You'll pay us to move to Vermont!

Population density in Vermont.

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

Something that used to surprise me a bit after the advent of the full-frontal Internet since the ‘90s is that the ability to work remotely has not hollowed out cities. Instead, big American cities have drawn increasing numbers of younger workers who are working on computers all day.  You might think that more of them would want to live in beautiful countryside.

Such as in Vermont, which is trying to bribe some workers with up to $10,000 to move to the Green Mountain State, from which they’d work remotely for an out-of-state company. The Boston Globe reports:

“To qualify, workers must be employed full time with a company based outside Vermont, and move to the Green Mountain State on or after January 1, 2019. The worker must also perform most duties from a Vermont home office or co-working space. The state will then issue grants to newly minted Vermonters up to $5,000 per year for two years for things like moving expenses, Internet access, or a computer.’’

The offer sounds very much like a pilot plan, since it’s capped at only a total of $125,000 for 2019, with grants to be on a first-come, first-served basis.

The main idea, of course, is to draw in more young people, including those who might want to grow a business in the state. Vermont has long had among the lowest unemployment rates in America, but has for years been among the three or four states with the oldest population. Policymakers worry about how to ensure long-term economic growth and how to lure and keep a large enough percentage of younger people to pay taxes to maintain the state’s good social services.

I think that the joys of working remotely have been overstated. Most people want daily, in-person interactions with co-workers, and many, especially the young, prefer the energy of a big city to the most beautiful quiet landscape.

In any event, little Vermont can’t afford to pay many folks to move to Vermont. But some refugees from city jobs will find Burlington’s rather hip charms, and view of the Adirondacks across Lake Champlain, suffice for urbanity.

To read more, please hit this link.

Chris Powell: Back to the future with CTrail

Within living memory there was frequent passenger railroad service north and south out of Hartford, and the railroad company, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, known simply as the New Haven, was as famous as any. Thanks to Hartford-born financier and monopolist John Pierpont Morgan Sr., the New Haven practically owned transportation in southern New England for the first half of the 20th Century, having acquired most of its competitors. 

The line north of New Haven to Hartford and Springfield, Mass., was double-tracked to hasten the heavy traffic. But the New Haven was usually over-indebted, went bankrupt twice, was crippled by cars and highways in the 1950s and '60s, and was taken over by the government in 1970. One track north of New Haven was torn up to reduce maintenance costs. Since then the passenger service maintained on the line by the government railroad, Amtrak, has been only nominal. 

Now Connecticut's Transportation Department hopes to revive passenger service frequent enough to serve commuters from Springfield to New Haven, connecting there to the Metro-North commuter railroad system, the busiest in the country, serving Grand Central Station in New York and the whole metropolitan area. Double track north of New Haven has been restored and the new trains (refurbished ones, actually) are running. This is thrilling as it shows that state government still can do something more than pay pensions to its employees, do something of potentially general benefit. 

But it may be a long time before the new train service can be considered a success. For just like the old New Haven, the new service, dubbed CTrail, will lose money -- probably tens of millions of dollars per year -- and each passenger paying $8 per trip between Hartford and New Haven probably will be subsidized by state government by many times that amount for a long time. Busy as Metro-North is, fares still don't cover its costs and never will. State government pays tens of millions each year to keep the line running. 

Of course highways cost money too and are vital to commerce and development. But a railroad can support commuters and development only if its stations have frequent trolley, subway, bus, or van service to connect them to their communities. Such systems are not yet in place for the new line, and when they are they will lose money too. 

Ironically, at the outset the new rail service's biggest beneficiary may be the MGM casino under construction in Springfield, which more easily will siphon Connecticut and New York customers away from the Indian casinos in eastern Connecticut, costing the state still more money. State government has authorized the tribes to build a casino in East Windsor to intercept Springfield gambling traffic but the railroad doesn't go through East Windsor. No one seems to have thought of that when the site for the interceptor casino was chosen. 

Even so, on the whole the new rail service will accentuate Connecticut's excellent position between New York and Boston, especially if, as is contemplated, Massachusetts extends its own commuter rail service from Boston and Worcester west to Springfield. 

After all, nearly everyone in Connecticut goes to New York and Boston sometimes. Now it is easy again for people north of New Haven to go to New York by train and use the time not to stew in traffic but to read, work, or just relax or nap. (If only Metro-North and CTrail trains could be equipped with wireless internet service.) 

So "puff-puff, toot-toot, off we go" -- just, please, not to another bankruptcy. 

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

 

Lizet Ocampo: The truth about 'sanctuary cities'

Via OtherWords.org

In a recent White House meeting on “sanctuary cities,” President Trump called some undocumented immigrants “animals” — a disturbing new low even for someone who’s demonized immigrant communities from the beginning. The president painted a picture of “sadistic criminals” who are being given “safe harbor” through so-called sanctuary policies.

While Trump and his right-wing supporters would have people believe that “sanctuary cities” are places that allow lawlessness and where immigrants aren’t prosecuted for crimes, the reality is far different.

Here are the facts: the federal government can enforce immigration law anywhere. The term “sanctuary city” typically refers to a jurisdiction that wants to limit the use of local law enforcement resources to carry out federal law-enforcement work, especially when they’re asked to violate constitutional protections.

While these cities focus their resources on fighting local crime, they can still work with the federal government on immigration enforcement, since federal agents can issue a warrant. This is especially the case in situations where an undocumented person has carried out a serious crime — as opposed to someone who, for example, happens to have a broken taillight.

Experts note that undermining “sanctuary cities,” which are more accurately called “safe cities,” often isn’t good for anyone.

As two police chiefs from Storm Lake and Marshalltown, Iowa, recently explained: “We depend on residents, including immigrants, to come to us when they see something suspicious or potentially criminal. If they hear of a looming ‘crackdown’ that could affect their families and friends, they are less likely to come to us to report and prevent actual crimes.”

A law-enforcement association representing some of the largest cities in the country has similarly argued that asking local police to do the work of federal immigration officers would likely lead not only to more crime against immigrants, but also to more crime overall.

And a 2017 analysis from the University of California at San Diego found that “counties designated as ‘sanctuary’ areas by ICE typically experience significantly lower rates of all types of crime“ than comparable counties without such policies in place.

While ongoing police abuse against communities of color has underscored the urgent need for police reform and the rebuilding of deeply damaged community-police trust, further eroding trust by attempting to dismantle “safe cities” policies would be a significant step in the wrong direction.

Despite the facts, Trump and his administration want to scapegoat immigrants, appealing to fear and racism rather than actually looking at which policies are most effective.

Time and again, Trump entangles two separate issues — immigration and crime — by telling gruesome stories about crimes committed by immigrants that exploit the pain of victims’ families and aim to demonize entire communities. (When it comes to crime against immigrants however, the administration is mysteriously silent.)

The reality is that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than people who were born here — and that immigrants who do commit crimes go through our criminal justice system, just like everyone else.

Especially as Trump’s administration is reaching new levels of cruelty by separating children and parents at our borders, we have to be vigilant in countering the use of any dehumanizing lies for political gain. We have to push our elected officials to stand up to Trump’s dangerous anti-immigrant agenda.

Our public policies should be grounded in our shared values and in sound data about what works and what doesn’t work in our communities — never in fear-mongering.

Lizet Ocampo is the political director of People For the American Way. 

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Lawless & disorderly

'Connecting Stories'

By printmaker and hand-made book artist Carol Strause FitzSimonds, in her  joint show,  "Connecting Stories,'' with Elena Obelenus, a ceramicist and printmaker, at the Providence Art Club through July 20.  

But scare us more

"Tell Us Again'' (oil on panel), by Colin McGuire, in the group show "Close to Home,'' at Galatea Fine Art, Boston.

A summer twilight game

"We knock red yellow blue

twilight in and out of wickets

bent spines of invisible animals

we need to enter. The rhododendrons
are out of bounds….''

From "Croquet in Childhood, '' by Helena Minton

Pine-pollen time

Pine pollen awaits being liberated by the wind.

“Now I know that summer is here, no matter how cold it is at night, for when I went out to the car this morning, the windshield was dusted with orange and the whole shiny dark blue of the body was powdered. The pine pollen has come! This is a thick, almost oily deposit that penetrates everything. If you close a room and lock the windows, the sills will be drifted with the pollen the next morning. The floors turn orange.’’

Gladys Taber, in My Own Cape Cod (1971)

Mona Younis: On poverty, Americans' low expectations of their government

Homeless man in Boston.

From OtherWords.org

Are we Americans unworthy? That’s certainly the message we’re getting from our government.

Over 40 percent of us are poor or low-income. How is that possible in the wealthiest country in history?

“The United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance,” explains U.N. rapporteur on poverty Philip Alston, “they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable health care, or growing up in a context of total deprivation.”

Alston says that “the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power” — which means that “with political will, it could readily be eliminated.” Unfortunately, our government’s political will is increasingly exercised to make things more, not less, difficult for us.

Most Americans don’t know it, but in 1977 the U.S. actually signed an international treaty called the U.N. Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which mandates government responsibility to ensure their citizens do more than merely survive. Unfortunately, one

U.S. administration after the other has completely disregarded it, and Congress never ratified it.

Our leaders have apparently judged that we either don’t need — or don’t deserve — things like an adequate standard of living and universal health care. As one dizzy U.S. congressman,  Idaho Republican Raul Labrador claims, “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”

164 countries have ratified the treaty, but ours won’t. Are their people more deserving than we are? Is it something we’ve done?

It can’t be because we’re doing fine without those rights.

I mean, look at our minimum wage. There isn’t a “single county or metropolitan area,” as a Guardian report put it, where a minimum wage can get you a “modest two-bedroom home, which the federal government defines as paying less than 30 percent of a household’s income for rent and utilities.”

The price we pay for this disregard for our fundamental human rights begins at the beginning of our lives. Indeed, many of us struggle to survive to our first birthday. Citing figures from the Centers for Disease Control, the Washington Post declared our infant mortality rate “a national embarrassment,” noting that it’s higher “than any of the other 27 wealthy countries.”

That’s painful enough. But they went on: “Despite health care spending levels that are significantly higher than any other country in the world, a baby born in the U.S. is less likely to see his first birthday than one born in Hungary, Poland, or Slovakia. Or in Belarus. Or in Cuba, for that matter.”

Sad!

And a recent UNICEF assessment of how children are faring found the U.S. near the bottom of 41 rich countries when it came to meeting goals on child poverty, hunger, health, and education.

Tragic!

Well, there’s an important difference between us and other prosperous countries: Their citizens expect and demand more of their governments than we do of ours. And governments do only as much as their citizens expect — not more! So why do we accept so little from ours? How have we come to deem ourselves less worthy than others?

Mona Younis is a human rights advocate. 

David Warsh: Comey tried to play referee in a dangerous game; see widely ignored context here

The report of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices has been extensively hashed over since it was published.   You can read about it, if you like, here or here or here.

What’s lacking is vital context. Yet tucked away on the last two public pages of the 568-page report are some tantalizing findings destined to eventually become the fundamental background to the story.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report covered eight broad topics, as described by its executive summary –

• The FBI investigation, code-named “Midyear Exam,” of former Secretary of State Clinton’s email server.
• Former FBI Director James Comey’s go-it-alone statement about the FBI’s findings in July, 2016.
• The Department of Justice’s subsequent decision not to charge Clinton with a crime.
• The discovery in September of some unexamined Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, and the month that passed before the FBI sought a warrant to examine the machine.
•  Comey’s decision to notify congressional leaders in October that the investigation had been reopened,
• Some recusal issues.
• Various text messages among agents.
• And the FBI’s policies regarding Twitter announcements.

Indeed, the report presents an unusually thorough re-examination of the issues.  Agents assigned to the IG’s office sifted through 1.2 million documents and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, some of them more than once.

News organizations concentrated on two aspects:  Comey’s decision to make a unilateral announcement of FBI findings on July 5, in which he scolded candidate Clinton for having been “extremely careless” while recommending publicly that no charges against her be brought; and  his decision to notify Congress on Oct. 28 that new emails had been found.  Both decisions are held by partisans to have influenced the election to some unknowable degree.

In both cases, Horowitz was blistering. Of the July statement, its contents undisclosed in advance to his Justice Department superiors, the IG wrote that Comey had been both insubordinate and heedless of well-established FBI rules. He should have made his recommendation privately and allowed (or forced) President Obama’s Justice Department to make the call (and take the heat) that no charges would be brought.  Of October, Horowitz wrote:

"… Comey’s description of his choice as being between 'two doors,' one labeled 'speak' and one labeled 'conceal,' was a false dichotomy. The two doors were actually labeled 'follow policy/practice' and 'depart from policy/practice.' His task was not to conduct an ad hoc comparison of case-specific outcomes and risks. Rather, the burden was on him to justify an extraordinary departure from these established norms, policies, and precedent.''

Receiving slightly more attention, at least in conservative media, was a text exchange between the agent leading the investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russian connections and a high-ranking FBI lawyer, then his girlfriend.  Lisa Page wrote on Aug. 8, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?”  “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” replied special agent Peter Strzok.

(Remember, Paul Manafort was still managing the Trump campaign at the time; 10 days later he resigned.) In September Strzok was promoted to deputy assistant director of the Espionage Section.  In October, he drafted Comey’s letter to congressional Republicans – the one widely seen as harmful to Clinton’s candidacy.)

Overlooked entirely in the coverage, as far as I could tell, were four pages at the end of Chapter 12 -- “Allegations that Department and FBI Employees Improperly Disclosed Non-Public Information” – in other words, leaks.

Horowitz expressed “profound concerns” about the “volume and extent” of unauthorized communications, despite “strict limits,” which had been “widely ignored.” The IG’s ability to identify leakers was hampered by two factors. Horowitz wrote:  Sensitive information was widely shared, often involving dozens, and in some cases, more than a hundred persons; second, the normal strict rules governing disclosure appeared to have been widely ignored during the month before the election.

Which leads to those two pages at the end of the report. (I couldn’t think of a way to link them but you can easily scroll down here to find them at the bottom – Attachments G and H.) They contain two “link charts,” or schematic diagrams, depicting verified communications between FBI employees and media representatives, in April/May and October 2016.

Why April/May? That was a period in which Comey was pressuring the Department of Justice to move more quickly to obtain possession of the laptops that Clinton lawyers had used to sort personal from State Department messages, telling DOJ supervisors that he might appoint a special prosecutor if he couldn’t obtain them. (Horowitz found no evidence that he seriously considered it.) Already Comey had begun to contemplate the unilateral announcement he would make in July, fearing that the Obama administration could no longer announce a decision not to prosecute Clinton in a way that the public would find objective and credible.

Why October?  That was the period of intense behind-the-scenes maneuvering over the existence of the Weiner emails. After Comey revealed their existence in his letter to congressional leaders, Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett followed up with a blockbuster story, FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe. Barret disclosed, among other things, that an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation had begun.

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was later fired, at the IG’s instigation, and referred for possible criminal prosecution, for having confirmed the existence of the second investigation to Barrett, and for having been less than candid when interviewed about his actions. McCabe has said that he was defending the FBI (and himself) against earlier unauthorized leaks accusing him of resisting the investigation.

No details are included in those diagrams about the identities of the callers and the called, but it seems a reasonable bet that the centerpiece of “Network Two” is reporter Barrett.   Whoever it is, you get from those 112 calls a pretty good idea of what true shoe-leather reporting looks like these days. And remember, the charts reflect FBI contacts only with journalists; congressional staffers are not mentioned.  (They may yet be if the Democrats regain the House.)

Comey has insisted, both in his book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, and in interviews with agents working for the IG, that the threat of leaks had no effect on his decision to write that letter on the eve of the election. Some senior officials who worked for him weren’t so sure.  His general counsel, James Baker, told the IG, “If we didn’t put out a letter, somebody is going to leak it.”  Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney before he becoming mayor of New York, was widely involved as a go-between between FBI-connected sources and reporters at the time.

In each case, Comey’s defense against the Inspector General’s criticisms has been that he felt the FBI – and perhaps the nation itself – were  caught in a “500-year flood” and that extraordinary measures were required to deal with it.   Precisely this sense of the extraordinary is missing from Horowitz’s report.

The last word in these events will belong to journalists, first, and then historians. Among the former, reporter Barrett will likely be the most important. He left The WSJ  for The Washington Post in February 2017 and the next year helped The Post share a Pulitzer Prize with The New York Times for national reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and Russia's connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

Comey sought to play the role of referee. My hunch is that eventually he will be seen to have performed a service similar to that of another outsize regulator with an independent streak.  Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, also 6 feet 8 inches tall, began a costly campaign against price inflation in the late 1970s.  Despite expert skepticism and political criticism, he won his battle over a 10 years and subsequently was celebrated at a hero.

Upholding post-Watergate standards at the Justice Department (Comey was deputy attorney general 2003-05) and the FBI during three presidential administrations is not the same as making monetary policy..  Yet there may be something in the experience of growing up tall that predisposes some men to act in certain ways when confronted with emergency. Whether you think the comparison is apt depends on what you expect will happen to President Trump and the congressional Republicans who support him.

David Warsh is a longtime business and political columnist and economic historian. He is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.

Chris Powell: Kardashian's lesson for Moral Monday poseurs

Kim Kardashian.

People who don't watch what is ironically called "reality" television have never understood Kim Kardashian's reason for being except perhaps for her combining a voluptuous figure with tight clothes. But if she never does anything else with her life, she will have justified it by persuading President Trump to pardon Alice Johnson, the 63-year-old woman who has been in federal prison for more than 20 years, serving a life sentence for being part of a drug ring in Tennessee, a first offense and a nonviolent one. 

Twenty years is unjust for mere drug dealing, and mercy is often in order, especially from the president, who lately had been calling for capital punishment for drug dealers. Yes, as New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker complains, the nation's prisons hold thousands of other drug offenders whose sentences are disproportionate to their crimes. But let Kardashian's efforts prompt a review of those cases and indeed of drug criminalization generally. 

After all, as economic inequality worsens because of government policy, contraband law increases the temptation for people to make a living by breaking it. Drug law imprisons some people, like Johnson, longer than some people convicted of murder or manslaughter. 

Trump is not likely to give up his demagoguery any time soon. But if there is a spark of decency and mercy in him, it should be searched for and nurtured. 

Kardashian offers a lesson for the people of Connecticut's Moral Monday group who are making a career of blocking traffic in the Hartford area to protest poverty, racism and such. 

The Moral Monday people exalt this as civil disobedience but it is far from the civil disobedience of old, like the lunch-counter and bus sit-ins protesting racial segregation. Those protests had a direct connection to the evil being protested. Blocking traffic today has none. Indeed, it offends even those who otherwise might be sympathetic. 

The civil disobedience of old also was connected to specific policy objectives. Articulating no specific policy objectives in their protests, the Moral Monday people might as well protest the weather. For they aim less to accomplish anything in policy than to demonstrate self-righteousness. They don't care that by blocking traffic they are inconveniencing the supposed oppressed as much as the supposed oppressors. With their choreographed and gentle arrests, arranged in advance with the police, they seek a mock martyrdom. 

A member of the Moral Monday group, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Manchester, the Rev. Josh Pawelek, who has gotten himself arrested several times only to be sentenced to a little community service, told the (Manchester) Journal Inquirer the other day: "I'm breaking the law because I don't know how else to draw attention to the laws that impoverish people." 

Yet every day Connecticut and the country are full of political clamor and even a little action in regard to poverty. To influence policy and lawmaking and improve lives, people write letters to their elected representatives and news organizations. They support or oppose candidates for office or even become candidates themselves. They speak at public forums. They volunteer for charitable groups. If their message is compelling enough they may even recruit disciples and travel the world to spread it, risking a martyrdom far more severe than community service. 

Yes, Kim Kardashian is fortunate enough to be able to stop traffic without blocking an intersection. But who would have considered her more thoughtful and relevant than a clergyman? 


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
 

City getting bad for cynics

The Rhode Island School of Design, along the banks of the Providence River.

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

Local cynics will be depressed to read that Magnify Money has ranked the Greater Providence area the fifth-best metro area in America in which to retire.  The rankers looked at lifestyle, cost of living, medical quality and cost, and assisted-care quality and cost.

The high score was explained by what were seen as reasonable (in regional terms) monthly housing and goods-and-services costs and the quality and quantity of its retirement and assisted-care facilities. Assisted-care establishments are certainly thick on the ground in Rhode Island, especially in Providence!

The highest-ranked cities: Portland, Ore.; Salt Lake City; Denver; Charlotte, and then Kansas City, Mo., and Providence, tied for fifth. The bottom three, by the way, are Miami, Houston and New York. (The first two have an increasing propensity to be underwater.)

Interestingly, the Providence area’s “lifestyle’’ ranking, a much better than  average index score of 55.9, was brought down by a low  volunteerism rate (18.6 percent, compared to a 50-city average of 24.7 percent) – something I have long lamented about Rhode Island. The  highest rates of volunteerism tend to be concentrated in affluent parts of the state, such as Barrington, East Greenwich and the East Side of Providence. We need to widen that!

Porch maintenance and righteousness.

Sitting in a demoralizing screened-in porch.

A "connected farmhouse'' in Windham, Maine. The barn dates from the late 18th Century. The house itself was built in three stages during the 19th Century while the unconnected garage was a 20th-Century addition. All doors of the structure are visible in this view from the south side, where sun would melt accumulated snow and ice. Following the 20th-Century outbreak of Dutch elm disease only one American elm remains of the line that provided summer shade along the southern and western sides of the building.

"Yankees traditionally build porches that will sag after a decade, and tack them onto houses built to stand a century. …New England is a harsh climate not only for crops but for neighbors and porches as well. Any flagging of morale – any passing of days skulking indoors in a state of depression…any slacking of righteousness – and down goes the porch.''

-- From Three Farms, by Mark Kramer

Eerie beauty in P Town

Photo by  Charlie Hunter  in his 25-photo show at Gallery 444, Provincetown, showing  the beauty of the  Outer Cape. The show runs through June 20.

William Morgan: A back-of-beyond town in New Hampshire

Union Church, Town Hall, and Congregational Church, Kensington, N.H.

-- All photos by William Morgan

Despite the grand-sounding name, there's not much to see in Kensington, in southeastern New Hampshire. "Downtown" Kensington is just a wide place in the road, with a cluster of two churches and the town hall. Many Granite State towns were named not for places back in the mother country, but for members of Parliament, in this case, 1st Baron Kensington.

The town library, a small late-Victorian gem, is some distance away, next to the elementary school (104 students in kindergarten through 5th grade), while the Bell Hill Schoolhouse, built in 1839, and the North School, built in  1842,  now unused brick boxes, were erected  farther out in the country to serve the scattered populace. No doubt, there is a country store-cum-filling-station at a crossroads somewhere else in the town.

The Union Church, built in 1840, is a conservative mix of the late Georgian and Greek revival styles.   

Kensington has just over 2,000 people spread out over 12 square miles. As is typical of northern New England, many people wanting to live here will have to commute  considerable distances to work – to Exeter, Portsmouth, Haverhill or even Boston. Yet, though only a stone's throw from Massachusetts, Kensington captures that back-of-beyond quality of rural New Hampshire. As in  much of the state, the forests are reclaiming what was open grazing land for two centuries or more.

Gravestone of Henry Lamprey, who died May 12, 1764, aged 90.

Samuel Tucke's stone of 1843 is of slate, the stonecutter's name is inscribed at the bottom and the urn and weeping willow motifs are more sophisticated than the primitive winged head of the early stones.

There are almost no gravestones beyond the middle of the 19th Century, suggesting that the town's young people had migrated to Yankee mill towns or out West. One gets the inescapable feeling that Kensington is a place passed over.

William Morgan is an architectural historian and essayist. He is the author of  American Country Churches and The Abrams Guide to American House Styles, among other books. He  has taught at Princeton University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Louisville and his essays have appeared in numerous publications.

Beware when it stops

"Restless Vapor'' (painting), by Cristi Rinklin, in her current  show, "Paramnesiac," at the Newport (R.I.) Art Museum. The museum cites  her "flowing and luxurious work, which uses swelling shapes and clouds of fog and smoke to create a dreamlike reality. "

'Thrusting aside the soil'

The Old Manse is an old house in Concord, Mass.,  famous for its  historical and literary associations.

"I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over  my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.''
 

--  Nathaniel Hawthorne,  from Mosses from an Old Manse

In 1842, the novelist   Nathaniel Hawthorne rented the Old Manse for $100 a year. He moved in with his wife, Transcendentalist Sophia Peabody, on July 9, 1842, as newlyweds and lived there for three years before  they were being evicted for not paying their rent.

Ms. Peabody had previously visited Concord and met Ralph Waldo Emerson while working on a bas-relief portrait medallion of his brother Charles, who had died in 1836. She praised the town to Hawthorne. Before the Hawthornes' arrival at the Manse, Henry David Thoreau created a vegetable garden for the couple.  In the upstairs room that Hawthorne used as his study, you can see  affectionate sentiments that the two etched into the window panes.

Llewellyn King: The case against mega-mergers is written in U.S. history

A judge has green-lighted the $85 billion merger of Time Warner and AT&T. Unless the Trump administration appeals and wins on appeal, another behemoth will take the field.

This merger, it is assumed, will lead to a flurry of other mergers in communications. Witness Comcast’s $65 billion bid for Fox, topping Disney’s $52.4 billion offer.

This is heady stuff. The money on the table is enormous, in some cases dwarfing the economies of small countries.

Merging is an industry unto itself. A lot of people get very rich: They are investment bankers, arbitragers, lawyers, economists, accountants, publicists and opinion researchers. When really big money moves, some of it falls off the table into the willing hands of those who have managed the movement.

The fate of the real owners of these companies, the stockholders, is more doubtful after the initial run-up. The earlier merger of Time with Warner Communications is considered to have been disadvantageous for stockholders.

Another concern is the mediocre performance of conglomerates. The latest to have run into trouble is General Electric, which had managed to do well in many businesses until recently.

A more cautionary story is what happened to Westinghouse when it went whole hog into broadcasting and lost its footing in the electric generation businesses. This was spun off, sold to British Nuclear Fuels in 1997, then sold again to Toshiba and later went into bankruptcy.

From the 1950s, Westinghouse it bought and sold companies at a furious rate, until the core company itself was sold in favor of broadcasting. One of Westinghouse’s most successful chairmen, Bob Kirby, told me it was easier for him to buy or sell a company than to make a small internal decision.

In another pure financial play, a group of hedge funds bought Toys R Us and with the added debt, it failed.

In many things, big is essential in today’s economy. News organizations need substantial financial strength to be able to do the job. Witness the cost of covering the Quebec and Singapore summits. As Westinghouse proved by default, big construction needs big resources. That is indisputable.

When growth through acquisition becomes the modus operandi of a company, something has gone very wrong. The losers are the public and the customers. The new AT&T, if it comes about, will still need you and I to lift the receiver, watch its videos and subscribe to its bundles.

Recently, I was discussing the problems customers have with behemoth corporations on SiriusXM Radio's "The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley" when a listener tweeted that I hated big companies and their CEOs and loved big government.

Actually, I’d just spent a week with the CEOs of several companies, admirable people, and I don’t think government should be any bigger than needs be. I certainly don’t think government should perform functions that can be better performed in the private sector.

The problem is size itself.

When any organization gets too big, it begins to get muscle-bound, self-regarding. Although it might’ve been built on daring innovation, as many firms have been, supersized companies have difficulty in allowing new thinking, reacting nimbly and adopting innovative technologies and materials.

If large corporate entities were as nimble as small ones, the automobile companies would’ve become the airplane manufacturers in the 1920s and 1930s. They had the money, the manufacturing know-how and the engineering talent. They lacked the vision. It was easier to be rent-takers in the production and sale of automobiles.

Likewise, it’s incredible that FedEx was able to conquer the delivery business when another delivery system, Western Union, was up and running. But Western Union was big, smug and monopolistic. They had the resources and an army of staff delivering telegrams.

Companies like Alphabet (Google’s owner) snap up start-ups as soon as they are proven. That snuffs out the creativity early, even if it wasn’t meant to, and makes Google even more dominant. I would argue too big for its own good -- and for ours.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.  He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

The epicenter of merger mania -- Wall Street, with the New York Stock Exchange draped with the flag.

They don't do it for the money

The New Hampshire State House, in Concord.

"The fact that a New Hampshire legislator's position is not seen as a career or a way of supporting a family has meant that it draws women. At times, I think men who might be looking for a paid career have known that they couldn't make one out of serving in the legislature. So there's a little more space for women.''

-- Maggie Hassan, now U.S. senator and former New Hampshire governor.

New Hampshire state legislators are paid $100 a year.

At the New Hampshire State House.

Briefly scary in spiffy Southboro

"Entelodont,'' by Robert Shannahan, in the "Art on the Trails 2018'' show at the Beals Preserve, Southboro, Mass.  The show includes 18 outdoor art installations in the Beals Preserve.   The theme of the exhibition is "Unexpected Gestures''.  The juried works  were created and selected with the setting of the preserve in mind, contrasting and blending with its woods, meadows, trails and ponds. See artonthetrails.com for more information.

Southboro is a rich Boston  outer suburb, with snob zoning and lots of open space. It is well known as the home of a prestigious boarding school,  St. Mark's School, founded in 1865 by Joseph Burnett. It also hosts  the nation's oldest junior boarding school, the Fay School, founded a year later  by Joseph Burnett's first cousin Harriet Burnett Fay.

Unbustling downtown Southboro (aka Southborough).