Whitcomb: More $ Up the Road; Publicly Owned Utilities; Slob Society; Conscription

Sunday, October 01, 2023

 

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Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

“Closing time at the Athenaeum,
but this visitor bat
(who knows how he got in)
seems intent on staying the night;
our waving arms, a rolled Times,
the janitor’s broom haven’t fazed him a bit.’’

-- From “American Sublime,’’ by Mark Doty (born 1953), American poet.

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To read the whole poem, set in the St. Johnsbury (Vt.) Athenaeum, hit this link:

 

 

“A critic is a legless man who teaches running.’’

--Channing Pollock (1926-2006), American magician and film actor

 

 

“I believe that I would rather that the people should wonder why I wasn’t president than why I am.’’

--- Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873), Ohio governor, Treasury secretary in the Lincoln administration and U.S. chief justice. He was a native of New Hampshire.

 

 

October: It starts with lingering murmurs and scents of summer, explodes with color and then fades into wet brown leaves on the ground. Virginia creeper can make a tree look like it’s on fire in the early fall.

 

 

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Save the Bay’s Exploration Center and Aquarium in Newport is both highly instructive and lots of fun, especially, of course, for kids. Check it out by hitting this link:

 

 

I think this will become one of Newport’s major attractions if it isn’t already.

 

 

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PHOTO: File

Last week, I noted how Greater Boston’s universities and associated institutions have been crucial in enriching the region. We had another example of their ability to spark profitable business ventures with news that the Feds are setting up an “investor catalyst” center at Kendall Square in Cambridge. Its neighbors, of course, include Harvard and MIT. Kendall Square has become something like the world’s bio-tech capital.

 

The center will use basic research findings about such tough diseases as cancers and dementias to create new technologies, medicines, and devices and get them in the market by working with entrepreneurs and financial organizations.

 

This center, part of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) will probably pump billions into the regional economy over coming years. Perhaps some Rhode Island institutions, especially Brown University and the University of Rhode Island, as well as Lifespan, Care New England, and some Ocean State biotech businesses – established and startups -- can glom on to some of this activity.

 

 

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Governor Dan McKee PHOTO: GoLocal

Rhode Island legislators and Gov. Dan McKee will now have to see how closely they can adjust the Ocean State’s tax system so that it’s roughly competitive with Massachusetts’s system, which legislators revised last week.

Hit this link for an overview:

 

 

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Many consumers complain all the time about their electric utility. In Rhode Island, that mostly means Rhode Island Energy. Would they get a better deal from a community-owned utility? What has happened in Winter Park, Fla., which bought out the city’s electricity system from investor-owned Progress Energy in 2005, suggests that they might.

 

Since 2005, city officials say, rates have generally fallen and are now 35.6 percent lower than Florida’s average investor-owned electric rates, and reliability has improved, especially as more than 70 percent of the system lines have been put underground, safe from falling trees in hurricanes. Meanwhile, the city is pushing hard for renewable energy.

 

New Englanders ought to look into this. Hit these links:

 

https://cityofwinterpark.org/departments/electric-utility/#:~:text=On%20June%201%2C%202005%2C%20the,city's%20electric%20utility%20service%20areas.
 

https://www.pressherald.com/2023/09/25/commentary-public-power-was-a-win-win-for-my-city-and-the-scary-ads-proved-untrue/

 

 

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PHOTO: File

Now Amazon, like Google, is being sued by the Feds for monopolistic practices. Both have provided many revolutionary services. But both have gotten dangerously huge, giving them tremendous market power. Amazon, for its part, keeps expanding its cut of sellers' earnings through the fees it levies on them. They’re trapped with Amazon, on which ads have become increasingly misleading.

The company’s sheer size discourages other companies from entering the e-commerce sector. Generally, the more competition, the more technological and other advances.

Time to break up Amazon and Google, despite their addictive convenience.

 

 

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President Joe Biden PHOTO: Campaign Commercial

Should Have Stayed Out

President Biden should not have taken an overt side in the auto strike! It’s fine that he expresses general support for organized labor, which has steeply declined over the past few decades amidst globalization, anti-union actions by Republicans and the expansion of the service sector, and decline of manufacturing jobs. Organized labor’s decline has gone along with the decline of the middle class and America’s ever-more-extreme income inequality, in which a tiny sliver at the top has become ever richer and more politically powerful, including through bribing politicians.

But presidents should be above getting involved in specific labor actions, with all their unpredictably moving parts. In private-sector disputes, a president should stay away from the fray. He or she might help quietly, and without cameras, to get the parties together – say at Camp David – to try to come to an agreement, appealing to their enlightened self-interest and patriotism.  My good friend of many years, Llewellyn King, columnist, businessman, former union official and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, reminded me that Camp David, in the Maryland hills, would be a good venue for this.

Certainly, openly intervening in such private-sector fights can be politically perilous.

 

 

A Tacky Time

America has become a slob culture in recent decades, literally and otherwise.

 

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democratic senator, has become a poster boy for the literal side of this in recent weeks as he has been turning up for work at that once-august body wearing gym shorts, sneakers and a hoodie, instead of “business wear,’’ which for men usually means a suit and tie or maybe a blazer or sports jacket and tie. Now, Fetterman has long been eccentric, and more so after he suffered a stroke, in 2022. But he blessedly defeated physician/con man Mehmet Oz , the GOP/QAnon candidate, in the general election that year.

 

Of course, we generally have to let people wear what they want. But there’s a good reason we have dress codes in certain settings: They encourage and reflect the sort of dignity and seriousness that we need in, say, legislative settings and funerals. For that matter, dress codes in school encourage more studiousness; they signal that this is a place to apply yourself.

 

What’s most surprising to me is that people show up in sports clothes at funerals.
 

But wait! After Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer at first gave Fetterman a pass to wear his inappropriate clothing, the Senate last Wednesday adopted a formal dress code by unanimous consent, requiring a coat, tie and slacks, or long pants for men. It does not include any specific requirements for women. A victory for dignity in a tacky time.

 

Meanwhile, many of us continue to be depressed by the slovenliness of people on planes, trains and buses, which is psychically associated with the oafish and selfish behavior of far too many travelers, including the road-rage drivers on the roads. Angry and selfish.

 

If you dress with some dignity, you’re a bit more likely to act with consideration and respect and to be accorded them, too.

 

Back to congressional slobs.

 

Consider that despite an emergency such as the pending government shutdown forced by the far-right wing of the GOP, members of the very narrowly Republican-controlled House didn’t stay in Washington the other week to address the problem, but rather, headed home to spend yet more time unloading brazen-lie-enriched  garbage rhetoric on media, which their sucker listeners consume with relish.

 

But then, the millions of these credulous  cultists don’t care about reality; they just want the thrill of hearing  such buzzwords such as “lock her up,’’ “build the wall,’’ and “stolen election!’’ as their pockets are being emptied.

 

“There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science.’ There is only ‘German science,’ ‘Jewish science,’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years, that is not such a frivolous statement.’’
 

-- George Orwell (1903-190), in his 1943 essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War.’’ Think of the Trumpers’ “alternative facts.’’

 

 

Tennessee Republican  Congressman Tim Burchett lamented on the BBC last week that while his constituents back home work hard, “These groups up here {in Washington} will start their meetings at 10:30, cater in a lunch, and take a couple of hours off in the afternoon."

 

Hit this link:

 

 

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U.S. Senator Robert Menendez PHOTO: U.S. Senate

Most people who watch politics have long known that New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez is an industrial-strength crook, from that cemetery of ethics Union County, N.J. His latest bribery scandal, which is both foreign and domestic, includes gold ingots and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash found in his home, is a corker, even by Menendez’s sleazy record. I predict he’ll finally go to jail.

 

Unlike what usually happens when a leading Republican politician is charged with corruption and/or other really bad behavior and his/her party circles the wagons to try to protect him/her – e.g., see their incendiary maximum leader and their fantasist Congressman George Santos  --    leading Democrats generally ask their indicted people to resign, which is what has happened in the Menendez case.

 

 

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As the housing crisis intensifies, to no small degree, because of relentless nimbyism against the construction of new housing,  many Americans seem more interested in housing for cars than for people.

 

Montana, of all places, might have some suggestions.

 

Hit this link:

 

Those making policies for housing and transportation, including state and local politicians, housing and transportation officials,  state, town, and city planners, and, of course, developers and property managers, ought to read Henry Graber’s richly researched and often grimly entertaining book “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World’’.  It’s about how Americans’ parking obsession has ravaged our communities.

 

 

More Moral Squalor

The crew at last Wednesday’s Republican debate really outdid themselves in political cowardice – they are still too terrorized by violence-inspiring Trump and his tribe to criticize his past and present murderously sociopathic behavior --  and they spent most of the evening fleeing easily verifiable facts.

 

By the way,  many in this crowd love to talk about “closing the border with Mexico.’’  Details, please!  Maybe mine it? The border is  1,954 miles long, much of it through wilderness, and Mexico is our largest trading partner. And reminder: Across the border go piles of guns from the U.S. to arm the drug cartels in Mexico and points south. And  Americans, with their vast demand for drugs, finance the cartels.

 

Americans might look (but won’t – it’s too tiring to look it up) to Europe, still swamped by migrants willing to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean, which is a tad wider than the Rio Grande. Some countries are so awful that people will do virtually anything to escape.

 

 

Finally, a History of the Draft

Whatever your opinions on the policies described, it's hard to deny that retired Providence lawyer Jerry Elmer's new book, "Conscription, Conscientious Objection, and Draft Resistance in American History,'' published by Brill,  is a rigorously researched, fair and lucidly written work, with a powerful narrative drive. I could see screenwriters getting a couple of movies out of it.

 

Surprisingly, the book, which details the history of the conscription and related issues going back to the  18th Century, seems to be the first such work.
 

Hit this link:

 

 

Reading Mr. Elmer’s book reminded me of the arbitrariness/contingencies of the draft. In 1969, during the Vietnam War, there was a lottery in which all men born between 1944 through 1950 would be assigned a number based on their date of birth. The lower the number, the greater the chance of being drafted (if you didn’t first volunteer for military service).

 

My number was 361, which meant that barring something like the imminence of a world war that could incinerate most of us, I was home free. But my friend Steve Perry’s number was 7. He was drafted and killed only about a month after arriving in Vietnam.

 

But there are many bloodthirsty dictators in the world who wish us harm, be it Hitler, Stalin or Putin, which means that from time to time we’ll need the draft.

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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