Jim Hightower: Hypocrite House speaker should spare us his lectures on morality of entitlements

Via OtherWords.org

For nearly half a century now, America’s middle-class working families have been pummeled by corporate greedmeisters and their political henchmen.

Indeed, during the recession, the typical median-income family has lost 40 percent of their wealth. Haven’t they been punished enough?

No, says U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Along with other top Republican leaders of Congress, he intends to slash the Social Security money that middle-class and low-income workers depend on for their retirement, and he ultimately aims to kill it altogether.

Dependence on such public “entitlements,” he preaches, weakens our nation’s morality.

Entitlements? Social Security isn’t a welfare program — regular working people pay a 12-percent tax on every dime of their wages into this public pension fund year after year. They earn their retirement.

Morality? Social Security embodies America’s core moral value of fairness and our society’s commitment to the common good. And it works: Before it was enacted, half of all Americans spent their “golden years” in poverty.

Social Security has saved the great majority of us from old-age penury. Where is the morality in stealing away this earned retirement — and the modicum of dignity that comes with it — from millions?

Besides, a sermon on the morality of entitlements should never come from a congress critter’s mouth.

Ryan himself wallows in a mud pit of congressional entitlements that working stiffs couldn’t imagine getting: A $223,500 annual paycheck, a free limousine and chauffeur, a maximum-coverage health plan, a tax-paid PR agent, a lavish expense account, free travel — and, of course, a platinum-level congressional retirement program funded by the very taxpayers whose Social Security he’s out to kill.

Yet Ryan wonders why Congress’ public approval rating is plummeting toward single digits.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. 

It's been a lot worse

A scene in Middletown, Conn., just after the Blizzard of '88, still considered by many to be southern New England's most fabled  such storm, dumped more than 50 inches in some places on March 11-14, 1888.

"March is frequently a wintry month in New England. Not until the close of the month do the chances of a twelve-inch snowstorm or a morning of zero cold diminish to a minimal percentage possibility. One needs only recall the rugged month of March, 1956, when six storm systems crossed the region, and back-to-back snowstorms on March 17-18 and 20-21 paralyzed the Boston area.''

--From The Country Journal New England Weather Book, by David Ludlum

My siblings and I liked the March 1956 storms' drama on the Massachusetts coast, which included the wreck of the freighter Etrusco on the shores of Scituate and, of course, a few days without school.  My parents, however, were bitter about the inconvenience and disillusioned by Mother Nature's arrogance and deception. The storms followed what had been generally a very mild and easy (aka "open'') winter.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Finally, 'Open Space Master Plan' for fabled Newport

The U.S. Naval War College, in Newport.

The Newport Open Space Partnership is very close to making public its “Open Space Master Plan,” which the Newport Daily News says is the “first citywide open space planning effort since [legendary landscape architect} Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. published “Proposed Improvements for Newport,’’  in  1913. ‘’ Amazing that with all the changes in the City by the Sea in the past century that it has taken this long!

“It’s a high-quality planning document,” Scott Wheeler, the city’s arborist and supervisor of buildings, ground and parks, told the paper. “It will be invaluable as a helpful guide to much of what we do. It has already helped us.” Good news for one of the most interesting, colorful  and complicated cities in America and one that despite its small size, is well known around the world. Mr,. Olmsted, famed designer of New York's Central Park, would have been pleased.

Migration and our sense of place

"Migration,''  by Adrienne der Marderosian, in the show "Up/Rooted,'' at the Brookline (Mass.) Art Center, March 17-April 21.

The gallery says that the show "explores origin, displacement and the influence of the past on the future...and how culture and identity relate to our sense of place.'' The show includes 59 artists working in painting, mixed media, photography, charcoal, glass, monoprint and more.

Happy travel news

Kudos to the Raimondo administration  and others involved in bringing Norwegian Airlines to T.F. Green Airport! The Federal Aviation Administration and others have long wanted Green to offer regular international flights, to, among other things, reduce congestion at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Certainly southeastern New England has the population density to support a major international airport.

The extension of the main runway to 8,700 feet due to be completed at year’s end should draw more international airlines since the longer runway means very long-haul airlines can use it.  Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut business should study how they can best benefit from Green’s expanded role in international travel.

xxx

In other happy travel news:

Gov. Charlie Baker is now looking again at closing the broken, one-mile link in the Northeast rail corridor between South and North stations in  downtown Boston that prevents connectivity between commuter rail systems and interrupts Amtrak service. I hope that he sees this as a priority. Closing the link would ultimately help most New Englanders. This was a dream of former Gov. Michael Dukakis, but fiscal and political pressures blocked the way.

Timothy J. Babineau, M.D.: Study what works well in U.S. healthcare and build on it

American healthcare is expensive. Too expensive. On this, there is little debate.  In 2001 the median U.S. household spent 6.4 percent  of its income on healthcare; by 2016, the same household spent 15.6 percent  of its income on healthcare. That bigger share of the pie leaves less for other essential purchases such as food, education and housing.

The same phenomenon exists at the national level, with spending on education, the environment and social programs getting squeezed. Recent estimates from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) have the American healthcare tab coming in at $3.6 trillion for 2016 and projected to continue to soar through 2025. Despite broad agreement that rising healthcare costs are unsustainable, the root causes of the rates of increase and the best ways to combat them remain the subject of some debate and confusion.   

Numbers matter. The 80/20 rule—known to healthcare actuaries as the Pareto principle, posits that 80 percent  of all medical spending is incurred by only 20 percent of the population. Whether a population is defined as a company, a county, or a country, most healthcare spending is for care of a small minority of individuals. Moreover, the bulk of that spending arises from either largely unavoidable or unpredictable single events (such as trauma or sudden-onset acute illnesses); such chronic conditions such as diabetes; complex episodes of care for such illnesss as cancer, and care delivered at the end of life.

A critical (but often overlooked) point is the fact that as much as 40 percent of spending during chronic and complex episodes is avoidable if providers and systems adhere to established standards of care. Reining in runaway healthcare spending must involve better management of high-cost episodes of chronic and complex care.

A key buzzword in today’s debate is “population health”. Confusion occurs when the term is interpreted as a strategy for controlling healthcare costs when it is applied across our entire population as opposed to the sickest 10 percent  or 20 Percent. Wellness initiatives, early detection, the avoidance of emergency room visits, and disease prevention have undeniable value, and should all be pursued, but they will not (by themselves) sufficiently reduce healthcare spending by enough to make the system “affordable”.

As the Baby Boomers swell the ranks of Medicare beneficiaries, the inevitability of illness is the only certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. To be successful, programs, payment systemsand policies to curb healthcare spending must focus on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of care delivered to the sickest subset of the population. This is best accomplished within a completely integrated healthcare-delivery system.

American hospitals and healthcare systems are among the best in the world. Rather than asserting that “American healthcare is broken” and in need of rebuilding from scratch, a better strategy may be to look at what works well within our system and ask how we can build on those strengths while facing the escalating costs head on. Hospital systems are in the health care business, and we should not be reluctant to say so.  No matter what wellness and prevention programs we collectively offer, inevitably a small subset of the population will still get very sick, and it is a core mission of health systems—working in close partnership with our primary and specialty providers—to take the very best and most efficient care of them when that happens.

Irrespective of what happens with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as leaders in health care, we must redouble our efforts to eliminate unnecessary variations and wasteful spending in the clinical care we deliver to patients.

Rather than debate the actual percentage that is “wasteful spending” (now commonly referenced at around 30 percent) we would be better served by continuing the hard work of identifying and eliminating areas within our own systems where needless variations in care add cost without improving outcomes. As Lifespan, the system I lead, continues to evolve into a comprehensive, high-value, integrated healthcare system, we are doing just that.  

Timothy J. Babineau, M.D., is president and chief executive of Providence-based Lifespan, a large hospital system, and a professor of surgery at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

'A masterpiece of design'

Photos by Wilson Bentley, circa 1902.

Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley
Photographer, (1865-1931)

Mr. Bentley, of Jericho, Vt., was one of the first photographers to closely study and photograph snowflakes. See his picture below. 

"...But always, from the very beginning, it was
snowflakes that fascinated me most. The farm
folks, up in this north country, dread the winter;
but I was supremely happy, from the day
of the first snowfall-which usually came in
November-until the last one, which sometimes
came as late as May."

"Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes
were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame
that this beauty should not be seen and
appreciated by others. Every crystal was
a masterpiece of design and no one design was
ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that
design was forever lost. Just that much beauty
was gone, without leaving any record behind."

He died of pneumonia at his farm on Dec. 23, 1931, after walking home six miles in a blizzard.

Mr. Bentley at work.

A certain look at nature

"Hitched'' (after Desportes and Handecoeter), by Shelly Reed, in her show "A Curious Nature,'' at the Fitchburg Art Museum, through June 4.

The museum says :"With artworks spanning from a decade ago to works that have never been seen by the public, 'A Curious Nature' provides viewers with insight into the artist and her transformation throughout the years. The exhibition features a variety of works, including black and white canvasses  (e.g., above) and oil on paper. Her subject matter ranges from large scale scenes with animal and botanical details and more intimate portraits. ...Reed also includes several predator/prey images, detailing the stalking, contemplation, and attacking of these beings while encouraging the audience to contemplate who is watching whom both in the artworks themselves and the inspiration.''

David Warsh: Journalism, Russia's 'hybrid war' and the U.S. elections

St. Basil's Cathedral, on Red Square, in Moscow.

The other week, in which Atty.  Gen.  Jeff Sessions’s visit with the Russian ambassador dominated the news, the  most interesting thing I read was a 13,000-word article in The New Yorker. It exemplified all the preconceptions typical of what I have come to think of as reporters of the Generation of ’91.

David Remnick, b. 1958, was Moscow bureau chief  in 1988-1992 for The Washington Post, before he moved to become The New Yorker’s editor, a job he got in 1998.  He wrote Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1993. Evan Osnos, b. 1976, joined the magazine from The Chicago Tribune in 2008 and covered China for five years. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China appeared in 2014 and was a Pulitzer finalist. Joshua Yaffa is a journalist based in Moscow. He has written for The Economist and The New York Times Magazine.

Nothing in The New Yorker’s article – “Active Measures: What lay behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election – and what lies ahead?’’ – was quite as punchy as the art that accompanied it. The magazine’s traditional anniversary cover featured Vladimir Putin, as a dandy peering through a monocle at a raging butterfly Trump, instead of the customary rendering of Eustace Tilley. That was non-committal enough, though it reminded me of the magazine’s 2014 Sochi Olympics cover, a figure-skating Vladimir Putin leaps while five little Putin lookalikes feign lack of interest from the judges’ stand.

More alarming was the art opposite the opening page, Saint Basil’s Cathedral, in Moscow, administering a jolt of light (a digital illumination ray?) to the White House from the skies above.  The caption states, “Democratic National Committee hacks, many analysts believe, were just a skirmish in a larger war against Western institutions and alliances.”

The article was organized in five little chapters.

In “Soft Targets,” Putin orders an unprecedented effort to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. It is a gesture of disrespect, ordered out of pique and resentment of perceived U.S. finagling in the 2012 Soviet election, intended to be highly public.

In “Cold War 2.0,” the Obama administration is caught flat-footed by the campaign and fails to respond effectively. The Russians have adopted a new and deeply troubling offensive posture “that threatens the very international order,” a former Obama official states.

In “Putin’s World,” a capsule history of the decline of Russian pride during the 1990s is presented alongside an argument for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Putin’s mistrust of democracy at home is described, as well as his recoiling from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama after the annexation of Crimea are recounted:  She sometimes favors the use of military force whereas he does not.

In “Hybrid War,” Russia becomes technically adroit at cyberwarfare and experiments with a digital blitz on Estonian communications after a statue of a Soviet soldier is removed; meanwhile, the U.S. unleashes its Stuxnet computer virus on Iran’s uranium-refinery operations. The Russian Army chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, is introduced, along with his 2013 article, “The Value of the Science Is in the Foresight’’ urging “the adoption of a Western strategy,” combining military, technological, media, political and intelligence tactics to destabilize a foe, the article having “achieved the status of legend” as theGerasimov doctrine, following the invasion of Ukraine.

An estimated thousand code warriors are said to be working for the Russian government on everything from tapping former Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland’s cell phone in Kiev (“a new low in Russian tradecraft”) to the forthcoming French and German elections. Finally, the hacking campaign against the Democratic Party is rehashed, and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta says the interaction between Russian intervention and the FBI “created a vortex that produced the result” – a lost election.

In “Turbulence Theory,” Trump is said to be a phenomenon of America’s own making, like the nationalist politicians of Europe, both the consequence of globalization and deindustrialization, but Russia likes the policies that are the result: Leave Russia alone and don’t talk about civil rights. Meanwhile, the hacking campaign may have backfired, and Trump may no longer have the freedom to accommodate Russian ambitions as might have been wished, but at least Russia has come up with a way to make up for its economic and geopolitical weakness, namely inflict turbulence on the rest of the world.

Three things about this assessment stand out.

Putin’s views of U.S. foreign policy are not integral to the account: They are presented in two widely separate sections, one on the history of U.S. “active measures,” the other on changes in his opinion wrought by the war in Iraq.

Putin is quick to accuse the West of hypocrisy, the authors write, but his opinions, and those of others, especially who compare the invasions of Crimea and Iraq (where the U.S. immediately set out to build an embassy for 15,000 workers) are dismissed as “whataboutism,”  exercises in false moral equivalence. NATO expansion is more or less taken for granted.  The military alliance’s extension to the borders of Russia forms no part of the narrative.

Second, no attention is paid to Putin’s problems, aside from a nod to his suppression of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the rock group Pussy Riot. His plans for a Eurasian Union, which were at the heart of the Ukraine crisis, go unmentioned.  There’s nothing about the centuries-old struggle between Westernizers and Slavophiles who oppose policies that would tie Russia more closely to the West.

Third, the history of the Cold War itself gets short shrift. The genesis of the doctrine of “hybrid war,” ascribed to General Gerasimov, is described at length in The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy, by Andrew F. Krepinevich and, Barry D. Watts (Basic Books, 2015). Marshall founded the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. In 1973 he described what would become a dramatic strategic shift:

“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.’’

Many factors led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  “Active measures,” of the sort propounded by Marshall, were prominent among them. You can hardly be surprised that the Russians have sought to master new techniques. The underlying proposition of The New Yorker’s article is that the world is, or at least it should be, unipolar, with the U.S. in charge of its democratic values. After all these years, the Russians still don’t agree.

David Warsh, a veteran financial and political columnist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.

A look at Brazil after a very tumultuous period

March 9, 2017

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

And so the coldest part of the winter comes near the end…. New England’s bizarre climate!
 

Distinguished Brazilian political economistand commentator Evodio Kaltenecker (whom some of you may remember for a few years ago) willspeak on Thursday, March 16, about the challenges and opportunities facing that huge nation as well as conditions in South America’s Southern Cone – Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.

His talk's headline:

Brazil: 2018 and beyond and the pro-market wave in Latin America.

With political upheaval, the Zika virus, economic distress, Olympic agonies and other issues, this will be a good time to look at Latin America’s most important nation.

On  Wednesday, April 5, famed French journalist, novelist and broadcaster Jean Lesieur will speak on the global  order being turned upside down by the advances of dictators, the retreat of democracies and the presidency of Donald Trump, not tomention the existential crisis of the European Union and the wild French election campaign.
 
Dr. Rand Stoneburner, the international epidemiologist, is now scheduled to speak on Wednesday April 19. He’ll talk about Zika, Ebola and other global health challenges.
 
James E. Griffin, an expert on ocean fishing and other aspects of the global food sector, will speak to us on Wednesday, May 17.

David Shear, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, under the Obama administration, will speak to us on Thursday, June 1. (He is leaving office of Jan. 20, 2017.) He previously served as United States Ambassador to Vietnam.  He was also formerly deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs at the U.S. Department of State. He’ll talk about Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea, North Korea and other Asia/Pacific topics.
 
Joining us on Wednesday, 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.
 
Meanwhile, we’re trying to keep some flexibility to respond to events. Everything in human affairs is tentative. ”We make plans and God laughs….’’
 

Suggestions and contacts are always appreciated!

The man who would take on Partners HealthCare

The Boston Globe profiles Kevin Tabb, M.D., who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, and is now trying to engineer a merger between his system and another prestigious one — in Greater Boston — Lahey Health. Such a combined entity would presumably be better able to compete with the elephant in the region — Partners HealthCare.

To read the profile, please hit this link.

Llewellyn King: St. Patrick's Day and the delicate matter of Irish immigration

St. Patrick’s Day is hard upon us. The green dye is being added to the beer in bars across the land, while more than 40 million Americans will remember their linkage to the Old Sod, even if that is sometimes tenuous.

Aye, it’s time for a wearing of the green and we will do it on March 17, in the great celebration of a small Irish nation and its relatively obscure patron saint.

On St. Paddy’s Day, we are all Irish whether we are, in fact, African-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American or any other hyphenated American. We all watch the parades, maybe take a drink or two and wear some green, from a hair ribbon to a whole suit.

If Britain has a special relationship with the United States, then Ireland has an extra-special relationship.

As has become a modern tradition, the taoiseach -- as the prime minister of Ireland is called -- will visit the White House to lobby the president.  

The prime minister, Enda Kenny, heads Fine Gael, which is more conservative than Ireland's other two parties. Kenny will, one supposes, present the customary bowl of shamrock and talk of the long history of Ireland and the United States. Ireland has always looked to the United States as kind of safety valve – a place where Irish immigrants could find safety and hope, particularly during and after the Potato Famine of 1845-49.

Kenny also will have a purpose: lobbying  President Trump on behalf of the 50,000 Irish who are in the United States illegally -- "illegal aliens" in the lexicon of the administration.

But the Irish PM will eschew that term in favor of “undocumented immigrants.” He will want to invoke that long history of migration from Ireland to America. He might even point out that the “wearing of the green” was illegal during the Irish Rebellion against the British in 1798.

The language is as loaded in Ireland as it is here. The Irish like to refer to their paperless migrants to the United States as “undocumented” -- suggesting a slight matter of language, rather than an implicit indictment of “illegal.”

By contrast, and several Irish commentators have pointed out, workers in Ireland who do not have papers to work or live are referred to by Irish politicians as “illegal aliens.”

The Irish intelligentsia and many Irish analysts say that this is racist. That the unspoken message Kenny will convey to Trump is: Take it easy on the Irish undocumented, they are white and Christian. Not brown or Muslim. We are you.

The Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole rages against what he sees as the race preference, and points out that the Trump administration is loaded with those of Irish descent. O’Toole calls them the “enablers” of Trump's immigration policy: They are advisers Steven Bannon and Kellyanne (nee Fitzgerald) Conway, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly -- as was short-lived National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Another Irish journalist, Cillian Donnelly, makes the same points and fears that Kenny, who has said his mission is to speak up for the undocumented Irish in America, will become complicit in the Trump immigration stand and the deportation of “brown” migrants.

Trump himself has links to Ireland. He owns a huge golf course and hotel in Doonbeg, on County Clare’s Atlantic coast.

Ironically, there he is enmeshed in a dispute over building a seawall. It seems when it comes to Ireland, Trump believes in global warming and sea rise: He has tried to get permission to build a 1.7-mile-long wall to keep severe storms from flooding his resort.

Trump's request to build the original masonry wall were turned down, and he is pushing for two more limited rock and steel structures. Environmentalists are opposing them, too. They maintain that these structures will not end the erosion, but rather will increase it with time, destroying the dunes. However, Trump is the largest local employer and his wall is supported locally.

If all this is enough to drive you to drink, St. Patrick's Day is a good time to start. Slainte!

Llewellyn King, a frequent New England Diary contributor, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle,  on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

They're everywhere

Jazz Glastra: My meeting with my GOP congressman about healthcare

Via OtherWords org.

The Republicans just introduced a new plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, or ACA — aka Obamacare. The rollout came after many members of Congress caught an earful from constituents trying to stop them.

Although I’ve voted for people in both parties in the past, I wanted to be one of them.

Residents in my central Ohio district started a petition in early January calling for our member, Republican Pat Tiberi, to hold a town hall to discuss the issue. After all, he’s the chair of the House Subcommittee on Health.

The petition quickly garnered over 1,000 signatures, but Tiberi refused to hold a public event, claiming they’re “unproductive.” Fair enough: I can see how it might be hard to have a discussion about complex issues in a hall filled to the brim with angry constituents.

So I decided to take Tiberi up on his offer to meet with constituents privately instead. When I arrived at his district office, I was surprised to find that eight other people had also been scheduled for the same time. It turned out that all of us were there to discuss the ACA.

Person after person shared gut-wrenching stories.

One woman was unable to find an insurer to cover her small business and its employees because of her Type 1 diabetes. Thanks to Obamacare, she was able to get coverage that’s affordable and life-saving.

A young woman recovering from cancer explained how, before Obamacare, her diagnosis prevented the entire company she worked for from changing insurers because the new insurer wouldn’t accept her “pre-existing condition.”

Another woman with breast cancer explained that if it weren’t for the subsidized health insurance she received through the Obamacare exchange, she might not be here today.

My own story is much less dramatic — without the ACA, I never could’ve afforded to pursue my chosen career path in the nonprofit sector. Luckily, the ability to stay on my parents’ insurance for a few years after college gave me the security I needed to take a risk on a low-paying but highly rewarding job that kick-started my career.

While Tiberi started out the meeting by declaring that he was “there to listen,” I left disappointed by how he treated our group. Not once during the entire meeting did he allow someone to finish speaking without interrupting to “give them the other side of the story.”

For many of the people in the room, Obamacare was literally the difference between life and death. Unfortunately, Tiberi only wanted to talk about how premiums are going up and in some places there aren’t enough coverage options.

To be sure, these are real problems that need fixing. But how can you look a breast cancer survivor in the eye and tell her the law that saved her life needs to be thrown out because it’s costing someone too much money?

My meeting with Tiberi took place well before Republicans released their Obamacare replacement plans, but even then Tiberi agreed that he doesn’t want to go back to 2009, when 20 million fewer people had health insurance.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to many people under the Republicans’ plan. That includes low-income patients on Medicaid and people who are young but have serious health conditions, like the woman at my meeting.

Someone recently asked me whether I consider myself a liberal or a conservative on healthcare. But what does that even mean?

We all want the same thing: affordable coverage we can actually use, lower costs, and a healthier population. I don’t think the ACA achieved all of these goals, but getting coverage for over 20 million people was a huge step in the right direction.

Why tear down years of progress and start from scratch when we can simply fix what we have?

Affluence under sail

Painting by Laura Tryon Jennings at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass.

A generation of sociopaths?

"Narcissus'' (1590s) by Caravaggio.

Adapted from an item in Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com.

Generations obviously flow into each other and we must be leery of over-generalizing. But Bruce Cannon Gibney is on to something when indicting the Baby Boom generation (1946-1964) for having all too many selfish, narcissistic, greedy, uncivic-minded, myopic and, well, dishonest people. He makes his case in forthcoming book: A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.

Consider the corruption in varying degrees of leading politicians and business leaders in the past 40 years as the Baby Boomers came to power. Look at their disinclination, compared to their parents, to participate in unpaid if admirable civic projects.

You don’t hear very much anymore of “dollar-a-year men’’ who volunteer to take onerous but crucial public-sector jobs to address a crisis. Look at their using public office to line up gargantuan payoffs  later in the private sector.

You see many more rich Boomers plastering their names on buildings, be they at colleges, museums and hospitals, compared to their parents’ generation, for whom anonymous giving was much admired. From the Gospel of Matthew, in the New Testament: "Be careful not to do 'good works' in front of others. Don't do them to be seen by others. If you do, your Father in heaven will not reward you.’’

You see something of the Baby Boomer culture in executive suites, not to mention the Oval Office. As Boomers started to take big jobs in public companies many started to display astonishing greed compared to their parents, and a disinclination to share corporate wealth with their underlings, whose inflation-adjusted wages generally have fallen over the era of Boomer hegemony.

 That is, of course, partly due to the increasing self-segregation of Americans into their own socio-economic groups.  The rich have less and less daily contact with the nonrich and so the former care less and less about the latter. There is less and less cross-class interaction.

At the same time, insider trading and other Wall Street sleaze have flourished.

For whatever combination of reasons – be it that too many Boomers were cosseted as kids or whether the media came to excessively worship wealth and conspicuous consumption –arrogance and extreme greed came to characterize much of American business under the Baby Boomers. You have to go back to the Twenties and the Gilded Age of the late 19th and very early 20th centuries to see its like.

And consider many Boomers’ lack of interest in supporting government programs for the poor and other weak  groups and their generally successful push for lower taxes even as they fight any cuts in programs that benefit, or will soon benefit, them, especially Social Security and Medicare.  And look at the popularity of eliminating the federal estate tax as affluent Boomers’ parents started go to their reward. Or their debonair attitude toward the ever-deepening federal debt that goes with lower taxes and higher spending on programs that disproportionately favor the Boomers.

Glance at America’s crumbling infrastructure -- mostly due to a refusal to pay taxes commensurate with long-term public needs – is another monument of the Boomers, too many of whom are not societal builders but users.

And it’s curious that older Baby Boomers often get credit for promoting civil rights for racial minorities, women’s and gay rights associated with the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the people who led these movements were from the so-called Greatest Generation and Silent Generation.

And while Steve Jobs and his Silicon Valley contemporaries did come up with some nifty inventions they can’t compare in long-term importance with those  developed by the generation before them – often with the help of federal programs. Semiconductors and Internet are examples.

It is true that many Boomers became avid foes of the Vietnam War – but mostly because they didn’t want to fight in it.

Let us hope that younger folks display more civic-mindedness and generosity than their parents. Or will they just disappear into social media?

'How out of breath you are'

Dear March - Come in -	
How glad I am -
I hoped for you before -
Put down your Hat -	
You must have walked -
How out of Breath you are -	
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest -
Did you leave Nature well -	
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me -
I have so much to tell -

I got your Letter, and the Birds -	
The Maples never knew that you were coming -
I declare - how Red their Faces grew -	
But March, forgive me -	
And all those Hills you left for me to Hue -	
There was no Purple suitable -	
You took it all with you -	

Who knocks? That April -
Lock the Door -
I will not be pursued -
He stayed away a Year to call	
When I am occupied -	
But trifles look so trivial	
As soon as you have come
	
That blame is just as dear as Praise	
And Praise as mere as Blame 

-- Emily Dickinson "Dear March -- Come In''

-

-

A tolerance for ambiguity

"Through,'' by Kathy Soles, in the show "Place and Memory: Two Views: Iris Osterman and Kathy Soles,'' at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham, Mass., March 9-April 2.

Mystery season

Photo by THOMAS HOOK

Depending on your attitude, a wintry  or springlike day Tuesday in  Southbury, Conn., with the mist, as Mr. Hook notes,  "veiling the difference between the seasons'' around Hidden Pond.

Chris Powell: Insurers may be joining the state in enabling Hartford's bad habits

Hartford from the other side of the Connecticut River.

Hartford's three biggest insurance companies -- Aetna, The Hartford, and Travelers -- are being hailed as the city's saviors for their pledge last week to donate $50 million, $10 million per year for five years, to help city government out of its financial disaster.

But rather than saviors, the companies more likely have just become the city's new enablers, joining state government in that counterproductive work. The companies say their gift will be "conditioned" on making it "part of a comprehensive and sustainable solution for Hartford -- a solution that allows the city to stabilize its finances and support quality services."

But such a solution is nowhere in sight. Mayor Luke Bronin has been trying to negotiate concessions from the city's government employee unions but he hasn't yet gotten nearly enough to close a projected city budget deficit approaching $50 million. The mayor also has been touring Hartford's suburbs in pursuit of financial contributions but has not yet come back with a check, a pledge, or more than sympathy for the thankless job he has been stuck with. And while Governor Malloy has proposed to slash state financial aid to suburbs and rural towns and transfer it to Hartford and other cities, his proposal's prospects in the General Assembly are not strong, since many legislators know how incompetent and corrupt city governments have been, even if the legislators don't recognize state government's shared responsibility for this.

With perfect irony the $50 million gift from the insurers happens to match the original estimate of the cost of the minor-league baseball stadium city government just built and botched, a cost now believed to approach $75 million not counting litigation expenses. Indeed, even as the insurers announced their gift, the stadium contractor fired by the city announced that it is suing the city for $90 million,

A few days earlier the state child advocate's office revealed that the city's school system long has failed to act against school employees who harassed and molested students. A "comprehensive and sustainable solution" for that problem is not yet in place either. So with their huge gift the insurers may have only 1) rescued city government from some of the expense of its irresponsible decision to build the stadium as bankruptcy approached, 2) reduced the pressure on the city employee unions to make the concessions the mayor wants, and 3) reduced the pressure on state government to stop subsidizing the anti-social behavior that is worst in the cities and has turned them into poverty factories.

As Aetna, The Hartford, and Travelers are big companies doing business throughout the nation, they might concur in the advertising slogan lately being used by another big insurer, Farmers: "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two." Surely the insurers should know that in Connecticut, as elsewhere, when supposedly liberal government gets down to its last dollars, it will kick the innocent needy out of their hospital beds, open the doors of the prisons, and stop plowing the roads after snowstorms so what's left of the money can be paid as raises and pensions to government's own employees.

Saving Connecticut and Hartford requires overthrowing this mindset, and as major employers and taxpayers that are exceptionally able to relocate, the insurers have great leverage over both state and municipal policy. Having just bestowed something for nothing on the city, and, really, state government, the insurers have squandered their leverage. Instead of showering millions on incompetence, they should have threatened to move if state and city government don't quickly start pursuing the public interest instead of the usual special interests.

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