Roadside lunch break

From photographer Thomas Hook: "I was driving back from Woodbury. Conn.,  to my house in Southbury and from my car, I saw a Carolina Wren. I grabbed the camera and got off three shots while stopped at an intersection. Here was that bird with what looks to me like a rather large earwig firmly in its grasp. It was lunchtime after all.''

Llewellyn King: Internet is a cesspool of crime, war and mischief

Via Inside Sources

The big news coming out of the G7 meeting in Japan will not be about establishing international norms for cybersecurity. That will only get an honorable mention at best. But maybe it should get greater attention: The threat is real and growing.

Consider just these four events of the recent past:

The electric grid in Ukraine was brought down last Dec. 23 by, it is believed, the Russians. Because of its older design, operators were able to restore power with manual overrides of the computer-controlled system.

The Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles was ransomed. This crime takes place when a hacker encrypts your data and demands a ransom, often in untraceable bitcoin, to unlock it. The hospital paid $17,000 rather than risk patients and its ability to operate.

While these ransom attacks are fairly common, this is the first one believed to have been launched against a hospital. Previously, hospitals had thought patient records and payment details were what hackers would want, not control of the operating systems. Some of the ransoms are as low as $3,000, with the criminals clearly betting that the victims would lose much more by not settling immediately, as did the medical center. The extortionists first asked for $3.6 million.

In a blockbuster heist on the Internet, the Bangladesh central bank was robbed of $81 million. The crooks were able to authorize the Federal Reserve of New York to release the money held in an account there. They would have got away with another $860 million, if it were not for a typing mistake. In this case, the money was wired to fraudulent accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Target, the giant retailer, lost millions of customer records, including credit-card details, to an attack in February 2014. Since then, these attacks on retailers to get data have become common. Hackers sell credit card details on what is known as the “black web” to other criminals for big money.Often the finger is pointed at China, which will not be at the G7. While it may be a perpetrator, it also has victim concerns. There is no reason to think that Chinese commerce is not as vulnerable as that in the West.

China, with the help of the Red Army, is blamed in many attacks, particularly on U.S. government departments. But little is known of attacks Chinese institutions sustain.

Governments want to police the Internet and protect their commerce and citizens, but they are also interested in using it in cyberwar. Additionally, they freely use it in the collection of intelligence and as a tool of war or persuasion. Witness U.S. attempts to impede the operation of the centrifuges in Iran and its acknowledged attacks on the computers of ISIS.

As the Net’s guerilla war intensifies, the U.S. electric utility industry, and those of other countries, is a major source of concern, especially since the Ukraine attack. Scott Aaronson, who heads up the cybersecurity efforts of the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for private utilities, says the government’s role is essential and the electric companies work closely with the government in bracing their own cyber defenses.

Still, opinions differ dramatically about the vulnerability of the electric grid.

These contrasting opinions were on view at a meeting in Boston last month, when two of the top experts on cybersecurity took opposing views of utility vulnerability. Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security who now teaches emergency management at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said she believed the threat to the electric grid was not severe. But Mourad Debbabi, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who also has had a career in private industry, thinks the grid is vulnerable -- and that vulnerability goes all the way down to new "smart meters."

The fact is that the grid is the battleground for what Aaronson calls “asymmetrical war” where the enemy is varied in skill, purpose and location, while the victims are the equivalent of a standing army, vigilant and vulnerable. No amount of government collaboration will stop criminals and rogue non-state players from hacking out of greed, or malice, or just plain hacker adventurism.

Governments have double standards, exempting themselves when it suits from the norms they are trying to institutionalize. Cyber mischief and defending against it are both big businesses, and the existential threat is always there. 

Llewellyn King is a longtime publisher, columnist and international business consultant. He is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Editor's note: See bostonglobalforum.org for coverage of  international cybersecurity issues.

You can't trust spring

"The wind is tossing the lilacs,
The new leaves laugh in the sun,
And the petals fall on the orchard wall,
But for me the spring is done.

Beneath the apple blossoms
I go a wintry way,
For love that smiled in April
Is false to me in May."

--  Sara Teasdale'  

Bathroom bathos: Some Democrats' obsessive identity politics

Yet again some Democrats' obsession with identity politics undermines the traditional Democratic strengths onbroad socio-economic issues.  The latest example of this stupidity is the Obama administration's obsession with forcing states to let anyone self-declare his or her sex and use public bathrooms that by any criteria of common sense and history should only be used by people according to their biological sex -- i.e., by their sex.

The idea that anyone can make a (nonphysiological)  gender "choice'' and  move between facilities that by prudence and tradition are assigned to one sex is ridiculous. This will lose the Democrats quite a few votes that they could otherwise have won by appealing to voters for the right to address the downward mobility that most Americans now deal with.

The Democrats need another FDR, not a campaign for unisex bathrooms.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Chris Powell: Have politics reformed away the virtue of the citizenry?

Connecticut's former and sometime Republican U.S. senator and governor, Lowell P. Weicker Jr., told the Connecticut Post the other day that Donald Trump's capture of the party's presidential nomination may be the “last act“ of the party's destruction nationally, leading to “total reformation“ of the party.

Maybe. But Trump's ascendance may be that reform already, and since polls show him running competitively against the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the decisive states of Ohio, Floridaand Pennsylvania, the demise of the Trumpian Republican Party is no sure thing.

Yes, Trump's success suggests that the Religious Right's influence in the party has been greatly exaggerated. His reference during the campaign to “two Corinthians“ when he meant “Second Corinthians“ was among his big gaffes, but it did him no more harm. He embodies an entire environment without fear of God or even concern for ordinary decency. But no matter -- the candidate of the Religious Right, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, was easily turned aside even in the Bible Belt.

Meanwhile the candidates from the presumably sane section of the party -- Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and John Kasich -- only divided it fatally.

Disparaged as they may be by respectable news organizations, the major grievances of Trump supporters are legitimate: illegal immigration and the political establishment's calculated devaluation of citizenship; the disastrous failures of U.S. foreign policy; and the steady decline in incomes. In response to these grievances Trump has gotten away with offering only demagogic nonsense because little else is on offer.

No wall along the Mexican border would be necessary under a government that enforced immigration law against employers. But Trump prefers the wall because it lets him vilify powerless foreigners instead of powerful citizens.

Trump's foreign policy is merely incoherent rage: “America first“ except when certain foreign powers are so repugnant that he wants to nuke them. 

As for incomes, no one more than Trump has used a system of cronyized government credit and corporate welfare that has pushed wealth upward.

But no matter again, for reveling in his vileness, Trump even more than Bernie Sanders has captured the political mood -- a contempt so complete that people feel exempted from responsibility even for their own place in public life.

It's not hard to see what caused this contempt -- the exploitation of most basic institutions of government by their supposed custodians, from government employment to finance to education and medical care, undertakings where service to the public has become secondary, service to self primary, and elected officials have done nothing to reverse the trend.

Democrats have “reformed“ too. They have managed to become the party of both Wall Street and the slob culture, of corporate and individual welfare. To try to win a pass from the masses for delivering the economy into a new Gilded Age of plutocratic consolidation, the Democrats promise free college tuition for students who never master high school, encourage racial and ethnic minorities to think that their lagging has nothing to do with their own lack of effort, and righteously contrive constitutional rights for any sexual oddity no matter how trivial its grievances nor how much it tramples on social conventions.

So not only has the country's political health collapsed. Its basic social health is collapsing as well under waves of drug addiction and suicide. 

Yes, what if the political "reform" is already here -- not just with Trump and the Republicans but with Clinton and the Democrats too? What if politics has reformed the people themselves out of their virtue?

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Leaves on a May afternoon

Japanese maple leaves in Southbury, Conn., by photographer Thomas Hook, a superb bird photographer who is now, he says, taking more plant pictures these days. "It's easier on my knees.''

The moment between moments

"Forest Road Series: Dead Red Sky'' (oil and cold wax on wood panel), by George Shaw, in his show "Home Again,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, June 1-26.

He writes:

''We live from moment to moment but rarely in the moment. Time appears to be a
seamless flow from then to now to when. But to perceive time we are forced to break
it up into ticks of a clock, endlessly making each tick shorter as we perfect our
measure.

"We thus create a paradox or perhaps a conundrum that makes existence perceptible.
Although we think that time marches on as we perceive it, it flows backwards. We
live for tomorrow but we can never reach it. When we do it all too quickly becomes
but a memory - a dream that never ends.  But what of that moment between moments?
The works in this exhibition are a continuation of my interest and fascination with
what that place may be and what tales it may tell.''

Llewellyn King: Invasive, relentless coverage has driven good people from politics

Trump: What's The Deal?: The Documentary Trump Doesn't Want You To See.

There is a line of reasoning in political circles which says that Barack Obama created the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I aver that Donald Trump is a creation of the post-Watergate media. Collectively we have made running for office so absolutely awful, so fraught for families and careers that only two types of office seekers have the fortitude for public life: the grotesques, who are outside of the norms of the political culture, and the shopworn.

Both are on display as we trudge toward November wondering how in a country of so much talent so little of it has been on the ballot in this primary season.

The rot, I submit, began with Watergate when publishers and editors came to believe that the mission of the media was not only to scrutinize the policy views of elected officials but also to rip down the bedroom door, peer into the piggy bank and examine every word in print or on tape that a candidate has uttered since high school, whether in jest or earnest.

We confused personal rectitude -- or rectitude according to the norms of public morality of the day -- with sagacity, statesmanship and talent to lead. In the days before Watergate, Jack Kennedy could do with impunity what got Bill Clinton impeached.

Now that Watergate is 44 years behind us, its legacies are many, but two stand out. The first is that journalists in large numbers were suddenly attracted to covering politics in a way that fewer had been previously. The late Arnaud de Borchgrave, who covered 18 wars, noted disapprovingly that young journalists nowadays aspire to cover politics when they used to aspire to be foreign correspondents.

Even in these days of restrained budgets, Capitol Hill, and to a lesser extent the White House, is flooded with journalists, from the national media to the smallest newsletter. Politics is big news and that is good for business. As the incredibly successful Politico editors like to say, “flood the zone.”

But Congress is a deliberative body and moves slowly, so the news maw is fed with gossip. When the secrets of the budget are not clear or hard to get at, there is always the personal conduct of those working on the budget. If a member of Congress goes out to lunch with someone, anyone, a family member, it will be reported somewhere.

Being in public life is now like being on trial day in and day out without knowing what evidence the prosecution has or when it will bring it forward. In fact, being in public life has become God awful and no talented person ought to want to do it.

No wonder no one holding public office wants to stray from the talking points. A few stray words can bring you down, unless you are so outlandish that you have nothing say but stray words in lieu of coherent ones, like Donald Trump.

Watergate washed away unwritten rules under which what political figures did after hours was not fair game. I once saved a Cabinet member from a situation with two “ladies” who did not have his best interests at stake. Everyone knew why a certain congressman liked to travel to Mexico -- and it was not for tacos. Publicly, it was debated whether the statesman Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan drank too much and no less a person than that public scold, George Will, defended the New York senator by concluding that the great man drank just enough.

Olin “Tiger” Teague, a revered chairman of the House Science Committee, served drinks to his guests at 11 a.m. --and if you wanted an audience, you enjoyed a glass of bourbon with the Texas congressman. Today, you are lucky to get a plastic bottle of water during a Capitol Hill visit.

A Capitol Hill secretary of my acquaintance was proud of the number of congressmen she had bedded, including some in the leadership.

The post-Watergate, unwritten rules of scrutiny, which imply that in private conduct there are clues to public greatness, rather than bringing a new morality to politics, only frightened off the talented, the effective and the patriotic and created a space for the outrageous and the shopworn. Look to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and wonder no longer how we got that unappetizing choice to lead the nation.Ll

Llewellyn King (llewellynking2@gmail.com), executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, is also a  longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant.  This first ran in InsideSources.

Loaded and ready for the election

"Chris,'' by Ed Friedman, in his show "Focus on: The Gun Culture,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, June 1-26.

A boy's art amidst refugee anguish

One in a series of art works  using stones done by a Syrian boy in a refugee camp. It was forwarded to us by my friend and fellow Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org) member Reza Mahdavi, a Cambridge, Mass.-based international businessman. -- Robert Whitcomb

To offset the green

"Longing for Blue,'' by Lauren Pollaro, in the show "Color and Construct,'' at Mitchell Giddings Fine Arts, Brattleboro, Vt., through May 29.

Don Pesci: Learning how to make frescoes at Enders Island

 

Enders Island is la few miles from Mystic Seaport. on Long Island Sound.  In the first week of May, I spent a rainy eight days there laboring, with some success, to produce three mural frescoes under the guiding hand of Chady Elias, a masterful religious artist who is the Vice President & Dean of Administration at Sacred Art Institute Enders Island and the Adjunct Professor of Sacred Art at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, Conn.

About the rain: I cannot help mentioning a morning prayer delivered by Sister Eugenia, a Master Catechist, after a sumptuous breakfast before we set out for the studio. It contained the usual appreciation and gratitude for all things large and small, with a slight knock “even though the weather has been not to our liking.”

When someone – was it me? – pointed out that this was a proper Biblical way of addressing the God of mercy and justice (See Job, 7:11), the sister pointed out with a slight Irish lilt in her voice, “Well, I’m Irish.” Such mild reproofs are to be expected of Irish lasses: Roses mingle with thorns.

And she was Irish, full of green thoughts, prone to laughter and seated comfortably on years of study and learning. A certified Spiritual Director and a member of Spiritual Directors International, Sister Eugenia has degrees in Education, Music, Religious Studies, Spirituality Theology and Scripture. She left Ireland when she was eighteen, but Ireland, as we know, never leaves the Irish. She has taken Ireland with her to several states – agnostic California among them -- loves children, has dedicated her life to the service of God and man, quotes Wordsworth at length from memory, and composes, on the spot and with flawless fervor, prayers that tickle the ears of angels.

Frescoes can be intimidating. Through our eight days, Chady leads us by baby steps – first a watercolor of the subject, then a painting on dry plaster, and finally a portable fresco mural on a wet surface. How, one may ask, is it possible to paint on a wet surface? Ah, but with God, who leads the senses to beauty and form, all things are possible. Every bit of Michelangelo’s art in the Sistine Chapel is fresco, a process that involves simultaneous multiple steps: plotting the image, preparing the surface with a combination of lime, sand and plaster, waiting patiently for the moment when the surface will accept dry pigments dissolved in lime-water, kissing the  surface softly with a brush plunged in color.

One thinks of Michelangelo, suffering under the mild lash of a pope, carving forms on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with brushes the size of brooms, wondering, like Job, when the horror will end so that he might return to his first love -- sculpture.

As they say in the fairy tales: There are things twain; one you must do, the other you must not do. A fresco is a form to be seen from afar. And so, on the final stretch, you must see the projected painting from a distance, plastering in large blocks of color that change hue as the fresco dries. Chady puts it this way: NO DETAIL! The final strokes will be lines, bordering off the colors, the way stained glass is presented from a distance when a raking sun floods the forms with the light of creation.

After eight days of spiritual comradeship and hard work, I came home with three frescoes thinking, oddly enough, of the sea wall surrounding Enders Island and of Sister Eugenia’s yet unanswered prayer. During a violent storm, part of the sea wall collapsed. She was assured by the Army Corp of Engineers they would repair the wall. In years and years following that assurance, large boulders necessary for the repair were collected on the island. She prays, she waits, full of a fugitive hope. The boulders lie untouched by the Army Corps of Engineers. There may be somewhere in Connecticut a politician attuned to God’s whisperings, so quiet they seem to be faint commands tucked in whirlwinds. Heaven needs earth to move Heaven.

Following its connection with Holy Apostles College & Seminary, St. Michael’s has become an internationally renowned religious Art Institute.  It is a jewel in the heart of Connecticut that has drawn artists and aspiring artists the world over. It’s time now to shout for joy, time to ring the bells – time to fix that wall. Do it for Sister Eugenia, do it for Art, do it for God. But do it.

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

RIP, Providence's Sal Laterra: Part of a quiet immigrant family's success story

Sal Laterra, for nearly 50 years a familiar presence at Paramount Cleansers, on Union Street, in Providence, died unexpectedly at Massachusetts General Hospital on May 3. He had celebrated his 90th birthday on the preceding Wednesday.

Born in Providence on April; 27, 1926, he was a son of Joseph and Elisabetta (Autiello) Laterra, immigrants, respectively, from Sicily andsouthern mainland Italy. He attended Mount Pleasant High School, but left school when he was 17 to join the Marines in World War II began. As a member of the Third Marine Division, he participated in the freeing of Guam from the Japanese, and his unit was in China awaiting orders to invade Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped.

Proud Marine though he was, he happily returned home to Providence and soon joined his father in the dry-cleaning and tailoring business that Joseph Laterra had opened 20 years earlier at the suggestion of then Providence Journal editor and later publisher/editor Sevellon Brown. For the next 40 years, Sal Laterra would be a familiar presence on Union Street, cleaning and tailoring clothes for Providence mayors and Rhode Island governors, Brown and RISD professors and Providence Journal reporters and editors.

At the end of each day, by pre-arrangement, he would hurry out into Union Street with a smile and a wave, with an armful of clothes that had been tailored or cleaned, and hand them out quickly to patrons who slowed down in their cars. At the death of his father, in 1987, he inherited the shop and it continued in business until his own retirement, in 1995. By then his son, John, was well embarked on his career as a neurologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore (he was named one of the nation’s top neuro-oncologists by Newsweek earlier this year), and his daughter, Elizabeth, was in a post with the National Security Agency. He was ready, he said, to spend more time with his wife, Alda (Pontarelli) Laterra, and in the garden he had planted beside his Naples Avenue, Providence, house. He had bought the lot, he said, not only so  that he and his family could enjoy it, but for the enjoyment of neighbors who had lots too small to have gardens. Having grown up in a six-story Providence tenement with no land around it, he said, he knew how you could long for a garden.

Always an outdoorsman, he also hoped to spend more time bicycling, skiing and mountain climbing. He was always proud of having skiied France’s Chamonix glacier and climbed Maine’s Mount Katahdin, and peaks in the White Mountains with the late Providence Journal art critic Bradford F. Swan and the late Journal photographer Andtrew Dickerman. In retirement, he bicycled with enthusiasm, joining the Narragansett Bay Wheelmen. In 1985, when he was 58, he had been featured on the Sunday Journal’s Health and Fitness insert as a prime example of a healthy Rhode Island outdoorsman. (It was not the first time that he had been featured on a Sunday Journal supplement cover. In 1967, his picture had been on the Rhode Islander cover when Paramount Cleansers itself was the subject of a story on the tailoring business.)

Although his wife died soon after his retirement, he continued to tend the garden they had both so enjoyed, and to travel as they had traveled together. He revisited the China he had known as a young Marine, and went on in Asia to visit Thailand and Vietnam. He also went to Australia and New Zealand, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, the Azores, Italy, Sicily, Turkey, England and Scotland, and crossed both the United States and Canada by train. On his travels, he perfected his photography -- a talent  that he had helped develop in the Providence Journal darkroom. As a memorial to his wife, he established a children’s book fund at the Providence Community Library on Academy Avenue.

He is survived by his daughter, Elizabeth Hobbins of Laurel, Md., his son, John Laterra, M.D., Ph.D., of Baltimore, and three grandchildren, Catherine Hobbins of Columbia, Md.; Sarah Yusko of Westminster, Colo., and Anne Laterra of Atlanta  and a brother, Joseph Laterra of Wickford. He was predeceased  by his wife and two sisters, Adeline McGuirk and Lucy Pettinato.

A memorial service will be held at a time to be announced.

-- Phyllis Meras

Robert Whitcomb: Mr. Brooks finally discovers that the natives are restless

In an April 29 column by The New York Times’s David Brooks headlined “If Not Trump, What?’’ he writes that to understand Donald Trump’s GOP popularity (and by implication Bernie Sanders’s among Millennials):

“{I]t’s necessary to go out into the pain. I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable….’’

“….Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.’’

How little effort  much of the elite have made  to know the plus-90 percent of the nation who aren’t. You’d think that big-time journalists would try to talk more to “everyday Americans,’ at least for show. But media celebs such as Mr. Brooks are addicted to the money, privilege and ego-gratification that go with spending most of their time with the rich and/or powerful.  Meanwhile, many business/economics journalists have been fired to help maintain media outlets’ profit margins. So rigorous, data-driven coverage of socio-economic changes has declined in the media that American most look at in favor of, well, nonstop coverage of Mr. Trump’s latest insults. (I’m a former business editor.)

Mr. Brooks, et al., now seem to fear that massive social unrest is coming unless members ofthe “middle class’’ think that they will get a better deal.  (Of course, many low- and middle-income people could help their situations by, for example, avoiding having kids out of wedlock and other disorderly behavior linked to poverty. They could also vote.)

The nub of the problem:

Government data show that American economic productivity  in 1945 -1973 rose 96 percent and inflation-adjusted pay 94 percent; in 1973-2014 productivity grew 72.2 percent and inflation-adjusted pay 9.2 percent, with almost all of the growth in 1995-2002. 

This suggests that the folks owning and/or running companies have become  much less willing to share. At the same time, tax laws remain very skewed in favor of investment income over earned income. This keeps reinforcing a plutocracy based on inherited capital and privilege. The Sunday New York Times weddings section displays this crowd in all its glory.

Meanwhile, the elite’s  disinclination to share has slowed economic growth by constraining most Americans’ purchasing power.

The very rich have increasingly sequestered themselves from the poor and the middle class through, among other things, jet travel, globalization,  the Internet and gated communities. Thus they’re less likely to  see and be embarrassed by extreme divergences of wealth. Ever more large local enterprises are owned by far-away companies and/or individuals rather than by people in the communities where the companies operate. The local employees are mere numbers on a screen rather than people whom senior executives and major shareholders might awkwardly encounter on the street.

In some of the burgs where my family have lived over the past century, such as Brockton, Mass., when it was a shoe-making capital, and Duluth, Minn., an iron-ore and grain shipping port, my relatives  who were executives, factory managers and the like would encounter a wide range of the population daily, from rich to poor. Now, the descendants of these folks who have not yet drunk away the old money made in these places tend to spend six months and a day enjoying tax avoidance in Florida , and those who own and/or run largeenterprises with operations in places like Duluth and Brockton may never visit them at all.

Out of sight, out of mind.

But now there’s the glint of pitchforks in the sun. It’s too bad that the leading spokesmen for the new “populism’’ are con man Donald Trump (see: www.trumpthemovie.com) and a naïf like Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t understand the need to always encourage entrepreneurialism  to raise living standards.  As for the Clintons, all too often they act like establishment grifters.

Anyway, we need capitalism, but adjustments are long overdue.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former Providence Journal editorial page editor, a former International Herald Tribune finance editor and a former Wall Street Journal editor, oversees New England Diary and is a partner at Cambridge Management Group and president of Guard Dog Media, based in Boston.

Josh Hoxie: Forget Panama: Delaware will suffice for hiding money from tax authorities

The first thing you notice on the cab ride from the airport to downtown Panama City is the skyscrapers. They’re architecturally beautiful, but jumbled together as if there was no plan or consideration for how they might look next to one another.

What you might not notice is that they’re nearly all empty.

Panama, a small Central American country with just 4 million people, has dominated the news in recent weeks.

For that you can thank the Panama Papers — a massive leak of private documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which serves well-heeled companies and individuals all over the world. The leaks exposed a vast global system of shady offshore tax shelters and the global elites that benefit from them.

A few months before Panama landed on the front pages of nearly every newspaper in the world, I visited the country and got a look at those empty buildings firsthand.

Unlike many travelers, I wasn’t in Panama City to launder my ill-gotten cash or to hide my profits from meddling tax collectors (not least because I have neither). I was in search of beautiful beaches and perfect waves, both of which the country is well known for.

It was striking, however, that the most attractive resource the country advertises to the global elite is a hands-off business and tax climate seemingly designed for exploitation.

According to my cab driver (and Reuters), drug cartels are responsible for much of the building boom in Panama City.

For cash-laden criminals unable to drop their funds in a checking account, investing in a Panamanian commercial building makes a lot of sense. They carry excess cash into the country by hand and convert it into an appreciating asset that can remain empty for years. Never mind that many Panamanians live in rickety shacks and dire poverty.

Many who take advantage of Panama’s lax business climate never have to step foot in the country. Named in the Panama Papers were 12 current or former world leaders, 128 other public officials and politicians, and hundreds of other elites — from well known celebrities to enigmatic businessmen — from over 200 countries.

They each in some way used Mossack Fonseca to create hard-to-trace shell companies to hide their assets. Those companies helped their owners evade taxes, public scrutiny, legal action, or all three.

Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, was forced to step down in the face of massive public protests after he was named in the leak. British Prime Minister David Cameron, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and famous soccer player Lionel Messi have faced significant public scrutiny as well.

Notably, few American names have been listed to date. That could change in revelations to come, but it also might not. States like Delaware offer very similar hands-off approaches to regulation that individuals and companies can exploit to hide their business dealings without going overseas.

One single address in Wilmington, for example — 1209 North Orange Street — is listed as the headquarters for 285,000 separate businesses exploiting Delaware’s lax laws. Indeed, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have firms registered in that two-story office building.

In fact, the Tax Justice Network ranks the United States third in the world for financial secrecy, behind only Switzerland and Hong Kong. Panama is No.13.

As the saying goes, behind every great fortune is a great crime. And the Panama Papers provide the tools to begin prosecuting some of the more egregious crimes of tax evasion and corporate irresponsibility. Many countries have already begun to take action on this front, the United States included.

Perhaps more importantly, the leak provides an impetus for much-needed public pressure to fix our rules so they work for everyone — not just the tax-dodging elites and their shady shell corporations.

Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS-dc.org). Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Bankers' bacchanal

"Piggy Bankers/The Great Recession of 2008'' (porcelain, wood, white gold leaf, gold leaf, bone, brass balls (!)), by Mara Superior, in the show "The Face of Politics: In/Tolerance,'' at the Fuller Art Museum, Brockton, Mass., through Aug. 21.

Negative capability

"Hoe while it is spring, and enjoy the best anticipations.  
It is not much matter if things do not turn out well."

--  Charles Dudley Warner

Cities around airports and underwater, backstabbers, Panama Canal helps Quonset

May 5, 2016
 
 
To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com):

Our next meeting comes on Wednesday, May 11, with the internationally known expert on cities,  transportation and workplaces around the world,  journalist, urbanist and futurist Greg Lindsay. (He’s also a former Jeopardy champion.)
 
Look at:
 
http://www.amazon.com/Aerotropolis-Way-Well-Live-Next/dp/0374100195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279805811&sr=8-1

As this Amazon summary of that book, co-written by Mr. Lindsay and John D. Kasarda, put it:

 “This brilliant and eye-opening look at the new phenomenon called the aerotropolis gives us a glimpse of the way we will live in the near future―and the way we will do business too.

“Not so long ago, airports were built near cities, and roads connected one to the other. This pattern―the city in the center, the airport on the periphery―shaped life in the twentieth century, from the central city to exurban sprawl. Today, the ubiquity of jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks has turned the pattern inside out. Soon the airport will be at the center and the city will be built around it, the better to keep workers, suppliers, executives, and goods in touch with the global market. This is the aerotropolis: a combination of giant airport, planned city, shipping facility, and business hub.’’

Mr. Lindsay is also a contributing writer for Fast Company, author of the forthcoming book Engineering Serendipity,  a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation — where he leads the Connected Mobility Initiative — a non-resident senior fellow of The Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute.

Heprovocatively notes, on a topic of particular interest to coastal New Englanders: “Rising sea levels is no longer the twenty-second century’s problem; it’s ours. Will we be forced to abandon coastal megacities? Will we manage to wall them off, or float them? The answer is probably ‘all of the above,’with the wealthiest districts of the wealthiest cities deploying some mix of technological and infrastructural fixes while the rest are submerged. 

As usual, the dinner will be at the Hope Club, 6 Benevolent St., Providence. Drinks start at about 6, dinner by 7, then the talk and a Q&A and the evening ends by 9.

Please let us know whether you will join usby replying to pcfremail@gmail.com or, in a crunch, calling (401) 523-3957.

Thanks very much to those who have already let us know!

 The Hope Club needs good estimates no later than the day before a PCFR dinner.

Dues and dinner cost information may be found at: thepcfr.org. Other membership information may be found there, too.  (A member asked if (the modest) duesand dinner fees for this nonprofit educational and civic membership organization aredeductible for business purposes. In some cases. Ask your tax adviser.)

On Tuesday, June 7, Michael Soussan, former UN whistleblower; acclaimed author; widely published journalist; NYU writing professor, and women's rights advocate, will speak. His satirical memoir about global corruption,  Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course In International Diplomacy (Nation Books / Perseus) is being adapted  for a feature film, starring Ben Kingsley and Josh Hutcherson

He will speak about the subject of his next book TRUTH TO POWER: how great minds changed the world. A brief history of thought leadership.
 
Evan Matthews, a key thought leader at the North Atlantic Ports Association and director of the Port of Davisville, has very kindly offered to talk to us on Wednesday, June 22, on changes in world shipping, including the widening of the Panama Canal and other changes of huge interest to New England ports, especially Quonset/Davisville.

: @ThePCFR

Charles Chieppo: Every state should have gubernatorial line-item veto power

The recovery from the Great Recession has largely been a half-­hearted one, and few see the economy improving dramatically in the near future. These realities present challenges for state and local governments that will likely require a range of responses, but giving governors the line-­item veto should be seen as low­-hanging fruit for the six states that don't have it.

Those states are Indiana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Vermont, and there is a movement afoot in at least one of them to do something about it. Three bills pending in the Rhode Island legislature would put the issue before the Ocean State's voters this November.

Former gubernatorial candidate Ken Block, founder of the state's Moderate Party, has created a Web site, lineitemveto.org, that has gathered more 900 signatures for a letter urging the state's leaders to support the change.

There's good reason to consider the idea. The long­-term fiscal forecast is far from rosy for states and their local governments. A decade ago, the concern was rising health­care costs. Then came a number of municipal bankruptcies fueled in part by the costs of long ­underfunded pension systems. Next came a rule from the Government Accounting Standards Board that required governments to report liabilities associated with postemployment benefits such as retiree health care.

More recently, the focus has been on the need for costly improvements to infrastructure at a time when the sluggish recovery has produced slow revenue growth. It's not as though the line­item veto, which allows governors to delete items or parts of items in an appropriations bill without rejecting it entirely, will solve these problems for the six states that don't allow it ­­ after all, plenty of states that do have it struggle with their finances ­­ but it's one of the tools that will be needed if governments are to survive the fiscal challenges to come.

Like most things in politics, the full impact of the tool can't be measured in dollars and cents. The threat of the line-­item veto can shape debates and make it harder for legislators to lard up popular bills with pork. A line-­item veto could be overridden by lawmakers, but not without shining a light on provisions they might not want the public to pay a lot of attention to.

The temptation for public officials to duck responsibility for dealing with hard problems and let successors wrestle with them is always going to be great. But state and local leaders who want to deal with problems now face difficult choices. One approach, of course, would be to raise taxes, but voters are rarely happy about that. Another would be for governments to retreat entirely from some areas they now fund.

One could make a realistic argument that the public sector does a number of unnecessary things, but the inconvenient truth is that in a democracy every one of them has a constituency.

In most states, the far more realistic approach will be a combination of raising revenues and finding savings. The line ­item veto may be an imperfect tool for accomplishing the latter, but it's one that all states ought to have at hand.

Charles Chieppo (Charlie_Chieppo@hks.harvard.edu) a research fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard''s Kennedy Center. This piece first ran on govering.com.

Nature imitating art on Amtrak

Commentary and photo by William Morgan

Travel today is mostly a chore. But one pleasure of taking Amtrak's Northeast Regional between Boston and New York is the trip along the shore of Long Island Sound.

Between Westerly, R.I.,  and New Haven, Conn. -- going through Stonington, Mystic, Old Lyme, Saybrook, Clinton, Madison and Guilford -– there is an aqueous landscape of estuaries, rivers and marshes.

Despite efforts to despoil our natural habitat, this watery stretch  between Interstate 95 and the Sound cannot support much more than the train tracks and summertime sailboats.

An iPhone shot taken at 65 miles an hour, in the rain, should be nothing to write home about. Yet, this glimpse of coast around Clinton evoked New England landscape painters of 150 years ago, such as Worthington Whittredge, Martin Johnston Heade, and Fitz Hugh Lane. Like them, we are still inspired.