic stimulus from a jump in defense spending.After tax increases in the early ‘90s, there was an extended boom.
Then, with the arrival of President George W. Bush in 2001, he and congressional Republicans pushed deregulation and large tax cuts that favored the very rich. This was followed by a period of slow growth and then the biggest crash since 1929, followed by a very deep recession, from which many Americans are still recovering.
The latest GOP tax cut may well cause an economic-growth spurt in 2018. But the widening federal budget deficit and income inequality, as well as that financial markets are in bubble territory, may lead to another crash sooner rather than later. Before that happens, the yawning budget deficit will be used to promote Republican efforts to slash Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, thus reducing consumer purchasing power, which itself could cause a recession.
I assume that the tax law, however unpopular now, will become quite popular at least from January to April 15, since most folks will get at least some tax cut. The big ugly chickens probably won’t start to come home to roost until, perhaps, next year. Even in 2018, that the law guts part of the Affordable Care Act will mean that insurance premiums will rise for many Americans enough to more than offset reduced income taxes.
Oh wait! Companies will pour savings from their tax cuts into big raises for folks below the executive suite and go on hiring sprees! They’ll no longer pour money into stock buybacks (to boost share prices), bigger dividends and ever higher compensation for senior executives, right, even though that’s what they’ve done over the past few years of record corporate profits!? And they’ll cut back on automation! Anyway, ignore some big corporate promises of the past week, meant to garner administration applause. Look at things in a year or two.
(Actually, as I’ve written, corporate taxes should be gradually eliminated and the top rate for individuals raised to pay for the government services that most citizens say they want and/or need. Corporate income taxes are just too inefficient and corrupting.)
There’s at least one really good thing in the tax law. By limiting the interest deductibility to new mortgages of no more than $750,000 and ending the deductibility of interest on home-equity loans, the tax writers will tend to discourage upper-middle class people from taking on excess debt and will put healthy downward pressure on prices in some neighborhoods, though the Realtors won’t like that since they’re paid a percentage of the sale price.
The next couple of years should be exciting. As Brett Ryder recently noted in The Economist: “{“R}arely have so many asset classes – from stocks to bonds to property to bitcoins – exhibited such a sense of invulnerability…rarely have creditors demanded so little insurance against default, even on the riskiest ‘junk’ bonds. And rarely have property prices around the world towered so high…add to this the craze for exotica, such as cryptocurrencies, and the world is in the throes of a bull market in everything.’’
Or as Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate, said recently: “We seem to be living in the riskiest moment of our lives, and yet the stock market seems to be napping.’’
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We’re still early in the renewable-energy era, and many will be slow to accept its tradeoffs. Consider the angry complaints of some neighbors of Richard and Lola Eanes, of Beverly, Mass., after the couple installed a ground-mounted grid of solar panels on their land in that generally affluent community.
One neighbor, Mary Downing, told The Boston Globe: “It’s a foreign body. We don’t want to be out on the deck in the summer, by the pool, and see that thing.’’ The installation is a stack of 20 panels that turns with the sun and shuts down for the night. The Globe says that “It hums rather than rumbles {and} moves a foot or two several times a day.’’
Another neighbor, Bill Soares, told The Globe: “I’m stuck with the property value diminished. I’m stuck with looking at the thing.’’
The heroes in this tempest are Richard and Lola Eanes. Lola said: “We have grandchildren, and we’ve been thinking about climate change and what has to be done to reduce {fossil-fuel} energy {use}. It’s a plus for the environment.’’
I think that people will get used to such installations, as they have gotten used to cell towers and telephone poles. It reminds me of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. I worked across the street from them in the ‘70s. For years, they were denounced as hideous Modernist abominations. But as the years rolled by, and New York City returned to prosperity after the bad years of the ‘70s, many New Yorkers started to love them as symbols of Gotham. (Okay, I continued to dislike them myself.)
To read The Globe’s story, please hit this link:
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In other energy news, it was good to learn from ecoRI News that Rhode Island will soon install its first large battery-storage facility. It will be in Little Compton and be used to help meet growing electricity demand in that town and adjacent Tiverton. The system will be focused on meeting summer demand in the towns, which have many seasonal residents. Massachusetts has already done 26 such projects. To read the ecoRI story, please hit this link:
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Beware of protectionism, especially involving close and traditionally friendly nations. Here’s a little example of what can happen when the United States excludes itself from international trade deals.
The New England lobster industry (which mostly means Maine) is understandably worried about the fact that Canada, whose Maritime Provinces are very big lobster exporters, and the European Union have agreed to end E.U. tariffs on Canadian lobster imports. North American lobsters are very popular, if expensive, food in Europe. The E.U. is the world’s biggest seafood importer.
The lobster deal is part of the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Implementation Act (CETA). This is the sort of agreement that recalls the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free-trade agreement between the E.U. and the U.S. Such a pact would strengthen economies on both sides of the Atlantic and make the West better able to confront the economic and security challenges posed by the aggressive, expansionist dictatorships of Russia and China. And, after all, we share basic political, social and economic values with Europe. We’re stronger together. But the Trump administration’s instincts, here and elsewhere, are protectionist, even when it comes to our closest allies, whom we need as much as they need us in a dangerous world.
The TTIP would, of course, be particularly beneficial to New England.
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It was pleasant to read that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating Jill Stein, M.D., the leader of the leftist Green Party and its 2016 presidential candidate, for possible “collusion’’ with Russia before the election last year.
Among other things, Ms. Stein attended a December 2015 tenth anniversary dinner in honor of RT (formerly called in English Russia Today), the Kremlin’s international propaganda TV network. Intriguingly, at the same table that festive night was Michael Flynn, Trump’s former (very briefly) national security adviser, and none other than Vladimir Putin.
The whole thing makes one speculate on whether the Trump campaign, and the Russians, had anything to do with propping up the campaign of Stein, who took votes away from Hillary Clinton, who won the overall national popular vote but lost it narrowly in three states that handed the Electoral College victory to Trump. In any event, Stein and Flynn should be ashamed of themselves for in effect honoring the murderous thug Putin and his most important international propaganda outlet. The GOP-controlled committee is also digging into reports that Clinton’s campaign paid for research in a report with allegations about Trump’s behavior during a 2013 business trip to Moscow. That’s generally called “opposition research’’ and is virtually universal in American political campaigns for major offices.
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In the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration built big projects to be both beautiful and to last. They used lots of granite for public buildings, walls, bridges, monuments and so on. So a lot of stuff they put up is still lovely.
Not so most public projects of the past few decades. The favored materials are easily stained, flaked and chipped cement and concrete, which quickly show their age. Take a look at the bridges and other parts of the river-relocation project put up in downtown Providence in the ‘90s and you’ll see what I mean. They’re lovely from a distance but shabby close-up.
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The Trump administration has been trying to censor certain phrases that formerly were widely used in some federal agencies, such as “global warming’’ and “human-caused climate change’’ in the Environmental Protection Agency (the fossil-fuel industry doesn’t like them) and ‘‘evidence-based,’’ “science-based,’’ “transgender’’ and “diversity’’ at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Tea Party and some Evangelical types don’t like those words.)
At the same time, the administration is trying to force out some agency scientists disinclined to follow the new regime’s line. But science is international and these phrases and the science they refer to will still be out there, although the administration’s actions will tend to move some important scientific research abroad. Too bad.
When I worked in Paris in the ‘80s we lived right next to the Institut Pasteur, the famed medical-research center, where I often went in to look at the bulletin board to read announcements about discoveries. (Institut Pasteur scientists found the AIDS virus.) Most of the announcements were in English, the primary language for high-level scientific communications. One got a strong sense of just how global science is.
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RIP, George Graboys, a stellar Rhode Island banker and visionary civic leader, and Kerry Kohring, a longtime Providence Journal editor, Newspaper Guild activist and civic leader in his neighborhood on the East Side of Providence. They both combined moral principle, leadership, kindness, good humor and persistence.
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The Land Remembers, by the late Ben Logan, is a very evocative memoir of growing up on a southwest Wisconsin farm in the ‘30s. It manages to be both nostalgic and realistic, heartfelt and factually rigorous. It is indeed a very moving piece of personal history. My maternal grandfather, who died when I was very young, grew up on a large farm in upstate New York. I’ve always regretted not having been able to ask him what it was like.
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