Vox clamantis in deserto
Jill Richardson: It's not about the straws
A few years ago, I had a cupcake problem. I’d go to the cupcake store almost daily and I’d eat at least one cupcake, sometimes more.
At the same time, I wanted to lose weight, or at least stop gaining it. So I kept looking up information about diets and superfoods, just looking for some magical solution to present itself.
Something like: “The key to weight loss is eating large quantities of parsley every day.” Or turmeric, maybe? Ginger? Garlic? Finally, I realized, there is no magical fix. The problem was the cupcakes.
It’s tempting to look for easy ways to fix big problems by trimming around the edges to avoid making the real changes you don’t want to make. Tempting, but not feasible.
That’s similar to what presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren just said about fixing climate change. She was asked about her position on small changes like banning plastic drinking straws or inefficient light bulbs.
“Give me a break,” she said. “This is exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants us to talk about… They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your lightbulbs, around your straws” when “70 percent of the pollution” comes from “the building industry, the electric power industry, and the oil industry.”
Like my cupcakes, those three industries are the real problem. Banning straws while leaving those three industries in place will make about as much of a dent in the climate as eating two cups of parsley a day while continuing my cupcake habit would have made in my waistline: Not much.
My cupcake habit was a problem, but it was also a symptom of a larger problem. In the end, I got therapy for difficult feelings I was dealing with. Once I took care of my mental health, the emotional eating stopped, and I lost 30 pounds.
Carbon pollution is also a problem as well as a symptom of a larger problem. As Warren pointed out, fossil fuel companies exert too much influence on Washington, preventing us from regulating them in the ways we need to save our climate.
They also hire public relations firms to dupe the public into doubting that the climate crisis is caused by humans — or at least, not by them — and to convince us not to regulate them in a way that would save the planet but cost them money.
We should be looking for win-win solutions to the climate crisis: solutions that create jobs and preserve quality of life and individual freedoms while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.
In order to do that, we need to curb the corrupt influence of polluting industries that are profiting off of carbon emissions while harming the future of our planet. And, when they try to distract us with light bulbs and drinking straws, we can’t allow ourselves to be fooled.
Jill Richardson , a sociologist, is an OtherWords.org columnist.
Llewellyn King: Beware the tyranny of polling
Comparing 1975 and 2016 referenda on U.K. membership in the European Union (whose predecessor organization, in 1975, was the European Economic Community).
The political chaos in Britain — and the situation in British politics is chaotic — can be laid at the base of two interventions by direct government usurping representative government.
The first is the intervention of polling. Polling, although useful and indeed invaluable most of the time, does restrict the free operation of representative government. The public state of mind the polling day affects the actions of its elected representatives and can inhibit new ideas as they evolve. In the defense of polls, they are reality check when politicians give way to intoxication with their own thinking. Polls are here to stay; an organic part of the political landscape.
Yet the deliberative process can be inhibited by them. It is no accident that the U.S. Senate is regarded as a great deliberative forum: With six years between elections, there is time to work through a problem — at least there should be.
Former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union because his pollster assured him that the public would support him, as they had voted by a large majority for Britain to remain in the European Economic Community, as it was then known, in 1975. Britain’s membership began in 1973.
A poll is a snapshot and reflects not only the feeling of the populace at the time but also the basis of what it thinks it believes or, in fact, does believe.
Cameron did not allow for campaigning and the emotional appeal of inflamed nationalism, plus some pretty hefty fibs from the current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his allies in the Brexit camp.
Had the E.U. membership issue been left to simmer, as it has simmered for decades, it might eventually have been decided by the elected representatives of the people in Parliament or just simmered on, either to dissipate or develop into an election issue at a later time.
But this has always been a particularly difficult issue for Parliament where the two main parties were split on it. Neither of them, Labor and Conservative, was wholly for Europe or against it. Successive Labor and Conservative governments have stayed firmly in Europe, although complaining all the way — as did Margaret Thatcher during her time as prime minister.
The E.U. referendum was an intrusion of direct government into the workings of parliamentary representative government — a referendum, not favored in Britain’s unwritten constitution, a sort of legal blithe spirit of practice, precedent, tradition and habit, trailing all the way back to the Magna Carta.
The constitution, long believed to gain its strength from its flexibility, now is flexed to a point of full crisis. Polls gave Cameron overconfidence in looking to a referendum to settle a nettlesome issue. It did, but not in the way Cameron and the polls predicted.
Polls are not going away. Recently I visited Quinnipiac University, in Hamden, Conn., home to the influential Quinnipiac Poll, where I conducted a television interview. Conclusion: Those pollsters know what they are doing, and they do it with science and without prejudice. Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, and his staff are employed by the university. The polling arm takes no outside funding, shielding the poll from allegations of political favoritism or manipulation.
It should be recognized by politicians that polls are only a snapshot, a second in time, of evolving public opinion. They do not handle complex issues well and referendums, which are polls taken to extreme, are unreasoning.
It can be argued, and I will not argue against you, that politicians now have abandoned thinking, reasoning and compromising in favor rigidities on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet politicians, in doing their jobs in session, remain a better way of deciding great issues than the whole populace in a committee of the whole.
Britain is in crisis not because it is a democracy, but because it tried something undemocratic and antithetical to its own traditions. The nation that ruled much of the world appears unable to rule itself.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
New PCFR chairwoman; 2019-20 schedule
The Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com) is pleased to announce that Barbara Ann Fenton has been named chairwoman, succeeding Hannah Hazelton, whose has successfully led the organization for the past couple of years.
Ms. Fenton has lived and studied in Scotland and Australia, and has long had a keen interest in international affairs, especially in regards to global health and environmental issues. This year Fenton was named to Providence Business News's "Top 40 Under 40" list. She has extensive university teaching and political experience.
Fenton stated, "After immensely enjoying the lively evenings that the PCFR dinners are known for, I'm thrilled to be stepping into this role and leading this renowned 91-year-old organization. With guests such as Jon Gage, Tweed Roosevelt and Ambassador Duddy early on in the season, we are looking forward to another energizing year of camaraderie and learning.’’
The Providence Committee on Foreign Relations is an independent private membership organization established in 1928 under the aegis of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which is based in New York. It no longer has a formal connection with the CFR, although CFR-linked experts sometimes speak at PCFR dinners.
The PCFR remains faithful to informing citizens about the world, and hosts around 10 engaging speakers each year in an off-the-record setting. For information about the organization, including on joining, see: www.ThePCFR.org
and/or email:
Below is the current list of our dinner speakers (at our venue, the Hope Club, in Providence) for our 2019-2020 season. There will be refinements and outright changes in topics; the PCFR tries to remain somewhat flexible to respond to news and other events
Our first scheduled speaker comes Wednesday, Oct, 2, with Jonathan Gage, who will talk about how coverage of such international economic stories as trade wars has changed over the years, in part because of new technology, and how that coverage itself changes events.
Mr. Gage has had a very distinguished career in publishing and international journalism. He has served as publisher and CEO of Institutional Investor magazine, as publisher of strategy+business magazine, as a director at Booz Allen Hamilton and Booz & Company, as enterprise editor for Bloomberg News and finance editor of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune (of sainted memory) and as a senior writer for the Boston Consulting Group.
He is a trustee, and former vice chairman, of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
He has written or edited for such publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Psychology Today magazine.
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On Wednesday, Oct. 23, comes Ambassador Patrick Duddy, who will talk about Venezuelan internal political and economic conditions and relations with the U.S., Cuba, Russia and other nations. Mr. Duddy, currently director of Duke University’s center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, served as American ambassador to Venezuela during some of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. The late President Hugo Chavez expelled him but eight months later he resumed his ambassadorship. He finished that assignment in 2010.
Before his ambassadorships, Mr. Duddy served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (DAS) for the Western Hemisphere, responsible for the Office of Economic Policy and Summit Coordination, which included the hemispheric energy portfolio, as well for the Offices of Brazil/ Southern Cone Affairs and of Caribbean Affairs. During his tenure as DAS, he played a lead role in coordinating U.S. support for the restoration of democracy in Haiti.
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On Wednesday, Nov. 6, comes Tweed Roosevelt, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and great-grandson of that president. He’ll talk about how TR’s foreign policy, which was developed as the U.S. became truly a world power, affected subsequent presidents’ foreign policies. Mr., Roosevelt is also chairman of Roosevelt China Investments, a Boston firm.
In 1992, Mr. Roosevelt rafted down the 1,000-mile Rio Roosevelt in Brazil—a river previously explored by his great-grandfather in 1914 in the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition and then called the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt. The former president almost died on that legendary and dangerous trip.
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On Thursday, Dec. 5, we’ll welcome Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou, who directs the Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy, and is visiting associate professor of conflict resolution, at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She titles her talk "God, Soft Power, and Geopolitics: Religion as a Tool for Conflict Prevention/Generation".
Dr. Prodromou is also a non-resident senior fellow and co-chair of the Working Group on Christians and Religious Pluralism, at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, and is also non-resident fellow at The Hedayah International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism, based in Abu Dhabi.
She is former vice chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics and religion, with particular focus on the intersection of religion, democracy, and security in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Her current research project focus on Orthodox Christianity and geopolitics, as well as on religion and migration in Greece.
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On Wednesday, Jan. 8, comes Michael Fine, M.D., who will talk about his novel Abundance, set in West Africa, and the challenges of providing health care in the Developing World. He will speak on: “Plagues and Pestilence: What we learned (or didn't) from Ebola about Foreign Policy and International Collaboration in the face of epidemics and outbreaks’’
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On Wednesday, Feb. 5, we will welcome as speaker PCFR member Cornelia Dean, book author, science writer and former science editor of The New York and internationally known expert on coastal conditions. She’ll talk how rising seas threaten coastal cities around the world and what they can do about it.
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On Wednesday, March 18, comes Stephen Wellmeier, managing director of Poseidon Expeditions. He’ll talk about the future of adventure travel and especially about Antarctica, and its strange legal status.
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On Wednesday, April 29, comes Trita Parsi, a native of Iran and founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance and A Single Roll of the Dice. He regularly writes articles and appears on TV to comment on foreign policy. He, of course, has a lot to say about U.S- Iranian relations and a lot more.
Mr. Parsi is a co-founder of a new think tank, financed by an unlikely partnership of the right wing Koch Brothers and the left-of-center George Soros. It’s called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and dedicated to helping craft a new U.S. foreign policy that would be far less interventionist and put an end to America’s “endless foreign wars.’’
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On Wednesday, May 6, we’ll welcome Serenella Sferza, a political scientist and co-director of the program on Italy at MIT’s Center for International Studies, who will talk about the rise of right-wing populism and other developments in her native land.
She has taught at several US and European universities, and published numerous articles on European politics. Serenella's an affiliate at the Harvard De Gunzburg Center for European Studies and holds the title of Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d'Italia conferred by decree of the President of the Republic for the preservation and promotion of national prestige abroad.
June: Keeping open for now but possibly something on China.
In Portsmouth, 19th Century prosperity and decline
“Lowd House Shadows, Fall’’ (gouache on paper), by Carol Aronson-Shore, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
Lowd House is part of Strawberry Banke Museum, in Portsmouth, N.H. The museum says:
“James Drisco built this house across Horse Lane from the Shapley-Drisco House where he lived. He had the house built in 1810, probably as rental property. The house is named for Peter Lowd, a Portsmouth cooper, who bought it in 1824 and lived there with his family until his death in 1837. Making a living at coopering, as demonstrated in Strawbery Banke’s Dinsmore Shop, meant crafting the barrels and kegs needed for shipping New Hampshire products, Lowd was one of the many middleclass artisans who made Portsmouth prosper. In the early 1830s when he had reached the peak of his personal prosperity, Lowd invested the money from his shop on Long Wharf in another wharf and several ships. But after 1833 he and Portsmouth’s finances went into decline and he died leaving his wife and five children with extensive debts.’’
Drawing the line in Duxbury
“Fortified’’ (charcoal and pastel), by Lesley Cohen, in the group show “Draw the Line,’’ at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass., Sept. 15-Jan 12.
In Duxbury, view of Bluefish River inlet, with “King Caesar House’’ at left. The Federal-style mansion was built in 1809 for Ezra Weston, a well known shipbuilder and merchant nicknamed King Caesar for his influence and prosperity.
— Photo by Ruth W. Demby
Growing cranberries and electricity
“The Cranberry Harvest on the Island of Nantucket,’’ by Eastman Johnson, 1880.
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Cranberry bogs, which produce Massachusetts’s largest crop by revenue, are obviously open to full sun. And so a new Massachusetts state solar-energy incentive program is getting a lot of attention from financially struggling cranberry farmers anxious to diversify their revenue.
The Solar Massachusetts Renewable Energy Target (SMART) program pays growers a stipend for the electricity, to be sold to utilities, from solar panels put up on their farmland. While some farmers worry that somehow installation of the panels might hurt their crops, others see the plan as a savior in a time of sharply falling prices for cranberries, which are mostly used for juice.
The program requires growers to continue producing food on the same land as the panels to get the stipend. The mission is to simultaneously promote farmland preservation in a mostly urban and suburban state while boosting locally generated renewable energy. Would the small amount of shading from the solar panels hurt the crop? Probably not, but it will probably take a year or two of observation to know for sure.
We ought to follow the general principle that already existing open space, such as parking lots at dead shopping malls and on rooftops, should be used for solar farms, instead of cutting down trees to make space for the panels.
To learn more, please hit this link and this one, with photo of panels on a bog and one farmer’s story.
Colleen J. Quint: Children's Savings Accounts in New England and beyond
Children playing ball games, Roman artwork, 2nd Century A.D.
From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)
PORTLAND, Maine=
As students throughout New England head back to school this fall, tens of thousands of them have a head start on a bright future through a Children’s Savings Account (CSA). These investments in children’s future postsecondary education are offered in cities and states throughout the region—and beyond—and all share a goal of boosting college-going. CSAs are long-term savings or investment accounts for children that often include incentives such as seed deposit or matches to encourage additional savings. Withdrawals from CSAs are typically restricted for their intended use, usually education after high school.
Whether thought of as improving aspirations, building assets or creating a more educated workforce (or all three!) CSAs have the potential for an outsized impact. Promising early outcomes indicate positive effects on aspirations, academics and even health. Commonly understood as helping to create a college-bound identify, CSA programs are referred to by one leading researcher as “hope in tangible form.”
Earlier this summer, representatives of CSA programs throughout the region and beyond met at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for a “Celebration & Showcase” to mark the fifth anniversary of the creation of the New England Consortium of Children’s Savings Accounts (NECCSA). This regional peer learning group meets quarterly to share information and insights, discuss program innovations and explore research opportunities. By the end of last year, participating programs had awarded nearly $65 million to more than 132,000 children through their CSA programs. Importantly, families had invested over $76 million in additional funds.
Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island all offer statewide programs in which newborns have the opportunity for a seed grant to a CSA account. Through CHET Baby Scholars in Connecticut, My Alfond Grant in Maine, BabySteps in Massachusetts and CollegeBound Baby in Rhode Island, children born as residents of these states are awarded funds at birth—in some cases automatically, in others when parents open their own account. Massachusetts also has numerous city- and neighborhood-based CSA programs like Boston Saves, Inversant and the Cambridge Housing Authority. Rural northern New Hampshire has a program through AHEAD that helps students start saving in school. And just outside the region, programs are underway as well: a pilot program in New York Kindergartens and a statewide program announced in Pennsylvania.
The work in New England is in many ways a good representation of what is happening across the country. CSA programs can now be found in 34 states with nearly half a million children nationwide benefiting. And the field is building incredible momentum. Legislation has been passed this past year in Nebraska, Colorado and Illinois to create CSAs for children statewide. In the early days of his new administration, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has also committed $50 million to expand CSAs throughout the state. And a Mid-West CSA Consortium, modeled on NECCSA, has developed, supporting nearly a dozen nascent and emerging programs in that region.
So why are so many places deciding to develop CSA programs? There is early and compelling evidence that indicates a strong return on investment. An analysis of national data by the Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis shows that children with a college savings account in their name, even if that account has only a few hundred dollars in it, are three times more likely to go to college and four times more likely to graduate. And a long-term randomized control study of one CSA program in Oklahoma showed that, five years in, children had social and emotional developmental gains as if they had participated in Head Start—and mothers had higher aspirations and lower levels of maternal depression.
Closer to home, the My Alfond Grant program in Maine has been looking at early outcomes as well. As referenced above, the My Alfond Grant program invests $500 at birth for every Maine resident baby. Following a pilot year in 2008, the program used an “opt-in” model from 2009 to 2012 during which time, a college savings account needed to be opened by a child’s first birthday in order for the grant to be awarded. Statewide, about 25,000 children were awarded grants during this time—approximately 40% of eligible children. For babies born as Maine residents beginning January 1, 2013, the $500 Alfond Grant is now awarded automatically. The program is now statewide, automatic, universal and at birth. Just this month, the Alfond Scholarship Foundation, the nonprofit organization that manages the program, announced a major milestone: $50 million invested for the future education of 100,000 Maine children.
With the oldest children benefiting from the My Alfond Grant program entering fifth and sixth grade this fall, high school graduation and college matriculation are still several years away. Yet research conducted by the University of Michigan through a grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation has yielded valuable insights on interim measures of success. A quantitative analysis of family savings behaviors by those involved in the first five years of the My Alfond Grant program (when it used an opt-in model) showed that families at all income levels were saving—including 27% of families with annual household incomes at or below $25,000. Qualitative interviews with families suggest that families with Alfond Grants start thinking about college—and saving for college—at an earlier stage in their child’s life than they would have otherwise. And a recently conducted statewide quantitative survey that included opt-in families, universal families and those without an Alfond Grant found that families whose children had an Alfond Grant reported higher aspirations and even more positive health outcomes than those without a grant. Interestingly, there is no statistical difference between opt-in and universal families; the mere fact of having the Alfond Grant seems to be enough.
With Massachusetts looking ahead to January 2020 for the rollout of its Baby Steps program and Rhode Island’s recent check-the-box innovation (enabling an account to be opened on behalf of children whose families check a box granting permission to do so on the birth record form), more and more children throughout New England will benefit from having a college savings account in their name. And that can only be a good thing for those children, and for our region.
Colleen J. Quint is president & CEO of the Alfond Scholarship Foundation, which is based in Portland.
Grand tour of grand New England houses
William (“Willit’’ ) Mason, M.D., has written has a delightful – and very handy -- book rich with photos and colorful anecdotes, called Guidebook to Historic Houses and Gardens in New England: 71 Sites from the Hudson Valley East (iUniverse, 240 pages. Paperback. $22.95). Oddly, given the cultural and historical richness of New England and the Hudson Valley, no one else has done a book quite like this before.
The blurb on the back of the book neatly summarizes his story.
“When Willit Mason retired in the summer of 2015, he and his wife decided to celebrate with a grand tour of the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley of New York.
While they intended to enjoy the area’s natural beauty, they also wanted to visit the numerous historic estates and gardens that lie along the Hudson River and the hills of the Berkshires.
But Mason could not find a guidebook highlighting the region’s houses and gardens, including their geographic context, strengths, and weaknesses. He had no way of knowing if one location offered a terrific horticultural experience with less historical value or vice versa.
Mason wrote this comprehensive guide of 71 historic New England houses and gardens to provide an overview of each site. Organized by region, it makes it easy to see as many historic houses and gardens in a limited time.
Filled with family histories, information on the architectural development of properties and overviews of gardens and their surroundings, this is a must-have guide for any New England traveler.’’
Dr. Mason noted of his tours: “Each visit has captured me in different ways, whether it be the scenic views, architecture of the houses, gardens and landscape architecture or collections of art. As we have learned from Downton Abbey, every house has its own personal story. And most of the original owners of the houses I visited in preparing the book have made significant contributions to American history.’’
To order a book, please go to www.willitmason.com
Matt Robinson: Legends and lore of the Ivy League
After over 20 years as a professional writer, editor, publisher and “pen for hire,” I have composed my new book Lions, Tigers, and…Bulldogs?: An unofficial guide to the legends and lore of the Ivy League. It was just published by Fighting Quaker Books. However, you can go to www.lionstigersbulldogs.com to order the book or respond to weekly trivia contests for a chance to WIN a copy.
In addition to tons of trivia about the Ancient Eight, the book and Web site offers interesting information about the history of academia and college sports in America, as well as a veritable Who’s Who of famous graduates (and almost graduates). So if your students or children need a bit of a boost to get them thinking about and striving for college, Lions, Tigers, and…Bulldogs? can be a fun way to start the conversation.
A book party is scheduled for Sept. 14 at the New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton, Mass.
Matt Robinson is a Boston area-based journalist, editor and educator. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996.
Sun also dresses
“Yellow’’ (found dresser: plywood, maple wood and paint), by Sarah Braman, in a group show through Oct. 6 at Hampden Gallery, Amherst, Mass.
Chuck Collins: Make the very rich pay their fair share in taxes first
“The Worship of Mammon’’ (1909), by Evelyn De Morgan
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
Presidential candidates should take a pledge: The middle class should not pay one dollar more in new taxes until the super-rich pay their fair share.
Already candidates are outlining ambitious programs to improve health care, combat climate change and address the opioid crisis — and trying to explain how they’ll pay for it.
President Trump, on the other hand, wants to give corporations and the richest 1 percent more tax breaks to keep goosing a lopsided economic boom — even as deficit hawks moan about the exploding national debt and annual deficits topping $1 trillion.
Eventually someone is going to have to pay the bills. If history is a guide, the first to pay will be the broad middle class, thanks to lobbyists pulling the strings for the wealthy and big corporations.
Here’s a different idea: Whatever spending plan is put forward, the first $1 trillion in new tax revenue should come exclusively from multimillionaires and billionaires.
Four decades of stagnant wages plus runaway housing and health care costs have clobbered the middle class. In an economy with staggering inequalities — the income and wealth gaps are at their widest level in a century — the middle class shouldn’t be hit up a penny more until the rich pay up.
The biggest winners of the last decade, in terms of income and wealth growth, have not been even the richest 1 percent, but the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. This 0.1 percent includes households with incomes over $2.4 million, and wealth starting at $32 million.
They own more wealth than the bottom 80 percent combined. Yet these multi-millionaires and billionaires have seen their taxes decline over the decades, in part because the tax code favors wealth over work.
This richest 0.1 percent receives two-thirds of their income from investments, while most working families have little capital income and depend on wages. But our rigged system taxes most investment income from wealth at a top rate of about 24 percent — considerably lower than the top 37 percent rate for work.
One way to ensure that the wealthy pay first is to institute a 10 percent surtax on incomes over $2 million. This “multimillionaire surtax” would raise nearly $600 billion in revenue over 10 years, according to an upcoming study from the Tax Policy Center.
The surtax would apply to income earned from work (wages and salaries) and to investment income gained from wealth, including capital gains and dividends. So those with capital income over $2 million would not get a preferential tax rate.C
The multimillionaire surtax is easy to understand, simple to apply, and effective — because it covers all kinds of income, making it difficult for the wealthy to avoid.
And it is laser focused on the super-rich. Anyone earning below $2 million a year would not pay a dime.
As a nation, we will need to raise trillions to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and to address urgent priorities such as health care, climate change, child care, higher education, opioid addiction, and more.
The middle class should have 100 percent confidence that they won’t be asked to pony up until Wall Street speculators and billionaires pay the piper. A multimillionaire surtax is a good first step.
Chuck Collins, based in Boston, directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies.
'Fiber Fusions'
“Summer Planter, ‘‘by Sue Colozzi, in the show “Fiber Fusions: A Juried Quilt Exhibition,’’ through Oct. 26 at the Whistler House Museum of Art, Lowell, Mass. The show displays 60 quilts from more than 100 submissions from American and European artists. The building housing the museum was the birthplace of the famed painter James McNeill Whistler (as in “Whistler’s Mother”).
Tim Faulkner: Vineyard Wind delay holds up similar projects
The federal wind lease area for the first phase of the 84-turbine Vineyard Wind project.
— Vineyard Wind graphic
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
The Vineyard Wind project is a major test of the offshore wind industry. The 84-turbine project is hailed as the first large utility-scale power source, after the five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm went on-line in December 2016.
As a pilot project, Block Island showed that the United States can profitably produce and deliver offshore wind energy, and create jobs. More than a dozen other proposals have followed, and new federal wind-lease areas are expected along the East Coast.
Vineyard Wind, with 800 megawatts of electric capacity, is presumed to clear the way for more than 10 gigawatts of power coming from the waters off southern New England.
The $2.8 billion project, backed by the Danish investment fund Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables of Portland Ore., has received most of the needed permits, including a power-purchase agreement from the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities.
In Rhode Island, the project went through a bruising review to secure an agreement with commercial fishermen and seafood processors. In February, the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council approved a consistency certification.
The latest impasse, however, may be more difficult than reducing the number of turbines and bargaining over compensation, as Vineyard Wind did with the fishing industry. The delay issued by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Aug. 9 presents a more formidable hurdle.
In its announcement, BOEM said it will take more time to review Vineyard Wind’s environmental impact statement (EIS), in part because of the influx of offshore wind proposals and state mandates for offshore wind energy.
Additional hearings will be held and public comment will be reopened to include input from federal, state, and local agencies, elected officials, and fishing communities. No dates have yet been announced.
BOEM expects to complete the supplemental EIS by the end of this year or in early 2020. Once the EIS is issued, permits can move forward from the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Vineyard Wind said it was surprised and disappointed by BOEM’s announcement.
“Even though today’s decision will delay development of American offshore wind projects, Vineyard Wind remains deeply committed to the emerging industry’s success,” according to Vineyard Wind statement.
Vineyard Wind noted that it worked closely with BOEM to have the EIS completed by Aug. 16 and issued by Sept. 6, so that construction can begin by the end of the year. Further delay reduces a key federal investment tax credit the project is relying on.
BOEM has a reputation for rubber-stamping commercial projects. Some elected officials, however, have accuse the agency of thumbing its nose at renewable energy and favoring a fossil-fuel industry that wants to keep New England reliant on natural gas and oil.
BOEM, a division of the Department of Interior, is lead by David Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the mining and fossil-fuel extraction industry. President Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly besmirched the wind-energy industry despite its rapid growth and a trend of lower costs.
U.S. Rep. William Keating, a Democrat representing Martha’s Vineyard, said, “the Trump Administration has not dealt fairly with Vineyard Wind.”
“Taking this action, at this late stage, is another example of this Administration’s hostility toward those seeking to combat climate change, as well as its overall rejection of basic environmental values,” Keating is quoted in a statement.
Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said BOEM’s delay “sends a clear and chilling message across this nascent industry that the Trump Administration will do everything in its power to cut corners for oil and gas projects while cutting the chord on the next frontier of clean energy deployment.”
Despite the setback, shareholders still back the project, according to Vineyard Wind.
Vineyard Wind, based in New Bedford, said the project is the lynchpin to the construction of thousands of offshore wind turbines.
“The project is poised to kickstart a new offshore wind industry that promises industrial growth along with new manufacturing and blue-collar employment across the United States from New England to Louisiana to Colorado and beyond,” according to project officials.
The BOEM setback hasn’t deterred Vineyard Wind from proposing up to two additional offshore wind facilities: a 400-megawatt proposal and an 800-megawatt project called Vineyard Wind 2, south of the first Vineyard Wind proposal and in the same federal wind-lease area located 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.
The first Vineyard Wind is also appealing a decision by the Edgartown Conservation Commission to deny a permit to run power cables through the Muskeget Channel. The commission rejected the proposal in July for lacking a decommissioning plan, an absence of environmental research, and concern about the impact of future wind projects.
The Vineyard Wind project and perhaps the future of the offshore wind industry could face another potential obstacle: radar interference. An Aug. 21 story by the MV Times reported that offshore turbines potentially distort marine radar, thereby impairing boat navigation.
The Coast Guard raised the issue in a letter to BOEM in March and suggested that Vineyard Wind research the radar problem and pay for any remedies. The Coast Guard recently joined a federal task force that has been reviewing the issue since 2014. Earlier federal reports showed that wind turbines can interfere with military radar and weather instruments. Various technologies that reduce the problem are being researched.
Vineyard Wind said it answered the radar issue in the EIS and intends to work with the Coast Guard to address any problems. Vineyard Wind said it also will consider “mitigation measures” to compensate fishermen and other stakeholders if needed.
The target completion date for Vineyard Wind is 2022. If built, it will generate enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. According to the Department of Energy the offshore wind industry is expected to create 600,000 jobs by 2050.
Tim Faulkner is an ecoRI News journalist.
David Warsh: Was ending the draft a big mistake?
On June 5, 1917, young men in New York City registering for the draft during World War I .
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The news was intriguing: billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch, polar opposites in much of their philanthropic activism, had joined forces to provide seed funding for a new foreign policy think-tank. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is to be dedicated to promoting restraint in the use of American military power abroad. The initiative was first reported by Stephen Kinzer in The Boston Globe, enthusiastically if cautiously seconded by Daniel Drezner in The Washington Post, its plans described in some detail by David Klion in The Nation. The name comes from an 1821 speech by John Quincy Adams.
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
The institute is expected to open its doors in November, with Andrew Bacevich, of Boston University, as president.
The news coincides with the appearance of a striking new account of the creation of an all-volunteer army, in 1973, to replace military conscription in the United States. Richard Nixon espoused the measure as part of his successful campaign for the presidency in 1968, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War.
In The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society, by New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum writes:
The world changes and it’s hard to say why. The United States ended conscription in 1973 because an insecure man named Lyndon Baines Johnson doubled down on a losing hand and because it kept getting harder to teach recruits how to operate new military technology and because the voting age dropped to eighteen and because young men in an increasingly prosperous nation did not want to fight. But it is also true that the United States ended conscription because Milton Friedman persuaded [campaign adviser Martin] Anderson who persuaded Nixon, who won the 1968 election
Congress traditionally authorized a draft as part of a decision to fight a war, The Selective Service Act was passed in 1917, as America prepared to enter World War I. It served as a model for the Selective Service and Training Act of September 1940, the nation’s first peace-time draft, which was considerably extended after Pearl Harbor. The second peacetime draft, the Selective Service Act of 1948, was passed as the dimensions of the Cold War became apparent. It ceased to be operative after 1973 but was reinstated by President Jimmy Carter in July 1980, in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
Since then, the volunteer army has been employed in Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and in countless small-unit actions in Africa and South America. Civilian contractors were employed in numbers roughly equal to the military in large-scale deployments in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, according to Appelbaum.
Did a measure designed to remedy one quagmire by professionalizing the military lead to the creation of new quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, by making the armed forces easier to deploy? Wikipedia says that no one has been prosecuted for failure to register for the draft since 1986. Did the end of the obligation to serve weaken the bonds of civil society? The law is still on the books. Women aren’t required to register: here’s why.
Bacevich is the author of several powerful books critical of America’s interventionist tendencies, beginning, in 2007, with The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seducd by War (Oxford). He says, “I long ago concluded that the creation of the all-volunteer force is the principal source of evil in contemporary American society.” Look for an increasing level of debate.
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Environmental economist Martin Weitzman’s splendid life and tragic death are related here by The New York Times, here by the The Washington Post, and here by The Economist.
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com
Direct reparations for slavery won't work
Linden Place, in Bristol, R.I., built in 1810 for the Rhode Island slave trader George DeWolf
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Some Democratic candidates -- intent on political suicide? -- continue to promote financial reparations for the slavery that ancestors of African-Americans endured. But this would be administratively impossible and unfair: No one alive in America has owned slaves and most African-Americans have some white blood. Do we believe in blood guilt for what some our distant ancestors may have done?
Apportioning blame for American slavery is sure tricky. The African slaves who were brought to North America (who were a small percentage of the slaves brought to the Caribbean and Central and South America) had been captured and sold to European slave traders on the West African coast by Africans. (Slavery continues in parts of Africa to this day.)
Thomas Sowell, the conservative economist, and an African-American, succinctly noted:
"The region of West Africa … was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent - before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere. Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of Europe."
Most African-Americans still suffer, in varying degrees, from the socio-economic effects of slavery and segregation. The fairest and most effective way to deal with that is through public policies that help address income and education inequality.
Chris Powell: Lamont rightly acted fast to release vaccination data
No Connecticut governor may have ever rushed to the defense of the public's right to know faster than Gov. Ned Lamont did the other week when his public health commissioner, Renee Coleman-Mitchell, said she would not release school-by-school data on the vaccination of students. Within a few hours the governor overruled the commissioner. The governor's spokesman said the data will be released as soon as they are complete and verified, since Lamont "believes strongly that this is important information for the public and policymakers to have at their disposal."
Indeed, the growing number of parents claiming a religious exemption from vaccination for their children was a controversy in the General Assembly this year, causing concern that the old childhood diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella could return in epidemic size if "herd immunity" is not sustained by the traditional vaccination rate of 95 percent.
Last year's school-by-school vaccination data was released by the commissioner in May. But reversing herself last week, the commissioner claimed that the law gives her discretion to withhold the data. Her spokeswoman did not respond to a request to cite any such statute and the commissioner did not provide any argument for concealing the new data. She seemed not to have been vaccinated against bureaucratitis, which causes government officials to hallucinate that government information is proprietary.
But the governor immediately recognized that the vaccination and religious-exemption issues can't be evaluated by legislators and the public without disclosing the data.
The religious claim against vaccination is bogus. It figures in no denomination's theology and is being used as a pretext by parents who fear that vaccines or a chemical formerly used in them may cause autism. All authoritative studies have found no connection, but innumerable people have been demonstrably protected by vaccines since the autism scare was perpetrated.
Connecticut doesn't require that children be vaccinated, only that they be vaccinated if they are to attend school or day-care centers. That is enough parental choice, for vaccination is simply a small duty to society.
But this year the General Assembly was intimidated by the opponents of repealing the religious exemption. Their numbers were small but they were fierce and even hysterical, so the legislature failed to act. The new data from the Public Health Department will show not only the increasing use of the exemption but also the particular schools where use of the exemption is getting out of hand. That indication of danger may generate the pushback from the public that is necessary for the exemption's repeal. There is enough political hysteria these days, and legislators need to reject it in defense of public health. There is courage in information.
Now that the governor seems to be in a right-to-know mood, he would do Connecticut another favor to seek repeal of something else: the provision of the state budget that exempts the state's new educational grant agency from freedom-of-information and ethics rules.
The commission will dispense not only the $100 million gift from Ray and Barbara Dalio but another $100 million in state government money. No good reason -- indeed, no reason at all -- has been offered for the exemption. Apparently the Dalios want to avoid disclosing their connections to potential grant recipients. In that case they should donate their money privately without mingling it with state government's.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Llewellyn King: How an increasingly brutal Mugabe destroyed my homeland
Robert Mugabe
Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe, who stood head and shoulders above other awful African heads of state, has died aged 95. He may have directly killed more people, and caused more deaths through starvation, than even that other icon of African evil dictatorship, Uganda’s Idi Amin.
When Mugabe became the republic’s first president, in 1980, he was celebrated the world over as the face of the new Africa: a leader who would usher in a time of harmony, heal the wounds of war, and who was keen to assure the white minority he had overthrown that all would be well.
Mugabe spoke of the country that he inherited from Britain and the British settlers as kind of jeweled timepiece. He boasted of its sophisticated agriculture, its functional central bank and its vibrant stock exchange.
Initially, Mugabe’s partnership with the old, white-run regime appeared to be sincere. I met two white men who ran his security detail at that time who spoke well of him and said they had detected no bitterness. Early warnings, such as his takeover of the newspapers, were ignored. To miscreants, the media are always the problem.
I was born and grew up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, as was my father. (The country was first known as Southern Rhodesia.) I, like my family, wanted to ignore Mugabe’s downside. The period from the granting of independence to Zimbabwe — with the Lancaster House agreements in London — in 1980 to the mid-1990s was sometimes promising.
True, my brother was forced from his farm by squatters whom the police refused evict. But even so, he and his wife were remarkably optimistic, if a little apprehensive, when I visited from my perch in Washington in 1996.
Old friends were keen to believe, as were people around the world, that Mugabe was the new face of enlightened Africa. There were signs that pointed to a troubled future, but the people loved their country and were loath to believe the worst.
More people worried about the communism that Mugabe and his allies in the local university spouted than what was to become vicious and overt racism directed against all people of European descent.
For a few years, Zimbabwe remained what it had been before independence: a peaceful place with racial respect, a thriving commercial sector, and farms that were so productive that they represented the regional breadbasket, feeding Zambia and Malawi as well as exporting to South Africa.
Some trace Mugabe’s descent into dictatorial insanity to the release of Nelson Mandela from detention in South Africa and Mandela’s usurpation of Mugabe as the darling figure in the capitals of the world. There was a sexual overlay as well.
Both Mugabe and Mandela sought the hand of Graca Machel, the widow of Mozambican President Samora Machel, in marriage. Mandela carried off the damsel, and Mugabe’s descent accelerated.
Mugabe seized the primarily white-owned farms, played games with the citizenship of people he didn’t like; rigged elections; used violence against political opponents; and ordered, or condoned, the security forces, in violation court orders, to beat and intimidate anyone who opposed him.
He began to espouse a kind of paranoid racism, where everything that was wrong was because of the colonialism and the evils of the white population. It was always someone else’s fault.
In the end, Mugabe smashed his jeweled-timepiece nation. The currency failed when inflation ran into the millions of percent and today, over two years since Mugabe fell, Zimbabwe still has no currency. Under the new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, it continues to be beset with poverty and famine.
This is the message of Mugabe: Failure to stop the tendencies of those who get away with small constitutional infringements will lead to their getting away with massive wrongdoing.
Part of the dictator’s path is to buttress support by denigrating a particular group, and then persecuting that group.
Mugabe started by sending his dreaded Fifth Brigade into the south of the country, where he killed an estimated 25,000 of the Ndebele people who had supported the opposition party and fought colonialism separately under their leader, Joshua Nkomo.
Then it was on to seizing white property, white passports, and in the end driving out the commercial class. Hardly a white “Rhodesian” remains in what was Rhodesia.
There are those who shrug at governmental transgression in the belief that the pendulum will swing back. Maybe, but not if it has broken the clock and is on the floor. That is the lesson of Robert Mugabe and the tragedy of the land of my birth.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Bummer! We have to freeze first?
“March Thaw’’ (pastel), by Jacob Aguiar, in the show “For Pastels Only,’’ at the Saco Museum, Saco, Maine, Sept. 11-Oct. 25
Main Street in Saco.
Saco, on the southern Maine coast, was once densely populated with Native Americans, but English colonists moved into the area in the 1630s and started to take over. With the arrival of the Portland, Saco and Portsmouth Railroad, in 1842, Saco’s Factory Island gradually became a major textile-manufacturing center, with very thick-walled brick mills coming to dominate the Saco waterfront. Other businesses included foundries, belting and harness making and machine shops. Local manufacturing, and especially the textile industry, faded in the 20th Century with competition from the South and abroad. But the prosperous mill town era left behind much fine architecture in the Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival and Victorian styles, with many buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places.. Saco is now a popular Portland suburb and home to many artists. The Saco Museum is delightful.
On the Saco River
Saco is a watery town.
