Nicholas Corvino: Push innovation in psychologists' training

NEWTON, Mass.

We’ve heard the term “innovation” a lot lately. Boston’s Innovation District is booming. Life sciences and biotechnology companies throughout New England are creating innovative approaches to solve some of medicine’s most challenging problems. Companies across New England have “Chief Innovation Officers.”

The universities and colleges around New England are innovating daily. The tools, technology and research developed by these institutions will impact the world for generations to come. At the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology (which is changing its name to William James College in May 2015) our faculty and staff also know of the importance of innovation. We practice a craft with more than 125 years of success, but our future will be bleak if we do not constantly think of new ways to prevent and treat mental illness.

Mental illness is a problem  that many people don’t want to discuss, yet it affects all of us. Today, one in four adults and one in five children have a diagnosable mental illness, and one of two Americans will suffer from mental illness at some point in their lives. Suicide will claim one American every 13 minutes, and 12 times that number will make an attempt each day. When this problem strikes your family, and it is highly likely to, you might be among the 70% of parents in this country who cannot obtain care for your child.

These statistics are shocking, yet mental illness is a subject we talk about only after a terrible tragedy, or an act of violence. This should not be the case, as talking about and treating mental illness leads to tangible results. A good deal of research supports the efficacy of #psychotherapy. Up to 80 percent of the time, people who avail themselves of treatment will improve. That’s why our students spend about half of their time at William James College working in the field, learning their discipline from experienced professionals and encouraging people to open up about something that society has subtly suggested they should not talk about. However, with 50 percent of Americans likely to develop a mental illness in their lifetimes, we need to do more to start this conversation.

Mental-health professionals need to deliver information and care through electronic means. This involves embracing the latest tools and technologies available to them, and supplementing these technologies with the development of meaningful relationships with each patient. Technology alone cannot end the stigma associated with mental illness, but it can help to abate it.

At the same time, psychologists cannot be the only ones addressing mental illness. They are part of a multifaceted system. Teachers, medical practitioners and attorneys whose work touches the psychosocial lives of their students, patients and clients need to be educated to both attend to and intervene properly around emotional and behavioral issues that they see.

The future of mental-health care is not just in educating mental-health practitioners, but allied professionals to improve the quality of life of those affected by mental illness. These professionals are often the “first-responders” in a mental-health emergency. If they spot signs of mental illness early on, they can help the person suffering from mental illness to address the problems they face before they get out of control.

Conversations about mental illness should also be sensitive to our increasingly multicultural world. Students must be culturally informed and sensitive. Our role as innovators involves thinking about ways to meet the prevention and treatment needs of diverse populations. At William James College, faculty lead immersion trips to Haiti, Costa Rica and Ecuador each year to help students understand the mores, culture and health care system of diverse people. To talk about mental illness effectively, it is imperative to keep the diversity of the target audience in mind at all times.

Embracing experiential learning, having constant conversations about mental illness, educating colleagues in other professions, engaging technology, and encouraging a diverse approach to psychology education are concepts that our field has been slow to embrace. As innovators, we must champion these ideas, while also activating them.

I hope we can embrace the spirit of innovation and practical psychology that William James championed. William James was the founder of American psychology. He was an educator's educator, one of the century's greatest philosophers whose prolific writings and prodigious mentorship profoundly influenced the practice of applied psychology, experiential education, sociology and race relations in this country.

I think James would agree that psychology is about analyzing the past in order to look forward to a brighter future. If we all focus on innovating our field, our future conversations will revolve less around problems, and more on solutions.

Nicholas Covino is president of the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology,  in Newton, Mass., which will be renamed William James College in May 2015. This piece originated on the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (#nebhe.org).

Gentrifying fire traps

"Triple Decker'' (porcelain, glaze, underglaze, oxide wash), by KEVIN SNIPES, in the show "Human Moments: Ann Agee, Sana Musasama, Annabeth Rosen,  Sally Saul, A&A and Kevin Snipes'' at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, on March 21-April 25.

Of course, in this part of the country when we hear of "##triple-decker'' we think of those wooden, three-story, firetrap buildings in poorer sections of our cities and smaller mill towns. Back in the day when more people used space heaters, they often went up in flames, with death and injuries resulting. (I well remember the news reports of such fires virtually daily in the winter on WBZ radio, in Boston.)

The surviving three-deckers remain ugly, but in some gentrifying neighborhoods, especially in Boston, Yuppies have moved into them.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Linda Gasparello: ISIS's cultural devastation reaches new level

 

The ruins of Hatra

There is horror in the recent news that the Islamic State bulldozed the ruins of two of the greatest #assyrian cities #nimrud and #nineveh. And there is irony. These ancient cities, in what is now northern Iraq, were built by a ferocious people whose profession was war – people for whom the Hebrew prophets, including Isaiah, Nahum, Zechariah and Zephaniah, reserved some of their fiercest denunciations.

In the 9^th Century B.C., Assurnasirpal II, a brutal militarist, erased entire nations as far as the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, stretching through what is now Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. But he restored the ancient city of Nimrud and established his capital there. His magnificent Northwest Palace, first excavated by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s, was probably completed between 865 and 869 B.C. Its dedication was celebrated with a banquet for 70,000 guests.

Sennacherib, who moved the capital to Nineveh in 704 B.C., was as bellicose as his forefathers. When the city of #babylon rebelled against his despotic rule, Shennecherib destroyed it, saying, “ The city and its houses, from its foundation to its top, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. The wall and outer wall, temples and gods, temple towers of brick and earth, as many as there were, I razed and dumped them into the Arahtu canal.” But in Nineveh, he built a palace decorated with precious metals, alabaster and woods. Mountain streams were diverted to provide water for the city's parks and gardens, resplendent with trees and flowers imported from other lands – along with captives who were enslaved and brought back to Assyria to build and tend them.

It is a wonder that these Assyrian kings who were capable of such ruthlessness were also capable of building cities filled with such majestic architecture.

In the 1970s and 1980s, in the time of another ruthless leader, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi antiquities board reconstructed large parts of Assurnasirpal II's palace, including the restoration and re-installation of the carved-stone reliefs lining the walls of many rooms, according to Augusta McMahon, a professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

“The winged bulls that guard the entrances to the most important rooms and courtyards were re-erected. The winged bull statues are among the most dramatic and easily recognized symbols of the Assyrian world,” McMahon wrote in a BBC report.

Nimrud, she added, “provided a rare opportunity for visitors to experience the buildings' scale and beauty in a way that is impossible to find in a museum context.”

That is lost for all of us, now and in future generations.

Fortunately, a significant number architectural artifacts from Nimrud and Nineveh are housed safely in museums in Europe and North America, including the limestone and alabaster reliefs, portraying Assurnasirpal II surrounded by winged demons, or hunting lions or waging war, and the monumental, human-headed winged lions that guarded important palace doorways, currently displayed in the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

As if the loss of Nimrud and Nineveh were not horrible enough for world heritage, #isis continued its campaign to eradicate ancient sites it says promote apostasy last week by leveling the ruined city of Hatra, also in northern Iraq, founded in the days of the Parthian Empire over 2,000 years ago. Hatra's massive walls withstood attacks by the Romans.

Irina Bolkova, director-general of UNESCO, said, “The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing underway in Iraq.”

I hope it does. And I hope that what Zephaniah prophesized for Assyria will befall the Islamic State: “Assyria will be made a desolation.”

Linda Gasparello (lgasparello@kingpublishing.com),  is  a longtime journalist and the co-host of “White House Chronicle,” on PBS. She was a master's candidate in Arabic and Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University in Cairo.

States' giveaways to corporations are bad business

  This is a good piece in  The Wall Street Journal, about North Carolina, on why state government giveaways to companies are a bad use of taxpayer funds.

Government and job-creation

  ''Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.''

-- H.L. Mencken

Again and again we hear the mantra from the likes of Tea Partiers that "government doesn't create jobs.''

Oh, yeah? Try starting and running a private business without roads and airports, without public education, without public health agencies, without the innumerable inventions of public-sector people working in the Defense Department (ever hear of the Internet?), the National Institutes of Health, etc., etc., etc.

Much of the anti-government mantra comes from folks in the Tea Party-dominated parts of the country in the South and the West that, interestingly, have the highest percentage of people depending on federal pork.  And despite the Bible-thumping speeches that emanate from these places, they also in general have the highest rates of social pathologies, such as substance abuse and what we used to  quaintly call "illegitimacy.''

Hypocrisy makes the world go round.

Sorry, but to have civilization you always need a "mixed economy'' of private business and the collective action known as ''government''. The ratio between them, as with tax rates, will frequently have to be adjusted to address the dangers of the excess power that one or the other will inevitably develop.  The top federal tax rate, for example, was  too high as Reagan took over. It was cut and the system was briefly simplified. (Since then, it has again been made even more complicated than before.)

Now, with, Putin, a cold and murderous gangster, running Russia, and collapsing U.S. physical infrastructure, the rates will probably have t0 be raised again. A matter of national security.

Most of us want simple answers to avoid doing the hard work of adjusting our processes and practices to changing reality. But as  J.P. Morgan once said after being asked what the stock market would do: "It will fluctuate.''

You listening to me?

 

"Hey You'' (wooden sculpture), by KENN SPEISER, in the show (with the painter Paula Martiesian) "Thirty Years: Martiesian, Speiser and Bert,'' at the Bert Gallery, Providence. The show celebrates the highly regarded gallery's 30th anniversary.

Coastal treasure in steel

"Eelgrass Dancing'' (steel and lacquer), by K. GRETCHEN GREENE, in her show at Artisan's Asylum, Somerville,  Mass., May 21-June 4.

Eelgrass, by the way, is a salt-water plant essential for the survival of many coastal  animal species -- including many that we eat -- in New England. Far too much of it has been destroyed by man-made pollution and coastal development.  Public and private groups have made efforts to restore eelgrass beds in some places, such as Narragansett and Buzzards bays.

Robert Whitcomb: Film tax credits, stadiums and 'mud season'

  Massachusetts Gov. Charles Baker wisely proposes to end that state’s film/TV-production tax credits. Perhaps it will get more Rhode Islanders thinking about such dubious projects as what I call 38 Studios Memorial Stadium, proposed for downtown Providence. (Readers would do well to read the March 9 Wall Street Journal article “Pro Stadiums, Public Money’’.)

In lieu of the gift to film and TV producers, Mr. Baker wants to expand the state’s earned-income tax credit, which helps poor people. That’s broad enough policy to perhaps help the economy of all of southern New England.

The Massachusetts film/TV tax credit goes back to 2005, when movie star and Massachusetts native Matt Damon pushed the idea. Legislators and then-Gov. Mitt Romney put in a law in that made film-and-TV-production companies eligible for sales, income and corporate-excise-tax credits. The giveaways were expanded in 2007 under then-Gov. Deval Patrick.

The math never added up for the state, much as politicians and others loved being photographed with movie stars and Boston gossip columnists loved writing about them. And, yes, it’s been nice for a few show-biz folks actually based in Massachusetts – while keeping money from people in other sectors and from, for example, MBTA repair.

Robert Tannenwald, a former Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economist who now teaches at Brandeis, analyzing state Department of Revenue data, told The Boston Globe that ‘’each full-time-equivalent job created by the credits and filled by residents has cost the commonwealth $118,000 in foregone revenue. For each dollar of foregone revenue, Bay Staters have earned only 53 cents in additional income.’’

And The Globe’s Joan Vennochi noted (“Good riddance to the Mass. film tax credit,’’ March 8): “{O}nly about one-third of the $304 million in spending generated by the tax credit{s}was spent in Massachusetts; and of nearly 2,000 jobs created by the tax credit{s}, only about one-third went to Massachusetts residents.’’

I think of film and pro-sports stadium scams when I drive around Rhode Island, with its Third World roads, crumbling bridges, decayed public buildings and other signs of infrastructure decline.

Those promoting special deals for favored individuals and businesses depend on the public not doing the macro-economic math. The fun for the favored few has to be made up in taxes paid by the unfavored and by not maintaining services and infrastructure used by everyone, thus hurting the economies of the jurisdictions handing them out.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island should focus on creating a fair, simple and transparent tax systems and on investing in physical infrastructure and services that help as many people as possible, not sexy economic special-interest groups and celebrity ego trips.

With the states’ superb location for doing business in the international market, famous educational institutions that directly and indirectly churn out technological innovations, and natural and manmade beauty, they can succeed without handing out special deals. Let the rich build the likes of stadiums entirely with their own money.

xxx

With the snowpack slowly melting, I recall this from Alan H. Olmstead’s book “In Praise of Seasons’’ about winter’s end, desired more than usual this year:

“Addicted to the thermometer, we are precariously indifferent to other standards for living. The fire stands off the ice; we run the season’s gauntlet between them, one half of us always a little too warm, the other on the verge of being too cold. We come near the end of our passage without much feeling of any kind, a surly numbness with the world as we would never have made it.’’

New England’s ''mud season'' is much maligned, but the prospect of softness underfoot, even a squishy softness, is happy. Finally, we’ll see the ground, the mud will dry out and the brown will change to green to soothe us for weeks, until we all too quickly take it for granted.

As Mr. Olmstead wrote:

“When, at last, spring starts to emerge, we know it first by a restoration of respect for things about us, a rebirth of loyalty to life, a softening of our partisan judgments, an ending of our harsh loneliness.’’ Briefly.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), overseer of this site, is a partner in Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com), a health-care sector consultancy, and a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. He's also a former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and former editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal.

Back home, under wraps

 

"Bullets Revisited #8''  (C-41 photographic print mounted on aluminum), by LALLA ESSAYDI, in the show "Beyond the Veil,'' at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, through March 20.

The gallery says the show "explores the complexities of Arab female identity, both from an insider's experience of her own Moroccan childhood, and with the outsider perspective of a Western-trained artist.''

The pictures are part of a "collaborative performance project that takes place in her childhood home in Morocco with female friends and family members.''

"{T}hese women use calligraphy, bullet casings, henna, their bodies and their gaze to subvert traditional and imposed notions of gender, ethnicity and identity.''

She's lucky to have escaped, at least in  part, Arab culture, with its often horrendous treatment of women and of  members of other religions faced with the brutal bigotry of some versions of Islam. She now lives relatively safely in the U.S., away from 7th Century ideas of women's place in the world.

Our own speed trap; arrogant SUV'ers

The stories about the Ferguson, Mo., police using big fines from trivial traffic violations, especially against African-American drivers (who are, it is true, a majority in that city), as a major municipal revenue source sounds like a variant of some communities in New England. East Providence, R.I., is one of those "speed traps'' that works very hard to get as much revenue as it can from hapless drivers who find themselves into that confusing labyrinth, with its notoriously bad signage. Some  forward-looking drivers might want to avoid that burg entirely.

xxx

What is it about the arrogance of SUV drivers that makes them speed through streets narrowed by snow banks and push everyone else  aside -- people in normal cars as well as pedestrians?

Is it because they're sitting so high above the street and that they think they can use the sheer size of their hideous gas-guzzlers to force everyone else off the road? Or do they think they're better than other drivers because they have been able to afford one of these disgusting vehicles?

And they're even worse at night because SUV's have blinding lights. Where is the National Transportation Safety Administration when we need them?  But wait a minute. A lot of lobbyists have these things.

--- Robert Whitcomb

Chris Powell: Conn. losing a casino war it started

MANCHESTER, Conn. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Connecticut is losing population again, but state legislators -- at least some prominent Democratic ones -- are determined that the state shouldn't lose any more gamblers. Noting Massachusetts's impending descent into casino gambling, the legislators propose to authorize construction of two or three more casinos here, strategically placed to discourage the state's gamblers from heading to casinos in Springfield, the Boston area, Cape Cod, and New York, thereby forsaking Connecticut's two Indian casinos in the southeast corner of the state. "Massachusetts has declared economic war on us," Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, harrumphed at a press conference this week, "and we're going to strike back." Massachusetts declared economic war? Where has Duff been? Connecticut declared the casino war, practically on the whole country, when the state authorized its Indian casinos 25 years ago, making inevitable the nationwide expansion of casino gambling that is now under way, as one by one states have tired of losing domestic gambling revenue to their neighbors. The legislators are trying to frame the issue as a matter of saving jobs in Connecticut. This is nonsense. The Democrats are after the money just to compensate for the steadily declining tribute being paid to state government by Connecticut's casino Indians in exchange for the state grants of monopoly as gambling opportunities arise in neighboring states and reduce traffic to Connecticut. Indeed, other legislators are simultaneously clamoring to increase other forms of gambling, such as the state lottery, and that has nothing to do with jobs either, just getting more money. The money will be used mainly to continue supporting government's own employees in the style to which they are accustomed. They can't be asked even to give up Columbus Day as a paid holiday, a paid holiday no mere taxpayer would dare seek for himself. Throughout a couple of decades Connecticut made hundreds of millions of dollars from gamblers in neighboring states, but the state's near-monopoly is gone now and each state soon will be stuck fleecing its own people. In these circumstances every dollar spent to support a job at a casino will be only a dollar transferred from supporting a job elsewhere in the same state. Of course, the jobs protected by casino expansion will include those of police officers, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, parole officers, and social workers, who already handle the robbery, theft, and family abuse to which many gamblers resort as they feed their addiction. Meanwhile, Connecticut legislators are also considering putting tolls on the state's expressways at the borders, another scheme advertised as a way of getting out-of-staters to pay for government here -- as if Connecticut residents don't travel too and won't paying such tolls as well. If, as the legislators are suggesting, ubiquitous casino gambling should become public policy and people should be encouraged to gamble as a substitute for taxation, Connecticut might as well cancel the grants of monopoly to the Indian tribes, which expect to be given control of any additional casinos, deregulate casinos entirely, and let anyone open one wherever he can get zoning approval. Twenty-five years ago the better part of the case for the Indian casinos was their monopoly and location away from population centers -- the confinement of such gambling. If casinos are to be quickly accessible everywhere, they can be taxed comprehensively and produce as much revenue for state government as the Indian casinos do, and nobody will need casino Indians. Then the gross offense of ethnic privilege, so contrary to what the country purports to represent, can be erased without cost. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Move to:

Cocktail canines

"How Our Neighbors Got Through the Winter of 2014-15,'' painting by NANCY WHITCOMB.

Well, okay, just this once

 

"Succumbed' (charcoal/conte on paper), by HOPE RICCIARDI, in her show "A Century of Waiting,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston.

Don Pesci: Three steps to fix Connecticut

VERNON, Conn.

Stop financing failure. Rather than providing tax and regulatory relief to all businesses in Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy’s progressive government is content with boosting taxes on all businesses in the state – the highest taxed state in the nation, by the way --  and then parceling out to select businesses special exemptions, temporary tax relief and loan forgiveness; a select business is one selected by government officials for special favors, often in return for compensating favors such as campaign contributions or assistance. Campaign-finance regulations, a gift offered by incumbent politicians to themselves, obscure the quid pro quo determinant in such transactions that would in a sound and ethical system of government send all involved to a stretch in the slammer.

There are two kinds of businesses that take advantage of such state aid programs: a) businesses that would fail without special favors not enjoyed by their competitors, and b) businesses that are successful and therefore do not need state handouts.  Beggar a), a failing business that, for whatever reason, finds it unlikely to borrow money from the usual sources – Connecticut is plush with banks, lending institutions and investment companies – should be allowed to fail; it likely will fail in the future if the state props it up with tax funds that should be put to better use elsewhere. Beggar b) should under no circumstances receive state aid, because beggar b) is self-sufficient and state support in this case is redundant.

William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, the premier conservative magazine in the country, explained why failing enterprises should be permitted to fail in a 1981 address to students at the Cornell University Graduate School of Business:

"I desire, perversely, to sing a song of praise to failure; as well as, of course, to success; and to urge that we reappraise the dialectical voltage generated by these two polarities…. Public policy must tolerate, indeed anticipate, economic failure .” (Italics are Mr. Buckley's.)

Reduce spending. In the non-political economy, it is quite true that increasing revenue is the seed corn for profitable and universally beneficial economic activity. However, progressives manning the barricades on the left continually remind us that there are important differences between business and government. They are right. Here is an important difference: Despite the progressive bumper stickers, government cannot create wealth; it can only collect and distribute wealth – to the poor and needy, one always hopes, rather than to the CEOs of international mega-companies hinting they might bolt Connecticut if they are not graced with tax money that, given to them, will not be distributed to the deserving poor.

The distribution of governing revenue is a zero-sum game. What you have disbursed to A you cannot disburse to B. Tax distribution is a zero-sum game for another reason: The “ability to pay” taxes depends ultimately upon a healthy and growing private economy. Economic activity in a private economy and the growth of government, businesses and young entrepreneurs fleeing Connecticut may have noticed, are inversely related. Large tax consuming regulatory states kill business activity.

Reward right behavior. It is the culture of communities that determines the nature of government. This is a truth so common as to be commonplace. Mark Twain used to say that you may break a law with impunity, if you are clever enough, and get away with it; but break a custom and you are done for. It is men without chests – an inborn sense of right behavior – that produces destructive social engineering and tyrants, C. S. Lewis believed.

The broad culture here in the United States is atomizing; it is devolving into multiple cults largely because government, both state and national, is removing the unum from e pluribus unum. Laws should reinforce right behavior, here defined as public action that advances the general good of the state or nation. That is why laws ought to be general rather than specific; such are the provisions of both the U.S. and Connecticut Constitutions.

A good means to a good end produces a good society. A politics directed to good long-term ends – solvency, independence, self-reliance, religious affections, moral governance, solid and loving family affiliations -- rather than to short-term advantages would speed us on our way. A politics that seeks to separate economic and social ends cannot succeed because the two inform each other. The goodness of the laws and the goodness of the people are indivisible, which is why the fathers of our national independence closely linked in their writings the twin springs of liberty – virtue and intelligence.

"Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people. The general government,” George Washington said, “can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, or any despotic or oppressive form so long as there is any virtue in the body of the people.”

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political writer who lives in Vernon.

Eleanor Schwartz Greco: Inhofe and other capital weather wimps

 

Coming up next in Washington.

What’s wrong with Washington?

I’m not talking about goofy political antics, like James Inhofe’s latest bid to disprove climate change.

In case you missed it, the chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee gave a mind-numbing speech a few weeks ago in which he muttered about February’s “unseasonal” weather, ice ages, polar bears, and terrorism.

At the start of the Oklahoma Republican’s 22-minute ramble, he slipped a snowball from a Ziploc bag and tossed it from his Senate floor perch. Mashing together weather and climate, Inhofe said the Earth can’t possibly be getting any warmer if it still snows in our nation’s capital.

Even Fox News Radio taunted the nation’s most prominent climate denier about this stunt, quoting from one of his books and running the headline “James Inhofe: There Is No Global Warming Because God.”

Money, actually, powers this delusion. Fat contributions from oil, gas, coal, and utility companies explain why politicians like Inhofe are still ignoring the overwhelmingconsensus among scientists that makes addressing climate change a top priority.

What I don’t get is why the 6 million people who make their homes in the District of Columbia and its suburbs cower whenever winter does its thing. No lobby fuels that.

Entire school systems in the nation’s seventh-biggest metropolitan region may open late or close altogether because of botched snow forecasts followed by slushy streets. The Metro system slows down and trains can’t service all stations when rail lines ice over. Garbage piles up and accidents clog the roads when it snows.

After living here for nearly 20 years, I’m never surprised when temperatures dip below the freezing point between November and March. Or when snowflakes flutter from the sky. I realize that snowdrifts bury cars and skim the bottoms of stop signs once every five years or so.

That’s why the whimpers irk me as much as the area’s systemic failure to hack winter weather. On crowded elevators, I struggle not to blurt “This isn’t Florida: Bundle up or shut up” at complainers who won’t wear a hat, a scarf, gloves, or a good pair of boots.

If they would just stop whining, these folks might take advantage of the freedom cold bouts bestow upon you to sleep in, cradle a good book, or cook up a storm.

I live in Arlington, Va. It’s the nation’s most-educated county, but lately my second-grader and third-grader haven’t spent much time with their teachers. During the first week of March, the local authorities shut schools on a snowy Monday, whittling a three-day week to just two days of instruction.

You see, the school system had already canceled all Thursday and Friday classes to give the parents of kids in elementary school time to meet with teachers. When it snowed again, Arlington Public Schools locked us out, too.

My family made the most of winter’s final blast by heading to Davis, W.Va., for two days. We cross-country skied, slid down North America’s longest sled run, and stomped around in the sparkling snow.

Spring snuck into town before we returned.

The cherry blossoms will bloom soon. All that pink will cheer up Washington’s wimps for a while. Then they’ll start fretting about the summer heat.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords.com, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Finally, rigorous management

"The Center of the Universe'' (acrylic on canvas), by MICHAEL SHORES,  in his show "Visions of the Otherworld,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, April 1-26.

Yogurt, or psycho-ceramics?

 

"Composition of Enclosed Cylinders,'' by LAUREN MABRY, in the show "A Ceramic Spectrum,'' at New Art Center, Newton, Mass., March 22-May 9.

The gallery's notes say:

"Mabry's cycliners and curved planes create a 'still' canvas for her Abstract-Expressionist glaze experiments, which flow and co-mingle when fired in the kiln.''

Charles Chieppo: Olympics bid has a Big Dig ring

  This piece was first published in The Boston Globe. We use it with the permission of our friend Mr. Chieppo.

BOSTON The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has yet to restore normal service after cold and snow that was the straw that finally broke the system’s back. Yet proponents of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics are already pushing a proposal that harks back to the expansion policies that helped bring about the T’s  severe troubles.

At first, Boston 2024 organizers claimed that transportation improvements already in the pipeline would be the only Olympic-related cost to taxpayers. But when pushed, it became clear they meant any projects included in a $13 billion bond bill then-Governor Patrick signed last year. The problem is that bond bills only authorize the commonwealth to borrow money; just a fraction of the projects in them actually fit within state borrowing limits. A recent Globe story showed that some of the projects in Boston 2024’s successful bid to the U.S.  Olympic Committee aren’t even in the bond bill, and only a portion of the included projects are funded. Completing them all would roughly double the $4.5 billion that proponents claim taxpayers would have to kick in to host the games.

How quickly we forget. In 1991, the commonwealth committed to build a laundry list of transit expansions as environmental mitigation for the Big Dig. But no funding source was identified for any of them. As a result, building, operating, and maintaining the mitigation projects ran up more than one-third of the $9 billion the T owes in debt and interest.

Redirecting money from maintenance to expansion to pay for the projects is one reason for the authority’s maintenance backlog, now estimated at a stunning $6.7 billion, and for the recent systemwide meltdown.

State leaders must avoid letting organizers turn the Olympics into Big Dig mitigation 2.0. Among the many projects included in Boston 2024’s bid are South Coast Commuter Rail, extending the Fairmount commuter line to Newton, and expanding South Station. For those projects alone, more than $3 billion is currently unfunded.

Commuter rail featured prominently in the 1991 mandates. Required expansions included extensions to Newburyport, Worcester, and Plymouth, and construction of the Greenbush Line to the South Shore.

It is up to state leaders, not Olympic boosters, to plan the region’s transportation future. But a recent Pioneer Institute study by former state Inspector Gen. Greg Sullivan (full disclosure: I am a senior fellow at Pioneer but was not involved in preparing the report) revealed the folly of allowing mandates to dictate transit policy.

Sullivan looked at 18 American commuter rail systems and found that the T’s was the only one that lost ridership between 2003 and 2013. Despite all the expansion, MBTA commuter-rail ridership fell by a stunning 13 percent over a decade. The finding reiterates the direct relationship between investing in maintenance and the reliable on-time service that attracts riders.

No project captures the madness of transit policy by mandate better than Greenbush. Since the federal government wanted no part of it, the entire tab of nearly $600 million was picked up by the Commonwealth.

Greenbush was projected to take eight passengers off highways for each one that had previously used the MBTA’s South Shore commuter-boat service. Instead, about the same number of the line’s riders were lured from the ferry as from area roadways. When those who previously rode other commuter rail lines are added in, more than 60 percent of the line’s meager ridership was already using public transit.

Common sense dictates that new lines should be added only when there is enough money to build, operate, and maintain them without cannibalizing existing assets. To be sure, a number of the projects Boston 2024 organizers tout are important maintenance investments, including MBTA signal and power system upgrades. But it is up to state leaders, not Olympic boosters, to plan the region’s transportation future.

Those boosters are backpedaling furiously in the wake of revelations about the real cost of Olympic-related transportation upgrades. The group’s CEO, former state transportation secretary Richard Davey, told the Globe that the only transportation enhancements really needed to host the games are new Red and Orange Line cars that are already slated for delivery beginning in 2018. That’s quite a departure from their official bid.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Let’s not run the risk of repeating Big Dig mitigation’s devastating impact on the MBTA by allowing Olympic dreams to dictate the next generation of area transit policy.

Charles Chieppo is principal of Chieppo Strategies, a public policy writing and communications firm.

David Warsh: The high-speed bailout of 2009

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

I spent some hours last week browsing the newly released transcripts of Federal Open Market Committee meetings in 2009.  Mostly I relied on the extraordinary “live tour” and subsequent coverage by The Wall Street Journal team.

I was struck by how greatly the action had shifted to the incoming administration of President Barack Obama.   The acute-panic phase of the crisis was past, and relatively little of the drama of that troubled year is captured in the talk of monetary policy.

On Jan. 15, President George W. Bush asked Congress to authorize the incoming Obama administration to spend $350 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds.  Obama was inaugurated Jan. 20.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Feb. 10 announced a financial stabilization plan consisting mainly of stress tests for the nineteen largest bank holding companies.

In a conference call, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained to the Federal Open Market Committee that the details were hazy. “It’s like selling a car: Only when the customer is sold on the leather seats do you actually reveal the price.”

On Feb. 17 Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a stimulus package of around $800 billion in spending measures and tax cuts designed to promote economic recovery.

In March the Fed announced it planned to purchase $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities in 2009, expanding the “quantitative easing” program it had begun the previous November.   Also the administration’s bailout of the auto industry was completed.

In May, Geithner reported that nine banks were judged sufficiently well capitalized to have passed the stress tests. Ten others would be required to raise additional capital by November.  Gradually the stabilization was recognized to have been a success.

And in August, Obama nominated Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman. Senior White House adviser Lawrence Summers had been unsuccessful in his efforts to replace first Geithner, then Bernanke.  He would try again.

Bernanke’s book-length account of all this is expected in the fall. About the same time, U.S.  Court of Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler likely will have delivered a verdict in a lawsuit against the government alleging that Bernanke acted illegally when the Fed took control of insurance giant American International Group at the height of the crisis.

Meanwhile, Summers has been repositioning himself, perhaps hoping to return to the White House in a Hillary Clinton administration.  In a New York Times piece, ''Establishment Populism Rising,'' Thomas Edsall interviews the Harvard professor for an update on Summers’s thinking.

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I continue to get my news of Russia from even-handed Johnson’s Russia List – five issues last week alone, containing 188 items from the U.S., European and Russian press, most of which, needless to say, I did not read.  Two that I did stood out.

Jack Matlock, ambassador to the disintegrating Soviet Union under George H.W. Bush,  wrote  on his blog that the “knee-jerk” conviction that Vladimir Putin  was directly responsible for the deliberately shocking murder of Russian dissenter Boris Nemtsov overlooks other possibilities. “So far nothing is absolutely clear about this tragedy except that an able politician and fine man was gunned down in cold blood,” he concluded.

Peter Hitchens, in The Spectator, argued that It’s NATO that’s empire-building, not Putin. His principal authority, George Friedman, founder of the high-end publisher Stratfor, dates the current phase of the conflict from Putin’s refusal to go along with US policy in Syria in 2011.

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I was struck that when the Club of Growth asked Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker about his foreign- policy credentials, he replied that he considered Ronald Reagan’s decision to fire striking federal air-traffic controllers in 1981 “the most important foreign-policy decision of his lifetime.”

{Added by New England Diary overseer: Walker said of the firings; "It sent a message not only across America, it sent a message around the world'' that "we weren't to be messed with.''}

When you’re a kid with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.

(Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan offered Walker some half-hearted backup and The Washington Post zeroed in on Walker’s  cram course in foreign policy.)

I mention it mainly ir to say that, having spent most of my life covering economic development, one way or another, I’d say that the skein of events more important to U.S. foreign policy than any other were those in which the march in Selma, Ala.,  commemorated this weekend played an important part.

David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com and a longtime financial journalist and economic historian.

Pre-rock memories

 

"Dance to the Music,'' by JUDY ROBINSON-COX, at Alperts Fine Art, Andover, Mass. The increased interest in pre-rock, Great American Songbook music shown by older Baby Boomers these days, and even by the likes of  the pre-Baby Boomer Bob Dylan, shows how as you head into old age, memories from childhood tend to come flowing back.

The music referred to here is a song from "South Pacific,'' the  Rodgers & Hammerstein musical that premiered in 1949 and was based on James  A. Michener's book Tales of the South Pacific, which stemmed from his Navy service in World War II.