Whitcomb: Providence Gets Back Its Schools; Mass. Tax; Bourne Bridge Bathos; Our History With Cuba
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Providence Gets Back Its Schools; Mass. Tax; Bourne Bridge Bathos; Our History With Cuba
“With the warmer days the shops on Elmwood
Stay open later, still busy long after sundown.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIt looks like the neighborhood’s coming back.
Gone are the boarded storefronts you interpreted,
When you lived here, as emblem of your private recession….’’
-- From “Spring Letter,’’ by Carl Dennis (born 1939), American poet and educator
Another song about June:
‘’Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.’’
– Robertson Davies (1913-1995), Canadian man of letters
“To be turned from one’s course by men’s opinions, by blame, and by misrepresentation shows a man unfit to hold office.’’
– Quintus Fabius Maximus (died 203 B.C.), Roman statesman and general
“Tomorrow never comes, man. It’s all the same xxxxing day.’’
– Janis Joplin (1943-1970), American singer and songwriter
Here she is at work:
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Last week briefly brought a summery humid southwest wind, with a touch of the perfume of New Jersey petrochemical plants. You can sense the impatience of schoolchildren for summer vacation as they amble down the sidewalks with their backpacks.
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Now that Providence is regaining control of its school system from the State of Rhode Island, people are arguing about how much good the takeover did.
Well, there were some sectors that have apparently improved, such as (crucially!) parental involvement, some better facilities, stronger multilingual programs, and curricular adjustments. This has led to some modest student-proficiency improvements, but far from the levels hoped for. The poverty of many families in the city’s school system, the large number of families for whom English isn’t their first language, and too few families with the father in the home ensured that raising educational achievement would be difficult. (It’s hard to measure the effects of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies on all this.)
And the resistance of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals to some changes got in the way.
And then there was bad luck! We shouldn’t forget the huge role of COVID-19 in disrupting reform attempts! Consider that the state takeover began in November 2019, and the pandemic became a global crisis several months later. Another monkey wrench in the takeover was that its most important sponsor, then-Gov. Gina Raimondo, left to become U.S. commerce secretary.
Indeed, maybe it’s something of a miracle that any improvements got through. Meanwhile, some stars of the system continue to shine – most notably Classical High School – an institution for which even some affluent families are willing to eschew private schools to have their kids attend in this age of ever-widening class and income inequality.
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Trump’s order sharply limiting the number of foreigners who can apply for a green card while in the United States, forcing many people to laboriously go back to the nation they came from and try to apply from understaffed American consulates there, will hurt a lot of poor would-be immigrants and break up some families. It will also send away, some never to return, such “wealth creators” as entrepreneurs, researchers, health-care, and scientists. Many of these sorts of people had already decided that Trump’s America is a bad place to live and work in.
If It’s Really Invested….
It’s a good thing that Massachusetts’s constitution says that revenue from the commonwealth’s “millionaires tax’’ (a 4 percent surtax on household incomes over $1 million) can only be spent on improving transportation and education – two sectors key to the state’s long-term health. That’s instead of the money being diverted into such short-term matters as covering a year’s state government deficit. (But will fiscally desperate state officials find ways around the law?)
The surtax has already produced $3.1 billion so far this year, way above the $2.4 billion that had been projected for the fiscal year to end June 30. It seems that there are more rich people around, or at least richer ones, than expected.
The idea is to make the state stronger and more self-sufficient – better able to handle the ups and downs of the national economy; AI and other disruptive technologies, and any future retribution from the current or a future corrupt president illegally withholding federal funds or taking other actions against the state as political punishment.
Of course, some very rich people leave out of anger about the tax. But the hope is that spending on the stuff above will, over the next few years, make the state more competitive, and so a better place for both the rich and non-rich to make more money.
Might some of the transportation money go to paying for part of the cost of replacing the aged Bourne Bridge, especially since Trump might stick it to a state he hates by rejecting a request for $1.2 billion in federal funds for the project? There’s apparently enough to fix the Sagamore Bridge, and the quaint Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge is still okay.
Cape Codders, especially those in the western part of the giant glacial moraine, pray that the Bourne Bridge money can be found. After all, they live on an island created by the digging of the Cape Cod Canal.
Other states, most notably California, that are considering “wealth taxes,’’ or that have already implemented them, will be carefully watching how it goes in Massachusetts.
Sorry, rich tax refugees in Florida:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-28/florida-plan-to-cut-property-taxes-risks-charging-fees-for-everything?srnd=homepage-americas
And Only 90 Miles From Us
Trump likes to threaten countries too small to seriously fight back. So it is with the crumbling Communist dictatorship of Cuba, which he threatens to invade.
This is another big “what if’’ of history.
Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 from the gangster-style dictator (the kind the Trumps like to do business with), Fulgencio Batista, who had helped turn the island nation into a paradise for the American Mafia. And Cuba had long been a kind of American economic colony, providing sugar, fruit, tobacco (especially for cigars) and coffee.
Because it was based in Boston, I grew up learning about the United Fruit Co. That company, along with other large U.S. enterprises, had big power on the island, including politically. And refining Cuban sugar was for many years very important in Greater Boston. I heard a little of this because of my relatively poor-boy father’s friendship with members of the extended Snare family, who were major economic and social powers on the island. The power of American capitalists naturally caused a lot of resentment, even if, like Frederick Snare, the founder of the family’s business empire, they weren’t rapacious.
American visitors tended to see Cuba, especially around Havana, as romantic, recalling lyrics about “tropical splendor” and swaying palms in 1935 song “Begin the Beguine."
Of course, things weren’t particularly romantic for those toiling in the sugar-cane plantations.
Here’s an offbeat memoir about pre-Castro and later: READ HERE
Castro came in promising to get better deals for his people after the long, very inequitable economic relationship with America. His regime pressed for reform (based on a section of the 1940 Cuban constitution) and the expropriation of many American assets, with U.S. owners to be compensated via 20-year bonds.
But this depended mostly on Cuba making money on sugar exports to pay American companies. However, the U.S., wanting a return to the quasi-colonial relationship that existed under Batista, launched an embargo and made plans to overthrow the Castro regime. It’s unclear to what extent Castro was a Communist or just socialist when he gained power, but there’s no doubt that U.S. policies tended to push him into the arms of the Soviets. So Moscow became the island’s main economic supporter.
And then there was the usual problem of power corrupting: Castro loved being dictator of what he turned into a sometimes Orwellian police state.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, aid from abroad fell off sharply but some Russian help continued, and to this day is one of the few things staving off Cuba’s complete collapse and starvation in the face of U.S. sanctions, which Trump has turned into a merciless blockade. It’s hard to believe that this hasn’t killed some vulnerable Cubans.
Meanwhile, consider the, er, paradox: Russia continues to economically aid Cuba and militarily aid Iran even as the traitorous Trump remains a Russian asset undermining Western democracies.
Craig Unger has done a splendid job investigating Russia’s hold on Trump: READ HERE
The Trump Organization would like nothing better than to return Cuba to something like the land presided over by Batista, with, say, lots of casinos and beach resorts (with adjoining brothels?) mostly for cash-heavy foreigners.
After all, U.S. citizens flocked to the island before party-pooping future charismatic tyrant Fidel took over.
Trump has called Cuba “a failed nation.’’ We made it so.
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Meanwhile, at Trump’s behest, 95-year-old Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, has been indicted for the alleged murder of four Americans in the shooting down in 1996 of two planes being used by the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue. The aircraft were flying between Cuba and Florida.
Will Trump and intense self-described “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth ever be indicted by somebody on murder charges for killing almost 200 (and counting) people by military strikes on at least 60 small boats in Latin American and Caribbean waters since last September, in violation of what’s left of international law. Our regime alleges that they were drug smugglers peddling to America’s insatiable hunger for drugs.
But after all this time, NO physical evidence has been provided for the U.S. attacks, such as seized narcotics or written or printed inventories for American buyers.
Last time we checked, a lot more people go fishing in the ocean than transport drugs on it.
Too Many Pills?
In other psychotropic matters, it’s good to see increased attention, including from our “troubled’’/former heroin addict HHS secretary, R.F. Kennedy Jr. , and his MAHA allies, to the probable widespread overprescription of drugs to treat mental illness; some of these have bad side effects. But given the campaign contributions of the pharmaceutical industry, with its slick TV and other ads, don’t expect a full-frontal attack on the industry. And let’s keep in mind that millions of lives have been saved by psychotropic medications.
MAGA, of course, is the acronym for “Make America Healthy Again” (my italics). But was America actually healthier in the past?
A resounding NO, as even a cursory look at American history shows: SEE HERE
Many people fret, sometimes egged on by demagogues, that they’ve unfairly missed out on living in some (mythical) golden age.
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In last Tuesday’s Texas Republican primary, Orange Oligarch cultists provided voters in November with the quintessential Trumpian candidate in state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton – a financial crook, a philanderer, and a non-stop liar who will do whatever the Oval Office tells him to do.
Given Texas’s fetid political culture and truckloads of cash from billionaires to defeat fresh-faced Democrat James Talarico, Paxton may well win, despite, as they say, having more baggage than Samsonite. After all, much of the electorate is corrupt!
"The most corrupt politician in America just became the Republican nominee for the United States Senate,’’ said Talarico. The most corrupt?
‘Microsoft’ Nightmare
There have been increasing cases of very sophisticated foreign crooks breaking into personal computers, claiming to work for Microsoft and such U.S. agencies as the Federal Trade Commission, and cheating people out of a lot of money. The FBI, state, and local police seem powerless to stop, track down, and prosecute these criminals. And big banks (including in Providence) don’t do enough to save customers from being victims in these cases.
Know when to turn off your computer, fast.
Example of what’s going on:
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVzkr5JFAXI/