Vox clamantis in deserto
In search of lost time
"Forever Young'' (photo realist painting), by John Mark Gleadow, at his recently ended show "John-Mark Gleadow Live,'' at the Wit Gallery, Lenox, Mass.
Robert Whitcomb: Blue State economics; overrated fracking; ugly Route 114
This is the latest "Digital Diary'' column from GoLocal24.
Two somewhat related stories: General Electric moving to Boston and the Red State-Blue State economic divide
For decades, we have heard about the glories of the Sunbelt, now often called the Red States. These generally Republican-run places are cited as exemplars of economic growth. Their leaders also like to assert that unlike the Democratic-leaning Blue States they’re centers of individualism, and not wallowing in tax-supported programs.
But in any event, the Red States continue, after all these years of air-conditioning, to have the nation’s highest levels of poverty, the worst health indicesand the worst sociological problems, such as violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction and so on. The Blue States are, generally, the rich states and with much better social indices.
That’s in large part because the rich folks who run the Red States do everything they can to keep their taxes low, and thus, for example, favor sales taxes, which are regressive, over income taxes, which are not. Thus public infrastructure – in education, health, transportation and environment -- suffer.
Meanwhile, the Blue States, for their part, tend to put money into physical infrastructure, education and mass transit (in their metro areas) that help the locals keep churning out innovation. (Actually, if they want to get richer, they’d increase investmentin these areas.)
The suckers in places like much of the South follow the fool’s errand of electing anti-tax fanatics to keep the local lobbyists happy, with such political tools as touting the glories of guns to help distract the citizenry.
Because of federal policies that favor moving tax money from rich places to poor ones, Blue States heavily subsidizethe Red States, for all their latter’s whining about the Blue States’ ‘’socialistic’’ tendencies. After all, the people in the richer states pay more in federal income taxes than the ones in the poorer (generally the Red States) because Blue States’ policies have tended to make their citizens better paid than those in the Sunbelt. The real welfare states are the Red States. (An exception in all this is Utah, with its Mormon rigor.)
I have written about thesocio-economicgap between the Red and Blue States for years. And that gap seems to be widening again. Look at a new statistical analysis in an essay “The Path to Prosperity Is Blue,’’ by Professors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson in theJuly 31 New York Times using U.S. Census and other government data.
Which gets us to GE, whose management, led by CEO Jeff Immelt, is moving from one Blue State, Connecticut, to Boston. The main reason is the density of engineering and other talent in Greater Boston, which Massachusetts’s very good public education, healthcare and transportation infrastructure has helped to build up. (That many of GE’s up-and-coming stars don’t particularly like their current boring suburban office park also played a role in the decision to leave the Nutmeg State. They want to be in an exciting city.)
Of course, while Connecticut’s infrastructure has been slipping it still is superior to most of the Red States’. Just the fact that it has lots of passenger trains gives it an advantage.
Massachusetts, under GOP and Democratic governors, has long accepted the importance of investment in infrastructure. That has helped make it and keep it rich – rich enough to send some of its residents’ income to Red States.
As Professors Hacker and Pierson note at the end of their piece: ‘’{W}e should remember that the key drivers of growth (and incomes} are science, education and innovation, not low taxes, lax regulations or greater exploitation of natural resources.’’
“And we should be worried, whatever our partisan tilt, that leading conservatives promote aneconomic model so disconnected from the true sources of prosperity.’’
xxx
Speaking of “exploitation of natural resources,’’ some states, and parts of states, have had famous booms from fracking for natural gas. One of the selling points has been that because burning natural gas contributes less to global warming than burning oil or coal, that fracking is an environmentally better. But increasing evidence that fracking releases huge amounts of methane at and near the drilling sites suggests that it’s far from the wonderful transition fuel away from oil and coal that it has been made out to be. Redouble efforts to boost wind, solar, hydro and geothermal, please.
xxx
It’s clear that the cold killer Vladimir Putin’s Russia is engaged in a relentless cyberwar against the United States. Failure to find ways to push back to undermine the Putin regime will only embolden him further. Clouding everything is Donald Trump’s admiration for Putin and the developer’s business dealings in Russia.
xxx
The Trump phenomenon and the return of the Clintons has of course elicited much denunciation of them. But why not more attacks on the people who hired them – the voters? Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton have been public figures for a very long time, and most oftheir strengths and dirty laundry have long been visible. In spite of that, Republican and Democratic primary voters gave them the nod, even when other candidates with good records in public service were running in both parties.
Perhaps this year’s primary campaign might encourage party organizations, in the states and nationally, to reduce the roles of the primaries, now conducted in electronic media echo chambers, and increase the influence of party elders. The idea would be to save the parties from an increasingly ill-informedcitizenry who wants to hear again and again the mantras that reinforce their wishful thinking.
Bring back the “smoke-filled rooms’’ filled with smart political operators insulated to some extent from the short-termism and demagoguery that some of the electronic media, in particular, facilitate.
Okay, this will probably neverhappen because it would be called “undemocratic’’ even though the parties legally have the right to determine their own rules for nominee selection. Indeed, the body politic would be healthier if the parties wrestled back the power and influence that they have lost to special-interest groups and hysterical media. The general election, of course, is quite a different creature.
And, while we’re at it, let’s bring back some of that pork-barrel spending, aka “earmarks’’ (a very minor part of government budgets) that has been a lubricant in getting legislation crafted and passed in the days before Congress became gridlocked.
Reform reform.
xxx
Route 114 in Middletown, R.I., on the way to the way to partly gorgeous Newport, is one of America’s uglier and more depressing stretches of strip malls and other commercial crud. Now that the Internet and middle-class wage stagnation are ravagingbrick-and-mortar stores, we can expect many more stores on this depressing stretch to close.
Hopefully, the abandoned commerce will be replaced by trees and other plants and such possible routes to a better future as solar-energy arrays or wind turbines.
xxx
Providence needs more revenue but putting parking meters around the Thayer Street retail area has been a loser so far. The confusion and cost to drivers associated with the meters has scared away many customers, already inconvenienced by the many parking spaces handed over to Brown as part of a desperate payment-in-lieu-of-taxes deal a few years back.
The money that the city makes from the meters may end up more than offset by lower real-estate taxes because of commerce killed by themeters. The city needs an agonizing reappraisal of this policy for Rhode Island’s Harvard Square.
Wayland Square, a few blocks away, seems to have avoided the worst effects of the meter invasion. Nearby free street parking and some large parking lots are probably the main reasons. Indeed, the square bustles with stores (some new) and eateries and lots of walkers and buyers.
In both places, denser and more frequent mass transit would help address the parking problem, and in a fiscally fairer way: The added sales tax that would go to the state from prospering stores and restaurants would help finance RIPTA expansion, in a virtuous circle.
Robert Whitcomb is overseer of New England Diary.
PCFR 2016-17 season to start off with Brexit
From the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (PCFR), which will lead off its 2016-17 season with famed international political economist Prof. Mark Blyth.
See: thepcfr.org for details on the PCFR, whose email is: pcfremail@gmail.com.
Mr. Blyth, whom some of you have heard on NPR commenting on Brexit, will speak on Wednesday, Sept. 14, on Europe after Brexit.
He is Eastman Professor of Political Economy andProfessor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown.
He is an internationally celebrated political economist whose research focuses upon how uncertainty and randomness affect complex systems, particularly economic systems, and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary. He is the author of several books, including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press 2013, and The Future of the Euro (with Matthias Matthijs) (Oxford University Press 2015).
Coming fast after that will be:
Prof. Morris Rossabi, probably the world’s greatest expert on Central Asia and particularly Mongolia: a democracystuck between the police states of Russia and China, Sept. 21. How does this faraway country do it? He’ll be speaking to us soon after returning from Mongolia and other points in Asia.
Then:
FormerU.S. Ambassador to Slovakia Tod Sedgwick, on thetense situation in Central Europe, Oct. 5.
Meanwhile, the World Affairs Council and the PCFR are preparing a forum for Oct. 20 at the Hope Club on the foreign-policy visions of the U.S. presidential candidates. Stay tuned.
Naval War College Prof. James Holmes on the geopolitics of global warming, Nov. 15.
German General Consul Ralf Horlemann on the role of Germany in an E.U. without the U.Kand with an aggressive Russia pressing in from the east, Dec. 14.
International epidemiologist Rand Stoneburner, M.D., on Zika and other burgeoning threats to world health, Jan. 18.
Indian Admiral Nirmal Verma, on military and geopolitical issues in South and Southeast Asia, Feb. 15.
Dr. Stephen Coen, director of the Mystic Aquarium, on the condition of the oceans, March 8.
Brazilian political economist and commentator Evodio Kaltenecker on April 5 to talk about the crises facing that huge nation.
Joining us June 14 will be Laura Freid, CEO of the Silk Road Project, founded and chaired by famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, promoting collaboration among artists and institutions and studying the ebb and flow of ideas across nations and time. The project was first inspired by the cultural traditions of the historical Silk Road.
We’re working on a May speaker. And we’re trying to keep some flexibility to respond to events. Everything in human affairs is tentative. ”We make plans and God laughs….’’
We are talking with Michael Soussan to talk about the U.N., diplomacy, Iraq and his book Backstabbing for Beginners, now being made into a major movie; an expert on the ocean-fishing industry, and an international travel expert.
Our 2015-2016 season speakers included:
Evan Matthews, director of the Port of Davisville, on international shipping changes, particularly in the context of the expansion of the Panama Canal.
Greg Lindsay, writer, futurist and expert on cities around the world and their relationship to airports.
Hedrick Smith, PBS documentary maker, former star foreign correspondent.
David Alward, Canadian general consul.
Allan Cytryn, international cybersecurity expert.
Andrew Michta, U.S, Naval War College expert on Russia and NATO.
Rima Salah, High U.N. humanitarian-relief official.
Eduardo Mestre, Cuban-American civic leader and international banker.
Scott Shane, of The New York Times, expert on international terrorism.
Paul Glader, author, foreign correspondent and expert on Germany.
Election Day art
"Imaginary Explosions, vol. II'' (sketch and film still), by Caitlin Berrigan, in the show "Obstacle Course,'' at New Art Center, Newton, Mass., Oct. 28-Nov. 22.
David Warsh: A sense of grief at conventions
The disparity between political conventions was striking. The Democrats were in good shape. The Republicans were a mess. Yet, as New York Times columnist David Brooks observed on PBS television, a sense of loss, of grief, pervaded both. What is that about?
Much more than individual losses were at issue; the deaths of soldiers in combat, of police officers in the line of duty, of victims of excessive force, of sufferers from treatable diseases. The new mood involves both parties in at least the tacit recognition of the existence of a series of limits – on trade, immigration, military force, inequality, atmospheric pollution.
For 70 years these limits often have been overlooked, ignored or even denied in favor of the pursuit of the overriding goals of peace, prosperity and global poverty reduction, under the banner of “globalization.” At last these limits have become unavoidable.
The emergence of the Trump and Sanders insurgencies in the U.S., the Brexit vote in Britain, the formation of ultra-nationalists movements in Europe, are obvious markers of the new mood. The sea-change presents itself in different ways in different places. ISIS is a protest too.
Writers on the left have been taking positions on these issues for years, not that a broad-based political platform has yet appeared. In "Abdication of the Left,'' Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, offered a short survey last month:
“Consider just a few examples: Anat Admati and Simon Johnson have advocated radical banking reforms; Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson have proposed a rich menu of policies to deal with inequality at the national level; Mariana Mazzucato and Ha-Joon Chang have written insightfully on how to deploy the public sector to foster inclusive innovation; Joseph Stiglitz and José Antonio Ocampo have proposed global reforms; Brad DeLong, Jeffrey Sachs, and Lawrence Summers (the very same! [as earlier pressed for financial deregulation]) have argued for long-term public investment in infrastructure and the green economy.
The Economist recently added to the canon Alberto Alesina, of Harvard, and Enrico Spolaore, of Tufts, for their 2003 book The Size of Nations. Robert J. Gordon, of Northwestern, belongs there as well, for The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War. And, on the eve of the Brexit referendum, Angus Deaton, of Princeton, last year’s Nobel laureate in economics, weighed in with a short essay, “Rethinking Robin Hood.”
“As Rodrik wrote, ‘There are enough elements here for building a programmatic economic response from the left.”’
So far the Right is flummoxed. The Wall Street Journal holds out for accelerated growth. The Economist sees mainly a schism between open and closed, whereas the new cautiousness with respect to the disruptive effects of immigration and trade wants a more pragmatic, conciliatory metaphor.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is a one-man wrecking crew of Republican Party orthodoxies: immigration, trade, social issues, the Iraq war, Russia, NATO cohesion. Who knows what will be left of the party when he is done?
Ten “battleground” states, according to the Website 270toWin: Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida. One hundred days until Tuesday November 8. My guess is that Clinton will win them all. Then we can get on with the hard part, coming to terms with grief.
David Warsh, a long-time economic historian and financial journalist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this originated.
Falling before the fall
"When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road."
- Howard Nemerov, "Threshold''
Leigh Vincola: Eat your sea vegetables
Seaweed salad
Fifty years ago, Charlie Yarish was fishing on Long Island when he first took an interest in seaweed. Where the fishing was good, he found certain types of seaweed, and where it wasn’t so great, other types of seaweed gathered.
A spark was ignited for the young scientist, and Yarish took this excitement all the way to Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he was invited to participate in a three-month intensive field research program as an undergraduate. Yarish set out to answer all of his questions about this beautiful, diverse vegetation by growing it. Ultimately, the time he spent in Halifax change his life forever.
Today, decades of research and experimenting later, Yarish is known as the grandfather of the emerging sea vegetable farming industry in the United States. He is a professor of marine science at the University of Connecticut and runs a seaweed research lab out of the Stamford campus.
There’s really not a lot to argue about when it comes to seaweed farming. It’s good for the environment, good for human health and good for the fisheries economy.
Yarish recognized this early on and saw, that while scientifically possible, no large-scale seaweed production was happening in the United States the way it was in Asia. He set out to change that making it his goal to nurture East Coast kelp farmers by following an “open source” approach.
All new farmers have access to Yarish’s knowledge and research. In return, Yarish asks that each farmer make his or her products available to his research lab, so that he can continue to unravel the mysteries of seaweed and figure out the part it plays in marine biology.
Yarish puts it simply, “Sea vegetable farming has a great environmental benefit, while also providing a valuable commodity that is nutritionally beneficial.”
Environmentally friendly
Seaweed farming is as much about coastal resource management as anything, and the environmental benefits are central to Yarish’s work. As the co-chair of the Long Island Sound Study, Yarish showed that similar to shellfish, seaweed is a nutrient bioextractor, meaning that seaweed removes harmful nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon from the water.
Kelp farming also doesn’t require fresh water. When it comes to farming kelp, all that is needed is already there and the outcome is that the marine ecosystem is left healthier than how it was found.
Health benefits
The most common farmed kelp species in New England is the sugar kelp. Winged kelp and horsetail kelp are other species that are in experimental phase. These varieties — and all seaweeds — are high in the essential minerals, trace elements and vitamins that we often don’t get from our diets.
In fact, in the United States, much of the food that we eat is nutrient poor, and our health is suffering because of it. Sea vegetables concentrate the minerals from the seawater, making them some of the most nutritious plants on earth. Adding just a few grams of dried seaweed to your meal daily can have a huge impact on overall health.
Fisheries economy
There are those who believe the future of fishing is aquaculture. “Kelp farming is giving people from the fishing industry the opportunity to have new, viable careers,” Yarish said.
The technology of sea vegetable farming is rather simple. Reproductive plants are grown in a laboratory to the size of a pinhead and wrapped around a PVC spool. When they’ve reached the right size, the seeds are unraveled in the sea on long lines and set to grow for five to six months.
Harvest season is in the spring, and from there are several ways to get seaweed to market: fresh, frozen, dried and value added. Today, 14 farmers from New York to Maine have seized this opportunity and are operating under licenses from their own state. Yarish is connected to each of them.
“I pass on all knowledge to the new farmers and that is essential to the success of our industry,” he said.
One key farmer to Yarish is Bren Smith, owner of Thimble Island Ocean Farm and executive director of GreenWave in New Haven, Conn. As a lifelong commercial fisherman, Smith was looking for solutions to help an ancient industry that was failing him and became the face of Yarish’s research.
Smith developed what he calls 3D Ocean Farming, a farming model that includes seaweed and shellfish and addresses issues of the environment, health and the economy. At GreenWave, part of Smith’s mission is to help new kelp farmers. The Farm Startup and Farmer Apprentice Program provides assistance with finding grant money, permitting, training and essential gear. GreenWave also is creating restorative hatcheries, where seeds are produced for sea vegetable farming, and is building seafood hubs where farmers can process and produce foods for distribution.
GreenWave is one of a few locations in New England that owns a “kelp cutter,” a seaweed processing machine that Yarish helped bring to the United States from a Korean manufacturer. The kelp cutter has significantly improved the amount of time it takes to get sea vegetables to market, and is an essential piece of equipment for large-scale productivity.
Currently, many if not most of the kelp farmers in southern New England use the cutter at GreenWave, according to Yarish. Maine Fresh Sea Farm also has one. and Yarish’s goal is to “sprinkle the cutter all over the East Coast as the industry demands it.”
He said the infrastructure is there for a seaweed boom, and like many food trends much of its success lies in the hands of chefs. When chefs begin experimenting with sea vegetable flavors and pushing people’s pallets, mainstream enthusiasm will follow.
For instance, Providence chef Jason Timothy of Laughing Gorilla Catering has been experimenting with kelp from the Point Judith Kelp Co. this summer.
Yarish has had a full career but he’s not done yet. Now that the foundation has been laid and kelp farming is taking hold on the East Coast, he is busy looking 10 or 15 years ito the future and making plans for better protecting the planet’s ocean environments. Yarish’s attention has turned toward figuring out how seaweed and ocean biomass will be a solution to future energy problems.
Editor’s note: The author is a partner in Laughing Gorilla Catering.
Trying to put us back in charge
My old friend Philip K. Howard sent this along. It’s well worth reading, and joining Common Good. http://www.commongood.org/
-- Robert Whitcomb
Common Good has launched a national bipartisan campaign – called “Who’s in Charge Around Here?” – to build support for basic overhaul of the federal government.
The campaign, which has been endorsed by leaders from both political parties, will show how to remake government into simple frameworks that let people to take charge again. Rules should lay out goals and general principles – like the 15-page Constitution – and not suffocate responsibility with thousand-page instruction manuals.
The campaign is co-chaired by former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley (D.-N.J.) and Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard. Among those who have already endorsed the campaign are former Governors Mitch Daniels (R.-Ind.) and Tom Kean (R-N.J.), and former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R.-Wyo.) who co-chaired the Simpson-Bowles Commission on government reform.
Americans are frustrated. They can’t take responsibility. Bureaucracy is everywhere. The president can’t fix decrepit roads and bridges. A teacher can’t deal with a student disrupting everyone else’s learning. Physicians and nurses take care of paperwork instead of patients. A manager can’t give an honest job reference. Parents get in trouble for letting their children explore the neighborhood. Washington does almost everything badly. Take any frustration, and ask: Who’s in charge around here? That’s a problem.
Modern government is a giant hairball of regulations, forms and procedures that prevent anyone from taking charge and acting sensibly. No one designed this legal tangle. It just grew, and grew, and grew, until common sense became illegal. That’s the main reason that government is paralyzed. That’s why it takes a team of lawyers to get a simple permit. Every year, the red tape gets denser.
Our campaign will use video and social media to drive a national conversation to return to Americans the freedom to let ingenuity and innovation thrive in their daily lives. The campaign’s first three-minute video, narrated by Stockard Channing, uses white-board animations to explain how government should work. Titled “Put Humans in Charge,” the video is available here.
Americans know that common sense has taken a backseat to stupidity, but political debate has not drawn a clear link to suffocating legal structures. The campaign features “The Stupid List” showing how obsolete and over-prescriptive bureaucracy undermines infrastructure and the environment, schools, health care, jobs and the economy. The Stupid List is available here.
“Whether you are Democrat or Republican, you are a citizen first,” said Co-Chair Bill Bradley. “A functioning government serves a citizen’s interests. We need sensible reform that encompasses compassion and responsibility. Common Good demonstrates such an outcome is not impossible.”
“Voter frustration with broken government will only grow until Washington reboots to reset priorities and cut needless bureaucracy,” said Co-Chair Philip K. Howard. “It’s time to mobilize for a dramatic overhaul – replacing mindless compliance with common sense. That’s the only way to liberate American initiative and make government responsive to modern needs. America’s global competitiveness depends upon it.”
The campaign’s Website is Take-Charge.org. The campaign is active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For further information, contact Emma McKinstry at emckinstry@highimpactpartnering.com.
Common Good (www.commongood.org) is a nonpartisan reform coalition whose members believe that individual responsibility, not rote bureaucracy, must be the organizing principle of government.
The founder and chairman of Common Good is Philip K. Howard, a lawyer and author of The Rule of Nobody (W. W. Norton) and The Death of Common Sense (Random House), among other books.
It works in politics, too
"Triangulation'' (oil and acrylic on canvas), by Irwin E. Thompson, in the show "Pathways to Abstraction'' at New Art Center, Newton, Mass., Sept. 20-Oct. 22. The gallery says that the "abstract scientific principles that were central to his career as a medical researcher have long fueled his interest in nonrepresentational art.''
Josh Hoxie: GOP platform includes more tax breaks for the rich
Via OtherWords.org
It was easy to get caught up in the circus that was the Republican National Convention. Rousing speeches (plagiarized and original) and raucous floor votes make for great television and funny Internet memes.
Unfortunately, as we’ve come to expect from events organized by Donald Trump, the convention was decidedly light on substance. For an inkling of what a Trump administration might actually do, we have to look elsewhere.
Let’s start with Mike Pence, the newcomer to the ticket and a relative unknown to most voters.
The self-described Tea Partier served six terms in the House of Representatives and one term as governor of Indiana. He’s best known for his staunchly conservative stances on social issues, notably on reproductive health and LGBT rights.
But Pence also stands way outside the mainstream on economic issues, with a clear track record of coddling the wealthy. He’s an ardent supporter of trickle-down economics, the debunked idea that giving more money to the rich will somehow help the rest of us.
As a congressman in 2010, for instance, Pence made the bizarre claim that raising income taxes would decrease federal revenue. Unsurprisingly, Politifact — the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking group — rated that false.
More recently, Pence put his ideas into action in Indiana, enacting a major tax cut that helped give his state one of the most regressive tax structures in the country.
Indeed, on taxes, Pence is largely in line with Trump, who’s shown significant support for massive tax cuts for wealthy people like himself.
During the primary, Trump released a tax plan that would cost a whopping $24 trillion over the next two decades, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center calculates — most of it in cuts for high earners. Now in the general election, reports indicate he may be promoting a more modest package of cuts, but an unmistakably regressive one nonetheless.
Under the soaring subtitle “Restoring the American Dream,” page one of this year’s Republican Party platform dives straight into ideas around tax reform. The tax code, it claims, “has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance.”
“Getting our tax system right,” it goes on, “will be the most important factor in driving the entire economy back to prosperity.” What Trump and Pence consider “getting it right” is massive tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
How do the American people feel about this?
I’m sure many see cutting their tax bill as a great thing — the adult equivalent of an elementary school class president promising to end homework or double the length of recess. But most see past this.
Cutting taxes means major cuts to programs that millions of families depend on. It means slashing budgets or perhaps completely eliminating child nutrition programs, senior prescription health plans, and early-childhood education programs. And the list goes on.
Perhaps that’s why for the third year in a row, an annual Gallup poll shows that most Americans agree with the statement, “Our government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.”
Further, a recent poll from Pew Research showed 78 percent are either “very bothered” or “somewhat bothered” by the “feeling that some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share.”
Trump’s candidacy has been anything but predictable, and there’s a long way to go before Election Day in November. But with Pence on the ticket and the GOP platform in place, it’s clear tax cuts for the wealthy are part of the plan.
Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies.
'With parching power'
"All your renown is like the summer flower that blooms and dies; because the sunny glow which brings it forth,
soon slays with parching power."
-- Alighieri Dante
No they aren't anymore
"Love Outside the Box'' (mixed media), by Betsy Cook, in her show "Stitches in Time,'' at the Monkitree, gallery, in Gardiner, Maine, through Aug. 24.
Chris Powell: Clinton, Trump stand on privilege; Democrats' college-promise boondoggle
Hillary Clinton has been at the top of national politics since becoming something of a co-president with her husband, Bill, in 1993. Leaving the White House in 2001, she became U.S. senator from New York. Narrowly losing the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama in 2008, she became his secretary of state in 2009, resigning in 2013 to run for president again.
For 23 years no one has been more of an insider. Even sympathetic observers acknowledge that Clinton is seeking what they call Obama's third term, just as Vice President George H.W. Bush sought and won Ronald Reagan's third term in 1988.
But the country is unhappy and clamoring for change. So addressing the Democratic National Convention last Tuesday night, Bill Clinton described his wife as "the best darn change maker I have ever met." To drive home the pose for the national television audience, delegates waved machine-printed signs reading "Change maker," signifying that the former president's seemingly folksy, personaland spontaneous reminiscences about his wife, now the party's presidential nominee, were actually precisely calculated.
So the Democrats will aim to try to offer the country continuity and change at the same time.
But then the insurgency offered by the Republican nominee, real estate developer Donald Trump, isn't much more persuasive. In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Trump denounced the political system as rigged, just as some Democratic leaders have done, and then claimed to be the only person who could fix it because he knows it so well -- presumably because he has made a career from it.
That is, both Clinton and Trump come to the election as products of the greatest privilege. The British writer and historian Hilaire Belloc made it rhyme:
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
Broke -- and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women, and Champagne).Chr
* * *
Supporting free tuition at public colleges, the Democratic national platform inadvertently has admitted that for most students a college education is worthless, more of a handicap than a help.
For if a college education was as valuable as supposed, graduates would not be bemoaning their college loan debt. That debt would be comfortably repayable from the higher earnings grads would enjoy.
Instead, of course, many grads are finding that higher-paying jobs are not available to them, partly because the national economy isn't producing enough jobs that require higher education and partly because grads don't qualify, their college education not having conferred useful knowledge and skills.
Indeed, at many colleges political indoctrination has supplanted useful learning. These days a quarter of retail clerks and 15 percent of taxi drivers hold college degrees, and while everyone can benefit from more knowledge, it doesn't always pay for itself.
The country's real education problem is lower education. Half to two-thirds of high school seniors, even in Connecticut, are not mastering high school English or mathematics or both but, in a system of social promotion, they are given diplomas anyway and sent on to college needing remedial work.
But rather than level with the country about social promotion and the collapse of educational standards and thereby prick the college bubble, the Democrats would transfer its huge costs to taxpayers, bailing out not just the disappointed college grads but, more so, another Democratic constituency -- educators, many of whose jobs are no more necessary than those of elevator operators.
Chris Powell is an essayist on political and cultural matters and managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Robert Whitcomb: Coastal conflicts; uniting on infrastructure; urban wildlife
This column of diverse ruminations originated as Robert Whitcomb’s GoLocalProv Digital Diary column, a fresh version of which goes on that site ever Thursday,
New England coastal communities have long hosted heated shoreline-access disputes made more complex by state laws, some going back to colonial times, that favor property owners’ rights to tightly limit the public’s access to the shore.
Some states, most famously California, heavily favor the public when it comes to beach access – but not in New England!
With the explosion of new and immense wealth in a sliver of the population in the past 30 years and the love of being on the summer shore, the tensions have gotten worse. The increasing arrogance and separation from their fellow Americans of many very rich coastal-mansion owners have poured more cyanide in the surf. Some of these people are much tougher than their more modest summer-place predecessors in dealing with the Great Unwashed trying to get close to the water.
Fast-moving sand and (related) rising sea levels linked to global warming will pour on more legal gasoline.
A case in point is a controversy about a beach near Oyster Pond on Martha’s Vineyard involving Boston real-estate mogul and Vineyard summer resident Richard Friedman. The Boston Globe reported, “The section of the beach that Friedman’s deed gave him rights to was a small sliver that, by the mid-20th Century, had moved into Oyster Pond itself.’’
“Friedman and a handful of {friendly} neighbors … believed that they could claim ownership of a bit of the beach’’ on the basis of old deeds and custom.
But some other landowners in the area objected, arguing, reports The Globe, that “Friedman’s property was legally underwater, 200 feet offshore. And the rest of the beach, they said, belonged to them’’ under assorted legal documents.
But Mr. Friedman decided to becomea man of the people. His legal advisers came up with new approach: As The Globe put it: “Oyster Pond, they note, is legally {under state law dating to colonial times} a ‘great pond’ – at least 10 acres – which Massachusetts law considers public property’’ and thus, they argued, the whole beach, part of which, again, had moved into the pond, is open to public use.
So Mr. Friedman got legislation filed on Beacon Hill declaring that barrier beaches that move into great ponds are thereby public property!
Some of the other rich landowners in the neighborhood don’t like this one bit. They assert that Mr. Friedman’s public-access argument would involve taking private land and thus require the state to reimburse the owners.
Anyway, as the sea rises and coastline erosion speeds up, especially of the low, sandy glacial debris that makes up such places as Cape Cod, the Vineyard, Nantucket and southern Rhode Island, then what?
Prepare for a lot of new law to be written in the next couple of decades. As for the Oyster Pond case, the law is so murky that the lawsuits could last as long as Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, in Dickens’s novel Bleak House. With beaches ever faster becoming sandbars and vice versa, oceanside bluffs falling ever more rapidly into the sea and summer people forced to put their (usually too big) houses on stilts, the land-law circus is coming to town. Maybe ahuge hurricane will clarify things.
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In other, perhaps happier, environmental news, zoologists are telling us about how many wild animals normally associated with the countryside are adapting to life in cities.
The East Side of Providence provides examples of this opportunism. Coyotes are thriving, raccoons are into everything, rabbits are proliferating and birds are learning new tricks to find food on rooftops and parking lots. There have even been some deer sightings by the mighty Seekonk River. (A moose wandered through inner Boston suburb Belmont, a few weeks ago; sadly, a car killed it soon thereafter in Weston.}
Why the rabbits (which we saw very few of when we moved to the East Side the first time 26 years ago)? My guess is that they thrive because more dogs are leashed in the area than years ago, there are fewer loose cats and there’s always lots of water being used in backyards and thus lots of green grass and clover and other edible plants. And those automatic irrigation systems (which deposit far too much of their water onto nearby sidewalks and streets) provide lots of reliable drinking water for creatures large and small.
But sadly, because of too much insecticide use, you don’t see many fireflies in our neighborhood.
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One thing that hasn’t changed is the crickets, which started their chirping last week in a melancholy reminder that we’re heading into late summer. The hot dry weather may have started the chirping a bit earlier than normal this year. Retailers ravaged by the Internet seem to have started their back-to-schools ads earlier than usual, too.
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I fear that this will be one of the most vicious and unpleasant presidential campaigns in history. Still, there’s one area inwhich Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should be able to come together: Fixing America’s infrastructure.
They, and virtually all Americans, agree that our transportation system – roads, bridges, rail lines, airports, etc. recalls the Third World. That also goes for much of the rest of our infrastructure, too – e.g., public school buildings and libraries. That’s in large part because of the anti-tax mania (maintained by lobbyists for the very rich) that has produced such inanities as no rise in the federal gasoline tax since 1993. In Rhode Island, with the truckers, and elsewhere we have seen how hard special transportation interests fight to avoid paying for the damage that they do to roads and bridges.
A massive federal infrastructure-repair and expansion campaign would train and employpeople, make business more globally competitive and, all in all, the country stronger. It shouldn’t be a Democrat-vs.-Republican thing.
Part of the answer, of course, is mass transit, which has helped make such cities as Boston and New York rich. It still gets far too little money and marketing, although more of it would save a lot of wear and tear on our roads and bridges, improve the environment, discourage sprawl, strengthen downtowns, and ease the lives of the elderly and the millions of people (many of them working young people) who can’t afford cars.
But it takes patience to make it work. Many complain, for example, that the newish Wickford, R.I., MBTA station is an under-used boondoggle. But they ignore that the Providence train station’s MBTA business took a while to get cooking but is now thriving.
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Maybe the big public-works project could provide jobs for some of those despairing, druggy, tattooed and chain-smoking people who hang around places like gritty/beautiful downtown Pawtucket with nothing to do but await assistance from social-welfare agencies there. You get a vivid look at America’s social dysfunction and decline driving through old mill towns like Pawtucket on a summer weekend.
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There’sa weird glamour about New England diners, which show up in movies from time to time. The latest: Scenes for a Jack Black movie, TheMan Who Would Be Polka King, will be shot at the Modern Diner, in Pawtucket. As of this writing it’s scheduled for Aug. 12. The intimacy and chattiness you find in dinersmake them great places for close-conversation shots, and that they were inspired by late 19th Century lunch wagons and railroad dining cars evokes a kind of (pre-natal?) nostalgia.
The Modern is one of two surviving Sterling Streamliner diners still open, with the other in Salem, Mass.
The Pawtucket diner has a heroic side: In the early ‘90s, Walt Disney Co. sold thousands of shirts featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse standing before the Modern Diner and its iconic neon sign. In doing so, the behemoth Disney broke copyright laws. The Modern’s owners, represented by Providence lawyer Michael Feldhuhn, who died recently, sued Disney and won.
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The oafish Fox News’s Roger Ailes’s well-paid exit from GOP house organ Fox News is a reminder that sexual harassment is still going strong in some companies. Now that he’s gone will Fox’s on-air bombshells dim their blinding lipstick?
Another example of women being taken advantage of comes in a new book, The Lady With the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire, by Laura Claridge.
The heroic Blanche Knopf was a brilliant publishing executive and literary lion finder and cultivator who, more than her husband, Alfred, was responsible for the success ofAlfred A. Knopf Inc., which in its 20th Century heyday was probably America’s most prestigious publisher, including of Nobel laureates. But her often cruel husband took most of the credit. This book provides a global panorama of book culture over the last century and ends up being very moving.
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You might be interested in a nonprofit public-affairs organization called the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com), which hosts speakers at monthly dinners September to June. Our 2015-2016 season speakers included:
Evan Matthews, director of the Port of Davisville, on international shipping changes, particularly in the context of the expansion of the Panama Canal.
Greg Lindsay, writer, futurist and expert on cities around the world and their relationship to airports.
Hedrick Smith, PBS documentary maker, former star foreign correspondent.
David Alward, Canadian general consul.
Allan Cytryn, international cybersecurity expert.
Andrew Michta, U.S, Naval War College expert on Russia and NATO.
Rima Salah, High U.N. humanitarian-relief official.
Eduardo Mestre, Cuban-American civic leader and international banker.
Our new season will open Sept. 14.
Mark Blyth, the first speaker of the new season and whom some of you have heard on NPR commenting on Brexit, will speak on Wednesday, Sept. 14, on Europe after Brexit.
Mark Blyth is Eastman Professor of Political Economy andProfessor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown.
He is an internationally celebrated political economist whose research focuses upon how uncertainty and randomness affect complex systems, particularly economic systems, and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary. He is the author of several books, including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press 2013, and The Future of the Euro (with Matthias Matthijs) (Oxford University Press 2015).
Coming fast after that will be:
Prof. Morris Rossabi, probably the world’s greatest expert on Central Asia and particularly Mongolia: a democracystuck between the police states of Russia and China, Sept. 21. How does this faraway country do it? He’ll be speaking to us soon after returning from Mongolia and other points in Asia.
Then:
FormerU.S. Ambassador to Slovakia Tod Sedgwick, on the situation in Central Europe, Oct. 5.
Meanwhile, the World Affairs Council and the PCFR are preparing a forum for Oct. 20 at the Hope Club on the foreign-policy visions of the U.S. presidential candidates. Stay tuned
Naval War College Prof. James Holmes on the geopolitics of global warming, Nov. 15.
German General Consul Ralf Horlemann on the role of Germany in an E.U. without the U.Kand with an aggressive Russia pressing in from the east, Dec. 14.
Internationalepidemiologist Rand Stoneburner, M.D., on Zika and other burgeoning threats to world health, Jan. 18.
Indian Admiral Nirmal Verma, on military and geopolitical issues in South and Southeast Asia, Feb. 15.
Dr. Stephen Coen, director of the Mystic Aquarium, on the condition of the oceans, March 8.
Brazilian political economistand commentator Evodio Kaltenecker on April 5 to talk about the crises facing that huge nation.
The rest of the season’s schedule is being worked on now. And we’re trying to keep some flexibility to respond to events.
In any event, we are working with, among others, Laura Freid, to talk about the Silk Road Project, of which she is CEO; Michael Soussan to talk about the U.N., diplomacy, Iraq and his book Backstabbing for Beginners, now being made into a major movie; an expert on the ocean-fishing industry, and an international travel expert.
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Digital Diary talks with Bruce Newbury on WADK (15:40 A.M.) most Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. and sometimes more frequently, depending on the news. You can also hear the show at any hour via wadk.com.
Robert Whitcomb is the overseer of New England Diary.
New Hampshire blue
"Canoers'' (oil on canvas), by Kim Case, at the Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery, Center Sandwich, N.H.
'Catching in open screens'
"A break in the heat
away from the front
no thunder, no lightning,
just rain, warm rain
falling near dusk
falling on eager ground
steaming blacktop
hungry plants
thirsty
turning toward the clouds
cooling, soothing rain
splashing in sudden puddles
catching in open screens
that certain smell
of summer rain."
-- Raymond A. Foss, ''Summer Rain''
If only they would
“To my knowledge, nobody has fallen into the lagoon yet,” said Susan Abell, director of communications at the Friends of the {Boston} Public Garden.
— regarding Pokémon players wandering around America like zombies from The Night of the Living Dead, as reported in the current issue of The Boston Guardian.
Body heat and global warming
"Burn Baby Burn'' (oil on canvas), by Mia Cross, in the show "Heat,'' at the Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Aug. 3 through Aug. 28. This juried show features 17 New England artists who explore the theme in relation to climate, sex and politics.
David Warsh: Trump, Rodrik and the clash of global integration, national sovereignty and democracy
David Brooks, of The New York Times, wrote the single best piece I read last week on the Republican convention: “Death of the Party.” Like him, I was riveted by Donald Trump’s acceptance speech. The scene seemed straight out of one of those dystopian Batman movies of the 1980s, ’90s, and ’00s, an outlandish character, sailing under false colors, bullying and threatening, preying on fears, selling Gotham a bill of goods, preparing chaos.
By the time the nominee bellowed, “I am your voice” to the hall of delegates, he seemed simply the latest in a long line of improbable adversaries: the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Ra’s al Ghul, the Scarecrow, Bane, Mr. Trump.
But then Batman movies depend on the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight, to answer the Bat signal, expose the fraud, counter the villains’ plans, and save the city.
Batman in this case is Dani Rodrik, 58, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is likely to be the next economist to enter the pantheon of those who went to school in the ’70s whom much of the public knows today” Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke.
His father, a Turkish manufacturer of ballpoint pens, was happy to finance his son’s education in the United States: Harvard College, ’79, before graduate school at Princeton University, where his adviser was Avinash Dixit. Rodrik’s first job was at the Kennedy School, in 1985. He taught for four years at Columbia University, 1992-96, then returned to the Kennedy School.
In 2013 Rodrik ascended to one of the pinnacles of the profession, replacing Nobel laureate Eric Maskin as the economist on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J .He returned to the worldly bustle of the Kennedy School after only two years. Something of an explanation of the journey is to be found in Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (Norton, 2015). Maskin, too, returned to Harvard and teaching after a few years; the Institute has no graduate students, only fellows.
In 1997, Rodrik published a monograph that boldly asked, “Has Globalization Gone Too Far?’’ (Institute for International Economics). He argued that trade was creating deep divisions between those who possessed the skills to thrive in global markets and those who lacked them. Redistribution to the losers of the gains from trade were almost wholly lacking, and globalization seemed to have permanently altered the norms surrounding domestic production in nations all around the world. There was bound to be a backlash.
In “Rebel with a Cause,” in the International Monetary Fund’s Finance and Development magazine, he told economist Prakesh Loungani that Harvard Prof. Andrei Shleifer, then advising the Russian government on privatization, would josh him whenever they met, “How is the revolution going?”
It was Shleifer who, as, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, published Rodrik’s 2000 article “How Far Will International Economic Integration Go?” in which he broached what has since come to be known as “the globalization trilemma.”
Democracy, national sovereignty, and global integration were mutually irreconcilable, Rodrik argued, because of the political strains that inevitably would emerge. Nations could have any two of the three possibilities, but could never have all three at once at least not in strong forms.
In 2000, Rodrik predicted that the nation-state eventually would disappear; that global federalism would take its place. By the time The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy appeared (Norton, 2013), he was no longer quite as sure.
By then, though, Rodrik had ceased to be a gadfly critic, and was well on the way to becoming the foremost policy authority on the political economy of global trade. Just ahead lay Brexit and the insurgent candidacy of Donald Trump. As Loungani writes in “Rebel,” the revolution was over and Rodrik had won.
Here, too, as in the movies, there is a foil, not a Robin-like sidekick, but a philosopher, Harvard Law Prof. Roberto Mangabiera Unger, a native Brazilian whose influence extends around the world to politicians on the Left. Rodrik and Unger taught a Harvard course on trade together for many years.
Unger habitually argued that economics had lost the capacity for grand narrative; Rodrik countered that small-scale theorizing about cause and effect was good enough, at least for now. The prolific Unger produced a book, Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics (Princeton, 2007), a demanding survey of the intellectual underpinnings of contemporary views on trade. The Globalization Paradox and Economics Rules followed in due course. For an introduction to the peripatetic Unger, read about the luncheon that ensued when John Paul Rathbone, of the Financial Times, came calling.
You have to go back to a sunnier time, the ’60s, and a memorable network television series, to find a more congenial Batman to serve as a stand-in for Rodrik as a crime-fighter. That series thrived, the Wikipedia entry says, by presenting relatively simplistic moral lessons aimed mainly at the young, including championing the importance of using seat belts, doing homework, eating vegetables and drinking milk, wrapped up in the story of one caper after another in which some villain tries to take over Gotham City. Today, it’s probably remembered best by those who saw it for its campy tone, especially Robin’s non-stop exclamations of astonishment at each new twist of the plot.
Rodrik isn’t exactly fighting with Trump, the way that Batman fights with those villains. He is, by his own account, recasting the globalization narrative, replacing the familiar triumphalist version with a more nuanced account, including the ill-effects of integration that gave rise to the Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns, and those of H. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan before them. (Meanwhile, Rodrik is interpreting events in Turkey as well.)
The Trump campaign supports no intellectual edifice whatsoever. For all its flaws, it is up to the Clinton campaign to begin translating into political terms the deeper understanding globalization – its costs as well as its benefits – that Rodrik, Unger, and many others have been working out.
Holy Hoodwink, Batman! Let’s get to work!
David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran, and a longtime economic historian and financial columnist.