Whitcomb: Pesky Facts; McMansions, Undermining Ukraine; Medicare Bonanza

Sunday, October 23, 2022

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

Along the line of smoky hills
The crimson forest stands,
And all the day the blue-jay calls
Throughout the autumn lands.

Now by the brook the maple leans
With all his glory spread,
And all the sumacs on the hills
Have turned their green to red.

Now by great marshes wrapt in mist,
Or past some river's mouth,
Throughout the long, still autumn day
Wild birds are flying south.

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-- “Indian Summer,’’ by William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918), a Canadian poet who lived for a time in New England

    

 

“It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable. No one knows Who created the visible universe, and it is infinitely improbable that anything properly describable as evidence on the point will ever be discovered. No one knows what motives or intentions, if any, lie behind what we call natural laws. No one knows why man has his present form. No one knows why sin and suffering were sent into this world—that is, why the fashioning of man was so badly botched.’’

-- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), American journalist, critic and scholar

 

 

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

― George Orwell (1903-1950) in his novel 1984

 

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I love the Pointillist look of yellow fallen leaves on roads at this time of year. In a little more than a week, we’ll probably finally have a freeze and then a huge dump of leaves in a few hours, which will remind us of winter but also of spring as the trees make way for buds.

Then we’ll presumably get some of those wan,  weirdly warm, windless and hazy days called Indian summer, which can last a week or two.

 

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I came across this thing while walking in the park near the Roger Williams National Memorial, in Providence. What is it? A memorial to a dead tourist? A Druid astronomical measuring device? A New Age shrine?

 

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These days are the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was even scarier than we thought at the time, as since-declassified documents have shown. I recall the tense news bulletins amidst the rock music on  “77 WABC, Home of the All Americans!’’ in New York as we mulled the possibility of being incinerated and/or irradiated while strolling on crunchy fallen oak leaves to a drugstore in Watertown, Conn., to buy a Coke at the soda fountain.

 

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Somewhat by accident, I stayed in a weird place called WhyHotel in Washington, D.C., last week. Pretty much everything is done with your cell phone – getting into the building, where there is no traditional lobby with hotel employees to get you set up, taking an elevator, and getting into your room. A celebration of impersonality.

 

At night I looked across the street from my room to see people pacing, watching TV and cooking in sterile-looking modern apartments and thought of the Bill Murray character pensively or sadly looking out his hotel room window in Tokyo in the strange, wonderful movie Lost in Translation.

 

The United States of Anomie.

 

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As the debate grinds on – though it may be a done deal -- about the plan to repair and retrofit the Industrial Trust Building in downtown Providence, mostly for apartments, there have been complaints that the project, especially its housing element, would involve “gentrification’’ -- a term that tends to be used in a pejorative sense.

 

But there’s something to be said for gentrification. It brings people into a neighborhood who can spend a lot of money there on goods and services, employ folks, including low-income people, and promote stronger policing and cleaner streets. (What a trash-strewn mess downtown’s Burnside Park is now.)

 

Much of the controversy about “The Superman Building’’ revolves around how much “affordable housing’’ (that very vague term) should go into the Art-Deco skyscraper, which was finished in 1928. Certainly, we need more housing built in many places to help lower rents and home-purchase costs. To do that in a big way, however, we need to change zoning and other regulations, and in some neighborhoods confront a nimbyism that seeks to block all new building.

 

The death of Robert Toll last week at 81 reminded me of an interesting example of what some people would call “American excess’’.  Or maybe call it “exuberance’’. Mr. Toll, with his brother Bruce, ran Toll Brothers, which pioneered the development of luxury “McMansions’’ in America’s affluent suburbs for the past five decades. These houses and their yards take up a lot of space, use a lot of energy and have added a new look to sprawl that some would call stylish and others boring. And they speak to Americans’ obsession with status and keeping up with the Joneses. No wonder consumer debt is so high!

 

The average size of an American house has tripled since the 1950s, to about 2,400 square feet now. The average size of a Toll house is about 3,500 square feet.

 

The average price of a house sold by Toll last year was $1.04 million.

 

 

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Is the Massachusetts South Coast to get a boost in air service?  The state plans to provide design and project funding for a new terminal and control tower at New Bedford Regional Airport. This would supplement the long-delayed and much more important revival of passenger-rail service (via the MBTA) scheduled to start late next year, a boon to Fall River and New Bedford, which like most old mill towns, struggle and whose people have long felt neglected by the big shots in Boston.

 

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Rhode Islanders may be the worst drivers in America, but they’re less dangerous than Massachusetts ones because they tend not to drive as fast as those impatient, irascible, hyper-aggressive Bay Staters.

 

Most people enjoy reading about rich heirs to family fortunes fighting via nasty lawsuits over inherited money, which is usually held in complex trusts. Thus it has been with the widow of Michael Metcalf (who died in 1987) and their three children, who are suing her lawyers. Michael Metcalf ran the late-lamented big multimedia company The Providence Journal Co. Then there are a couple of  Chace family cousins in Providence whose family owned Berkshire Hathaway, an old New England textile company that Warren Buffett turned into a kind of mutual fund for rich people.

Most people don’t have much money, and many live paycheck to paycheck. It makes them feel a bit better to see wealthy people angry and unhappy, though these privileged folks, often what the late Providence Mayor Vincent Cianci crudely called simply members of “the lucky sperm club,’’ almost always stay rich, and thus happier than most people.

 

Hit these links for details on the aforementioned fights:

 

https://www.golocalprov.com/business/family-of-former-providence-journal-owners-battle-over-control-of-tens-of-m

 

https://www.golocalprov.com/business/Billionaires-Legacy-Chace-Family-Battle-Over-Control-of-Hundreds-of-Milli

 

 

Details, details

One of the things that many politicians of varying levels of dishonesty, especially these days in the GOPQ Party, have going for them is that voters rarely make the effort to look up stuff after hearing political assertions. So, as this year’s political ads show, it’s very easy to market outrageous lies. Here are responses to Republican candidates’ lies. I concentrate on them because the party seems poised to take over at least the U.S. House.

 

The major causes of high inflation now (and inflation is higher in most of the world than in the United States) are not Biden administration policies.

 

Hit this link for a global perspective:

 

The main causes include global COVID-created shortages and supply-chain disruptions,  the world energy and food crisis instigated by Vladimir Putin’s rape of Ukraine and China’s ongoing COVID lockdowns. The lockdowns have thrown a monkey wrench into that manufacturing behemoth; China has the world’s second-largest economy.

 

The GOPQ has denounced last year’s Democrats’ $1.9 trillion stimulus law, much of which was allocated to assist individuals to address the personal economic challenges of the pandemic. The party blames this for excessively goosing demand and, thus inflation. But trillions of dollars in stimulus money were allocated in 2020, under the Trump regime, when the country was threatened by a severe depression. God knows what would have happened to millions of citizens without it.

 

Was the Biden stimulus plan excessive? In retrospect, probably, but look back at the public health and economic crises at the time he took office. And we should hail his infrastructure program.

 

Meanwhile, big corporations, some of them with near-monopoly power,  are taking advantage of the world economic mess by raising their prices by more than their increased costs.

 

Hit this link:

 

Also, there’s little doubt that the Federal Reserve Board should have started earlier to raise rates to cool demand. In any case, all inflation has a large international element and neither Republican nor Democratic presidents can do much about it, and state governors virtually nothing. The Fed is quite something else.

 

Then there’s crime, a perennial GOPQ complaint. Well, amidst the social and economic chaos of recent years, violent crime rose 28 percent from 2019 to 2020 and murders 35 percent as GOPQ states weakened gun laws.

 

Lack of police funding?  Warnings that “woke” Democrats will defund the police? Democratic-run major cities spend much more   on policing per person than Republican-run ones, which hate taxes, and 80 percent of the largest cities increased police funding from 2019 to 2022. Further, states run by the GOPQ comprise most of the worst crime states.

 

Hit these links:

 

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-recent-rise-in-violent-crime-is-driven-by-gun-violence/

 

https://www.salon.com/2022/03/16/democrats-for--but-new-data-shows-higher-rates-in-red-states/

 

 

The safest region in the country regarding crime is good old Blue New England.

 

Then there’s the flood of migrants pouring onto our southwest border. The GOPQ continues to make that a big political issue, which the Biden administration responds to erratically. Okay, what would the Republicans do? Shoot migrants at the border?  Send the survivors to Boston? Be specific!

 

But then, it has been impossible to get broad immigration reform through Congress for decades. During much of that time Republicans have controlled Congress.

 

Finally, there’s the bugaboo around the fact that the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act would boost IRS staffing by 30 percent -- to where it was before 2010. The GOPQ asserts that this would hit the middle class with many more audits. But what the Republican leadership mostly fear is that it would make their big donors  and lobbyists unhappy.

 

In fact, the staffing increase is focused on those making more than $400,000 a year. The very affluent, with their ability to hire tax lawyers and accountants to help them game the system, are the folks who have benefitted from the slashing of the IRS staff, and  their ranks include many big tax evaders.

 

In any event, inflations and recessions come and go, but once you lose a democracy, even a quasi-democracy like ours, it’s very difficult to get it back.

 

 

Abandon Ukraine?

 

“No Republican should vote for any money for Ukraine. $0 for Ukraine.”

-- -Steve Bannon, long-time Trump political strategist

 

“NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them. What the hell is going on with these #NATONazis?”

-- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R.-Georgia)

 

Reminder, Ukrainian President  Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and the Nazis murdered much of his family.

 

"Honestly, I think he {Trump} feared him {Putin}. I think he was afraid of him. I think the man intimidated him.’’

"I also think he admired him greatly. I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him." 

-- Stephanie Grisham, former Trump press secretary

 

Naturally, there’s plenty of fatigue from the expensive task of helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian barbarism. And inevitably, some leading Republicans, including the deliciously amoral, cowardly and relentlessly ambitious Kevin McCarthy, want to cut the billions in military and other aid we’re giving that country. Mr. McCarthy, a  frequent Trump bootlicker, will probably be the next U.S. House speaker and would rather slash taxes for billionaires than, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said in 1938 as Britain and France prepared to hand Czechoslovakia to Hitler, being in “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.’’

 

But we aren’t helping the Ukrainians in order to be nice. Rather, Ukraine is, in effect defending the community of democracies with whom we share democratic and other cultural values and close economic ties. Those values and economic ties are major factors in preserving American prosperity and, of course, human rights.

 

None of this is to say that NATO members that have not contributed as much of a share of their economies to the alliance as the U.S. has shouldn’t be pressured to pay much more – especially the deadbeat Germans. One good thing that neo-isolationist, dictator-worshipping Trump did was to complain more than his predecessors that most NATO members don’t cough up nearly enough for collective defense.  Consider that if Trump had been re-elected, it’s likely he would have tried to take America out of the alliance, with disastrous effects on our national security.

 

If Putin succeeds in crushing Ukraine (like all democracies a flawed one),  he’ll feel emboldened to move to other aggression,  such as seizing the Baltic States, while strengthening his police-state control of Russia itself, and do perhaps irreparable damage to the (roughly) rules-based international order. Appeasement is a false economy when dealing with tyrannies like the mass- murderer Putin.

 

The countries that most consistently back Putin are the terrible kleptocratic dictatorships of North Korea, Syria, Belarus, and Nicaragua. Then come the likes of Venezuela and Iran. Why? Because anything that undermines Putin’s bloody regime casts a cloud over fellow tyrants. It sets an unsettling example.

Adequately funding Ukraine means some economic sacrifice in America, and especially in Europe, over the next few months, particularly with energy prices, but the pain will get much worse if the West succumbs to Putin’s blackmail.

 

Think how much sacrifice there was in the U.S. and Europe during World War II to defeat Hitler – stringent rationing, etc. What we and Europe face now is nothing like that.

 

A usually forgotten fact:

 

After the Communist revolution, Ukraine was forced to become a member of the Soviet Union as a sort of quasi-country run from the Kremlin.  But Ukraine was among the first countries that signed the United Nations Charter, becoming a founding member of the United Nations among 51 countries. This provided the Soviet Union (a permanent Security Council member with veto powers) with another vote in the General Assembly.

 

So even under Kremlin control, Ukraine was a “country.’’ As the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, Ukrainians voted by over 92 percent for real independence. Few surrounding nations want to be run from Russia, let alone by a sociopath.

 

 

Warmth From Cold Water

Of course, Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the resulting European energy crisis have accelerated efforts to create economies not based on gas,  oil and coal from petrostate dictatorships such as Russia. It reminds me of the stuff that came out of the pressure of World War II – mass use of antibiotics and radar, jet engines, new building materials and, yes, the atomic bomb, which was used to end the war in Asia and the Pacific started by the brutal Japanese Empire – adding a new kind of existential fear.

 

One of the most interesting examples of this recent reactive innovation is in Helsinki, Finland.

 

There, a new, carbon-neutral heating system is planned in which a tunnel will be used to pull water from the seabed, where water temperature stays constant. The water would then be processed through heat pumps.

 

Bloomberg City Lab reports that “{H}eat exchangers will remove about 2.7 degrees (Fahrenheit) of heat from the seawater, which will later be returned to the sea via another nine-kilometer tunnel. The energy collected will then be refined via the heat pump process to reach temperatures of up to 203 degrees.’’

 

Bloomberg reports that  “by processing the water through underground heat pumps, the system could generate enough heat to serve as much as 40 percent of the Finnish capital.’’

 

This is something that should be looked into by some New England coastal communities. Meanwhile, if you can scrounge the several thousand dollars to buy and install a heat pump for your home, you can save a lot of money over the long run.

 

Hit this link:

 

 

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The plan by U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss to implement high-speed Reaganomics on steroids has imploded and given her the shortest tenure of any British prime minister.  She took office Sept. 6 and will leave at the end of this week. This is what happens when extreme ideology tries to Trump economic and political reality. The British news media are relishing the show, with its comic and absurdist elements.

 

Perhaps if Ms. Truss had had a personality transplant, she would have survived.

 

 

 

The Lucrative Maze of Medicare Advantage

Medicare Advantage has been a bonanza for insurance companies but a hit to much patient care and the taxpayers. I trust that the lobbyists who pushed it through Congress a couple of decades ago were well compensated for their labors. Medicare Advantage is a prime example of how American health care is by far the most complicated and expensive in the world, and with lousy medical outcomes considering America’s wealth.

 

And now we’re in the annual medical-insurance signup time, and Medicare Advantage plans are relentlessly promoting their wares. Be very, very careful.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/health/medicare-advantage-plans-report.html

 

 

Writing His Way Through Life

Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is a memoir, a bunch of essays and maybe even a novel. There are plenty of useful pointers about fiction and other writing and about keeping track of your life, as well as some engaging social history. The most entertaining part to me was about his catering company job working for conservative writer and talk-show star William F. Buckley Jr., who was rapidly aging, and his charming if often imperious wife, the social lioness Patricia Buckley.

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