In praise of user fees

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

plan to help maintain the 17-acre Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, in downtown Boston, may be an example for upkeep of other public parks. Since property owners near the Greenway   obviously benefit more than most people from this amenity, they’ve agreed to pay $1 million a year in a voluntary tax on the big buildings along the Greenway via aBusiness Improvement District that would defray the bulk ofyearly maintenance. The idea is to let the state reduce its spending on the park to $750,000 a year by 2020 from the current $2 million.

User taxes, including highway tolls, are very fair. You benefit. You pay.

India Point Park, in Providence, is  an example of where similar arrangements could be made to better maintain public spaces and save on local and state government spending. Certainly the Downtown Providence Improvement District has done fine work in making “Downcity’’  a lot more presentable than it was a couple of decades ago.

Boston's 'crooked steel teeth'

View of downtown Boston, with the Charles River.

I’ve been meaning to tell

you how the sky is pink

here sometimes like the roof

of a mouth that’s about to chomp

down on the crooked steel teeth

of the city,

-- From Aaron Smith's "Boston Poem''

Unforgettable Granite State squirrel

“All the time we were there, you could see that dead squirrel right out in plain sight. Whenever anyone mentions New Hampshire, that squirrel is always what I think of. I bet I’ve thought about that squirrel a million times.” 

― Wally Lamb,  from "I Know This Much Is True''

View of a protein factory

"Estuary, Looking West' (oil on canvas), by Priscilla Serafin, at Alpers Fine Art.

Chris Powell: New fast-food kiosks rebut promoters of minimum-wage rise

Electronic order kiosks have been installed as part of the renovation of the McDonald's restaurant on West Center Street in Manchester, Conn. There's no one inside the machine to ask if you want fries with that quarter-pounder with cheese. 

You push buttons to register your order yourself. Thereby hangs a tale that Connecticut's political class will do its best to ignore. The kiosks are the mocking rebuttal to the demands that Connecticut increase its minimum wage so that every job pays enough to support a family, demands rooted in the delusion of something for nothing, the delusion that employers can pay more than the market's judgment of the value of the work done.

The kiosks also are the mocking rebuttal to Connecticut's public school system, whose rising graduation rate is celebrated by Gov. Dannel Malloy even as half or more of the state's high school graduates fail to master high school math or English. Soon not even "careers" in fast food may be available to the uneducated and unskilled bearing meaningless diplomas. If they are lucky, their limited vocabularies will still include "cheeseburger" and "fries" and the kiosks will accept EBT cards so they won't have to figure the cost of their lunch

Since they are a reaction to government's impoverishing and dumbing down society and leaving young people unqualified for skilled work, the kiosks also may be a mocking rebuttal to Connecticut's newspapers, which have let government get away with it even though newspapers require customers who are literate, interested in civic life, and able to earn enough money to afford a subscription.

Four years ago, arguing that this impoverishment and dumbing down were damaging newspapers far more than the growth of the Internet was, this writer observed: "Newspapers still can sell themselves to traditional households -- two-parent families involved with their children, schools, churches, sports, civic groups, and such. But newspapers  cannot  sell themselves to households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they're living in, and couldn't afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read. And such households constitute a rising share of the population."

That observation drew denunciation around the world -- from Hartford, where the Courant editorialized against it  twice against it, giving it more scrutiny than the newspaper applied to the governor at that time, to New Zealand, where a columnist for the country's largest newspaper called it a lame excuse for the failings of this writer's own newspaper.

Single mothers and their negligent parenting, the scorners insisted, could not possibly have anything to do with the decline of the press. Yet now it is widely accepted that the impoverishment and neglect of children are the primary causes of their failure in school. Indeed, in testimony last year supporting the latest school-financing lawsuit in Connecticut, East Hartford's school superintendent echoed the infamous observation.

He said his schools are hobbled because 71 percent of their students are so poor that they qualify for free or discounted lunches, 15 percent have learning disabilities, 12 percent don't speak English, many need social workers to make up for parental neglect, and many are transient and disoriented, moving in or out of town or their school district during the school year as their families, most headed by single women, lose and regain housing.

Most such students, the superintendent said, never catch up. In spite of political correctness, no schools like that are going to produce newspaper readers, skilled workers, or good citizens.

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

Ready for the day

Morning on Rutherford Island, Maine, (Misnamed Richardson Island in earlier version of this post.)

Photo by Jon Salomon

'The Dream of Agata'

See The Dream of Agata, a short film by Kersti Jan Werdal, with music by Mark of Sugar Sleep, graphic design by Simon Lagneaux, voiceover by Serena Vintalaro and jewelry by Tapley. To see it, please hit this link or this (vimeo) link.

Berl Hartman: N.E.'s economy needs the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

How can we help ensure that our New England ocean economy continues to thrive? The answer: maximize protection for biological hot spots that nurture vulnerable populations of fish and other sea life. That’s exactly why our country created undersea monuments.

However, it’s not clear that everyone got the message. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visited New England last week as part of his review of more than two dozen national monument designations.

The Trump administration apparently plans to scale back or even revoke federal monument protections for some of our nation’s most treasured lands and ocean areas. One monument in the cross hairs is the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts — the first marine national monument off the Atlantic Coast.

There are countless, well-documented scientific reasons for protecting these treasures. But there’s another motivation for New England, and the United States, to preserve this marine monument: economics.

For an administration that prides itself on viewing policy through the lens of business, unraveling protections for the Canyons and Seamounts would be an unsound move.

This ecologically rich ocean area, about 150 miles off Cape Cod, has five undersea canyons and four dramatic submarine mountains. It is habitat to more than 1,000 species, including endangered sperm whales and Atlantic puffins. It’s also replete with corals, some of which are more than a thousand years old and reach the height of small trees. Scientists who have investigated the area say these coral formations and marine species are unique and extraordinary to behold. They are straight out of Dr. Seuss.

On behalf of the national nonpartisan business group Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), I can attest that America’s oceans are a highly valuable economic resource. Preserving a healthy ocean, with abundant populations of fish and other sea creatures, yields tremendous benefits for the region’s economy.

New England’s ocean economy supports more than 230,000 jobs. It brings in $16 billion to the region — much of it from tourism and recreation. Whale watching in New England is big business, with nearly 1 million watchers in 2008. Seabird watching is also popular. Recreational fishermen visit the closer canyons for marlin, tuna and other game fish.

As climate change threatens fish, shellfish and marine mammals elsewhere, protected canyons and seamounts serve as a refuge and nursery for at-risk marine life. Protecting these ocean wildernesses also can help fish populations. Studies show that fisheries adjacent to marine protected areas have seen spillover benefits over time.

As ocean resources are compromised, so too are the industries that depend on healthy and abundant fish and marine wildlife, including tourism, recreation and commercial fishing. In the Northeast, these sectors contribute billions of dollars annually to the gross domestic product.

To protect the outstanding ecological treasures in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is to support healthy and abundant fish and marine wildlife. And that benefits the regional economy — and the hundreds of thousands of  jobs — that depend on these ocean resources.

Berl Hartman is a founding director of the New England Chapter of Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2).

Naked and drunk

"Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.''

--    Ada Louise Huxtable 

Triumph of the old

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

U.S. public policy helps the old far more than the young. Consideran International Monetary Fund study that found that the lifetime net tax benefit in the U.S. – that is, the value of what we receive in government benefits compared to the taxes we pay – is positive for everybody over 18 but with the biggest benefit for those over 50.

But of course deficit spending (i.e., borrowing from the Chinese, etc.) has been paying for much of this. That suggests that eventually, younger people must pay much more in the new few years to cover the cost of old people on Medicare and Social Security. 

The attitude of many oldsters is: “Don't cut my Medicare, don’t cut my Social Security; I paid for those benefits!’’ Well, they only paid for part of them. As long as so many young people decline to take 20 minutes to vote, the heavy-voting oldsters will get an ever bigger slice of the pie.

Swimming through life

Untitled Pastel by Michele Poirier Mozzone, in the group show "Figure & Form,'' at ArtProv gallery, Providence, July 19-Aug. 29. The gallery says her work represents "life's journey through youth into maturity and beyond.''

Jill Richardson: J.K. Rowling needs to elevate the role of women

Via OtherWords.org

J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling Harry Potter series, just made headlines for an epic tweetstorm condemning misogyny. Referring to women politicians, she tweeted, “femaleness is not a design flaw.”

I love J.K. Rowling. I love her books. I’ve read the entire Harry Potter series cover to cover more times than I can count. And I believe J.K. Rowling is a feminist.

But her stance on overt misogyny makes me feel a need to call out the much more subtle, covert forms that our society must address if women are ever to be equal to men.

Rowling could’ve pushed this agenda forward by, for example, portraying the world of gender equality she wishes existed in reality in her books. With so many millions of children reading (and re-reading) her books each year, the world of Harry Potter plays no small role in teaching children about gender roles.

Yet in the world of Harry Potter, men and women aren’t equal at all. Men dominate, by far.

All of the political leaders are male, as are nearly all of the headmasters. So are all of the villains, with the notable exception of Bellatrix Lestrange — unless you want to count Narcissa Malfoy, who remains mostly in a wife role in her evildoing.

Harry’s role models and parental figures are nearly all male, too. The exceptions are his mother — a character who is never well developed, remaining idealized and practically saintlike throughout the series — and Molly Weasley, a shrill, overbearing nag.

The Weasleys, who become Harry’s adopted family, show readers a breadwinner-homemaker relationship in which the father works for the government while the mother stays home to clean, cook, and care for the kids.

The father is lovable, quirky, and not so strict with his children. The mother, Molly, runs the household and loves her children fiercely, but her approach to discipline portrays the worst stereotypes of women.

Hermione Granger, one of Harry’s two best friends, shows women in a positive light because she’s the top student at Hogwarts. But, like Molly Weasley, Hermione nags her friends to no end if she thinks they’re doing something wrong.

The women characters in the series are more likely to cry, whereas the men are more likely to lose control of their anger and resort to violence. And, when each wizarding school selects a pupil to compete in a competition, three boys and one girl are chosen. The girl loses to the boys badly.

This isn’t to say that all women are portrayed negatively, or all men are portrayed positively. But Rowling created a world in which most of the major characters are male and several major female characters conform to lazy or negative stereotypes of women.

Such gender stereotypes seep into our subconscious without our knowing. They don’t stand out, because they fit with the unequal treatment of gender we see in the real world.

We notice when Disney’s Moana is a princess who saves the day and doesn’t need a prince to complete her. But do we notice when the male lead in the movie, Maui, exhibits the worst traits of toxic masculinity? If Moana teaches little girls they can be heroes, what is Maui teaching little boys about becoming men?

Children learn about the world from the people around them, as well as from what they read in books or see in movies. Changing the real world is hard, but changing it in books and movies is easy.

Authors like Rowling could help socialize the next generation to treat women equally to men with a stroke of the pen.

Jill Richardson, an OtherWords,org columnist, is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. 

To work and to play with a water view

MBTA commuter boat in Boston Harbor.

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

Whatever you think of the heavy government subsidy for the Providence-Newport summertime ferry, the service provides more than just a very pleasant way to travel between the two cities. With adequate promotion it could bring many more tourists to the region. And the service’s existence is a reminder of the big potential of traveling – including commuting – by water in densely populated Rhode Island, with so much water. In parts of Europe and Asia a place like Narragansett Bay would be crowded with ferry boats year round.Fr

Massachusetts Bay has long had successful year-round MBTA ferry service connecting Hingham and  downtown Boston, although, of course, that’s a richer and more heavily populated area. Not to subsidize the Providence-Newport long enough so that it helps create a traveling habit and becomes a model for other ferry service around here would be a false economy. And wouldn’t drivers on Routes 95 and 195 prefer to have more people onboats and fewer on the roads?

Meanwhile, the small and unsubsidized Newport-Jamestown ferry service operated by Conanicut Marine Services suggests that there could eventually be a plethora of such services linking  Narragansett Bay communities. The ferry has been particularly alluring in the past few weeks with reconstruction work on the Pell Bridge causing big delays.

No Ambien needed

"The Dream,'' by Gustave Courbet

A languid atmosphere, a lazy breeze,
With labored respiration, moves the wheat
From distant reaches, till the golden seas
Break in crisp whispers at my feet.

My book, neglected of an idle mind,
Hides for a moment from the eyes of men;
Or lightly opened by a critic wind,
Affrightedly reviews itself again.

Off through the haze that dances in the shine
The warm sun showers in the open glade,
The forest lies, a silhouette design
Dimmed through and through with shade.

A dreamy day; and tranquilly I lie
At anchor from all storms of mental strain;
With absent vision, gazing at the sky,
"Like one that hears it rain."

The Katydid, so boisterous last night,
Clinging, inverted, in uneasy poise,
Beneath a wheat-blade, has forgotten quite
If "Katy DID or DIDN'T" make a noise.

The twitter, sometimes, of a wayward bird
That checks the song abruptly at the sound,
And mildly, chiding echoes that have stirred,
Sink into silence, all the more profound.

And drowsily I hear the plaintive strain
Of some poor dove . . . Why, I can scarcely keep
My heavy eyelids--there it is again--
"Coo-coo!"--I mustn't--"Coo-coo!"--fall asleep! 

-- "A Summer Afternoon,'' by James Whitcomb Riley

Life is a cabaret

"Stepping Out,'' by Bonnie P. Jaffe, in the show opening June 25 at the Providence Art Club called "Captured!  Life Through the Lenses of Bonnie P. Jaffe, Marc A. Jaffe and Eileen McCarney Muldoon.''

Facebook's damage to our democracy and civic life

Linked here is the best piece I've read about the the huge damage that Facebook has done to our democracy and overall civic life. Yes, this link is on Facebook, too, because it's a virtual monopoly, which hypocritical  CEO Mark Zuckerberg's lobbyists in Washington  assiduously protect. Likewise Google's lobbyists for that virtual monopoly. Where is the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Justice Department?

-- Robert Whitcomb

From mall to medical center

Medical providers are moving into some of the vast mall space left vacant by bricks-and-mortar retailers that are shrinking because of competition from online sales.

Med City News, picking up from a Wall Street Journal story, cites Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a prime example. Dana-Farber is converting the Atrium Mall, in Chestnut Hill, Mass. into a wellness and medical operation called Life Time Center, where Dana-Farber is a tenant.

The institute is leasing two floors of the former mall for  clinical trials, exams, infusions and support services for adult cancer patients. It plans to open by the end of 2019.

For example,  Med City reports,  UCLA Health provides primary care  out of the Village at Westfield Topanga, in Woodland Hills, Calif.; Southeastern Regional Medical Center is renting at  Lumberton, North Carolina’s Biggs Park Mall, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center runs Vanderbilt Health out of One Hundred Oaks Mall, in Nashville.

Med City reports that Eric Johnson, national director of healthcare at Transwestern Commercial Services, a real estate firm, said, in Med City’s paraphrase “malls provide the structural support to house the heavy medical equipment health systems use. On top of that, a mall’s location alone — often near a highway or busy road — can be helpful in drawing attention to a medical center.

To read the Med City piece, please hit this link.

To read The Wall Street Journal’s story upon which it’s based, please hit this link. (Subscription needed to read the article beyond the top).

Vermont's nostalgia problem

In Vermont's Green Mountains.

-- Photo by Joe Calzarette

"Where I live, in Vermont, there's this thing that women know about men, which is this disease: their childhood was so idyllic that nothing in the rest of their life can ever be satisfying. It's almost a plague.''

-- Colin Trevorrow, film director and screenwriter who lives in Vermont

'Heaven unexpected came'

A something in a summer’s day,

As slow her flambeaux burn away,

Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer’s noon,—

An azure depth, a wordless tune,      

Transcending ecstasy.

And still within a summer’s night

A something so transporting bright,

I clap my hands to see;

Then veil my too inspecting face,       

Lest such a subtle, shimmering grace

Flutter too far for me.

The wizard-fingers never rest,

The purple brook within the breast

Still chafes its narrow bed;       

Still rears the East her amber flag,

Guides still the sun along the crag

His caravan of red,

Like flowers that heard the tale of dews,

But never deemed the dripping prize       

Awaited their low brows;

Or bees, that thought the summer’s name

Some rumor of delirium

No summer could for them;

Or Arctic creature, dimly stirred        

By tropic hint —some travelled bird

Imported to the wood;

Or wind’s bright signal to the ear,

Making that homely and severe,

Contented, known, before        

The heaven unexpected came,

To lives that thought their worshipping

A too presumptuous psalm.

-  Untitled, by Emily Dickinson

Llewellyn King: Covering the White House from twilight to darkness

In the White House press briefing room.

Freedom of the press, in my view, has two parts. First there is the freedom to publish, to criticize and to petition. Then there is the critical issue of the freedom to gather the news – not just to report it, but also to gather it.

Without the freedom to gather the news, the freedom to print it, broadcast it or comment on it becomes pyrrhic. The official line predominates.

Right now, the freedom to report the news at the White House is under attack and the public’s right know is being impinged. What you get: All the news that can be leaked.

Covering the news at the White House has gotten progressively harder since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the first administrations I covered.

The Trump administration has attacked the press, ridiculed it and is starving it of critical access. Now there is talk of doing away with the daily press briefing, honored and needed. It is where the government is asked what it is doing and ideally tells the people. It is America’s answer to the much admired “Question Time” in Britain's House of Commons.

It has never been easy to cover the White House, and history is littered with the ways in which presidents sought to affect the way in which they were covered. Jack Kennedy, a darling to some reporters, so hated the coverage he was getting from The New York Herald Tribune that for a while he forbade it in the White House.

Lyndon Johnson worked over the press corps the way he worked over members of Congress: punishment and reward.

At The Washington Daily News, Wahillau La Hay worried aloud -- often in my presence -- that the file from the Scripps-Howard Washington bureau (it was an afternoon newspaper owned by Scripps-Howard) would make it hard for her to cover the social side of the White House, her assignment.

Richard Nixon believed that the press was out to get him and his famous enemies list was real. Yet he ran a surprisingly open White House, as had Johnson.

Compared to what was to follow, it was wide open. Once a reporter got through the gate you were a free agent to roam much of the grounds and to visit the West Wing, if you had someone to see. More important, you got one-on-one interviews with principles without some minder from the press office sitting in and acting as a double agent, reporting back on both the journalist and the interviewee.

After your interview, you were sometimes invited into the office of another staffer. As often as not, they wanted to know what you knew as much as you wanted to know what they knew, even during Watergate.

The best information is the information you get face-to-face, one-on-one. That has become very difficult as time has rolled on. Personally, I found George H.W. Bush open enough. I remember going over to see his chief of staff, John Sununu, without a  problem. I phoned him, got a time and went over. No press office involvement. Once, he asked me if I would like to write a speech for the president. I demurred.

Excessive leaking is a symptom, a cry from within the belly of the beast that all is not well. At this point the leakers are patriots, not criminals.

In recent administrations, the only way for White House reporters to get into conversations with White House staffers has been to travel with the president overseas: a very expensive stab in the dark. A European trip can cost more than $20,000, and few news outlets can afford the gamble. Even if you are in the pool and sitting on Air Force One, nothing is guaranteed.

If, as has been suggested, the daily briefings stop, more leaks are inevitable. If you cannot seek the information directly, you have to try and get it otherwise. If the front door is closed, a ladder up to the window is the next step. At the same time, relationships become more devious. Like an illicit love affair, no public acknowledgment in public places.

If the right to gather the news is abridged, the whole concept of a free press is diminished. The diminishment is underway.

Government in the dark is the government of authoritarians; not the kind of government one expects from a nation which prohibits the “abridging” of the press in its Constitution. Shame.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host  of White House Chronicle, on PBS.  Based in Washington, D.C., and Rhode Island, he's a frequent contributor to New England Diary. This essay first ran in Inside Sources.