Maintenance by the moon

Watercolor by William Hall, part of his show at the Jessie Edwards Gallery on Block Island, scheduled for this July.

Mr. Hall explains that this picture is about scraping the bottom of boats, in this case a Block Island Double Ender, at very low tides  Seaweed and barnacles slowed work boats. So this stuff needed to be regularly scraped off. Predictable very low tides would leave parts of Old Harbor, on Block Island, above water for 6 to 8 hours a day for several days in a row in the 19th Century heyday of these boats, which were essential for the islanders' fishing and transportation needs.

Double Enders were secured to the dock to wait for the extreme low tides. When they sat on the mud the work  could be done. After scraping,  antifouling paint was applied. Several fishermen and their wives worked together to get the scraping and painting done fast within the window of opportunity provided by the low tides.

"Think of it as  fishermen's barn-raising. Over two days several boats could fully scrapped, '' Mr. Hall says.

Paper cuts

"Pillar of Truth'' (paper "seeds'' -- 2,743 pieces), by Jaq Belcher, in her show at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., through April 15.

Don Pesci: Pity an oppressed climatologist

Perhaps the governors of the states should hand out victimization certificates along with birth certificates because – when everyone is a victim, no one will be a victim, and that may help to put an end to the victimization of non-victims nonsense. Students at Yale, we have recently discovered, are victims. One may wonder whether a graduate of Yale or Harvard has been the more victimized. Are any of them more victimized than the fatherless children in Connecticut's shoot-up capital city, Hartford, which a few months ago was proclaimed the murder capital of New England?

Everyone, it seems, wants to get in on the action. In academia, the victimization scam may end in the destruction of the liberties of scientists.

Among the most oppressed victims in the 21st Century, we discover, is tortured Penn State University climatologist Michael Mann, who appeared before U.S. Congress at the end of March to declare himself victimized. Consider his bleeding wounds.

Before Mr. Mann put before the Congress his statement, he supplied the members of the House Science Committee – is anyone wondering: does the Congress really need a Science Committee? -- with his curriculum vitae. Mr. Mann is the author of a number of books, none of them suppressed by a Stalinist government. During his hearing, Mr. Mann unreeled “a prodigious list of awards,” according to National Review magazine.

Mr. Mann is suing the magazine, Mark Steyn, Rand Simberg and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for defamation, a judicial action for which Mr.  Mann doubtless will receive from his persecuted colleagues yet another award, more plentiful in academia than snowflakes in a blizzard. Incredibly, the non-Stalinist D.C. Court of Appeals has not spiked the case and sent Mr. Mann to a frozen Gulag for gross impertinence.

Mr. Mann regaled the members of the House Science Committee with a story concerning false science. In Stalinist Russia, the crackpot theories of Trofim Lysenko concerning heredity and agronomy were embraced first by Vladimir Lenin and later by  Stalin. In practice, the theories were ruinous, Russian agriculture suffered a setback, and real scientists who took issue with Lysenko’s theories were imprisoned, many of them dying in their cells. Mr. Mann’s reference to the evils of the Stalinist state were intended to indicate that science, even here in the good old USA, might suffer setbacks under an oppressive governmental regime and anti-scientific culture.

Stalin’s agricultural and industrial policies did produce real victims: Five million Ukrainians suffered and died under a Stalin administered famine in 1933-34. Intellectuals and school teachers were shot or sent to the Gulag, and eventually Ukraine and the rebellious Caucasus were brought under Stalin’s hobnailed boot. “If you want a vision of the future,” said George Orwell, who was familiar with Stalinist regimes, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.”

 If you want a vision of our future in the new century, try to imagine a distinguished professor of climatology, the author of numerous books, who claims that climate change (AKA global warming) is “settled science,” that 90 percent of scientists in the United States agree with him on the point, and that he is being oppressed by Stalinists because other reputable scientists and commentators have had the temerity to disagree with him on the point.

 Furthermore, Mr.  Mann is the one using the organs of the state to sue his detractors for slander, hoping perhaps to shut down disagreeable commentators and bloggers who have poked fun at his “scientific” pretensions. Whose face is being smashed here? Is science, the lifeblood of which is controversy and disputation, the victim, or is the victim the tenured, much published, much honored, suit-prone but thin-skinned professor, who appears to be unwilling to brook controversy without taking science to court?

Mr. Mann’s slander case could be settled in an instant – the United States is not Stalinist Russia, and Mr. Mann’s disputants should be able to seek safe shelter under the nation’s 1st Amendment – were it not that most issues of this kind are settled out of court by a party to the suit that does not wish to be impoverished for the rest of his life by enriching lawyers. And so the case will drag on, and on, and on… until one of the principals has become poor enough to be unable to afford further litigation.

This torture by judicial process is what passes for justice in 21st Century America. It is the secret of U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal’s many successes as attorney general of Connecticut: if you can impoverish a target through the seizure of assets and endless litigation, you needn’t win a final case in court; after a few rounds, your target, now poor and much more reasonable, will settle the case more or less on your terms.

Leaving aside the all-important undetermined question -- who is right, and who is wrong about climate change? -- it should be relatively easy to determine, out of court, who is the victim and who the victimizer in this particular instance. Perhaps someone should revoke Mr. Mann’s victimization certificate. 

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based writer and frequent contributor to New England Diary.

'We wait for thy coming'

'T is the noon of the spring-time, yet never a bird
In the wind-shaken elm or the maple is heard;
For green meadow-grasses wide levels of snow,
And blowing of drifts where the crocus should blow;
Where wind-flower and violet, amber and white,
On south-sloping brooksides should smile in the light,
O'er the cold winter-beds of their late-waking roots
The frosty flake eddies, the ice-crystal shoots;
And, longing for light, under wind-driven heaps,
Round the boles of the pine-wood the ground-laurel creeps,
Unkissed of the sunshine, unbaptized of showers,
With buds scarcely swelled, which should burst into flowers
We wait for thy coming, sweet wind of the south!
For the touch of thy light wings, the kiss of thy mouth;
For the yearly evangel thou bearest from God,
Resurrection and life to the graves of the sod!
Up our long river-valley, for days, have not ceased
The wail and the shriek of the bitter northeast,
Raw and chill, as if winnowed through ices and snow,
All the way from the land of the wild Esquimau,
Until all our dreams of the land of the blest,
Like that red hunter's, turn to the sunny southwest.
O soul of the spring-time, its light and its breath,
Bring warmth to this coldness, bring life to this death;
Renew the great miracle; let us behold
The stone from the mouth of the sepulchre rolled,
And Nature, like Lazarus, rise, as of old!
Let our faith, which in darkness and coldness has lain,
Revive with the warmth and the brightness again,
And in blooming of flower and budding of tree
The symbols and types of our destiny see;
The life of the spring-time, the life of the whole,
And, as sun to the sleeping earth, love to the soul! 

--  John Greenleaf Whittier, "April''

Tonight's PCFR: French elections, Brexit, Trump & other adventures

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

 
Jean Lesieur, one of Europe’s most distinguished journalists, will be the speaker at tonight's (April 5) Providence Committee on Foreign Relations’  dinner. Mr. Lesieur is a novelist, a co-founder of France 24 (the French version of CNN), a former foreign correspondent and a former senior editor at the magazines Le Point and L’Express, among other publications.  Among other things, he’ll talk about Europe in the Brexit/Trump eras, the state of the Western Alliance and, of course, the wild French election campaign.

WPI prettier than Holy Cross

Boynton Hall, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Travel + Leisure magazine has declared the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, to have the most beautiful college campus in Massachusetts. I havealways found it windswept ( it is on a high hill) and forbidding. Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s campus is considerably more inviting.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Annual reminder

"King Lear and the Fool in the Storm,''  by William  Dyce.

"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year."
 

-- Mark Twain

Just before the greenout

Photo by Audrey Monahan, in "Making Marks,'' a current show featuring female artists hosted by the Providence Art Club.

Llewellyn King's Notebook: Tale of many weddings; obscene executive pay; Electronicsville

I have been to some amazing weddings. My own (three) have been quite modest, but I have been to some that were extraordinary bashes, with brides in designer gowns and grooms who looked as though they were dressed by Savile Row, and indeed some were.

I have been to Virginia Hunt Country weddings where you would think it was the horses who were getting married, and Irish weddings where you would think the celebrants would all need first responders' help in getting home.

I even can claim, sort of, a royal wedding. In 1960, I helped cover the marriage of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones in Westminster Abbey. I got a few paragraphs in a major London newspaper and thought I had arrived. In reality, I was on a ferry on the Thames and nowhere near the actual wedding: My job was to report on the crowds waiting for the Royal Yacht to take the newlyweds on honeymoon. All that, it turns out was prelude to the main event.

Last month I went to the wedding of weddings, the nuptials extraordinaire in my book. It topped all the others not in grandeur, but in infectious joy. It was the joining together, as they say, of Hannah Tessitore and Jarrod Hazelton, and I was inside enjoying really good red wine and Beef Wellington, not outside on a boat on a cold London day. These were royals of a kind, more so, methinks.

It all happened in the Rhode Island Yacht Club, an auspicious place, jutting out into upper Narraganset Bay,  almost  surrounded  by water and with resident swans, although I did not notice them being more or less celebratory than usual. Swans are tricky that way.

It was the meeting of a  family, hers that's partly Italian and his a mixture of English and German, via South America. Hannah is one of the most gifted people I have worked with. She is a producer on my television show and a quite fabulous Web designer. Jarrod is an economist and polymath; one of those people who seems to know more about everything than you do. This coupled with sardonic wit makes him awesome in a nonthreatening way.

I love their love story. They did not meet on a blind date, nor through a computer site, nor were they neighbors. They met -- Cupid is an imaginative fellow -- in line at an ATM. And I thought that those things just dispensed money.

As Noel Coward said in a song, “I’ve been to a marvelous party.”

Executive Pay: How High the Moon?

When I leaned that an executive at Enron was making $80 million, I told the chairman, a friend, Ken Lay, “Ken, you can get very good help for just $20 million.”

This comes to mind when I read that a near friend (a lot of those in journalism, where you are friendly but in a circumscribed way) has just had his salary raised to $15 million. Nice work if you can get it, but the board should have said no. The unions should have pounced and the customers should turn away.

Excessive executive pay is one of the things that contributes to the sense that most of us are doomed wage-wise, while the precious few are elevated above reason to a place where their compensation distorts the national well-being.

Years ago, before the nation became so inured to the C-suite ripoffs, the conservative columnist George Will said the executive compensation of the heads of public companies had reached a point where these lucky few were “taking,” not earning, their huge wealth. Quite so. It is enough to make a chap sing “La Marseillaise” in the bath.

How We Live Now: Life in Electronicsville

I read a lot of books, though not as many as I would like. I read so damn slowly. My wife, Linda Gasparello, tears up the typographical turnpike at an impressive clip, while I stay close to the curb.

Using a Kindle, I do find I get through more books. It is a clunky devise that needs refinement, but it is so portable. I am reading more books because I always have the gadget with me -- on a bus, plane or train, at the barbershop, while waiting for a friend at a restaurant.

The trouble is you do not have a book afterward, and you have really only rented one. No book to hand on, to grace your shelves. Also, to my shame, I can count the jobs lost when a book comes electronically and not physically: the typesetter, the printer, the binder, the trucker, the warehouse worker and the sales clerk. It is shameful, it is the future and it is me, circa 2017.

Llewellyn King, a frequent contributor to New England Diary, is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

'Vivid in their stillness'

On the Schoodic Peninsula, in Acadia National Park.

-- Photo by Bob LeChat

"The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.''

-- Alexander Chee (writer)
 

April 1 North Country scene

"Blue Snow'' (oil on canvas), by Marilyn Wendling, at Alper Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

'Only you are gone'

APRIL this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
From orchards near and far away
The gray wood-pecker taps and bores,
And men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep;
Noisy and swift the small brooks run.
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun
Pensively; only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.” 

― Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Song of a Second April''

'Egg-addling' to try to stem Canada geese population explosion in Boston

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

My friends at The Boston Guardian report that there’s an effort underway to get some residents to help reduce the swelling Canada geese population by “egg-addling,’’ which includes “painting vegetable oil on the eggs or gently scrambling them so they don't come to term. ‘’ Sounds cruel, but the goose droppings are a bit of a health issue, albeit probably exaggerated.

Marion Larson, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, explains that Canada geese were once used as live decoys for hunters until that practice was banned in the ‘30s. But, she told The Guardian, while many of these birds were then liberated, they had “their migratory instincts bred out of them.’’ So now their descendants hang around all winter and make a mess, although they are fun to watch.

They particularly love golf courses, which take up too much open space.

Like raccoons and more recently coyotes, these wild animals have learned to live among people, opportunistically taking advantage of the human-related food, such as garbage and backyard plants, and the relative lack of other predators near people. Given how human over-population is rapidly taking over and ruining much wildlife habitat, in the end perhaps only such opportunistic species will thrive in the future.

They'll bloom without me

"The year is ended, and it only adds to my age;
Spring has come, but I must take leave of my home.
Alas, that the trees in this eastern garden,
Without me, will still bear flowers."

-- Su Ting, in 720 CE

Llewellyn King: Regulation can give a big push to creativity and innovation

The Exxon Valdez, aground  and leaking massive amounts of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

There is a paradox of regulation clearly not known in the Trump White House. It is this: Regulation can stimulate creativity and move forward innovation.

This has been especially true of energy. Ergo, President Donald Trump's latest move to lessen the impact of regulation on energy companies may have a converse and debilitating impact.

Consider these three examples:

When Congress required tankers to have double hulls, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, in 1989, the oil companies and their lobbyists wailed that it would push up the price of gas at the pump.

Happily, the government held tough and soon oil spills in from tanker punctures were almost eliminated.

The cost? Fractions of a penny per gallon, so small they can not be easily found.

Victory to regulation, the environment and common sense. In due course, the oil companies took out advertisements to boast of their environmental sensitivity by double-hulling their tankers.

When the Environmental Protection Agency mandated a 75-percent reduction in hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions from two-stroke marine engines in 1996, with a 10-year compliance period, the boat manufacturers issued dire predictions of a slump in recreational boating and a huge loss of associated jobs.

In fact, two things happened: Two-stroke marine engines were saved with electronic fuel-injection, and four-stroke marine engines started to take over the market – the same four-stroke engines the manufacturers had said would be prohibitively expensive and too heavy for small boats.

Today, most new small boats have four-stroke engines. They are quieter, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and have added to the joy of boating. The weight and economic penalty, predicted by the anti-regulation boat manufacturers, turned out to be of no account. The problems were engineered out. That is what engineers do when they are unleashed: They design to meet the standards.

Similarly fleet-average standards,  so hated by the automobile industry, have led to better cars, greater efficiencies, a reduction in air pollution and oil imports. They also pushed the industry to look beyond the internal combustion engine to such developments hybrids and all-electric vehicles and news concepts, such as hydrogen and compressed natural gas vehicles.

A high bar produces higher jumpers. Water restrictions have produced more efficient toilets, electric appliance ratings have reduced the consumption of electricity. Regulation is sometimes incentive by another name.

Well-thought out regulation is constructive, mindless regulation deleterious -- as when the purpose is political rather than practical. Restrictions on stem cell research and the unnecessary amount of ethanol added to gasoline come to mind.

In his energy executive order, repealing many of the Obama administration's clean energy regulations, Trump has done no one any favors: Less challenge, less innovation, less protection of the environment, and less global leadership is a cruel gift.

Take coal mining. Trump wants to save coal mining jobs, but his executive order will cause coal production to increase, further glutting the market. There are ways of burning coal more cleanly and if the president wants to help the coal industry, he should be supporting these. He also might want to look at the disposition of coal ash and its possible uses, not bankrupt what is left of the coal industry by false generosity.

Trump's energy executive order might have had virtue 40-plus years ago. Back in the bleak days of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and the future shock it induced, coal was only plentiful energy source. I was one of the authors of a study, prepared for President Richard Nixon, that highlighted coal. Hence a passion that lasted through the Carter administration to gasify coal, liquefy it and back out oil with it whenever possible.

However the national genius produced a flood of innovation, leading today’s abundance of oil and gas.

The Trump administration is exhibiting a worrisome trend: fixing what is not broken, even if you have to break something to do it.

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

Chris Powell: Deal for Colt's makes Connecticut an arsenal of hypocrisy

The Colt Armory, in Hartford, in 1857.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy has made a political career out of denouncing scary-looking, military-style "assault weapons" like the one used by the disturbed young man who perpetrated the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012. Yet last week the governor announced that his administration will subsidize Colt's Manufacturing Co., a manufacturer of those weapons, with a discounted $10 million loan, $2 million of it forgivable if the company increases its workforce.

Colt came out of reorganizational bankruptcy last year and the loan will finance most of the company's purchase of its factory in West Hartford, an indication that private financing is not available to the company on favorable terms and that state government is taking substantial risk here.

Colt is a venerable name in Connecticut, where the company started in 1847, and still employs 600 people, many of them represented by a major Democratic Party constituency, the United Auto Workers union. Apparently to address the irony of the Malloy administration's subsidizing a manufacturer of "assault weapons," Colt promises to put gun-safety information on its internet site.

But Colt's internet site only adds to that irony when it promotes the company's Expanse M4 rifle, one of those "assault weapons," urging gun fanciers: "Start your adventure here." Colt's Internet site also advertises the company's manufacture of 30-round magazines, though at the governor's insistence Connecticut has outlawed magazines with capacities greater than 10 rounds.

Also advertised at Colt's site is a pistol that has been "updated to meet your concealed-carry needs," though many legislators of the governor's party, opponents of Second Amendment rights, don't like carrying handguns outside the home, and of course the governor himself proposes to make pistol permits prohibitively expensive.

So what's going on here? Colt never has pretended to be anything but a gun manufacturer. But the governor seems to be saying that guns are bad unless they are made by members of a union allied with his political party, in which case guns become a jobs program.

Thus the state once known as the arsenal of democracy may become the arsenal of hypocrisy.

xxx

A federal government report cited last week by the Connecticut Mirror finds that black public school school students in the state are almost twice as likely as white students to be taught by teachers with less than   five years of experience, the largest such such disparity in the nation.

No explanation was given, but it's either that teachers, perhaps the most politically correct professional group, are actually racist, or that many teachers tire of how their work is affected by racially disproportionate poverty, which sends them so many disadvantaged kids from poor households who are not prepared to learn. As a result teachers transfer to schools with better  demographics demographics.

Connecticut and the country really don't need government reports that only confirm the obvious -- that poverty stinks. They need reports explaining why poverty policy stinks and just keeps perpetuating poverty.

xxx

East Windsor's first selectman, Robert Maynard, shouldn't stop with prohibiting former U.S. Rep. Robert H. Steele from speaking at the town's senior citizen center because his opposition to locating a gambling casino in town might upset the old folks.

If, as Maynard maintains, East Windsor's old folks are really so frail intellectually, he should discourage them from paying any attention to the world at all and discourage them from voting. Or else he should apologize for insulting them and freedom of speech.


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

'They kept track of everything'

"The men who founded and governed Massachusetts and Connecticut took themselves so seriously that they kept track of everything they did for the benefit of posterity and hoarded their papers so carefully that the whole history of the United States, recounted mainly by their descendants, has often appeared to be the history of New England writ large.''

-- Edmund Morgan (historian)

MBTA needs to promote reliable weekend commuter train service

MBTA train at Route 128 Station on the Providence/Stoughton Line.

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

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (a Republican who, with California’s Jerry Brown,  a Democrat, may be the most able governor in America) has wisely dropped a proposal to end all weekend MBTA commuter rail service to reduce the agency’s red ink,  though apparently there might still be weekend cutbacks on some lines.

The original proposal would have made the MBTA the only commuter rail service in America to shut down on weekends! With work schedules becoming more fluid and business and building booming in Boston, such a shutdown would have been a false economy. 

Of course, labor contracts and  some other things need to be changed at the deficit-ridden agency but, still,  it produces far more wealth for Greater Boston than it costs. It does this by easing road congestion, making business schedules more reliable, reducing the disruption from bad weather, providing a service that lets people work (and sleep!) while they commute and all in all improving the quality of life in Greater Boston (and to some extent in Rhode Island, too.) And, if you tally up all the costs,  it’s always cheaper to take the train than to drive a car you own. The MBTA is a major reason that Greater Boston is prosperous.

What the MBTA needs to do is to heavily promote its weekend service to raise ridership. Regularity and reliability of service are essential for successful promotion.

A Syrian artist's 'Homeland inSecurity'

This was just sent to us by Boston's Lanoue Gallery,  which, in collaboration with the office of Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton and Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative, is presenting an  exhibition called ""Homeland inSecurity,'' featuring sculpture and installation works by Mohamad Hafez.

Mr.  Hafez, who was born in Syria and is a permanent resident of the United States, is an architect and artist currently residing with his family in New Haven. Lanoue says that the artwork featured in "Homeland inSecurity'' came out of Mr. Hafez’s "pained response'' to seeing media coverage of his homeland, which has been devastatedby a war that has turned more than 11 million Syrians into refugees. 

The exhibition showcases 20 works by Mr. Hafez, some of which feature lighting and sounds recorded in Syria giving viewers a multi-sensory experience.  It will be the largest exhibit of his work to date. He says of the exhibition opportunity, “My art is a voice for the Syrian refugees, for Muslim Americans, for forced migrants. I understand the fear of the unknown.''

Chuck Collins: Welcome to underwater nation

"The Drowned,'' by Vasily Perov (1867).

Via OtherWords.org

Are you or a loved one having trouble staying afloat? You’re truly not alone.

While the media reports low unemployment and a rising stock market, the reality is that almost 20 percent of the country lives in “Underwater Nation,” with zero or even negative net worth. And more still have almost no cash reverses to get them through hard times.

This is a source of enormous stress for many low and middle-income families.

Savings and wealth are vital life preservers for people faced with job loss, illness, divorce, or even car trouble. Yet an estimated 15 to 20 percent of families have no savings at all, or owe more than they own.

They’re disproportionately rural, female, renters, and people without a college degree. But the underwater ranks also include a large number of people who appear to be in the stable middle class. Health challenges are a major cause of savings depletion for these people, both in medical bills and lost wages.

Plenty more Americans could be vulnerable.

A financial planner will advise you to put aside three months of living expenses in financial reserves, just in case. So if your living expenses are $2,000 a month, you should try to have $6,000 in “liquidity” — money you can easily get to in an emergency.

But 44 percent of households don’t have enough funds to tide themselves over for three months, even if they lived at the poverty level, according to the Assets and Opportunity Scorecard.

Even having a positive net worth doesn’t mean you can always tap these funds, especially if wealth takes the form of home equity or owning a car.

A Bankrate survey found that 63 percent of U.S. households lack the cash or savings to meet a $1,000 emergency expense. They’d have to borrow from a friend or family, or put costs on a credit card.

Seven percent of U.S. homeowners are underwater homeowners, with mortgage debt higher than the value of their homes. And more and more people have taken on credit card debt to pay the bills. Meanwhile, student debt is rising rapidly and is projected to become one of the biggest factors in negative wealth.

Conservative scolds will blame individuals for “living beyond their means” and being financially irresponsible. And individual behavior is important. But the financial stresses facing millions of families are more likely the result of four decades of stagnant incomes.

Half the workers in this country haven’t shared in the economic gains that have mostly gone to the rich. Their real wages have stayed flat while health care, housing, and other expenses continue to rise.

So not everyone is on the edge at this time of dizzying inequality, after all. The 400 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have as much wealth together as the bottom 62 percent of the population.

This is only possible because of the expanding ranks of drowning Americans.

Some politicians will scapegoat immigrants or other vulnerable people for this suffering. When this happens, hold on tight to your purse or wallet. They’re trying to distract you from the rich and powerful elites who are rigging the rules to get more wealth and power.

They want to deflect your attention away from the reality that your economic pain is the result of deliberate government rules that give more tax cuts to the super-rich and global corporations, keep wages down, push up tuition costs, and let corporations nickel and dime you for all you’re worth.

Congress and the Trump administration are proposing to cut health care, pass more tax cuts for the rich, and give global corporations even more power over you. They promise benefits will “trickle down.”

Unless we speak up, the only trickle will be the expansion of Underwater Nation.

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.