Whitcomb: Proto-Party in Mass.; Soccer Eyed for Pawtucket; Seeking Harmony Amidst Anguish
Sunday, November 17, 2019
“For the second year in a row
I’ve let things go, neglected the leaves; the golden
platter-sized leaves the maples discarded
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTall through golden October, that layered themselves
To a four weeks’ deepness..,
breathless with labor, I swipe at the frozen leaves, I foresee
I’m destined to live a long life, letting things go.’’
-- From, “Raking the Leaves,’’ by John Engels (1931-2007, a Vermont-based poet)
“I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your effort to believe it’’
--Wilson Mizner (1876-1933, American playwright
Perhaps the country’s most interesting political development right now is in Massachusetts, where Gov. Charlie Baker, a moderate Republican, is supporting a sort of proto-new party called Massachusetts Majority that gives money to candidates of both parties whom Mr. Baker, currently America’s most popular governor, support. As Ed Lyons wrote in CommonWealth Magazine:
‘’By all appearances, Massachusetts Majority is the engine of a new statewide political party, targeting that sizeable majority of largely unenrolled voters who support Charlie Baker and his politics but are not being served by loud partisans to the left and right. These voters do not want to choose between supporting the positions of Donald Trump or progressive purists. Massachusetts Majority is specifically designed to be the organization they can finally support. ‘’
“Can Charlie Baker be the most popular governor in America, govern as a Republican, and also be the detached head of a third party here that supports Republican and Democratic candidates? It’s remarkably non-binary of him, and I think people in this state will be OK with that. After all, it is strict binary choices, and the accompanying polarization, that is destroying American politics. Here in Massachusetts, more than half want non-binary choices. ‘’
Can the newish organization be part of a foundation for a thoughtful new center or center-right national party? The old Slave States are probably off limits but perhaps something like the Massachusetts Majority can spread to large areas of the Northeast, Middle Atlantic, Upper Midwest and West Coast. The Northeast and Upper Midwest were the original heartland of the Republican Party – a party now dominated by the political descendants of the old Southern Democrats in the great 180-degree political party turn of the last half-century.
To Mr. Lyons’s piece, please hit this link:
Deval Too Late
Deval Patrick was a successful Massachusetts governor and many find him charismatic, including as an orator, but it seems far too late for him to start a presidential campaign. His getting in, of course, reflects doubts among many Democrats that any of their current “leading candidates’’ could defeat Trump in the Electoral College. Mr. Patrick is not as centrist as the too-often-ignored-by-the-media Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, another Democratic presidential hopeful, but he’s not as “progressive’’ as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren either. So he, like Mr. Bullock, would probably be a much stronger candidate in the general election than they would.
Pro Soccer in Pawtucket?!
This could be very good economic and psychological news indeed for Pawtucket and the region: multiple media sources have reported that Fortuitous Partners, a real estate investment firm and its co-chairman Brett Johnson are promoting a $400 million development project in “The Bucket” that would include bringing in a professional soccer team.
Mr. Johnson, a Brown University graduate, is also a co-chairman of the Phoenix Rising FC of the United Soccer League.
Ballpark Digest reports that Mr. Johnson wants a new downtown stadium for a soccer team, with the fate of charming but tired McCoy Stadium unknown, but perhaps it could be redeveloped into a recreational park with multipurpose athletic fields.
I think that most of us would like that McCoy, which the Pawtucket Red Sox will abandon to move to Worcester after next season, continue to host professional sports, but it’s heartening to know that at least some place in the city might become the home of a pro-team in the world’s most popular sport -- one that Rhode Island’s ethnic composition makes particularly popular.
To read more, please hit this link:
Now They Like It
Associated Industries of Massachusetts, the lobbying group, fervently opposed the Cape Wind project sought for Nantucket Sound, because of the project’s cost, which AIM argued would be too heavy for ratepayers (and maybe too many AIM-linked folks didn’t like it because they had/have fancy summer homes on the sound’s shores).
That was then.
Now, happily, the powerful organization is all in for Vineyard Wind, which would be installed south of Martha’s Vineyard. That’s because the price of electricity from the new project would reportedly be a third of Cape Wind’s, which may have gotten into the game too early, considering the politics and economics in this century’s first decade.
But there remains a big fly in the ointment: The U.S. Interior Department, part of an administration in bed with the fossil-fuel industry, is delaying its approval or rejection of Vineyard Wind in order to further study all offshore-wind projects’ potential impacts, which have already been studied nearly unto death. This delay has led AIM to ask the department to expedite its review. Let’s hope that Interior sets Trumpian politics aside and promptly approves the project. (Trump has said he hates wind turbines.) New England needs Vineyard Wind and other offshore projects like it, which, for example, have become a key part of Western Europe’s energy mix. Projects like Vineyard Wind would put New England well on the way to much more energy independence.
More Excitement at the Pump
Prepare for a big increase in Massachusetts’s gasoline tax to help pay for urgent MBTA and other transportation needs.
School Laundries
In another sign of our society’s dysfunction, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has put forward a plan, which apparently isn’t going anywhere, for now, to spend $50,000 to buy washing machines to put in schools. The idea is that this would reduce absenteeism by students embarrassed to come to school in dirty clothes.
But cleaning clothes is a household function, not the schools’. Why are some parents – and their children - not dealing with this? I suspect it’s connected with the chaos at home of some single-parent (overwhelmingly it’s the mother) households. Please, let’s bring back marriage and two-parent households, especially in low-income places. For the schools to provide such basic services as laundry will only encourage people to throw more such intrinsically private obligations onto the public sector.
Far too many young people are ill-prepared economically and psychologically to be parents.
Pet Passages
The closing and demolition of the charming Aqua-Life Aquarium store, on Wickenden Street in Providence’s colorful Fox Point neighborhood, brought this old parent a pang. Back when our daughters were little, we spent a great deal of time – and some money --- supplying them with pets, which included a panoply of tropical fish and goldfish, as well as hamsters, gerbils, a hedgehog, turtles, lizards – and, more important, cats (which I dislike) and dogs (which I like). My wife and I had to spend a lot of time dealing with the mess but the kids generally were well entertained and even educated by the creatures.
For several years, we made frequent visits to the store to buy fish and fish supplies and were soothed by watching them swim in the big tanks. We even bought a big tank ourselves, which provided much quiet distraction over perhaps eight years, though it was a pain to keep clean. The store’s owner, George Goulart, aka “The Fish Doctor,’’ was kindly and very instructive to children – and their parents.
Of course, as kids grow they want to spend much less time with their parents and pets and more time with their friends, and the pets die off as the years scurry by. We still have a dog though.
Automatic Skating Rink
The occasional absurdities caused by putting things on autopilot: With temperatures in the 20s last Wednesday I drove by a house whose front lawn and sidewalk were covered by ice as the automatic lawn-watering sprayed on heedless of the weather.
Stopping Companies’ ‘Economic-Development’ Scams
In an interview in citylab.com headlined “How Cities and States Can Stop the Incentive Madness,’’ economist Timothy Bartik explains how state and local programs to lure huge, rich companies often end up as scams for the companies. The fact is, as we have seen time and again, the public costs of tax incentives often far outweigh the benefits. He tells how a model business-incentive package would work.
Among his observations:
“A state that was wise, a local government that was wise, would say: ‘Look, we’re spending a lot of resources on these incentive programs. They have a relatively low bang for the buck, they have high opportunity costs, and we’re not getting the results we want. We’re going to restrict these incentives more to distressed areas. And we’re going to focus more on providing various programs that are more effective, such as services to smaller businesses, and investments in skills development and land development.’
“Unfortunately, handing out tax breaks is easy and provides immediate political benefits, while postponing costs to the next governor or mayor. So politics outweighs what would be in the best interests of a state’s residents.’’
To read the interview, please hit this link:
Kids Writing Up a Storm
Co-created by School One and Goat Hill, Write Rhode Island's annual short fiction competition is open to all Rhode Island students grades 7-12. Each fall, this program offers students an opportunity to participate in workshops with a large creative community of writers throughout the state and to have their stories published in a high-quality print anthology. Winners are announced in March and honored at an awards ceremony at the Newport Art Museum.
Please hit this link for more information:
Hard Truths From Macron
French President Emmanuel Macron is leading an effort to strengthen Europe to better protect itself from Russian and other aggression. His efforts come as the anti-European Donald Trump, who doesn’t care about shared Western values, continues to try to pull America away from our natural cultural, economic and political allies and replace traditional U.S. foreign policy with one based on transactional deals country by country. He seems to especially like dictators and to do deals with nations in which the Trump Organization has current or potential business interests.
Mr. Macron also states the now-obvious fact that the European Union has added too many new members to function well as a political and cultural “community’’ and hints that shrinkage may be in order, along with a structuring or even replacement of NATO – hard truths from someone who’s become the effective leader of the West at a time of expanding authoritarianism.
Depressing Drama
“In the first five years after conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 39 percent of the counties that the law had previously restrained reduced their number of polling places…. In Wisconsin last year, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes cast in state legislative races, but just 36 percent of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans tried to impeach the state Supreme Court justices who had struck down a GOP attempt to gerrymander congressional districts in that state. The Trump White House has tried to suppress counts of immigrants for the 2020 census, to reduce their voting power. …{O}nly a party {as with the Southern Democratic Party before the Civil War} that has concluded it cannot win the votes of large swaths of the public will seek to deter them from casting those votes at all.’’
-- Yoni Appelbaum, in an Atlantic essay titled “How America Ends: A tectonic demographic shift is underway. Can the country hold together,’’ in which he calls for moderate Republicans to put their country before the current version of their party. To read it, please hit this link:
Trump Lies
I have too many other chores these days to watch much of the televised Trump impeachment-inquiry hearings (which are somewhat similar to a public version of grand jury proceedings). In any event, the thing takes me back to 1973 and 1974, when I had to watch a lot of the Watergate-related hearings in the mornings on my small, black-and-white portable TV in my Brooklyn apartment before heading to Lower Manhattan to work as a copy editor, assistant news editor and, most importantly, as an occasional writer of the Page One World-Wide column at The Wall Street Journal. That was a particularly useful intellectual exercise because it required distilling the often complicated events of the day, and many events then were about Watergate. It was hard work.
Of course, there were far fewer electronic news media outlets in those pre-World Wide Web days (if far more newspapers). Most people got pretty much the same information – and in that time’s version of the “Mainstream Media,’’ most of the information was accurate. There was far less opinion journalism. Nowadays, all too many people first turn on the TV or the Internet and listen to/read the opinion spinners whom they think will agree with them before actually reading the facts – if they do at all. Thus, it was with the Mueller Report, which even after Atty. Gen. William Barr’s attempts to remove the worst of the incriminating stuff about Trump’s behavior, paints a devastating picture of corruption. I read it.
Nowadays, it’s nonstop gaslighting, such as perpetuating the debunked assertion that somehow it was the Ukrainians, and not Trump’s hero Vladimir Putin, who entangled themselves in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The stealing of the 2016 election was a joint venture of the Russians, their frequent tool Wikileaks and the Trump campaign. Period.
Economist Robert Shiller, a Nobel laureate and not a political partisan, recently wrote a New York Times column on how relentless lying by Trump and other leaders can hurt business and the overall economy. I have written about this before. Among his observations:
“There is substantial evidence that if an atmosphere filled with lies or presumed lies spreads throughout a society, the effect might reduce economic growth rates. Years of incremental damage would result in a substantially lower level of economic well-being than would otherwise have existed.
“The central reason is basic: An atmosphere generated by a steady flow and variety of lies is like a dark cloud over the facts. Businesses can’t plan effectively when they don’t know who or what can be trusted.’’
To read his essay, please hit this link:
Trump is an avid follower of Nazi propagandist-in-chief Joseph Goebbels’s successful strategy of constantly repeating big lies with the idea that eventually many, perhaps most, people will believe them.
The Watergate investigations revealed clearly criminal abuses of power by Richard Nixon and his henchmen, beside which impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about a tawdry affair with an intern seems laughable. Trump’s offenses include treason and self-enrichment at taxpayer expense, as well as endless perjury, destruction of evidence and other examples of brazen obstruction of justice. Most Republicans on Capitol Hill know this, but they fear their leader and the followers he riles up so successfully. So virtually all GOP senators will vote to acquit the most corrupt president in American history. But I think they’ll pay a long-term price for that. God knows the country will.
In any event, as former House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said last year, “There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party.’’ And don’t call them “conservatives.’’
If the Democrats were really smart they’d add to the impeachment counts other stuff besides Ukraine, such as Trump’s brazen violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause and other self-dealing (love those Trump resort hotels!) aimed at further enriching himself, his family and the Trump Organization through the presidency, as well as tax evasion. The public might understand such domestic corruption better than stuff Trump has done abroad. Now about his hidden tax returns….
Rudy Giuliani is a central figure in the Ukraine scandal. It’s sad that greed, the desire for a super-deluxe lifestyle, expensive divorce settlements and the lust to be near the center of power have led this once respected U.S. attorney and New York mayor to take up his father’s profession – mobster. Also sad is that Joe Biden did not find a way of discouraging his troubled son Hunter from serving as a director of a Ukrainian gas company. Nothing illegal but terrible optics!
Creating Beauty Amidst Disaster
Frank Lloyd Wright was arguably the greatest U.S. architect so far, designing natural-light-filled, “organic’’ buildings that fit in elegantly with their surroundings. He was also often a superb, if untrustworthy, writer. But his life – especially the first part of his adulthood, was rife with disasters, most horrifically murders and fires, as well as extra-marital scandals and financial bad behavior and distress. The central horror came on Aug. 15, 1914, when a crazed servant set Wright’s already famous Wisconsin residence, Taliesen, ablaze and murdered Wright’s mistress, Mamah Cheney, her two young children and four others with an ax.
Paul Hendrickson, in his new book Plagued by Fire: Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), a thickly researched, passionate and often deeply speculative -- and sometimes overly ruminative biography – brings this huge figure to life in all his genius, arrogance, reckless ambition, contradictions, and doubts. Along the way, he also weaves in a great deal of American aesthetic, sociological (including racial) and even economic history. But then Wright got around as he designed more than 1,000 structures, of which 532 were completed. And his family and friends comprised a Shakespearean cast of characters.
Mr. Hendrickson summed up Wright’s gigantic life thus:
“If harmony and order were his great artistic ideals. Wright could find little of them in his own debt-plagued, scandal-wracked, death-haunted history.” We are fortunate that many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are still around to marvel at.
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