Vox clamantis in deserto
Bankruptcy filing would be a basis for Providence resurgence
From Robert Whitcomb's Dec. 15 "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com.
Ken Block, the systems analyst and formerRhode Island gubernatorial candidate, and Alan Hassenfeld, former CEO of Hasbro, are right to urge that Providence promptly be put into bankruptcy protection. (I have said for years that the city should do this.)
The city’s vast $1.9 billion liability for unfunded pensions and capacious retiree health benefits, and largely intransigent municipal unions, make it impossible for the city to dig itself out of its hole unless it goes into bankruptcy, with a highly experienced, decisive and tough receiver appointed by a federal judge to make drastic and long-overdue changes.
The aforementioned liabilities can be blamed largely on past mayors’ (especially the late, outstandingly corrupt thug Vincent Cianci) sweetheart deals with labor unions in return for their political support, and wishful thinking about, for instance, the rates of return possible for the city’s investments.
Paying for this immense debt eats up money that otherwise could go into better city services and lower taxes. Better services and lower taxes would, of course, make Providence much more attractive to taxpaying businesses and individuals that might consider moving to it. The city’ssuperb location, distinguished educational and other institutions (albeit too many of themofficially “nonprofit’’ and thus sharing little of the tax burden) and many cultural charms would have drawn many businesses, large and small, over the past few decades if its fiscal condition had been healthy.
Providence is already effectively bankrupt. It’s past time to accept that and enter a fast and efficient bankruptcy process. Detroit has recently done just that and is now enjoying a revival. So has Central Falls. And Providence has much more going for it in the long run than Detroit, especially in location and institutions. It’s embarrassing for politicians and residents in general to admit that their city is bankrupt, but energizing to know that bankruptcy can help shovel out the manure left by years of irresponsible governance.
Disinfecting Providence’s finances would, of course, be a big boost to all of Rhode Island, which is in many ways a city-state, and indeed to all of southeastern New England, of which Providence is the center.
Merry Christmas from the King of Commerce
Norman Rockwell (1894–1978)
"Santa and Expense Book'' (oil on canvas), by Norman Rockwell, for the Saturday Evening Post cover of Dec. 4, 1920. This is in the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, R.I. Image courtesy of American Illustrators Gallery, NYC.
Frank Robinson: Ending the year with 'a bodyguard of ghosts' all around us
Photo by THOMAS HOOK (Connecticut-based nature photographer and essayist). He writes:
"We had our first proper snowfall last weekend. The next day on the white snow was a single, battered oak leaf.
"This reminded me of what anthropologist Loren Eiseley wrote of the world of primitive men who might see 'portents in the fall of a leaf.' This solitary leaf on the freshly fallen snow stamps autumn as dead and winter as ruling.''
December poem, by Frank Robinson
The letters in our new mail box
somehow seem
more important now.
xxx
This crossword puzzle is a bear.
Fifty years on,
and I’m still working on the first clue.
xxx
Begin every day with a poem
and get it over with
(with thanks to W.C. Fields).
xxx
This old skin I sleep in every night –
like a suit I should have sold
years ago.
xxx
Women have no illusions,
they know the cost of everything,
including love.
xxx
It will happen very slowly,
one second every million years.
Even so, I’m glad
I won’t be around
when it happens.
xxx
Am I proud or sad,
to pass my father’s “Sell by’’ date
by ten years?
xxx
For this, I gave up
family and friends,
for a hearty handshake at the end?
xxx
When you have a job,
You succeed or fail every day.
When you don’t,
you neither succeed nor fail.
xxx
I have no time, I have no time,
I’m too busy doing nothing.
xxx
In this place, no one is alone;
everyone comes with a bodyguard of ghosts.
xxx
Growing old, dying, lousy weather –
Oh, Margaret, you deserve better.
xxx
Is she so beautiful
because she’s so young,
or because I’m so old?
xxx
A hard choice:
recognition now,
or immortality when I’m dead?
xxx
On the beach –
I’m smarter than the waves,
smarter than the sand,
a genius compared to the sky,
so I’ll enjoy it all while I can.
xxx:::
At least it celebrates spring,
the nest they built
in our Christmas wreath.
-- Frank Robinson
Mr. Robinson is a poet, former director of the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, former director of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and an art historian.
Llewellyn King: Gifts to us from 'The Overcomers'
Certain gifts are given to us year in and year out. They are the gifts that keep on giving and they come, to my mind, from people I call “The Overcomers’’
This Christmas week A. A. Gill, one of Britain's most extraordinary newspaper columnists, died at 62.
Gill was nominally a food critic. He used that position as a launch pad for some of the most entertaining and acerbic writing anywhere.
His column in the Britain's The Sunday Times was a weekly joy. But Gill didn’t get there easily. First, he nearly died from alcoholism at 30.
He wrote a book about it.
Gill straightened out his drinking, but he never straightened out his awful spelling and severe dyslexia. He overcame them largely by phoning in his columns.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the greatest literary talents to come out of South America, struggled with terrible spelling, which he detailed in his extraordinary autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale. But it didn’t stop him from authoring masterpieces like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
Willard Scott, who had a successful career in radio in the Washington, D.C., market before making it as a personality and weatherman on NBC's Today show, suffered acute stage fright. He testified before Congress so that his experience would help others.
But in my random selection of overcomers, the biggest is Laura Hillenbrand, the author of two nonfiction bestsellers, Sea Biscuit: An American Legend and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption. Both were massive works of research and narrative writing.
The back story, though, is one of suffering, terrible unrelenting suffering. Hillenbrand is afflicted with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
This is a disease that knows no mercy; a life-sentence disease without a cure and no proven therapy. It punishes sufferers for any effort, even mild exercise, condemning them to bed, often for days. The symptoms are extreme fatigue, migraine headache, aching joints, hyper-sensitivity to light and sound, and dysphasia. Some patents are bed-ridden for years.
Hillenbrand missed her own wedding because she was unable to walk downstairs or to look down. Yet, this overcomer researched and wrote two extraordinary books. Just as important, in a seminal July 7, 2003 essay in The New Yorker, she told her own story, comforting fellow sufferers and prompting the medical world to take ME more seriously.
My favorite overcomer was a waiter at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., known simply as Mr. Blue. He was a man of such innate dignity that everyone called him “Mister,” and no one seemed to know his first name.
Blue had had a hard life as an African-American with no education. In fact, he was illiterate and I was one of the few to find out.
At the club in the 1970s, when I knew Blue, the waiters carried loose, paper checks on which members wrote their orders and club numbers. Blue survived by feats of memory, remembering who had written out which check by keeping them in order. One day, his system failed: He dropped his checks. Mr. Blue was distraught to tears.
Shame is a powerful censor and, like most censorship, it neither helps the sufferer, nor does it do anything for the body politic. No one wants to be famous for their inadequacies or their sickness. But going public comforts and is a gift. It is the gift, so important in the holidays, of saying: You are not alone.
In that spirit, I have to go public with this: I am, for a broadcaster, a bad sight-reader. I have mild dyslexia, and I've been humiliated by my terrible spelling all of my long life in journalism. Happy holidays!
Llewellyn King, based in New England and Washington, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a veteran publisher, columnist and international business consultant. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com. This piece first ran on Inside Sources.
In some ways Worcester is wonderful
Inside the Worcester Art Museum, the second-largest art museum in New England. It was founded in 1898, in Worcester's industrial heyday.
Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb’s Dec. 15 “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.
Worcester, which I have always seen as “New England’s Pittsburgh’’ because of its metal-related companies, is enjoying a revival, including in manufacturing, which first made it rich. Indeed, in a recent three-year period, the Worcester area’s manufacturing sector grew 15 percent as measured by revenue.
The city also has numerous higher-education institutions that are contributing to its renaissance, but probably the University of Massachusetts Medical Center has been the most important, helping to turn the city into a major biomedical center. Further, there are big redevelopment projects underway downtown. Some of the revival is simply the westward expansion of the booming Greater Boston economy but some of it is due to healthy homegrown boosterism.
And there are such distinguished cultural centers as the Worcester Art Museum and some gorgeous suburbs, such as Princeton and Harvard, Mass.
Worcester has plenty of problems, of course, but its recent success is edifying for other mid-size cities, in New England and beyond. If only its winters were tad milder. Some of the city is around 1,000 feet above sea level, which makes for considerably more snow and ice than in, say, Boston, Hartford and Providence.
By the way, Worcester is somewhat misleadingly called “the second-biggest city in New England,’’ with a population of about 181,000, compared to Providence’s about 180,000, but the latter’s metro area has many more people than Worcester’s – about 1.3 million compared to Worcester’s about 800,000. Worcester proper has far more square miles, at 38.6, than Providence’s 20.6.
Like Boston and some other Colonial-era towns, Providence’s area is small because other towns in its area were quickly incorporated well before Providence could absorb their acreage as its population and economy boomed in the 19th Century. Consider that while the population of Boston itself is about 667,000, its metro area has about 4.7 million people (or "souls,'' as people used to say).
Out west, on the other hand, cities, such as Phoenix, could easily gobble up vast stretches of unincorporated and under-populated land – much of it effectively wasteland.
Chuck Collins: The rest of us pay for rich, show-off philanthropists' gifts
Via OtherWords.org
It’s the season of giving.
When you hear about a billionaire “giving back” — like Nike founder Phil Knight’s $400 million gift to Stanford, or hedge funder John Paulsen’s $400 million donation to Harvard — do you feel a warm glow?
They could’ve kept their money and bought another house or private jet, you might think. But what if you heard that the tax write-offs billionaires claim for gifts like these force the rest of us to shell out more?
Suddenly that glow doesn’t feel so warm.
Compare that generosity to what you’ve probably seen in your own community. In every small town in America — at the local convenience store or diner — there’s “the jar,” a special collection for someone who needs an operation or has faced one of life’s misfortunes.
Everyone who can chips in. No one writes it off their taxes.
Keeping score that way would be as unseemly as asking for a tax break for coaching a neighborhood youth sports team, volunteering at a shelter, or making a casserole for someone coming home from the hospital.
Unfortunately, this is the wave of the future. More and more, our country’s charitable giving is dominated and controlled by billionaire mega-donors, their foundations, and donor-advised funds, according to a report I coauthored for the Institute for Policy Studies.
Between 2003 and 2013, itemized contributions from people making $10 million or more increased by 104 percent. The number of private grant-making foundations, mostly established by wealthy individuals and their families, has doubled since 1993. Today there are over 80,000.
Meanwhile, charitable giving by low and middle-income donors has steadily declined, reflecting stagnant wages, declining homeownership, and growing economic insecurity by low- and middle-income families. From 2003 to 2013, itemized charitable deductions by donors making less than $100,000 declined by over a third.
This top-heavy philanthropy poses a danger to charities, too. It makes their funding less predictable and pressures them to focus on wooing a finite, relatively small number of mega-donors, rather than on doing the important work many of them do.
But the largest peril is for our democracy. Unchecked, private foundations can become blocks of concentrated, unaccountable power with considerable clout in shaping our laws and culture. They can become extensions of the power, privilege and influence of a handful of rich families.
In this season of giving, we’ll hear plenty about billionaires “giving back” through donations to education, the arts, health, and medicine. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that you and I are subsidizing the charitable choices of the wealthy.
Maybe we’d all be better off if these billionaires just paid their fair share of taxes.
Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a co-editor of Inequality.org. He’s the author of the recent book Born on Third Base.
Summary justice
"Decision by Committee'' (still life with nine toys, oil on panel), by Gerry Perrino in ArtProv Gallery's (in Providence) show, "Henry's Kids,'' Feb. 8-March 18.
"Henry's Kids'' is a show of current work by former students of Enrico “Henry” Pinardi, who taught at Rhode Island College from 1976-1995 and affected the work and personal lives of the more than 30 participating artists in the show.
NIMBY war underway against straightening Northeast Corridor train route to improve service
The proposed path of the new Northeast Corridor railroad route through the Rhode Island towns of Westerly and Charlestown has some officials and residents worried. (NEC Future environmental impact statement). Yes, much of this is impossible to read, but you get a sense of the route.
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
By FRANK CARINI
The Federal Railroad Administration, about a week before Christmas, released its final environmental impact statement regarding the straightening of Northeast Corridor tracks, from Washington, D.C., to Boston, during the next few decades.
Impacted communities, including Charlestown, South Kingstown and Westerly, R.I., and Old Lyme, Conn., have 30 days to respond. The comment period is open until Jan. 31. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has estimated the cost of its proposal at nearly $130 billion, plus an additional $2 billion annually to operate. Northeast Corridor (NEC) states will be expected to pay part of the cost, and the project can’t happen without approval from the corridor’s eight states.
The proposed new railroad path would cut off an estimated 45 minutes of travel time between New York City and Boston, according to the FRA’s NEC Future initiative, by straightening out curves that currently exist in the tracks.
Both public and private property could be impacted, including some sensitive areas.
The proposal calls for rerouting the tracks through Grills Preserve in Westerly, and through Charlestown's Frances C. Carter Memorial Preserve and Amos Green Farm. The new tracks would rejoin the old rail bed in the Great Swamp Management Area in South Kingstown, where a third rail would be added to increase railroad width by 50 percent, according to NEC Future.
Some wetlands would reportedly be filled in Burlingame and the Great Swamp Management areas, and in Indian Cedar Swamp. The project also calls for the possibility of blasting and trenching.
The massive rail project proposal has both activists and lawmakers concerned about potential environmental impacts and cost.
Gregory Stroud, executive director of SECoast, recently told The Connecticut Mirror he’s no fan of the plan.
“A $100 billion dollar infrastructure project shouldn’t be planned in secret and announced by surprise, on a Friday (Dec. 16), just nine days before the Christmas holiday,” he told the newspaper. “This sets a terrible precedent, not just for NEC Future, but for all of the infrastructure projects planned for towns across Connecticut over the next two decades. This isn’t how you announce a good plan, or a plan with real public support.”
At a Dec. 16 press conference in Hartford, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said “this concept and plan, just to reassure people in Connecticut, is simply not happening,” according to the same Mirror story.
Other environmentalists and officials in both Connecticut and Rhode Island have noted their concerns. In a Dec. 19 e-mail to ecoRI News, a Rhode Island planning board official, who wished not be identified, wrote, “The proposed rail line appears to cut through state and private properties including the middle the Francis Carter Preserve ... this would make it dangerous for wildlife and people to use and negate its value. Wildlife and important flora will be affected.”
In a Dec. 21 e-mail to ecoRI News, Kristen Castrataro wrote that the proposed track changes would impact the entire state. The Richmond resident noted that FRA's environmental impact statement indicated that 11 Rhode Island cultural resources and historic properties would be impacted.
Castrataroalso noted two other concerns: the proposal would impact an additional 200 acres of prime Ocean State farmland; and, of the eight states and the District of Columbia named in the plan, Rhode Island would have the highest acreage of parkland — more than 50 acres — "converted to a transportation use."
NEC Future is a comprehensive planning effort to define, evaluate and prioritize future investments in the Northeast Corridor. The FRA launched the initiative in February 2012, to consider the role of rail passenger service in the context of current and future transportation demands.
Amtrak’s Stephen Gardner, who is in charge of business operations on the corridor, told The Associated Press that the plan affirms the railroad’s “long-held view that rebuilding and expanding the Northeast Corridor is essential for the growth and prosperity of the entire region.”
The 457-mile NEC — anchored by D.C.’s Union Station in the south, New York’s Pennsylvania Station in the center and Boston's South Station in the north — is one of the most heavily traveled rail corridors in the world, according to the FRA. The NEC is shared by intercity, commuter and freight operations, and moves more than 365 million passengers and 14 million car-miles of freight annually.
While improvements continue to be made, the FRA says NEC faces serious challenges, with century-old infrastructure, outdated technology and inadequate capacity to meet current or projected travel demand.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., is a proponent of the plan and was against Providence not being included in the project.
“One of the key points we’ve made emphatically is that Providence station has to be a key part of the Northeast Corridor and that’s been accepted by the secretary of transportation and everyone else,” Reed told WPRI Eyewitness News earlier this month. “It has to be an integral part because it’s important not only to Rhode Island but to the whole region.”
Reed is the top Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee that allocates Amtrak funding.
Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.
Trump's American Nazi followers are gleeful and hard at work
Here's an example of the work of some avid American Nazi supporters of Donald Trump. In this case they are denouncing Bill Kristol, who has stepped down as the editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard.
''Bill Kristol the evil Zionist Jew warmonger has called us Alt-Right Nazis 'scaredy cats.'
"What a disgusting faggot this vermin is.''
To read more from the Nazis’ publication The Daily Stormer, please hit this link.
Safer sushi from the Gulf of Maine
People who are environmental-science “skeptics,’’ such as our next president, and/or who basically want industry to do whatever it wants to maximize profits, might look at the Gulf of Maine, where anti-pollution regulations imposed on coal-fired power plants in the Midwest cut mercury levels in Gulf of Maine by 2 percent a year in the 2004-2012 period, Maine Public Radio reported. Bad for utility execs and shareholders, good for public health and fishermen. Enjoy your sushi.
-- Robert Whitcomb
David Warsh: Andrew Marshall and U.S. defense strategy; Gates for president?
Avoided since 1945. Are we on borrowed time?
Somerville, Mass.
The U.S. last elected a person without formal political experience to the presidency in the 1950s, in a landslide election. By common consent, Dwight David Eisenhower worked out extremely well. Sixty-four years later the nation has elected another outsider, a real estate developer turned television celebrity, this time by the narrowest of margins. Donald Trump is giving plentiful signs of becoming a disaster.
It’s best, I’ve argued, to view Trump’s victory as largely accidental, to seek to limit the damage during his administration, and think ahead. To what? Polarization will be even worse by 2020. We’ll badly need to elect a president who can be trusted. It’s not too soon to for the rudderless Dems to begin thinking about the possibility of drafting a soldier-statesman of their own +– Robert Gates (b. 1943), who served as secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is the one who comes to mind. At 77, Gates could conduct a front-porch campaign.
The question of the extent and effect of Russian hacking has taken on a new prominence. There seems little doubt that some, perhaps difference-making interference took place. The New York Times went a long way last week toward showing that the CIA is not making this stuff up, though there remain some knowledgeable skeptics. It’s a stretch to suggest that the existence of a Russian campaign somehow delegitimizes Trump’s victory. But the way the president-elect has rejected intelligence assessments out of hand poses a whole new range of problems.
In the circumstances, it is worth thinking back to the somewhat complicated story of what happened last time an incoming president doubted the competence of the U.S. intelligence community and sought to overhaul it. That was 1969, when Richard Nixon took office.
The world was scary then, too. More than half a million U.S. troops were in Vietnam; the American war there was entering its fifth year. The Soviet Union and China were threatening to go to war with each other along the Amur River, and each had enmity to spare for the United States as well. True, the U.S. was landing the first man on the moon, but the Soviets were testing their first multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, missile warheads that might confer a first-strike capability, a possibility much-feared in the Pentagon. West German Chancellor Willie Brandt had begun his new Ostpolitik, seeking better relations with the Soviets. Tensions simmered between Israel and Egypt in the wake of the Six-Day War, in 1967.
Nixon knew a thing or two about foreign relations from eight years as Eisenhower’s vice president. He was dissatisfied with the CIA’s intelligence reports, seeing them as lackluster and smug; indeed, he began skipping their morning briefing reports in favor of those prepared by the National Security Council staff of the White House Situation Room. Instead of quarreling openly with CIA Director Richard Helms, Nixon instructed former Harvard Prof. Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, to plan a massive overhaul of the intelligence community.
Kissinger turned to Andrew Marshall, an expert on long-range economic competition with the Soviet Union, who had replaced James Schlesinger as director of strategic studies at RAND Corp. when Schlesinger left to become deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in the new administration. .
Marshall, born in Detroit in 1921, attended the city’s premier vocational high school during the Great Depression. For the first three years of World War II, he worked as a machinist in a B-17 factory; a heart murmur kept him out of the Army. Having been broadly educated by his father, an English immigrant stonemason, Marshall tested straight into graduate studies in economics at the University of Chicago in late 1944.
He soon found himself involved in one of the great intellectual hothouses of 20th Century social science, the Cowles Commission, working with Jacob Marschak and Tjalling Koopmans, hanging out with Herbert Simon and Kenneth Arrow. All but Marschak (who died in 1977) eventually became Nobel laureates. Among Marshall’s professors were Milton Friedman, Allen Wallis, and, especially influential, Frank Knight.
(Knight has been enjoying something of a renaissance in recent years, largely because of his 1920 thesis book, Risk Uncertainty and Profit, with its distinction between calculable risks and the more deeply uncertain ones that are life’s “unknown unknowns.” A deeply skeptical Midwesterner, Knight struggled mightily to escape the Christianity of his youth. By the time that Marshall met him, he was becoming irascible; in 1954, Friedman ran him off into retirement. He continued to exert influence, though, especially at the University of Virginia Department of Economics. A particularly good account of various issues raised by Knight can be found in Escape from Democracy: The Role of Experts & the Public in Economic Policy, Cambridge, 2016, by David Levy, of George Mason University, and Sandra Peart, of the University of Richmond.
Marshall moved on to the Washington office of RAND Corp, a cutting edge social- science think-tank set up by the U.S. Air Force in Santa Monica, Calif., in the years after World War II. Soon he was splitting his time between Washington and the more free-wheeling West Coast environment, where he paired up with like-minded physicist Herman Kahn, worked with economists Burton Klein, Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, and gradually migrated towards other social sciences.
As early as 1952 Marshall was arguing that Western responses to Soviet power should designed, not just for self-protection, but to affect the behavior of the enemy. By the mid-1960s, he had embarked on studies of organizational behavior in the Soviet Union. Then Kissinger called and asked him to come by for a visit.
In December 1969, Marshall set up in the Executive Office Building next to the White House to analyze flows of information to the president. His next task was to referee an argument between the CIA and the Air Force over the significance of the new Soviet SS-9 rocket (those multiple warheads). By March 1972 he had become director of a newly created Net Assessment Group within the NSC.
Then in June 1972, the behind-the-scenes struggle among the Nixon White House, the CIA and the FBI catalyzed the Watergate burglary and subsequent scandal, whose complex dynamics have been unraveled and brought up to date by independent journalist Max Holland in Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (Kansas, 2012).
The White House forced CIA Director Helms to retire in December 1972, after he refused to impede the FBI’s investigation of Watergate. Marshall’s friend Schlesinger was assigned to replace him, then six months later was named secretary of defense, replacing Elliott Richardson, who had become attorney general. (Former Saigon Station Chief William Colby took over the CIA.)
Schlesinger asked Marshall to move to the Pentagon, creating the Office of Net Assessment for him – a small group, far from the spotlight, modestly funded, a “skunkworks” charged with keeping abreast of the growth of knowledge, reporting directly to the secretary of defense. In the bourgeoning Watergate scandal, Marshall enjoyed an extra layer of invisibility.
In his initial memo, August 20, 1973, Marshall told Schlesinger, “We are the end of an era,” and that the United States needed to play “a more sophisticated game.” Previously the competition with the Russians had been that of a rich man and a poor man, but now the Soviets had achieved military equality.
In general we need to look for opportunities as well as problems; search for areas of comparative advantage and try to move the competition into these areas; [and] look for ways to complicate the Soviets’ problems.
So much for détente; within a year Nixon was gone. All this is described in Casting Net Assessment: Andrew W. Marshall and the Epistemic Community of the Cold War, by Lt. Col. John M. Schutte, published by the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies of Air University, is available for free. It is, of course, a somewhat triumphalist account. There, is much corroborating evidence, however, including Jonathan Haslam’s excellent Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (Yale, 2011).
Over the next 15 years the U.S. ratcheted up the pressure on the Soviet Union, largely along lines suggested or supported by Marshall. The Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) pursued an exotic new generation of space-based ballistic missile defenses. The B-1 bomber forced the Soviets to invest in conventional defenses along their nine-time-zone border, adding to the military burden on the USSR’s economy. Extensive new war-gaming techniques demonstrated the value of strategic arms-limitation talks. The ONA battled with CIA and Congress, but always behind the scenes. And in the end, Net Assessment won out.
After 1991, Marshall moved on to promoting a new view of the middle-range future – one in which U.S. relation with China and Japan would become a major aspect of U.S. strategy, and technological advances would be so great as to bring about what he called a “military revolution” — global positioning satellites, drones, operational innovations (think SEAL Team Six), and organizational adaptation (think Tampa’s Central Command).
The second part of the story is laid out in detail in The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern Defense Strategy, (Basic, 2015), by Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts. In a foreword, former CIA director Gates writes
“[I]n the early 1970s, the CIA estimated the burden Soviet defense spending placed on the USSR’s economy to be 6 or 7 percent. Marshall’s independent assessment of the Soviet defense burden led the CIA to double its estimate. It convinced a number of key senior leaders that it would be difficult for the Soviets to sustain this level of effort over the long term. Put another way, it suggested that time was on our side. A decade later, Marshall was proved right.’’
It was hardly noticed when Marshall retired after 41 years of service to 12 defense secretaries under eight administrations. With Mie Augier and James March, Marshall published one paper last year –“The Flaring of Intellectual Outliers: An Organizational Interpretation of the Generation of Novelty in the RAND Corporation’’ – and is working away on another.
One virtue of the history of the Office of Net Assessment is to call attention to all that has changed in the nearly 50 years since 1969. Then the world had been carved into three great sectors, a First World (industrial democracies, Second (centrally planned economies) and Third (post-colonial nations). China was in the throes of its Cultural Revolution; the Soviet Union was entering upon a period of stagnation, and the U.S. was only just beginning to realize that the height of its powers lay in the past. Today, China is surging, the U.S. is deeply divided, and it is the Russians who, having taken a page from Marshall’s book, are searching for areas of comparative advantage and looking for ways to complicate America’s problems – with some success.
. xxx
Thomas Schelling died last week. He was 95. Sometimes vilified for work on nuclear deterrence in the early 1960s, he lived long enough to broadly apply his work on strategic thinking and to be recognized by a Nobel Prize. Tyler Cowen gives a good summary of Schelling’s influence
Many readers may have seen online Patti Smith’s performance of Bob Dylan’s song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” at the Nobel concert earlier this month. Only a few will have watched Schelling’s Nobel lecture about the origins of the taboo that has prevented the use of nuclear weapons for 75 years. One takes 9 minutes to view, the other 43 minutes. They are equally moving.
David Warsh, a longtime economic historian and columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.
Chris Powell: At least until spring, let the 'nattering nabobs' do their thing
Springtime on Connecticut's Wilbur Cross Parkway.
During the congressional election campaign in 1970, a campaign to me almost as nasty as this year's presidential campaign, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew famouslyvderided the Nixon administration's critics in the news media.
"In the United States today," Agnew said, "we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism."
Elected officials everywhere sometimes share that feeling, and Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy seems to be the latest one. Speaking last week to the Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Cromwell, the governor complained about the dismal view of Connecticut that is sometimes reflected by news organizations.
"There is more good news than bad news," the governor insisted, "but we dwell on the bad news." Having suffered a lot of bad news during his six years in the state's top office, news that included his two mammoth tax increases, the governor has developed a thicker skin, and his tone in Cromwell was more plaintive than demagogic like Agnew's.
Further, given the financial disaster bequeathed to him by his predecessors, Malloy is always deserving of some sympathy, while Agnew never was, since he was a mere political hatchet man, and sometimes equated disagreement with disloyalty and even communism. {And he was forced by office by a corruption charge.}
But most people in Connecticut really don't need to be told that times are good or bad. While they are paying less attention to the news and more to "social media," less attention to public policy and more to cat videos and other comic relief, they still can tell if their incomes are rising and their tax burdens falling or not, just as they can tell if the people around them are happier or more harried and depressed.
Even as national surveys still rank Connecticut high for quality of life, opinion polls of state residents find most of them in a mood so sour that they claim to be inclined to leave. That is, while living conditions here still may be better than elsewhere, people sense that conditions are getting worse.
As the governor spoke in Cromwell, Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that it wouldclose its research and development office in Wallingford, eliminating 500 jobs or moving them out of state.
Just after the governor spoke three men were shot, one of them being critically wounded, in separate incidents in the poverty factory known as New Haven.
Meanwhile, police in the poverty factory known as Hartford announced that they soon will start carrying the opioid overdose-reversal drug naloxone to combat the heroin plague that has broken out of the cities and is sweeping the rest of the state, even prosperous suburbs. (People tend not to inject themselves with heroin when their lives are going well.)
A few hours earlier Hartford's mayor had told a suburban audience that the city is insolvent and needs more of their money, but a suburban state senator replied that none would be forthcoming.
And just after he spoke the governor himself warned that a potentially deadly cold wave was sweeping down on the state from the northwest, prompting state government to begin emergency protocols to prevent the demoralized and destitute from freezing to death.
So even those who are not nattering nabobs of negativism might have been prompted by all this to start seeing virtue in those supposedly uneducated, uncultured, redneck-infested, and generally benighted but at least warm Southern states such as South Carolina and Florida, especially the latter, since it has no state income tax and half its residents already seem to be exiles fromConnecticut.
By May the young bloom of Connecticut's rolling countryside once again may make the state the most beautiful place in the world. But that's a long time to wait. Until then, offsetting the state's many disadvantages must begin with identifying them rather than minimizing them, which in turn will require some negativism and the nattering nabobs to provide it.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., and an essayist on political and cultural matters.
Reach out and saw
"Reaching Daisy'' (acrylic on ash wood), by Nick Hollibaugh, in his show "Between You and Me,'' at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, through Dec. 23.
Fresh-frozen words
"Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer."
- Plutarch, "Moralia''
Trying to make sense of 'The Fabric of Life'
From the "The Fabric of Life: Themes from the Personal Well'' group show at The ArtSpace Gallery, Maynard, Mass., through Jan. 13. The gallery says" "The fabric of life is complex and layered and unravels at times in everyone’s life bringing with it challenge and loss.''
Chris Powell: The origins of the contempt shown by Trump voters
As many people are, Gov. Dannel Malloy is appalled by President-elect Trump's selection of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry for secretary of the U.S. Energy Department, since Perry, as a presidential candidate, pledged to abolish it -- that is, when he could remember the department at all. Perry's selection, Malloy says, is "contemptuous."
But then Trump's election itself is a gigantic gesture of contempt by many of those who voted for him.
Yes, in the popular vote for president Trump, nominally a Republican, trails Hillary Clinton, the Democrat, by around 2.8 million. But Clinton received only 48 percent of the popular vote, and a majority of the votes for minor presidential candidates, 5½ percent of the vote, probably would have gone for Trump if people had been forced to choose among the top two candidates. Clinton, President Obama's candidate, represented continuity with the Obama administration and most of those voters for minor candidates wanted change.
Since there will be more elections soon enough, those who are appalled by Trump's election and some of his Cabinet appointments might do well to try to understand the contempt he embodies.
Maybe it arises from the contemptibility of so many voters themselves, people Clinton disparaged as "deplorables" for their supposed racism and other prejudices, as well as their supposed ignorance. But many of them live in the previously Democratic states that threw the Electoral College to Trump -- Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- and four years ago many voted for Obama.
Or maybe the contempt felt by so many voters arises from the performance of the Obama administration. Even some leading Democrats acknowledge that living standards for the majority have been declining, and theoretically at least it is possible to resent the trend toward ever-larger, politically correct, special interest-serving, and dependence-inducing government without wishing harm to racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.
With certain nominees to head federal departments, the new president's contempt and arrogance may take him too far. Being narrowly divided between the political parties, the Senate will be in a good position to check him. If Trump's administration fails to improve conditions in the country, as the expiring administration has failed, the people themselves may check him at the next two elections.
But Trump did not spring forth out of nowhere; he did not even create himself. Rather Trump is a reaction, just as he will produce a reaction. As the liberal sloganeering goes, "This is what democracy looks like," even if this time liberals don't like it.
* * *
HIMES IS TOO LATE ON THE WARS: Fearing that President-elect Trump will strive to get the country into more wars, Connecticut U.S. Rep. Jim Himes has introduced what he calls the Reclamation of War Powers Act. It would prevent deployment of the armed forces into hostilities without a declaration of war by Congress, similar congressional authorization, or an attack on the country or other national emergency.
These days, Himes says, "we operate in state of perpetual pseudo-war where neither the executive nor Congress is ultimately responsible. That has to end."
Valid as that criticism is, it has nothing to do particularly with Trump's ascension. While he is ill-tempered and reckless, Trump didn't get the country into and sustain its stupid imperial adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Lately those adventures have been sustained by President Obama, the head of Himes's own party. So Himes's legislation should have been introduced a long time ago.
Instead the congressman is turning against the wars only when a president from the opposing party is about to become responsible for them -- just as Democratic congressmen who supported the Vietnam War while a Democrat was president turned against it only when Richard Nixon, a Republican, took office in 1969.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Climb to some more commerce
The Mt. Washington Cog Railroad goes by a hiker above the tree line.
-- Photo by David W. Brooks
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's Dec. 15 "Digital Diary'' column in GoLocal24.com.
The owner of the famous Mt. Washington Cog Railway, Wayne Presby, wants to build a luxury hotel, along or even over its tracks, at about 5,000 feet up New England’s highest peak (6,288 feet).
This has inevitably caused a rumpus. Hikers complain that the hotel will degrade their experience on the mountain, whose summit is now crowded in the summer with climbers and people silly enough to ruin their brakes and transmissions by driving there. (In my healthier times long ago, I climbed it in the winter, when it’s more beautiful, albeit a tad nippy and breezy, than in its over-populated summer.)
Some locals are pushing back against the complaining greenies, many of whom are from out of state, saying that since tourism is the lifeblood of the White Mountains, the hotel should be allowed. I’m a former resident of New Hampshire and understand the tourism imperative but I think that building the hotel will, in the long run, hurt tourism by sending hikers and others bearing money elsewhere in search of a less sullied nature – maybe across the nearby border to Canada.
Yes, there was a hotel on top of the mountain in Victorian and Edwardian times but there was a lot more available nature in the region those days, before most people had cars and the invention of ski lifts.
The whole thing reminds me of current successful efforts to let companies turn some of our National Parks into major advertising venues. Thus it will get even harder to get away from the images and cacophony of commercialism in order to quietly reflect on life while enjoying the beauty of things so much bigger than loud, unreliable, anxious and grasping humanity.
Splendid isolation on Mt. Guano
"Observation,'' by Bobby Baker (copyright Bobby Baker Photography). Mr. Baker is based on Cape Cod.
Trump and treason; longing for Jim Webb and John Kasich
Our great leader.
Given Donald Trump’s pathological lying, record of personal and business corruption, narcissistic rapaciousness, and his hiding of the sort of financial information that previous presidents have provided to the public, we may never know the full extent of his ties to Russian murderer and kleptocrat–in-chief Vladimir Putin. (Some estimates put Putin's fortune as high as $100 billion.)
But given the extent of Putin’s relentless and successful effort to throw the presidential election to his fan Mr. Trump, we must start asking whether Mr. Trump is a traitor, perhaps because his organization has received massive loans from Russian figures close to the dictator. How much coordination was there between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin? How much will there be when our new maximum leader takes over?
One hint might be Donald Trump Jr.’s remark in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.’’
And then there is Mr. Trump's sleazy and very close associate Paul Manafort, with his very tight ties with the Kremlin. Much of the Trump entourage, including some members of his family, makes one want to take a bath in disinfectant. A creepy, immoral bunch.
John Shattuck, a lawyer and an assistant secretary of state (1993-98) in the Clinton administration and now at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, wrote for the Dec. 17 Boston Globe a column headlined “Trump raises specter of treason, '' about the Russian hacking to get Donald Trump elected. Among his comments:
“Why does Trump publicly reject these intelligence agency conclusions {on the Russian assault on our electoral system} and the bipartisan proposal for a congressional investigation? As president-elect, he should have a strong interest in presenting a united front against Russia’s interference with the electoral process at the core of American democracy.
“There are several possible explanations for Trump’s position. They are not mutually exclusive. First, he may be trying to shore up his political standing before the Electoral College vote on Monday. Second, he may be attempting to undermine the credibility of US intelligence agencies in advance of his taking office so that he can intimidate them and have a freer hand in reshaping the intelligence product to suit his objectives. Third, he may be testing his ability to go over the heads of intelligence professionals and congressional critics and persuade the American public to follow his version of the truth about national security threats. And finally, he may be seeking to cover up evidence of involvement or prior knowledge by members of his campaign team or himself in the Russian cyberattack.
“In each case the president-elect is inviting an interpretation that his behavior is treasonous. The federal crime of treason is committed by a person ‘owing allegiance to the United States who . . . adheres to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort,’ and misprision of treason is committed by a person ‘having knowledge of the commission of any treason [who] conceals and does not disclose’ the crime. By denigrating or seeking to prevent an investigation of the Russian cyberattack Trump is giving aid or comfort to an enemy of the United States, a crime that is enhanced if the fourth explanation applies — that he is in fact seeking to cover up his staff’s or his own involvement in or prior knowledge of the attack.’’
Meanwhile, many of us say: “If only the Democrats had nominated someone like Jim Webb as their presidential candidate and the Republicans John Kasich!’’ Honorable and able men with remarkably little bad baggage.
For a trip down Memory (or is it Amnesia) Lane, take a look at this show. http://trumpthemovie.com/
-- Robert Whitcomb