Vox clamantis in deserto
'Exotic wayfarers' from 'away'
Panoramic view of Willoughby Notch and Mount Pisgah, on the "Northeast Kingdom''.
- Photo by Patmac13
"During the years that I lived with my grandparents in Lost Nation Hollow , a number of itinerant specialists could be counted on to visit Kingdom County {Vermont's "Northeast Kingdom''} each year. I had no idea where most of these exotic wayfarers hailed from. "Away,'' most of us called anywhere more than five miles beyond the county line. Or' the other side of the hills.' All I knew for certain is that since we could not go to them, the mind readers and barnstorming four-man baseball teams and one-elephant family circuses came to us.''
-- Howard Frank Mosher, in Northern Borders
While the water's still warm
"Insight'' (pastel), by Michele Poirier-Mozzone, in the show "A Summer Collection,'' at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, South Yarmouth, Mass., through Aug. 27.
James P. Freeman: Using the espionage act against journalists
“Some of these people [columnists and commentators] have been known to make up, or willfully distort, information to support their political preferences.”
— Jody Powell, 1984, The Other Side of the Story
It may be a gnarly revelation.
President Trump is not the first president to wage war with journalists. As Jody Powell, a press secretary to Jimmy Carter in his presidency, understands. Forty years ago, Powell explains over 314 pages, “when the news seemed to me, then …, to be wrong, unsupportable, and unfair.” And, perhaps, fake.
Every president from George Washington to Barack Obama has expressed dismay about the press but, as the Los Angeles Times notes, “none have gone as far as Trump in their public derision.” Even so, few should be surprised by the graffiti artist from New York who came to Washington to deface standard protocols of public life, including media relations. So why is there such acute anxiety over Trump’s repeated calls this year about his arbitrarily defined “fake news” (“the enemy of the people”) against a further arbitrarily- defined “failing media”? Because some fear that he will invoke The Espionage Act as a form of retribution against journalists.
That prospect was recently broached by George Freeman (no relation to me), executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former longtime New York Times attorney.
In June 1917, a couple of months after America’s entry into World War I, Congress passed The Espionage Act, further strengthened and amended by The Sedition Act of 1918. The laws were intended to ensure the nation’s security after President Woodrow Wilson had demanded protection from what he called “the insidious methods of internal hostile activities.” Thousands of dissenters were prosecuted. While the Sedition Act was repealed after WWI, major portions of the Espionage Act remain part of U.S. law today.
At their core, many provisions sought to fundamentally bar many forms of communication (profane, abusive and disloyal speech) concerning the government, the flag, military forces of the United States, or any uniform connected to the American military. Such sweeping legislation, which placed severe and undue impediments on free speech, was challenged early in U.S. courts.
But no other modern legal challenge to free speech, as it relates to the freedom of the press, was more important than the landmark First Amendment case of New York Times v. Sullivan (1964). The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of The Times. Free and open debate about the conduct of public officials, the court reasoned, was more important than occasional, honest factual errors that might hurt or damage officials’ reputations. Associate Justice Hugo Black wrote: “An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.” The decision largely eliminated sedition as a crime. Fifty years later, Roy S. Gutterman, a journalism and communications law professor at Syracuse University, reasonably concluded, “This decision changed the way reporters and journalists could operate and transformed commentary, newsgathering, criticism, even parody and satire.”
Still, The Espionage Act is potent.
Freeman is concerned about the present, given the extreme unpredictability of a president who equally craves and crucifies the press -- especially a president whose administration seems oddly susceptible to frequent leaks of its own, and a president with a remarkable proclivity for calling any news he is discomfited by fake news.
While Freeman concedes that act has never been used to prosecute a journalist, let alone successfully, “that crucial distinction is somewhat in doubt.” If President Trump “actually tries to prosecute a journalist or publication that,” Freeman fears, “merely accepts and publishes a leak of information arguably covered by the Espionage Act — as opposed to just the leaker him/herself — that’s when the Trump offensive against the press will go to a whole new and terribly dangerous level.” He adds that, despite leaks of sensitive government information that the press has published throughout its history, “no president nor prosecutor has {fully} gone after the press.”
However, provocative Freeman’s thesis, though, he is wrong in believing that President Obama “defended ordinary newsgathering, including the reception of leaks.” Indeed, President Obama opened the door for waging a larger war on the press.
In eight years, the Obama administration prosecuted nine cases involving leakers and whistle blowers, compared with a total of three cases by all previous administrations. An analysis appearing in The New York Times last December by James Risen shows that Obama repeatedly used the Espionage Act “not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.” Risen, an investigative reporter, writes that, under Obama, the U.S. Justice Department and FBI “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting, and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.”
In 2010, Obama’s Justice Department obtained a search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s private email during an investigation. In an affidavit supporting the search warrant, an FBI agent accused the reporter of conspiring to violate the Espionage Act.
Obama’s team may have adopted a “zealous, prosecutorial approach” due to large-scale leaks by Chelsea Manning and later by Edward Snowden, says Risen. And he cites the Valerie Plame case during President George W. Bush’s administration, where Plame was outed as a C.I.A. employee and former operative, which in turn “led to a series of high-profile Washington journalists being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury and name the officials who had told them about her identity.”
Today, Risen asserts, many press freedom groups believe that Obama’s “record of going after both journalists and their sources has set a dangerous precedent that Mr. Trump can easily exploit.” So, what has Trump been up to? Following Obama’s lead.
In Part III of a compelling series by Freedom of the Press Foundation, on the 100th anniversary of The Espionage Act, senior reporter Peter Sterne last month wrote, “Espionage Act prosecutions of journalists’ sources have continued under the administration of President Donald Trump and only look to get worse.” While Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was the recipient and publisher of the classified documents leaked by Manning, Obama’s Justice Department, we are reminded, declined to publicly issue charges against WikiLeaks. But the case is still technically open. Nonetheless, the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions has indicated that it intends to seek Assange’s arrest.
This past spring, The New York Times reported a purported conversation earlier this year between President Trump and then-FBI Director James Comey, alone together in the Oval Office. A reporter wrote: “Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.”
Regarding "fake news'' (2016’s “Words of the Year”), a phrase modernized, not coined, by Facebook, the social-media company has made efforts to supposedly combat fake news and help support journalists. Facebook Journalism Project has led to modifications in its publishing tools, among other changes. Could Facebook, as a distributor of news, one day be implicated or prosecuted in the dissemination of sensitive and classified information, let alone fake news? President Trump might think so.
Meanwhile, history repeats itself at the White House.
Jody Powell believed “that our relations with the press began to fray in the late summer of 1977,” a few months into Carter’s first term, a president whose party controlled both houses of Congress. With abject chaos surrounding his relationship with journalists, culminating (so far) with the resignation of his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, the same sentiments may be echoed in the summer of 2017, a few months into Trump’s first term, a president whose party also controls both houses of Congress.
James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer and former columnist with The Cape Cod Times. His work has also appeared in The Providence Journal, newenglanddiary.com and nationalreview.com. This piece first appeared in the New Boston Post.
'Replete and satisfied'
"August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied."
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
Get tough on taggers
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' on GoLocal24.com
Localities and states need to get much tougher on graffiti “taggers’’ on publicly owned structures. Such public vandalism should be treated as felonies, with serious jail time, not as misdemeanors. And police and the rest of the law-enforcement community should make sure that photos of these people, who are mostly young males, be widely distributed to the public.
I was reminded of the need for this long-overdue change while reading about the graffiti guys’ attack on David Macaulay’s beautiful mural on a retaining wall alongside Route 95 in Providence. The state gave up and painted it over.
The effect of graffiti itself, and of leaving it visible far toolong, is much more serious than some might think. It signals lawlessness and menace to residents and visitors and tends to make people want to avoid areas where it’s common. Thus it’s bad for public morale and the economy.
It’s particularly offensive and depressing in such older areas as southern New England, with considerable manmade beauty in the form of old buildings.
Make this public vandalism a felony.
Chris Powell: The decline of civic engagement and newspapers
What happens to local news when there are no local news organizations? What happens to communities without local news? The Washington Post tried to answer those questions the other day, using as an example East Palo Alto, Calif., where many news organizations are nearby but none pays attention to the town.
Interesting as the Post's report was, the answers to its questions were a bit obvious: that without local news, communities stay ignorant of themselves; government decisions are made with less participation; problems are not well communicated; corruption increases; and communities lose their identity.
A related question may be more important: What is behind the decline of local news? The decline is manifested by the fall of newspaper circulation, the closing of scores of dailies and weeklies, and the collapse of newspaper employment by more than half since 2001.
The easy answer is the Internet. But while the Internet competes with newspapers for people's time, as radio and television did, it seldom provides local news. Instead the internet enables people to engage in virtual communities, to immerse themselves in interests that may span the nation or even the world -- sports teams, the stock market, movies, and such -- but at the expense of the attention people pay to their geographic communities.
Most of what remains of local news is still produced by newspapers, and the few Internet sites carrying local news are supported mainly by charitable donations because local businesses don't find internet advertising effective.
The real problem with the decline of local news, as that Washington Post story implied, is demographics. While East Palo Alto, a working-class town with a heavily minority population, lacks local news coverage, its wealthy neighbor, Palo Alto, receives plenty of coverage from local dailies and weeklies.
For Palo Alto's median household income is three times higher than East Palo Alto's, and local news is the most expensive part of journalism, since, while important locally, it is potentially of interest to fewer people than national and world news. Even the most compelling local news story may induce only a few thousand people to pay something for it, while millions of people may pay something for the most compelling national or world news story.
So while struggling communities need local journalism more, they can afford it less -- and they have less interest in it, for their residents are less literate and involved.
Indeed, the decline of local newspapers may correspond less with the rise of the internet than with the collapse of civic engagement as measured by voting in elections, which has been diminishing steadily for half a century. Today even in Connecticut a quarter or more of the population doesn't register to vote.
In a lecture a week ago in his hometown of Winsted, Conn., the country's foremost civic activist, Ralph Nader, noted that most schools fail to teach civic engagement and critical thinking.
Sometimes it's hard to see what the schools are teaching at all, especially when the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress tests show that even in Connecticut most high school seniors never master high school math or English. Such students are not prepared to become newspaper readers, much less citizens.
In the end communities will get local news only if they are willing and able to pay for it and value civic engagement. As public policy keeps dumbing down and impoverishing Connecticut and the country, demographic trends are otherwise.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Respite in the woods
"The Window'' (acrylic, copper and steel), by Aneleise Ruggles, in the group exhibition "Finding Solace in the Woods,'' featuring 15 sculptural pieces in the Elaine and Philip Beals Preserve, Southboro, Mass., through Sept. 14. The exhibition touts the woods as one of the "few places to find quiet moments of respite and meditation away from the stress of daily life.'' The idea here is to "create a symbiosis between nature and art.''
Playing in Portsmouth
Busker in down Portsmouth, N.H.
Photo by William Morgan, noted architectural historian and photographer
Affirmative-action angst
The earliest known image of Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., in the February 1793 issue of Massachusetts Magazine. The college, officially founded in 1769, was an outgrowth of a Connecticut school for educating Native Americans founded in 1755.
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
In other education news, the Trump administration, playing to its white male base, wants to sue colleges to block affirmative-action programs aimed at increasing the number of people of color on campuses. The implication is that black and Hispanic students get far more help than do white kids. (Asian-American students are put in another category.)
I’m not crazy about formal affirmative-action programs but colleges have, and should have, many things to consider when putting together classes. For example, many of the most prestigious colleges, including the Ivy League, give a big preference to “legacies,’’ those students, most of whom are white, with alumni parents or other close relatives.
Indeed, rich (mostly white) kids get a big advantage in admissions. First, they (or, rather, their families) can pay full tuition, a not minor consideration for admissions officers. Second, being already affluent, they and their families are naturally more likely to donate to their colleges before and after graduation – especially the legacy students. Thus Jared Kushner, with mediocre high school marks, got into Harvard – after his father donated $2.5 million to that illustrious institution. It’s unknown if Donald Trump’s rapacious multimillionaire real-estate operator father, Fred, wrote a donation check to get young Donald Trump into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School as a transfer student from Fordham.
Finally, a thought experiment forwhite people: Do you really think that life would have been easier for you as a black person?
Probablythe fairest way to do college affirmative action in our increasingly genealogically plutocratic society is to make more of an effort to enable low-and-middle-income to attend. That would particularly benefit people of color, as well as poor whites.
Wex, a fast-growing Maine tech company, to build new headquarters in Portland
This from the New England Council (nec.com):
"WEX is one step closer to building a new global headquarters in Portland, ME, after the City Council’s Economic Development Committee approved Wex’s bid.
"Wex, a Maine-based international technology company, currently has 800 of its 2,700 employees in Maine and will add an additional 500 with the completion of their new building. The new global headquarters will not only be of use to Wex as a recruiting tool, but it will also be of great value to the city of Portland. The proposed building would be 100,000 square feet and four stories with 10,000 square feet of retail space. The City Council is expected to finalize the deal on August 21st.
'''We’re looking forward to hearing from the public regarding the committee’s selected development proposal and our purchase and sale agreement,' City Councilor David Brenerman, chair of the city’s Economic Development Committee, said in a written statement. “This is truly an exciting opportunity to attract the world headquarters of a major Maine-based international business that will bring almost 500 new high-quality jobs to Portland’s eastern waterfront.”
"The New England Council congratulates WEX on its continued growth and success.''
Candace Williams: On the affordability of New England's colleges and universities
Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
The affordability of public colleges and universities, whose primary mission is to serve state residents, is top-of-mind for students and parents, institutional leaders and state policymakers. NEBHE's 2016-17 tuition & fees report "New England Fast Facts: The Price of Public Colleges in New England, 2016-17'' shows that since fall 2011, tuition and required fees have risen 16% at community colleges and 18% at 4-year institutions. Over that same period, enrollment in the region’s public institutions has fallen by 3.5%—a trend that is expected to continue due to a projected 14% decline in the number of new high school graduates in New England by 2032.
State and institutional financial aid awards seek to lower the sticker price of college. While individual financial aid packages vary, at least one program is fairly easy to predict and summarize: the federal Pell Grants. On average, Pell Grants continue to cover tuition and fees for students in the lowest income quintile in New England who are enrolled at community colleges. At the 4-year level, Pell Grants covered 60% of tuition and fees for students in the lowest income quintile in 2007-08. Today, the maximum Pell Grant pays for about half of a year’s tuition and fees at 4-year institutions.
These trends are forcing institutions and systems to get creative to ensure affordability for students, maintain enrollment and meet the needs of regional employers, who increasingly demand workers with postsecondary credentials.
In New Hampshire, a state known for its high in-state tuition prices, tuition has been frozen at community colleges. Meanwhile, the University of New Hampshire introduced the Granite Guarantee, which will provide free tuition to any full-time freshmen who are eligible for Pell Grants.
Rhode Island, with the leadership of Gov. Gina Raimondo, successfully passed a free college proposal for students entering the Community College of Rhode Island, beginning in fall 2017.
Maine, which consistently has the lowest in-state tuition rates in New England, has launched an effort, known as the Flagship Match, to extend competitive out-of-state tuition rates to residents of the five other New England states, as well as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.
Nevertheless, budget shortfalls continue to jeopardize state’s efforts to address college affordability. Maine is expected to raise tuition in 2018 for the first time in over six years, while higher education leaders in Massachusetts and Connecticut wrestle with budget and tuition constraints.
Candace Williams is NEBHE's associate director of policy & research.
Frank Carini: Selfish climate-change deniers helping to ruin the world for short-term profit
Climate-change deniers are selfish, or possibly scared. The debate they have managed to manufacture is artificial, like much of the food we consume. It’s fake news.
Whatever you want to call it — climate change, global warming, overpopulation — humans, in a short period of cosmic time, have had a tremendous impact on the planet, its climate and its ecosystems. Much of it to the detriment of life.
To think that 7.5 billion people, plus the more than 100 billion who have come and gone, haven’t had an impact is the very definition of denial. Why can’t we admit it and work to lessen the impact. The answer, sadly, is simple: greed. Sacrifice is for someone else.
We spew some 9.5 gigatons of global greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels into the atmosphere annually. We’ve done so for decades. One gigaton is equivalent to a billion metric tons, or more than 100 million African elephants or 6 million blue whales. If you think all that accumulating pollution isn’t having an impact on the planet, on the climate, you are divorced from reality. Pull your head out of the tar sands.
Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, which we generate in abundance, are altering the climate, changing ocean chemistry and helping the seas rise. Science doesn’t lie. But politicians, CEOs and Big Business frequently do.
Diversity created the planet on which we live, and we have spent our limited existence on this sphere stamping it out, for short-term individual gain.
Our hubris led directly to the demise of passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets and great auks, to name but a few. We have overfished and trashed the oceans. We felled cypress forests to sell mulch. New Orleans drowned as a result.
We treat the planet and life on it as if it is a free all-you-can-eat buffet. Profit trumps life. Drill, mountain mine and blast, baby.
Climate-change deniers like to argue that the planet’s rising seas and changing climate are just part of a natural cycle. They’re correct, but they also like to ignore the fact our activities play a major role. We’re changing and speeding up the process. We’re putting future generations at risk, and destroying life-creating/sustaining natural systems.
We’ve replaced natural coastal buffers, such as salt marshes and mangroves, with homes, roads, restaurants and tourist attractions, making our built-up shorelines vulnerable to storm surge, flooding and erosion. We're currently filling runoff-capturing wetlands to build another Rhode Island casino.
We dynamite and bleach coral reefs to capture fish for aquariums. We poach rhinos and elephants for their ivory. We slaughter sharks for their fins. None of these ongoing massacres are required for our survival.
We support diversity-killing monoculture so multinationals can control the world’s food supply. We poison water resources to save money or make money.
The only way to get better is to admit we're having an impact, a bigly one. We need to be educated and conscious consumers. We need to be stewards, not mindless devourers. It requires sacrifice.
Frank Carini is editor of the ecoRI News.
Public hearing on Stone House's request to let scheduled weddings, receptions proceed
The Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I.
A public hearing is set for 7 p.m., Aug. 10, on Stone House’s request to the Little Compton Town Council to let the venue fulfill its agreements with families for long-scheduled weddings and receptions.
The request is made in order to eliminate further stress on those families who had expected to hold such events at the Stone House during the rest of the 2017 season. The Stone House was required to cease conducting such events until the Town Council grants the Stone House an entertainment license. But according to Town Code §6-7.6, the council may waive any requirement of the entertainment license ordinance. Thus the Stone House urges the council to exercise its discretion and let these very socially and emotionally important events go forward.
On Monday, August 7, 2017, the Stone House filed an application seeking zoning relief pursuant to the Superior Court’s recent order along with an application for an entertainment license in hopes of obtaining the council’s immediate approval to let the historic venue conduct its remaining 2017 events. The Stone House requested an expedited hearing on its application for zoning relief but a hearing date has not yet been scheduled.
However, a public hearing on the Stone House’s entertainment license application will be held at the Town Council Meeting Thursday, August 10, 2017 at 7 p.m. in the Little Compton Town Hall, at 40 Commons. The Stone House encourages anyone who has an interest in these scheduled events to attend.
In light of the pending application for zoning relief and the potentially very heavy impact on the Stone House’s clients, the Stone House has requested that the Town Council exercise its power to permit the aforementioned events to be conducted as originally scheduled or with any additional conditions or restrictions that the Town Council wishes to impose to satisfy councilors’ concerns.
The wages of sin are fun
"Seb and Claire Illegally stream a Movie'' (sculpture), by Evan Morse, in a group show at the New Art Center, Newton, Mass., Oct. 27-Dec. 2.
David Warsh: Of 'guardians' and 'commerce-seekers'
It’s not easy to find a disinterested and well-informed view of the Russian economy these days. I don’t know a better source among economists than Kenneth Rogoff, of Harvard University.
The former chief economist of the IMF (2001-03) has no axe to grind as far as I can tell, beyond a certain taste for good housekeeping and global order. (His wife, Natasha Lance Rogoff, produced Sesame Street for Russian television in the Nineties.) An early diagnostician of the severity of the 2008 financial crisis, he was author, with fellow Harvard professor Carmen Reinhart, of This Time Is Different (Princeton, 2009). As a reformer, he wants to rein in on cash, especially $100 bills. Rogoff wrote up a recent estimate of Russia for Project Syndicate, a source of op-ed articles by economists.
He made two basic points.
The first is that 25 years after the Soviet Union came apart, Russia remains a victim of the resource curse, and therefore highly vulnerable to the cycle of commodity prices. The great preponderance of its foreign earnings come from the export of oil and gas. With the price of a barrel of oil at $119 Russia was riding high as Dimitri Medvedev completed his sole term as president, in February 2012.
Vladimir Putin began his third term just as the cycle turned down. The price of oilfell to $27 a barrel in 2016. A deep recession accompanied the plunge, comparable to what the US suffered in 2008-09, Rogoff wrote, with real output contracting 4 percent. The ruble fell by half against the dollar, forcing consumers to cut back sharply. The Ukraine crisis welled up halfway through the downturn: Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Moscow; the annexation of Crimea followed, and brought U.S. and European sanctions that exacerbated the recession, as least somewhat.
That Russia avoided a financial crisis, Rogoff wrote, owed largely to the efforts of the Central Bank of Russia, and its governor, Elvira Nabiullina. Despite strenuous objections by various oligarchs, she kept interest rates high to control inflation (cut from 15 percent to 4 percent) and forced banks to raise capital and write down loans (at least the smaller, less politically-connected banks). Twice Nabiullina has been cited by the trade press as central banker of the year. Putin reappointed her in March to a second five-year term.
Rogoff’s second point: Russia suffers from the failure to diversify its economy. The price of oil is back to around $50 a barrel but growth prospects for the year are barely 2 percent. The Economist reported last week that Daimler-Benz broke ground on a new Mercedes-Benz plant northwest of Moscow — the first such foreign automaker investment since sanctions were imposed three years ago.
Russian media blame the sanctions, Rogoff wrote, but far more pervasive are the problems identified by economist Sergei Guriev – weak institutions, courts inparticular. Guriev, head of Moscow’s prestigious New School of Economics, fled in 2013 rather than risk retribution for his opposition to Putin’s third presidential term. He is today chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “Without reform” wrote Rogoff, “there is little reason to be optimistic about Russia’s long-term growth trend… despite having an enormously talented and creative population.”
I have a lot of sympathy for central bankers. In principle, and sometimes in practice, they are among the most importantan protectors of social order. Reading about Nabiullina, whose contributions Putin underscores by regularly referring to her in public by her first name, I realized the extent to which I see the story of Russia’s transition through the eyes of Jane Jacobs, the American-born Canadian social philosopher.
In her last major book, Systems of Survival:A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (Random House, 1992), Jacobs distinguished between two different and distinct ethical systems – syndromes, she called them – that had evolved over millennia to govern human conduct in different spheres of life.
Guardians (a term she took from Plato) are custodians of the political order – leaders, priests, soldiers, police, bureaucrats and, yes, central bankers. An extensive commercial class called the bourgeoisie has grown up in the last several hundred years as well — traders, or commerce-seekers, in Jacobs’s terminology, as opposed to guardians. The two ways of life are essentially incompatible. Problems arise when one moral code or another gets too much of an upper hand in society; or when values are commingled.
Jacobs enumerated aspects of the two codes:
Guardians shun trading, exert prowess, cherish obedience and discipline, adhere to tradition, respect hierarchy, prize loyalty, take vengeance, deceive for the sake of the task, embrace leisure, dispense largesse, behave ostentatiously, remain exclusive, show fortitude, remain fatalistic, and treasure honor.
Commerce-seekers shun force, compete, prize efficiency, are open to inventiveness and novelty, use initiative and enterprise, come to voluntary agreements, respect contracts, dissent for the sake of the task, are industrious, thrifty, invest for productive purposes, collaborate easily with strangers and aliens, promote comfort and convenience, are optimistic, honest.
Russia has been investing heavily in its guardian class since 1993 – the men and women of power known as siloviki. What chance is there that leaders who already recognize the necessity of a rising commercial class will accommodate it with new ways and institutions in the future – sooner or later? Pretty good, I’d say. But what a lot of tension in the meantime!
. xxx
Marshall Goldman, a mainstay of the Wellesley College Department of Economics for several decades, died last week, at 87. He was well known, too, as an expert on the mysteries of the USSR’s centrally-planned economy, appearing frequently on television. As a member of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, he wrote six books about the Soviet transition
Goldman had one major scoop as a Sovietolgist, according to David Engerman, of Brandeis University: The USSR in Crisis (Norton 1983) broke the news and galvanized the public debate about the future of the Soviet Union, just as the Reagan arms build-up reached its peak. Goldman followed up with five more books, concluding with Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia (Oxford, 2012). Those six books constitue an indelible record of what we knew (and thought we knew) and how we knew it (or didn’t) — a first-rate first draft of the history of those years.
David Warsh is proprietor of economicprincipals. com, where this first ran.
Jill Richardson: A tale of two big beach states
This summer, a heroic group of good samaritans rescued nine stranded swimmers at a Florida beach by forming a human chain.
Initially, two young boys were stranded in the ocean by a rip current. As adults swam out to try to save them and couldn’t return to shore themselves, the number of people in danger grew.
The same day, on the opposite coast, I went with a friend and her kids to the beach. She had to stay on shore to care for her baby, so when the older children asked me to go in the water with them, I agreed. Even though my friend would be watching them from the shore, it seemed safest to have an adult with them in the water.
We hadn’t been in the water five minutes before a lifeguard approached us on a jet ski. We were swimming in a rip current, he said. We needed to move. He showed us where to move to so that we would be safer. And we did.
There was no drama at the beach that day. No rescues, no near-death experiences.
Just a group of kids and two supervising adults having a great time in the water and playing in the sand. The kids found seashells and poked at sea anemones in the tide pools. They found a slimy sea slug that squirted purple ink, and saw brown pelicans flying overhead.
Unlike the people in Florida, we didn’t make the news.
The beach in Florida had no lifeguard. That’s why, even after the first two boys became stranded, nobody but other beachgoers attempted to help them out. All nine people were struggling to stay afloat while help was called when the onlookers decided to form a human chain.
It’s the sort of story that restores your faith in humanity — but it’s not the whole story. With a lifeguard present, that day at the beach in Florida would’ve resembled my day at the beach in California, in which the worst thing that happened was that the kids fought over the sand toys.
Life in California comes with liberal “big government” at its finest. The state was the first to ban smoking in bars and restaurants back in 1995. Our cars must pass an emissions test before the state will register them. Warnings that just about everything on the planet might give you cancer are a staple in our lives.
But it’s occasions like this that remind me that it’s worth it.
It’s worth it to pay taxes so that there are lifeguards at the beach. Smog is a real problem here, so I’m even glad our cars are regulated. Without the regulations, the smog would be worse.
Sure, taxes run high. But I’d even be willing to pay more if it would finance more wildfire fighters — or, better yet, public transportation, because wildfires and traffic are two problems that the government could go a long way toward solving if it had the money.
Of course, our regulations aren’t all perfect, and it’s seldom fun to pay taxes or obey rules.
But for those of us who can’t hire private lifeguards to follow us around, pooling resources is a great way to make sure that when you get caught in a rip current — literally or figuratively — you don’t have to depend on the kindness of strangers to save your life.
Jill Richardson is a columnist for OtherWords.org and the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
Charles Pinning: In Newport, an alarming case of summer substance abuse
Money changes everything.
It was late morning and a sultry spell had settled over Newport. The beginning of August spelled just one more month of freedom, and I lay on my bed, bored, my gaze settling on the blue piggy bank on the bureau top. My recent birthday had caused it to ingest an unusually large meal of paper currency.
Staring at the ceramic piggy, something occurred to me that, oddly enough, had never presented itself before: I suddenly knew exactly what I could do, and was going to do, with some of that cash. Slipping a finger through the ring of piggy’s red cork nose, I fished out a dollar bill, put on my sneakers and headed downstairs.
“Where are you going?” asked my mother.
“Nowhere,” I replied. I kept moving, stepping out onto the porch and motoring determinedly up the street. At Bliss Road, I zeroed in on Kuznitz’s, our neighborhood corner store, which carried the usual array of cigarettes and candy, brooms and cans of soup, bread, balsa wood airplanes, peashooters and anything else one might need, including ... Hostess Twinkies!
I only got hold of Twinkies on rare occasions. Sometimes, I’d open my lunchbox, and instead of an apple or a handful of potato chips in a waxed paper bag, or a couple of homemade cookies wrapped in waxed paper, there would be a glistening store-bought cellophane package of two Twinkies, and life suddenly sparkled. I loved Twinkies, and believed there was no limit on how many I could consume.
With my one dollar, I was able to purchase 10 packages of Twinkies, which Mr. Kuznitz placed in a bag, one package at a time.
“Having a party?” he asked.
One of the good things about being a kid is that you can just stand there and not really say anything intelligible, particularly to an adult who is not your parent. I made some sort of a sound, avoided eye contact and got out of there.
My father had a 1949 Buick sedan that he only used to drive back and forth to work at the nearby Navy base, He kept it parked on the street in front of the house because “reverse” didn’t work. I discreetly got into the back and quietly pulled the door shut behind me.
The inside was a soft and silent chamber, and I disappeared deep into the sumptuous gray cloth seat. It must have been 100 degrees in there and I kept the windows shut so as not to arouse suspicion. I pulled down the fat armrest, put one leg up on the fuzzy rope attached to the back of the front seat, and removed my first package of Twinkies from the paper bag.
The cellophane of each new package fluttered off my fingers and floated down to the floor. After the fourth package, my efforts began to slow and, a couple packages later, everything began to grow hazy. The heat and the sugar were closing in on me and, suddenly, my engines reversed.
Pushing down the door handle, I shoved open the door and collapsed onto the curb. My father was coming around the corner of the house with a pair of hedge clippers in his hand and, spotting me, he grumbled, “What the hell?”
I was inching along the sidewalk on my stomach like a Marine under fire at Guadalcanal when he pulled me up by one arm.
“What the hell have you been doing?” he demanded, taking in my condition and the car’s open door. He dragged me over, then saw the Twinkie wrappers and the mess I’d left behind.
“God Almighty!”
“I had a dollar,” I moaned. “I thought they’d be good.” Was he going to spank me? I’d die.
“Were they?”
“No,” I bleated. “My head hurts.”
“That’s not the only thing that’s going to hurt,” he said, releasing me. “Go inside and clean up, then get out here and clean this damn car.”
And so the summer of 1960 writ my confused excesses into history — the beginning of a jingle-jangle decade like nobody’d ever seen before.
Charles Pinning is a Providence-based writer.
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Foundations for extending family wealth
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
There are lots of big charitable foundations around and many do good work, including work that government can’t or refuses to do. But they are also a way for rich families to stay rich and powerful by extending their power over generations. As The Guardian, in an article headlined “How philanthropic dynasties are exerting their power over US policy,’’ reported:
“Private foundations … offer a way to preserve – and grow – estates over many decades and even centuries. There are more than 90,000 private foundations in the US, with over $800bn {billion} in assets, almost half of which are under family control.
“Such institutions offer a powerful means for heirs to wield influence in society long after the original benefactor is gone….
“One benefit of controlling family philanthropic wealth is social status. Even if you don’t have much of your own money, the ability to give out grants means that people seek you out and pay attention to what you think. You’re asked to sit on boards and attend elite events. While that kind of popularity may not sound like it confers “blessings on generation after generation,’ as Buffett described {the advantages of inherited wealth} such status and access is a very real currency of power in society.’’
Indeed, family foundations are a way to ensure the future income (with power, connections and status come money) and privilege of people who had ancestors who made a lot of money. Meanwhile, Republican plans to get rid ofthe federal estate tax mean that the plutocracy based on inheritance will probably become even more entrenched. So much for a country created in part in opposition to hereditary, aristocratic privilege.
Another problem with some of these “charitable’’ foundations is that more than a few have become purely political organizations attached to one of the two major parties. They’re often used to promote the economic interests of those running the foundations. Donations to political parties aren’t tax-deductible. But gifts to these “charities’’ are.
See:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2017/jul/25/philanthropic-dynasties-exerting-power-us-policy
'Middle-aged summer'
"Silence again. The glorious symphony
Hath need of pause and interval of peace.
Some subtle signal bids all sweet sounds cease,
Save hum of insects’ aimless industry.
Pathetic summer seeks by blazonry
Of color to conceal her swift decrease.
Weak subterfuge! Each mocking day doth fleece
A blossom, and lay bare her poverty.
Poor middle-agèd summer! Vain this show!
Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset
One meadow with a single violet;
And well the singing thrush and lily know,
Spite of all artifice which her regret
Can deck in splendid guise, their time to go!''
-- "August,'' by Helen Hunt Jackson