Philip K. Howard: Blame Congress for our crumbling infrastructure

The infamous Bayonne Bridge.

President Trump has signaled that one of his next big initiatives will be to jump-start a trillion-dollar program to rebuild America's fraying infrastructure. As a former builder, Trump would seem to be uniquely qualified to oversee this initiative.

Rebuilding infrastructure enjoys broad public support, unlike, say, the failed rewrite of Obamacare, The economic benefits will be huge — not only improving America's competitiveness, but returning upwards of $5 on each $1 invested, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Two million new jobs would be created.

But it's all talk. What's missing is pretty basic: No one has the authority to say Go. Although supposedly in charge of the executive branch, Trump finds himself in a kind of mosh pit of overlapping statutory responsibilities and inconsistent legal mandates.

Approval processes can take a decade or longer. Environmental reviews, meant to highlight important choices, obscure them in thousands of pages of mind-numbing detail.

For projects that survive this gantlet, the delay dramatically increases costs. Uncertainties over time and cost keep many projects on the sidelines.

Governing shouldn't be this hard. Traffic bottlenecks, overflowing wastewater, rickety power grids, and crumbling dams desperately need to be fixed. All that's needed are responsible officials to give permits and allocate funding.

Who's to blame here?

Shine the spotlight on Congress. For 50 years, under Democratic and Republican control alike, Congress has piled up law after law, many with absolute mandates to protect endangered species, preserve historic structures, guarantee access to the disabled and scores of other well-meaning goals.

The accretion of statutes is matched 10:1, more or less, by agency regulations written to implement Congress's mandates. All these laws give enforcement power to 18 or so separate federal agencies — sometimes all on the same project. To top it off, almost anyone can sue based on alleged failure to comply with any of the countless requirements.

It's amazing anything gets built.

The red-tape idiocies are illustrated by the project to raise the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge, which spans the Kill Van Kull connecting New York Harbor with the Port of Newark. The roadway is too low for the larger "post-Panamax ships" (designed for the newly-widened Panama Canal), and the Port Authority thought it needed to spend $4 billion to build a new bridge or tunnel.

Then a long-time Port Authority employee, Joann Papageorgis, figured out that the roadway could just be raised within the existing arch of the bridge. The solution was like a miracle: It not only reduced costs from $4 billion to $1 billion, but also had virtually no environmental impact since it used the same foundations and right of way as the existing bridge.

Raising the Bayonne Bridge roadway was pro-environmental in every meaningful way. It would permit cleaner, more efficient ships into Newark Harbor, and avoid the environmental havoc to surrounding neighborhoods of a new bridge or tunnel.

But no official had authority to approve it without hacking through a jungle of red tape.

Here's some of the red tape: a requirement to study historic buildings within a two-mile radius even though the project touched no buildings; notice to Native-American tribes around the country to participate even though the project would not be disturbing any new ground; and 47 permits from 19 different agencies.

It doesn’t get more complicated than this

The environmental review for this project — again, a project with virtually no environmental impact — was 20,000 pages, including appendices. Proceeding on an expedited timetable, permits were finally awarded after five years. Then some self-styled environmentalists sued claiming….you guessed it, "inadequate review." The Port Authority started construction anyway, and hopes to complete the project in 2019, 10 years after the application was filed.

Where is Congress?

Only Congress has the power to change old laws, to make sure they work in the public interest. Congress's responsibility also includes making sure laws work together. Viewed alone, a law may seem perfectly reasonable.

But if all the laws cumulatively harm the public, then Congress has the obligation to change them.

The problem is, in the vast majority of cases, Congress doesn't even have the idea of fixing old law. It treats old law like the Ten Commandments — except that now it's more like the Ten Million Commandments.

Like sediment in a harbor, the accretion of old law prevents America from getting where it needs to go. What's missing is not mainly money: President Obama had over $800 billion in the 2009 stimulus but, five years later, had been able to spend only 3.6 percent on transportation infrastructure. As he put it, "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects."

What's missing is that no human has authority to use their common sense.

The harm to the public is intolerable. A study by Common Good, which I chair, found that the red-tape delays for infrastructure more than double the cost of large projects. The study also found that lengthy environmental review is dramatically harmful to the environment by prolonging polluting bottlenecks.

Environmental review is a good idea, but something is obviously amiss when the review of the environmental effects actually is environmentally harmful.

Greener countries like Germany are able to do environmental reviews and permitting on major projects in one to two years. The secret to their success is — hold on to your hats — to let officials take responsibility to make needed decisions.

All the red tape in America comes from a deliberate congressional philosophy to prevent humans from making decisions. Everything is preset in laws and rules. Thus, in American government, the concept of relevance is irrelevant.

That's why the Bayonne Bridge required a study of historic buildings even though no buildings were affected. That's why the new Tappan Zee Bridge project was required to do traffic studies even though the new bridge was not affecting traffic flow.

Restoring responsibility to officials to make decisions is the only way to end this red tape paralysis. It doesn't mean they can do whatever they want — they would still have to do an environmental review, accountable to the President and to courts in egregious cases.

But instead of overturning every pebble, officials could focus on what's important. "Oh, you're just raising the bridge roadway using the same foundations? Give 50 pages on construction impacts of the project" (not 20,000 pages).

Restoring clear lines of authority is actually simple. Common Good has proposed three pages of legislative fixes to make this vision a reality. The proposal empowers officials to determine the scope and adequacy of review, to intercede in inter-agency disputes and to expedite lawsuits to keep projects moving.

Trump recently signed an executive order designed to expedite approvals a little by giving coordinating authority to a designated official. That recommendation was based in part on Common Good's work. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao declared recently: "Business as usual is just not an option anymore." Even Senate Democrats'' proposed infrastructure plan commits to "accelerated project delivery." But talking about fixing the problem isn't enough.

Trump ultimately doesn't have legal authority to ignore these statutory dictates. Congress created all this bureaucracy. Only Congress can fix it.

And how about funding the infrastructure initiative, whenever it materializes? Congress has its head in the sand here as well.

Trump has vowed to push for a decade-long, $1 trillion initiative. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the infrastructure backlog is actually over $4 trillion, including: congestion on 40 percent of Interstate Highways; an antiquated power grid that wastes the equivalent of 200 coal-burning power plants; in New York State, 2,000 structurally deficient bridges and, in New York City leaky water mains that are almost a century old.

Delays on some of these projects could be disastrous. The two rail tunnels under the Hudson River, for example, are over 100 years old, and were damaged by superstorm Sandy. When they are forced to shut down for emergency repairs, the traffic jams could stretch for 25 miles.

Two new tunnels and other rail upgrades in and out of Penn Station are almost ready for construction. But this "Gateway Project" costs over $20 billion. Even with expedited reviews, and funding from state and local government, it will take a major financial contribution from Washington.

Yet Congress, or more accurately, the Republicans in Congress, refuse to advance any responsible plan to fund an infrastructure initiative. They don't dispute that infrastructure funding would be an excellent public investment — improving competitiveness, adding jobs and building a greener footprint. The sticking point is the Republican mantra — almost a theology — that they can never, never ever, raise any taxes.

Infrastructure does not, however, grow on trees. Trump in his campaign suggested that infrastructure could be funded with private investment.

Indeed, some infrastructure projects, such as transmission lines and toll roads, can be financed privately because they have revenue streams. But adding new lanes on congested highways, shoring up old dams and expanding sewage capacity will generally require public funding.

Where can infrastructure funding come from? One obvious source is the gasoline tax, which hasn't increased in 24 years. Raising the gasoline tax by 25 cents would raise over $40 billion per year, and fund most needed highway and transit projects. This could be supplemented by a "carbon tax" on other fossil fuels. Another funding source would be tax revenue from repatriated offshore corporate earnings.

New fees and taxes come out of our pockets, of course. But kicking the can down the road will cost us far more. An hour stuck in a traffic jam is multiple times more expensive than an extra 25 cents on each gallon of gasoline. Deferring maintenance is generally economically disastrous — increasing costs by a factor of 10, as occurred when the cables and girders of Williamsburg Bridge had to be replaced due to decades of neglect.

Doesn't Congress have a responsibility to do what's right here? Our parents and great-grandparents paid for the infrastructure that we now use. A great city, a great country, can't thrive with decrepit roads, rails and pipes.

Every time you're in a traffic jam — starting, say, this afternoon — think about Congress. It created a paralytic regulatory structure that prevents fixing infrastructure. Now it also refuses to help pay for it. Only Congress can cut these bureaucratic knots, raise funds, and get America moving again.

Philip K. Howard is chairman of Common Good, a legal- and regulatory-reform organization, a New York City-based civic leader, a lawyer, author of, most recently. The Rule of Nobody and a photographer.

Of roads and evolution

A Spotted Salamander, whose range includes southern New England.

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

WNPR, a Public Radio station in Connecticut, ran an intriguing little feature the other week headlined “Along Highways, Wildlife Appears to Be Breaking Evolutionary Speed Limit’’ .  See:  http://wnpr.org/post/along-highways-wildlife-appears-be-breaking-evolutionary-speed-limits

The story, which focuses on New England ecology, looks at “how roads, and the salts and chemicals we put on those roads, impact nearby nature. Some impacts are visible: think road kill and fragmented habitat.’’

Steven Brady, an evolutionary ecologist who has been working with a Dartmouth College-led research group, reports:

"Individual plants that are living right next to a road, in a couple different cases, have evolved the ability to deal with higher concentrations of things like lead, from fuel’’.

Mr. Brady has studied how roads affect amphibians in northeastern Connecticut. He notes that rapid evolution has a time element but also plays out in isolated pockets of space. Across ‘’just tens of meters, scientists are seeing differences in how one group of amphibians evolves compared to another nearby population,’’ the text with the broadcast says.

Colin Donihue, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University who studies how lizards evolve in human-dominated landscapes, said that species are evolving within human life spansmakes conservation more of a moving target.

"That idea that ecology and evolution happen on commensurate time scales and can actually feed back and forth to affect each other is a really powerful new way of looking at the interplay of ecology and evolution,"  Mr. Donihue told WNPR.

"The things we do to the planet -- even when they seem minimal, like a road through a forest -- are not only causing this impact on how well a population does, but it's fundamentally changing the biology of the organisms that live there,’’ Mr. Brady said.

That evolution is happening fastest in places where global warming is fastest, such as Rhode Island.

The naked king of the con men

Sam Pizzigati: A history of taxes in one mega-rich family -- the Rockefellers

New York Gov. and then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was embarrassed  to disclose  how little money he had -- relatively speaking.

David Rockefeller recently passed away.

You may have already heard that news. You may have not. America’s major media outlets haven’t treated Rockefeller’s death — at age 101 — as a top-of-the-news story.

How things change. Once upon a time, any breaking news that involved a Rockefeller almost automatically qualified as news not to be missed. And for good reason.

A century ago, David Rockefeller’s granddad, John D. Rockefeller, ranked as America’s richest man. No other fortune in the United States — or the world — came even close in size to his.

Old John D. passed away in 1937 at age 97. Newspapers treated his death as a mega big deal. Front-page headlines everywhere. Editorial pages filled with reflections on his long and lucrative life.

One of those reflections came from America’s most noted 20th-Century pundit, columnist Walter Lippmann. The nation, Lippmann observed, would likely never see a fortune as grand as Rockefeller’s ever again. John D. had “lived long enough to see the methods by which such a fortune can be accumulated outlawed by public opinion, forbidden by statute, and prevented by the tax laws.”

In the United States, Lippmann added, “sentiment has turned wholly against the private accumulation of so much wealth.”

John D. Rockefeller raged mightily against that public sentiment over his life’s last decades. He fiercely denounced, for instance, the drive to enact a federal income tax.

“When a man has accumulated a sum of money within the law,” old John D. intoned, “the people no longer have any right to share in the earnings resulting from the accumulation.”

The people felt otherwise. A federal income tax became the law of the land in 1913. That tax would go on to whittle down the fortune  that John D. later left his six grandchildren.

The most celebrated of those six, longtime New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, would end up feeling intensely embarrassed about his diminished financial status, as one Washington insider discovered in 1974.

That insider, a veteran lobbyist by the name of Tom Korologos, vetted Nelson Rockefeller to be vice president, a job in which he served until 1977.

“I’ve got something to worry about,” Korologos remembers Nelson grimacing. The former governor, Korologos soon learned, didn’t want to publicly reveal his personal financial picture.

“His concern,” the vetter explained, “was that when it became public, he wasn’t going to be as rich as everybody thought he was.”

What had happened to the fabled Rockefeller family fortune? Taxes.

Beginning in the early 1940s and lasting into the 1960s, the federal tax rate on individual income over $200,000 annually hovered around 90 percent.

And many states also had their own progressive taxes. In New York, the state tax rate on top-bracket income stood at 15.375 percent.

Deep pockets could, of course, deduct their state taxes off their federal taxable income. But those deductions didn’t change the basic bottom line: The extravagantly rich, in mid-20th Century America, were losing their capacity to be extravagant.

Nelson Rockefeller passed away in 1979, just before the Reagan Revolution began undoing the progressive tax system that had so shaved his net worth. His younger brother David, a banker, lived on to prosper in the rich-people-friendly political environment  that the Reagan years ushered in.

Where Nelson watched his wealth shrink, David saw his wealth soar. At his death, Forbes magazine put David’s net worth at $3.3 billion, the world’s 604th largest fortune.

What would John D. Rockefeller think about how his last grandchild’s life turned out? He might be a tad disappointed that his flesh and blood no longer ranked as the richest of the world’s rich. But he’d probably be overjoyed that in America the rich still rule.

At least for now.

Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, co-edits Inequality.org. His latest book is The Rich Don't Always Win. 

Beautiful in any season

"Fall, Fort Wetherill, Jamestown {R.I.}'' (monotype, archival ink, colored pencil), by Elizabeth Goddard in her show with Regina Partridge, "The Lay of the Land,'' at the Providence Art Club.

'All the trees are put on edge'

"Spring slattern of seasons
you have soggy legs
and a muddy petticoat
drowsy

is your hair your
eyes are sticky with
dream and you have a sloppy body from

being brought to bed of crocuses
when you sing in your whisky voice
the grass rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge

spring
of the excellent jostle of
thy hips
and the superior"

--  E. E. Cummings, ''Spring Onmipotent Goddess Thou''

Circular incarceration

"Circular Logic'' (steel and concrete), by Isabel Mattia, at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, Mass.  She references the "circular logic embedded in the design of our prison systems. They rely, she says, paraphrasing left-wing activist Angela Davis, on "the perception that certain people are inherently criminalized, and are self-perpetuating due to financial incentives to keep these people incarcerated.''

Bright cold dystopian day

"Happy 1984" (in Spanish) stencil graffito, denoting mind control via a video game controller, on a standing piece of the Berlin Wall, 2005.

''It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.''

-- George Orwell, from Nineteen Eight-Four

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''