Vox clamantis in deserto
A problem with their business model
The Great Stone Building at the Enfield Shaker Museum.
The Enfield Shaker Museum, in Enfield, N.H., memorializes a community of Shakers, a mostly 19th Century New England Protestant cult dedicated to, among other things, simplicity and pacifism. At it height the Enfield community had some 300 members. They built lovely furniture and wood and brick buildings. While they took in many orphans, children from poor families and some converts, that wasn't enough to offset a major impediment to their efforts to achieve long-term growth: Sex wasn't allowed. The cult died out by the early 20th Century.
'Smothering woods'
''{T}he entire Northeast seemed liked the inside of a house to me, the sky small and oddly lit, as if by an electric bulb. The sun did not pop over the great trees for hours – and then went down so soon. I was suspicious of Eastern land: the undramatic loveliness, the small scale….In time, though, out became outside my door in New England…In time, the smothering woods that had always seemed part of Northeastern civilization – more an inside than an outside, more like a friendly garden – revealed themselves as forceful and complex. The growth of plants, the lush celebratory springs made a grasslands person drunk. The world turned dazzling green, the hills rode like comfortable and flowing animals. Everywhere there was the sound of water flowing.’’
-- Novelist Louise Erdrich, in her essay “Skunk Dreams’’. From North Dakota and Minnesota, she went to Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. She now lives in Minnesota
The perils of palm-oil agribusiness
At the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations:
"Socio-economic Effects of Palm Oil,'' with Dan Strechay, on Feb. 21. Dinner event starts at 6 p.m. with drinks, followed by dinner, the talk and Q&A.
This Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com) event is open to both PCFR members and World Affairs Council of Rhode Island (WACRI) members.
Palm oil is tainted by environmental destruction and poor working conditions but global production is soaring. As the highest-yielding vegetable oil crop, global production is soaring, and also the cause widespread deforestation over the last four decades. In 2004, a group of environmental non-profits and palm oil companies joined together to set up the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The roundtable sets out eight principles, citing 163 criteria, which are designed to prevent the worst aspects of palm oil cultivation: illegal deforestation, chemical pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of biodiversity, water loss, poor employment conditions etc. With nearly 3,600 members, it is the largest multi-stakeholder initiative of its kind.
Dan Strechay is the U.S. Representative of the RSPO. Based in New York, he is now responsible for outreach and engagement activities to members and stakeholder in the U.S., as well as formalizing the RSPO’s presence in this important market.
Much ado about metal
"ID Series'' (aluminum with oil on panel), by Ruth Avra and Dana Kleinman, in their very metallic show at Lanoue Gallery, Boston.
Don Pesci: Few limits to Democratic demagoguery
We survived World War Two, the deadliest conflict in world history; we survived the frequently denounced McCarthy Era; we survived the Soviet Union and the darkest days of the Cold War; we survived Watergate; we even survived the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
But will the FBI survive the Nunes memo?
Piece of cake!
Prior to the release of the memo, U.S, Sen. Chris Murphy, up for re-election in 2018, warned that its release might well cripple democracy in the United States: “Attacking the FBI betrays the [law and order] traditions of the Republican Party and, of course, is a threat to democracy, if people lose faith in the highest levels of law enforcement.”
Much earlier, long before the publication of the Nunes memo, a distressed Murphy had sent a memo to the GOP: “Memo to GOP: whenever the great American experiment ends, those that left executive power unchecked will be judged guilty of its undoing.” Murphy’s unchecked “executive power” was a backhanded reference President Donald Trump; no sleight was intended to Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, who was disposed, when he was rebuffed by stiff Congressional opposition, to rule with his pen and phone by means of questionable executive orders.
“By the fall of 2011, after a summer standoff between the two political parties nearly caused a government shutdown,” the New York Times reported in a 2016 review of Obama’s regulatory tropism, “it was clear to Mr. Obama that little hope remained for moving his agenda forward in a Congress controlled by Republicans. Speaking in Las Vegas that October, Mr. Obama expressed disdain for ‘an increasingly dysfunctional Congress’ and pledged: ‘Where they won’t act, I will.’”
Last November, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Murphy announced his concern for Trump’s mental stability: “We are concerned the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapon strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests.”
The Trump administration cannot not last beyond the year 2025, thanks to term limits, though it seems clear that Connecticut’s two senators likely would prefer an impeachment before that date. The FBI and the permanent administrative state will have a much longer shelf life. They will survive.
There are few limits to Democrat campaign demagoguery. Democrats attempted to discredit the Nunes memo prior to its publication as ruinous to the FBI.
Post-publication, Blumenthal could not resist mentioning Sen. Joe McCarthy’s demagogic terrorism: “The release of this memo is really reminiscent of the darkest days of the McCarthy era, with character assassinations” Blumenthal fulminated on CNN during an appearance on Alisyn Camerota’s New Day. The memo, Blumenthal insisted, “endangers methods and sources of the intelligence community, and it reflects an effort to distract from the [Robert] Mueller investigation.”
Post publication, Murphy put away his pre-publication fears, insisting that the published memo was a dud. In the post-publication period, Murphy sought to defang the document characterizing it as “garbage evidence.” The memo is a four- page summary of a much larger body of evidence presented to a congressional committee concerning a FISA warrant application. Putting aside his earlier denunciation of the memo as signaling the end of the Republic, Murphy added, “This memo seems to do more to confirm the legitimacy of the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign than to undermine it.”
Democrats have sought to discredit assertions made in the Nunes memo by noting that details have been left out, the reddest of red-herrings. All narrowly focused summaries – police reports, editorials, political columns, news stories, and even the thousands of press releases sent to Connecticut’s media by Blumenthal during his 20-year reign as state attorney general – necessarily omit details of the broader investigations. Neither Blumenthal nor Murphy have yet focused on the assertions they claim are misleading in the Nunes summary memo.
The memo strongly suggests that information submitted to a FISA court wrongfully included questionable data from a dirt digger paid by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign team to produce an opposition research document usually used in political campaigns to generate media interest. The memo suggests that some of the data presented to the FISA court was circulated by the oppo-researcher to a news outlet and the resulting story was then used by those who secured a FISA warrant to support the veracity of claims made in the dirt document. The memo argues, a recent Washington Post story tells us, that the planted story was used by the Justice Department to confirm assertions made in the unreliable oppo-research document – which “violated the cardinal rule of source handing.”
One expects partisanship of politicians like Blumenthal and Murphy, but non-partisan journalists, a vanishing species, generally do not appreciate being misused in this way -- nor should the U.S. Intelligence community.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
Linda Gasparello: The mysterious mound builders; New England grits? Southern hockey
-- Photos of the Great Temple Mound by Linda Gasparello
The Mound Builders of Georgia
On a January day at the Ocmulgee National Monument, in Macon, Ga., a hiker ambles up the Great Temple Mound, a flat-topped, earthen ceremonial structure built by the Mississippians around 900-1100 A.D. Just as the Scottish explorer Joseph Thompson described Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1887, the mound is “entirely suggestive of solidity and repose, of serene majesty asleep.”
Macon lawyer Christopher Smith, a tall mound of a man, guided my husband Llewellyn King and I through the national park, which preserves an area that has been inhabited by humans since the Ice Age (before 9,000 B.C).
From the Visitors Center, we walked across a wooden bridge over a stream flanked by spindly Georgia pines and up a hill path to the Earth Lodge, which was probably a meeting place for the town's political and religious leaders.
Crouching, we entered the grass-covered lodge through an opening buttressed with thick wooden planks. Bent at our waists, we walked through a narrow hall with woven reed walls into the reconstructed council chamber of the Mississippians.
The circular chamber incorporates and protects the original clay floor, which is about 1,000 years old. There is a round fire pit and a raised platform in the shape of a large bird, where the chiefs or high priests sat. The chamber's wood-beamed ceiling and clay walls give it the look and feel of a Tudor chapel.
“The site of Ocmulgee is synonymous with Georgia and Southeastern archeology. During the 1930s, it was a training ground for a whole generation of American archeologists, some of whom later became the 'fathers' of modern American archeology,” according to the National Park Service.
The history of the park, from its inception as a Depression-era works project through to World War II, is intertwined with archaeological-project management on a grand scale by the Smithsonian Institution, various federal relief agencies (the Works Project Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Federal Emergency Relief Agency) and the National Park Service.
From 1933 to 1942 as many as 1,200 people excavated the site under the direction of Arthur R. Kelly, a Harvard-trained archaeologist working for the Smithsonian, and built the Visitors Center, which contains beautifully crafted dioramas of human habitation of the area from 10,000 BCE to the early 1700s. The 702-acre site was designated a National Monument in 1936; it is now a national park.
We toured Ocmulgee a day before its closure on Jan. 20, due to the government shutdown. That day, the national park posted a message on its Facebook page that the Visitors Center and Earth Lodge would be closed during the shutdown, but the roads, trails and outside grounds would be open as usual, daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Dee Shannon Garrison left this comment on the page, “Stupid congress critters. Ain't happy unless they putting somebody out of work.”
True Grits
Recently, I read in Yankee magazine that the Algonquin Indians of New England, not Southerners, invented grits. That may very well be true, but I don't trust New Englanders -- not even Rhode Islanders who make a corny cousin, johnny cakes -- to cook grits.
Northerners just don't get grits. In 1980, when I was living in Manhattan, I watched Stan Woodward's hilarious and insightful documentary about grits on PBS's WNET. Using a hand-held camera, the South Carolina filmmaker went from the streets of New York to the grist mills of the South asking people a simple question, “Do you eat grits?” A New York City construction worker replied, “Grits? Ain't that the stuff on my collar?” New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne, who grew up in Indianola, Miss., replied by making a grits souffle.
True grits are cooked in the “Grits Belt,'' which stretches from Virginia to Texas. Kevin Whitener, who was our neighbor for nearly 30 years in The Plains, Va., and cooks at the Old Salem Cafe, in nearby Marshall, makes the grits of my dreams.
Georgia is the middle hole of the Grits Belt: the one that's comfy for someone with a grits belly. Grits became the state's official prepared food in 2002.
Chris Smith, host of our Georgia trip, treated us to dinner at the Grits Cafe in Forsyth, near Macon. I ordered the fried catfish, remoulade and cheddar soft grits. I left the restaurant full as a tick.
High Sticking, Tripping and Roughing in Macon
I grew up in Massachusetts: a hotbed of ice-hockey rest. So I just can't get my head around professional ice hockey teams in the South. Sure, you can build a rink and import players from Boston. But how do you build a fan base in a region where people only like ice when it's in Coke or sweet tea?
Yet there are five National Hockey League teams in the South. The Southern Professional Hockey League has 10 teams, including the Macon Mayhems, who were the 2017 President's Cup champions.
Southern ice hockey teams have crazy good names, like the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs. But hands down, the best-ever professional hockey team name is the Macon Whoopees. The defunct team played in Southern Hockey League during 1973-74. A Macon reporter told me, “The first game the Whoopees played, folks left during halftime because they thought the game was over.” Poor attendance led the team to disband mid-season.
The Macon Whoopees rose again in 1996, renamed the Whoopee. After several owners endured seasons of poor attendance and financial losses, the team went belly up in 2001.
An East Coast Hockey League team, the Tallahassee Tiger Sharks, relocated to Macon in 2001. They became known as the Macon Whoopee and played just one season. The Macon Trax, a later effort to continue professional hockey in Macon, got stopped short.
I hop that the Macon Mayhem, a relocation of the former Augusta River Hawks, will play in the city for a spell.
Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her e-mail is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com.
Pau Sutliff: Yale accepts dhimmitude
Yale Law School, in New Haven, one of the university's lovely neo-Gothic buildings.
In 2008 Basak Otus, a writer for the Yale Daily News, the leading news source for Yale University, wrote an article that started:
“English majors getting tired of Shakespeare and Wordsworth will soon be able to turn to Yale’s libraries for a poet of a different kind altogether: Osama bin Laden”. (Osama, the leader of the 9/11 attacks, was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in 2011.)
The backlash to this article should have been taken as a prophetic warning of what was to come, akin to the handwriting on the wall of King Belshazzar of Babylon in the Book of Daniel. In that story the fingers of a man’s hand appeared and wrote on the wall an ominous warning that the prophet Daniel interpreted as meaning:
1) God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it.
2) You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting
3) Your kingdom has been divided, and given away.
Basak Otis’s article in 2008 pointed out that Yale no longer had America’s best interests at heart, but had begun a love affair with one of the most notorious men of the modern era: Osama bin Laden. Perhaps the article would have faded into the background and remained forgotten if Yale woke up when it was attacked that June by a jihadist firebombing, which was intended to destroy their power plant. But Yale slumberously ignored that wake-up call!
Yale reverted to its love affair with Osama and published a Sharia-compliant version of a book about cartoons staring Mohammed, taking care to censor illustrations that, in Paris, had inspired the murder of a dozen staffers at“Charlie Hebdo,” a publication that had printed cartoons about Mohammed. This occurred in September 2009, less than three months after the attempted fire-bombing.
It was Yale University’s overt attempt to display “dhimmitude”—submission to Muslims -- rather than display its heritage as a great defender of the First Amendment. Yale had the opportunity to take a strong stand for America and her beliefs in liberty for all her citizens! It was a chance to be seen as the university that defends the First Amendment. Yale, however, chose to become an example of “being weighed and found wanting” in its defense of the U.S. Constitution.
In 2014 Yale Law School hosted Rachid Al-Ghannouchi to speak to its students and the community as well. Rachid is a member of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. Ennahda is the Muslim Brotherhood entity in Tunisia. Osam bin Laden was counted as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yale University has people that vet public speakers. How is it possible they did not know that Al-Ghannouchi was a staunch defender of Hamas[1], a U.S.-declared terrorist entity?
Yale’s last act of dhimmitude was its receipt of $10 million in 2015 from the son of Saleh Abdallah Kamel, a documented financer of Al-Qaeda who had had banking ties with Osama bin Laden, himself. Yale agreed then to place an Islamic Law Center in its law school, but still refuses to acknowledge that Islamic law is Sharia law. This act equates Sharia with the U.S. Constitution.
The act of placing an Islamic Law Center at Yale forces the university to fight itself. Those studying at Yale to earn degrees in its divinity school must take a stand, it is their Christian duty. The Music School also must join the struggle, as Sharia requires the destruction of musical instruments and opposes the very concept of a music school[3].
The writing was on the wall in 2008. It seems that 2015 was the year that Yale became a house divided against itself; soon it may no longer exist as the great educational institute it once was.C an Yale survive its Dhimmitude? I think not?
Yale President Peter Salovey refused to debate me on this.
Paul Sutliff is the author of Civilization Jihad and the Myth of Moderate Islam and
Stealth Jihad Phase 2: Infiltrate American Colleges. He is a radio commentator on the Muslim Brotherhood. His blog site is http://paulsutliff.blogspot.com/
[1] "Taamulat Fiddine Wa Siyassa Al Hiwar TV, 22 February 2009." Broadcast Bulletin. December 10, 2009. Accessed October 17, 2015.
[2] Email from the Office of the President of Yale University.
[3] http://listverse.com/2012/11/12/top-10-everyday-things-banned-in-saudi-arabia/
Now it's Apple's turn to ask localities for a huge handout
Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in Silicon Valley.
Adapted From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
Apple says it plans to build another corporate campus. It also says it will hire another 20,000 workers, in part because of the new U.S. tax law, which cuts corporate income taxes. (Not all of the windfall will go to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividend increases!)_
Of course, Apple’s announcement means that various cities and states around America are already looking into how they can bribe the Cupertino, Calif., company to build its new campus in their jurisdiction. Presumably vast tax breaks, to be subsidized by the individuals and businesses already there, will be offered, along with very expensive physical-infrastructure improvements. As with Amazon, Greater Boston (which you might say now sort of includes northern Rhode Island) would be in the running because of the huge technology complex there. But would such legal bribery be worth it for the macro-economy of Greater Boston?
Local politicians’ and some business leaders’ obsession with luring huge, rich, sexy tech companies may be popular in the short term but the diversion of so many public resources to a few extremely profitable big companies could have a very big long-term cost. The problems of General Electric that were revealed after it was lured to set up its headquarters in Boston provide a useful caution sign.
'Welcome when he goes'
-- Photo by Schnobby
"Winter is good - his Hoar Delights
Italic flavor yield -
To Intellects inebriate
With Summer, or the World -
Generic as a Quarry
And hearty - as a Rose -
Invited with asperity
But welcome when he goes.''
-- Emily Dickinson
Layering on, layering off
"Accumulation Cycles'' (mixed media tubular drawing front and back), by Rebekah Lord Gardiner, in her show "Accumulations of Time and Place,'' at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 25. Her show explores accretions and erosions of our personal histories from past to present.
Jim Hightower: Bribing big firms to lure them to your area is a fool's game
"Eve Tempted by the Serpent,.'' by William Blake.
Via OtherWords.org
Governors and mayors insist that giving our tax dollars to corporations to lure them to move to our cities is good public policy. The corporations create jobs, those workers pay taxes, and — voila! — the giveaway pays for itself!
Does it really work that way? Unfortunately, no.
Good Jobs First tracked the 386 incentive deals since 1976 that gave at least $50 million to a corporation, then tallied the number of jobs created. The average cost per job was $658,427 — each! That’s far more than cities and states can recover through any kinds of taxes those jobholders would pay in their lifetimes.
The rosy job-creation claims by incentive dealmakers also tend to be bogus, because they don’t subtract the number of jobs lost as a result of these deals.
Amazon, for example, has leaned on officials in every major metro area to subsidize its creation of a nationwide network of warehouses, data centers and other facilities.
In a 2016 report titled “Amazon’s Stranglehold,” the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that more than half of Amazon’s facilities had been built with government subsidies. And Good Jobs First found that since 2005, Amazon has received more than $1 billion from taxpayers to build their private business.
Each handout was made in the name of local workers — and, yes, Amazon does employ thousands. But the subsidies enable the retail giant to undercut local, unsubsidized competitors, driving them out of business and causing devastating job losses that greatly outnumber jobs gained.
The Institute reports that at the end of 2015, Amazon employed 146,000 people in its US operations. But the taxpayer-supported giant had meanwhile killed some 295,000 U.S. retail jobs.
Check out the report for yourself at ilsr.org/amazon-stranglehold.
Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.
James P. Freeman: R.I.'s moderate Democrat Gina Raimondo a very consequential governor
The Slatersville Stone Arch Bridge, in the old Blackstone River Valley industrial zone.
For more than 200 years water has flowed underneath a bridge in North Smithfield, in the Blackstone Valley corridor of the smallest state in the Union, which helped usher in the American Industrial Revolution. The Slatersville Stone Arch Bridge, the oldest masonry bridge in Rhode Island -- built in 1855 to replace the original wooden structure and subsequently listed on the National Register of Historic Places – was for decades neglected and structurally deficient. Now it’s undergoing a complete rehabilitation at a $13.5 million cost. The bridge is symbolic of the state’s rise and fall. And now its revival.
Much of that effort is being spearheaded by Gov. Gina Raimondo.
Amidst the partisan tempest -- The Great Political Uncentering -- Raimondo, 46, the state’s first female executive, stands in defiance of political trends. And recent history. She’s seeking re-election this year, after a record of public service that has been a series of calculated experiments. She is arguably the nation’s most consequential reform-minded, results-oriented politician. She is resuscitating a nearly extinct species -- Truman Democrats. She is a pro-growth moderate and has handled heavy turbulence.
For an insular and provincial state -- where coffee milk is the official drink, Catholic Mass is still televised on Sunday mornings and, unbelievably, New England Cable News is not offered for viewing by the largest telecommunications provider -- the last decade was particularly cruel. Nothing went as planned and many plans went for nothing.
In the wake of The Great Recession of 2008-2009, Rhode Island’s already corroded economy saw unemployment spike close to 12 percent while housing prices plunged 27 percent. In 2010, after luring it away from Massachusetts, the state financed Curt Schilling’s scandal-plagued video-game start-up, 38 Studios, with $75 million in bonds before the company went bankrupt, two years later. And in 2011, sparking national headlines, Central Falls, a city with a population of 19,376, covering an area a little over a square mile (more densely populated than Boston), filed for bankruptcy, raising concerns that other heavily encumbered municipalities (including the capital, Providence) might follow suit.
Residents probably needed a professional psychologist to lead them out of their depressed state.
Instead, they chose a thoughtful capitalist. Raimondo -- a Rhode Island native with degrees in economics (Harvard), sociology (Oxford) and law (Yale), and co-founder of the state’s first venture-capital firm, Point Judith Capital -- was elected state treasurer in 2010. So began the secular resurrection.
Raimondo immediately understood a law of modern politics that most public officials refuse to acknowledge or act upon: Demographics is destiny.
Overly generous and ambitious, yet massively underfunded, pension assurances to Rhode Island’s aging population coupled with a rapidly hemorrhaging fiscal condition (exacerbated by the recession) were certain to wreak financial havoc. A series of cascading municipal failures would likely render the state itself technically insolvent. And that would be unchartered territory (a state declaring bankruptcy is not a contingency properly addressed under current bankruptcy laws). Raimondo foresaw that imminent horror.
So, the treasurer did something astounding. She conducted town-hall-style meetings exposing the severity of the crisis. And she told the unions and pensioners something that few Democrats ever say to those loyal constituents: “No!”
She engineered an overhaul by suspending cost-of-living increases and raising the retirement age for retirees, pointing the system towards solvency. Raimondo also understood state law. While many state pension systems are determined by contract (making modifications more difficult under constitutional law), Rhode Island’s, by statute, lets the government, if so inclined, make changes via swift legislative maneuvering, not protracted judicial wrangling.
It worked.
Predictably, though, public-sector unions fulminated and sued. A September 2014 Washington Post editorial noted, “In the face of ferocious opposition from labor, she explained the plain budgetary impossibility of maintaining pensions at the levels promised by politicians in Providence.”
Still, she was able to win the governorship that year with 41 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Later, in 2015, she negotiated legal settlements that preserved the reforms in the face of continued legal opposition. Her efforts are proof that pension reforms can be administered and may prove to be a model for other states suffocating under mountains of indebtedness.
Just after Raimondo was elected governor (the first Democrat in over 20 years to win the office despite Rhode Island being heavily Democratic) and after the national Republican congressional victory in 2014, The Daily Beast’s Joel Kotkin demanded that Democrats go back-to-the-future: “Time to Bring Back the Truman Democrats.”
“To regain their relevancy,” he hypothesized, “Democrats need to go back to their evolutionary roots. Their clear priorities: faster economic growth and promoting upward mobility for the middle and working classes. All other issues -- racial, feminine, even environmental -- need to fit around this central objective.”
Raimondo, perhaps instinctively, has embraced much of this sensible framework. Most of it via a back-to-basics moderate agenda. Actually, future-to-the-basics.
In February 2016, she launched Rhode Works, a comprehensive 10-year transportation improvement program to repair crumbling roads and bridges. Rhode Island ranked dead last (50 out of 50 states) in overall bridge condition and is one of the only states that did not charge user fees to large commercial trucks on its roadways, which do most of the damage to roads and bridges. Tolling on certain roads begins this winter. Unsurprisingly, she is facing more opposition. This time from trucking associations, leery of the legislation; claiming that they’re being unfairly discriminated against, they are threatening lengthy lawsuits. But her infrastructure initiative might be a template for the anticipated trillion-dollar federal program.
Raimondo has also looked north for much of her inspiration. It’s home to another moderate.
In her fourth State of the State address she made this startling admission: “For decades, we just sat back and watched as Massachusetts rebuilt and thrived. Boston and its suburbs flourished, while the mill buildings along {Route} 95 and the Blackstone River stood vacant and crumbling. The resurgence in Massachusetts didn't just happen. It wasn't an accident. They had a strategy and a plan to create jobs and put cranes in the sky. They used job-training investments and incentives to create thousands of jobs in and around Boston.”
Why not study a success story?
Unlike many parochial powerbrokers of the past who were content to resist change, at the state’s peril, Raimondo recognizes that Rhode Island’s is part of a regional economy. Indeed, in many ways it is dependent on Massachusetts’s economy. Two-thirds of Rhode Island’s population is within a 20-minute drive to any Massachusetts border. (Incidentally, she made the trip at least twice last year by appearing on WGBH’s Greater Boston program, marketing her ideas and progress.)
Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker is the most popular governor in the country, with a 69 percent approval rating. He too is a moderate (a Rockefeller Republican), a technocrat, and also up for re-election this year. While Raimondo’s most recent approval rating stands at only 41 percent, that figure may be distorted and artificially low. Baker’s reforms have centered on the inner workings of government, largely lost on everyday residents. Raimondo’s reforms, meanwhile, have been about the very public machinations and expressions of government. Her controversial actions have directly affected, and been clear to, the entire electorate.
Today, the unemployment rate is 4.3 percent. Last March, The New York Times wrote, “Ms. Raimondo’s frenzy of economic and job development is striking because Rhode Island has long been in a slump. It was the last state to emerge from the recession that began in 2007. As recently as 2014, it bore the nation’s highest unemployment rate for seven months in a row.” At the same time, private-sector employment has reached its highest level ever.
Even with forward momentum, the governor may be more popular outside the state than within. Two years ago, Raimondo and then-Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a Republican who is now the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., were cited by Fortune Magazine as two female governors being among the world’s 50 greatest leaders. And last month, she was named as new vice chair of the Democratic Governors Association.
Big challenges, however, still loom large locally. The Pawtucket Red Sox, Boston’s minor-league affiliate, are threatening to leave the state. (Will the public finance a nine-figure stadium for a rich, privately owned team?) Nearly a third, or $3.1 billion, of the state budget is funded by the federal government. And opioids continue to consume lives.
But due to Raimondo’s centrist leadership -- despite the occasional progressive flourish (tuition-free community college) -- she has largely validated Kotkin’s hypothesis by focusing primarily on economic matters. Rhode Island might finally be poised for a 21st Century renaissance.
As the Slatersville bridge undergoes its third iteration in its third century, Rhode Island voters are reminded of this possibility in 2018 -- the Year of the Woman. Should Raimondo be re-elected and serve a full second four-year term, she would be just the third woman (all Democrats) in American history to do so (after Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm and Washington’s Christine Gregoire).
And with the Clintons out of the running, serious Democrats must consider her fortitude and record of accomplishment when they’re looking for vice-presidential timber for 2020.
James P. Freeman, a former banker, 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.
Billboard Boulevard: Sex, fireworks, guns and God
The former railroad depot in Rural Retreat, Va., on our route. A lot of "former'' this and that on our route.
Adapted From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
Leaving our wives behind in Rhode Island (they had better things to do), an old friend and I drove the inland route to Florida the other week, mostly to check out what was happening in the inland southeastern corner of “Flyover Country.’’ We traveled in a huge Chevy Suburban, whose gas-guzzling appetite was gargantuan. Thus we did our part to boost global warming as we drove through weather that stayed nippy until we got to not-very-lovely Ocala, Fla., where it finally warmed up.F
Much of the route was in the Appalachians, with the most spectacular sections, of course, in Virginia, East Tennessee and North Carolina. I was particularly eager to see the Smoky Mountains again. Some of my East Tennessee relatives had taken me up there when I was a boy. On this trip, the mountains still looked softly spectacular.
Most of the folks we met on the way were at least superficially friendlier than New Englanders, who tend to be guarded. I’m mostly referring to hotel staffers, restaurant workers serving deliciously unhealthy fatty and salty Southern food, the personnel in a Civil War museum in the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia, who had good feelings about the Confederacy and the good ole fraternity house boys near the campus of the University of Georgia, in Athens. In front of their plantation-style house, they gave us directions to a couple of quirky restaurants, one of which would have fit in well in late ‘ 60s San Francisco, with waiters in clothes that looked like Hippie outfits, or at least Halloween versions of same.
Athens and Asheville, N.C., (also a college town) were the most engaging cities we visited.
There were innumerable attractions along the way, with seemingly every burg with more than 5,000 people with a museum or other attraction peddled on roadside signs, with such curiosities as upside down airplanes as graphic blandishments. I particularly liked such examples of local charm as the large but mysteriously closed auto museum (with big car models sticking out from the brick exterior walls) in a remote area of Georgia; the billboard advertising “Virginia’s only cavern with elevator service’’; a Virginia town named “Rural Retreat,’’ and a village in North Carolina called “Forks of Ivy.’’
But most illuminating were the big billboards along the Interstates seeming to give contradictory messages about the region’s moral climate. Hypocrisy, or just psychological/ sociological complexity in the Bible Belt?
Among the most numerous billboards were for those “Adult Superstores’’ (porn and sex toys), along with such related enterprises as strip joints (“Café Risque: We Bare All’’); gun markets and such related attractions as “Machine Gun America,’’ and Protestant evangelical churches (“Jesus Paid for All’’), some of them put up to promote attendance at an individual institution in a small town. There are lots of simple crosses but we didn’t spot any roadside crucifixes. This was Protestant Bible-thumping country.
And, yeah, fireworks signs remain plentiful. But with the loosening of fireworks-sale controls in the Northeast, that draws much less excitement for travelers from up here these days. I remember my father filling the back of our station wagon with fireworks he bought in South Carolina back in the early ‘60s on our way back from Florida. That both my parents smoked added a touch of suspense to the rest of the trip home.
The billboards become more conventionally commercial from Orlando south, but then as they say, the further south you go in Florida, the further north you go.
Site-specific show in hard-drinking, arty New Canaan
Sculpture by Jeremy Holmes to be shown in his show at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., starting Feb. 10.
His site-specific bentwood installations fill voids of unused space. He works with the shapes of walls and ceilings to create what he calls “abstract wood sculptures.” His work emphasizes his preoccupation with materiality.
East view of Church Hill, the central part of New Canaan (1836), by John Warner Barber
New Canaan, which is not on Long Island Sound, looks more like an old New England town than does much of the rest of Fairfield County. Much of it is bucolic and it has drawn many writers and artists to live there. It also has had the reputation of being a hard-drinking town, for youths and adults and, unfair or not, a reputation for having a surplus of spoiled rich kids.
Bridges for kissing and civic life
Plank-lattice truss interior structure of Green River Bridge in Guilford, Vt.
“They were called kissing bridges, and indeed many’s the kiss that was stolen in the darkened interiors of covered bridges. But covered bridges were more than convenient trysting spots for couples passing through in one-horse shays. They represented a triumph of local craftsmanship – and a surge of the spirit. {The late author} and artist Eric Sloane says that the covered bridge was to the nineteenth century what the barn was to the eighteenth. In the sense the covered bridge reflected the impulse to forge rivers, shift roots, and expand horizons, he is correct. But the covered bridge was also an expression of community, an eagerness to be closer to the folks “on the other side.’’ It is not surprising, therefore, that the covered bridge was often a meeting place for groups of citizens.’’
-- From the late John Deedy, in his essay in Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons.
Editor’s note: A couple of years ago my wife and I attended a wedding in a New Hampshire covered bridge. It was musty.
Covered bridge in Newport, N.H.
Philip K. Howard: How to make a deal to address America's infrastructure crisis
A photo by Philip K. Howard in his "Peripheral Visions'' series, much of it about transportation infrastructure, some of it crumbling. To see more, please hit this link.
President Trump this week reiterated his commitment to “rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.” He called upon Congress to enact a law that “generates at least $1.5 trillion” and also to “streamline the permitting and approval process — getting it down to no more than two years, and perhaps even one.”
This would be an enormous boon to society, improving not only America’s competitiveness, but also creating a greener environmental footprint — while adding more than a million new jobs.
But environmental groups are lining up in opposition even before they’ve seen the details. Streamlining red tape, they argue, requires gutting environmental regulations. Are they really in favor of bloated processes that can take a decade or longer and produce impenetrable 5,000-page environmental review statements?
The facts are not on their side. A 2015 report by my organization, Common Good, found the following:
Other greener countries such as Germany approve large projects in less than two years, including environmental review.
A typical six-year delay in large projects more than doubles the effective cost of the projects.
Lengthy environmental reviews often harm the environment by prolonging polluting bottlenecks.
Modernizing America’s infrastructure is a necessity, not an ideology. Rickety transmission lines lose 6 percent of their electricity, the equivalent of 200 coal-burning power plants. About 2,000 “high-hazard” dams are in deficient condition. Century-old water-mains leak over 2 trillion gallons of fresh water a year. Over 3 billion gallons of gasoline are consumed by vehicles idling in traffic jams. Half of fatal car accidents are caused in part by poor road conditions.
Fixing this doesn’t require changing, much less gutting, environmental protections. Common Good has presented Congress with a three-page legislative proposal that creates clear lines of authority to make decisions on a timely basis: An environmental official would be authorized to focus the review on material issues, not thousands of pages of trivial detail; the White House could resolve disagreements among bickering agencies; federal law would preempt delays by state and local governments on interstate projects; and lawsuits would be expedited and limited to material environmental harms, not foot faults.
No one intended environmental review or permitting to take a decade. Current regulations say that analyses in complex projects should not exceed 300 pages. But the review for raising the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge, a project with virtually no environmental impact (it used the existing bridge foundations), was 20,000 pages including exhibits. This is bureaucratic insanity.
What the current process does is give environmental groups a veto. Just by threatening to sue, they can drag processes on for years. But where in the Constitution does it empower naysayers to call the shots? Environmental review should not be used to prevent elected officials from making decisions.
Funding is also obviously needed. The political deal is obvious: Democrats should agree to streamline permitting as long as Republicans provide adequate funding. Most roads and other such projects lack a revenue stream and require public funds. It’s a good investment, returning about $1.50 for every dollar spent, according to Moody’s. It’ll be an even better investment when effective costs are cut in half by streamlining permitting.
Trump’s initiative is a moral as well as a practical imperative. We are living off the infrastructure built by our grandparents and their grandparents. What shape will it be in when we bequeath it to our grandchildren?
New York has choke points that can’t tolerate any further delay. The two rail tunnels coming into Penn Station from New Jersey are over 100 years old, and were badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy. When they shut down for repairs the result is “carmageddon” — 25-mile gridlock.
The approach bridge to those tunnels is made of iron and wood, and occasionally catches fire or gets stuck when pivoting open for barge traffic — causing trains to wait for hours. The “Gateway project” for two new tunnels is essential to avoiding economic and environmental chaos, and almost ready for construction. It needs permits and money. Congress has to provide it.
On fixing America’s transportation woes, it’s time to link arms, not use any pretext to oppose this plan.
Philip K. Howard is chairman of the nonpartisan Common Good (commongood.org) reform organization and a New York-based civic leader, lawyer, author (including the best-selling The Death of Common Sense), and photographer. He's also an old friend, classmate and sometime colleague of New England Diary editor Robert Whitcomb. This piece first ran in The New York Post.
After the storm in Sandwich
"Not In Kansas Anymore'' (aluminarte print), by Bobby Baker
Comment by Mr. Baker:
"A January storm took its fury out on the Sandwich (on Cape Cod) boardwalk. To the left of this image is a pile of twisted wood, rope, grasses, and whatever - all that is left of the end of this boardwalk. While walking Town Neck Beach on a recent winter day, I looked up at the open end of the devastated boardwalk, and saw someone approach the fall off. I quickly captured my shot, and just as quickly the subjects disappeared - stunned and sad at what they saw, they must have fled to the safety of solid ground. ''
Assume nothing
An airliner descending to land at Logan International Airport, in East Boston, aka "Eastie''.
"You can't assume anything in politics. That's why every Saturday I walk around my district. I talk to the longshoremen in Charlestown. I listen to the people in East Boston and their concern on the airport noise. I walk down to the Star Market in Porter Square, and people tell me about meat prices.''
-- Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill, the late U.S. House speaker.
'Delving into the past'
"Untitled #16" (mixed media on paper), by Jamal Thorne, in his show "Bootleg Delorean,'' at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Feb. 28-April 1.
The gallery says:
"These new paintings by Jamal Thorne {are} composite experiences that embody the dynamic of delving into the past while being confronted with the idiosyncrasies of the present. Events unfold and time moves forward. Thorne builds layers of paint and tape covering textured surfaces, with a process informed by the Civil Rights Movement, current and past. Each new layer preserves and makes an impression while some elements from the previous layers are lost. For Thorne the process of cutting deep into the accumulating layers serves to mimic the act of reclaiming a connection to the past, while the finished work is a documentation of shared experience.''