Electric holidays

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The Christmas season reminds me of the seasonal extension cords lying everywhere in the house I grew up in -- to light the tree, the fake candles in all the windows, a huge Santa Claus face and other displays. The floors in some of the rooms looked as if small snakes were occupying the place. For years, we didn’t stint on these displays. Then, rather suddenly, they didn’t seem worth the trouble. There were some mild shocks along the way, but no one was electrocuted.

Duke of decoys in Shelburne

“Swan, Havre de Grace‘‘ ( 1950) (watercolor and ink on paper) by Joel D. Barber Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of J. Watson, Jr., Harry H., and Samuel B. Webb, photography by Andy Duback, through Jan. 12 at the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt.

This exhibit focuses on the life and work of Mr. Barber, an architect, author, illustrator and decoy collector. This exhibit is the first of its kind about him, and is split into five sections according to the significant periods of his life and work.

Shelburne, one of northern New England’s richer towns, in part because of second homes and affluent retirees, is a suburb of Burlington and on Lake Champlain. Its major tourist attractions include  Shelburne Museum, Shelburne Farms, Vermont Teddy Bear, Shelburne Vineyard and Fiddlehead Brewery. There’s a beach on the lake and a nature park.

Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building, home of the Shelburne Museum's European paintings collection. The Havemeyer fortune came from vast sugar-industry interests based in New York City.

At Shelburne Farms, a nonprofit education center for sustainability that includes a 1,400- acre working farm — a National Historic Landmark — on the shores of Lake Champlain. The property an example of a Gilded Age "ornamental farm," developed in the late 19th Century with architecture by Robert Henderson Robertson and landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted.

'A wingless angel'?

The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, at Boston Common. A reproduction can be found at the Saint Gaudens National Historical Park, in Cornish, N.H. (the town in which the late famously reclusive writer J.D. Salinger lived for many years).

“….A month ago,
at Saint-Gaudens’s house, we ran from a startling downpour

into coincidence: under a loggia built
for performances on the lawn
hulked Shaw's monument, splendid
in its plaster maquette, the ramrod-straight colonel
high above his black troops. We crouched on wet gravel
and waited out the squall; the hieratic woman

-- a wingless angel? -- floating horizontally

above the soldiers, ‘‘

—- from “Demolition,’’ by Mark Doty

The Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park preserves the home, gardens and studios of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), one of America's most famous sculptors. The estate was his summer residence in 1885-1897, and then his permanent home from 1900 until his death. It was the center of the Cornish Art Colony. The estate includes two hiking trails. Original sculptures are on exhibit, along with reproductions of his masterpieces.

Allegedly, there were wild parties when Saint Gaudens was in residence.

One of the statues at the park

Skiing and snowshoeing at the park.

On Jan 4 10-11:30 a.m., follow a ranger at the park for a stroll through history around its grounds.

Holiday hallucination

From Ethel Franklin Betts's “Little John’s Christmas’’ (1906) (oil on canvas), courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport.

Frank Robinson: What we're left with

Note from Robert Whitcomb:

Every year at this time, a longtime friend of mine, Frank Robinson, an art historian, poet and essayist who used to run the art museums at the Rhode Island School of Design and Cornell University, sends a poem from his home in Ithaca, N.Y. Here’s this year’s:

Senior Moments, 111

(written from a senior community)

A notice in our auditorium:

“Dear Alzheimer’s Patients:

Please don’t talk during the concert.

It disturbs the other guests.’’

xxx

Of course we love our children —

without them,

we wouldn’t have our grandchildren.

xxx

The challenge here:

You’re nobody now,

but you can’t forget

you were somebody once.

xxx

        Just in Case

Of course, I’ll go first,

but just in case,

please write a note

to your successor

(not replacement, no, never!)

a brief note explaining me.

xxx

Advertisement

MOURNERS FOR HIRE –

YOU DIE, WE CRY

a public service for every occasion,

every gender, every religion,

loud or soft,

and all you can eat at the wake.

xxx

       Waiting for My Knee Replacement

A few helpful comments:

“It’s very painful – worse than a hip.”

“It’s a big deal.’’

“You’re walking so much better now,

you really don’t need an operation.’’

And then someone stole my walker –

or rather, walked away with it.

Even my cane clicks

every time I take a step.

Thank God

they operate tomorrow.

xxx

       The Day After

People are so nice to me,

I must be very sick. 

xxx

Here,

you’re out of step

If you’re perfectly healthy.

xxx

Each of us is known for our illness,

and each day,

we’re either better or worse or the same.

xxx

We grow smaller year by year.

They say it’s age,

But maybe, too,

it’s the way that time

keeps lopping off

our jobs, our homes, our friends.

We’re left with who we are,

nothing more, but nothing less.

xxx

We have so little time left,

we have  all the time in the world.

xxx

My wish for everyone here –

a healthy life, an easy death,

and a lot of money left over.

Chris Powell: The question for the day after Christmas

Scene from It’s a Wonderful Life

Frank Capra's 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life, broadcast again on Christmas Eve at 8 by NBC television, is loved most for its personal message of discovery at Christmas: that its hero's life has been, unbeknownst to him, crucial to his family, friends, community, and even his country.

Such general encouragement may seem more needed than ever these days; indeed, this may be, sadly, the cause of the film's popularity. But It's a Wonderful Life may be more important still for its overlooked lesson in democratic economics, a lesson arising from the struggle for survival of a combination credit union and savings bank, the Bailey Building & Loan in the Everytown of Bedford Falls.

The Building & Loan's founder and chief executive, Peter Bailey, has died and its board of directors is deciding the institution's future. The richest man in town, Potter, a misanthropic banker, ruthless landlord, and board member, played by Lionel Barrymore, proposes dissolving the Building & Loan, and his callousness angers Bailey's elder son, George, played earnestly by Jimmy Stewart, who has been working as assistant to his father.

POTTER: Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That's what killed him. Oh, I don't mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals -- so-called. But ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now you take this loan here, to Ernie Bishop. You know, the fellow who sits around all day on his ... brains, in his taxi. I happen to know the bank turned down this loan. But he comes here, and we're building him a house worth $5,000. Why?

GEORGE BAILEY: Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there -- his salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.

POTTER: A friend of yours.

BAILEY: Yes, sir.

POTTER: You see, if you shoot pool with some employee, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now I say. ...

BAILEY: Now hold on, Mr. Potter. Just a minute. Now you're right when you say my father was no businessman -- I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante building-and-loan I'll never know. But neither you nor anyone else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was. ... Why, in the 25 years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never thought of himself. Isn't that right, Uncle Billy? He didn't save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me, but he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. Now what's wrong with that? Why, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You said that ... what did you say a minute ago? "They have to wait and save their money before they even think of a decent home." Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they. ... Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this "rabble" you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. ...

At the board's insistence, George Bailey takes over in his father's place to keep the Building & Loan going, and soon he forestalls a run on it, part of a general financial panic, by putting up the money he has saved for his honeymoon and by preaching to a mob of frightened depositors about how they should not withdraw their money but instead have faith in the institution, because their money isn't kept in cash in the safe but rather is invested in the houses, the mortgages, the very lives of their neighbors.

Of course, this is Capra's metaphor for politics and the world: that there is progress when everyone is given a chance, a little capital and credit, when people play by the rules, look out for each other, and don't take too much more than they need, and that selfishness is the ruin of everything.

Something like this -- more or less a policy of helping to make middle-class everyone who aspired to it and would indeed play by the rules, a policy of democratizing capital and credit -- made the United States the most prosperous country and the most successful in elevating the human condition.

But for a few decades now the price of obtaining and maintaining those "two decent rooms and a bath" and the middle-class life to go with it has risen as real wages have stagnated, taxes are levied in the name of certain services that have not really been rendered, a welfare system that has subsidized what somehow is not permitted to be called the antisocial behavior it is, and a plutocracy that has gained control of the economy and both major political parties.

There seem to be more people who, if too confused or demoralized to be dangerous, are still closer to being a "rabble" than the country saw even during the Great Depression.

Even at its best now Christmas is seldom more than an itinerant charity that, necessary as it may seem, tends to suppress the great political question of the day after Christmas, the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the great joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are not lost, that the country has been shown the way and can recover it -- that society can work for all, that it really can be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one.

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

David Warsh: The Harvard Russia scandal, Ukraine and (treasonous?) Trump

Massachusetts Hall (1720), Harvard’s oldest building

— Photo by Daderot

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

In the summer of 2015, at a time when Hillary Clinton was widely expected to become the next president, I began writing a book in hopes of getting well-informed citizens to think more deeply about U.S. relations with Russia since the end of the Cold War.  The title I settled on – Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years – signaled my dual purpose.

{Wikipedia summarized the Harvard Russia scandal thusly: “{Hedge funder} Nancy Zimmerman's investments in Russia made national headlines in 1997 when the USAID ended a $14 million grant to the Harvard Institute for International Development, headed by Zimmerman's husband {Russian-American economist Andrei Shleifer after he was accused of using the institute to help Zimmerman with her investments.’’}

Harvard economic Prof. Lawrence Summers had been obtuse at every stage of the Harvard Russia scandal, as Treasury secretary and as president of Harvard University. I sought to make it less likely that would return to a position of power in a Clinton administration. I hoped, too, to encourage a closer examination of origins of the war in Ukraine that had begun the year before, which, I argued, was the climax of NATO expansion intended to diminish Russian influence beyond its immediate borders. The book appeared in May 2017, four months after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated. Though I continued to write occasional columns about Russia, I put the book aside and turned to a project more important to me

All that came back to mind last Friday morning when The Washington Post published a landscape-altering story. The import of “Former White House officials say they feared Putin influenced the president’s views on Ukraine and 2016 campaign” will require weeks to sink in, as other news agencies seek to test and explore its significance.

According to the article, “senior aides” in the White House and administration suspected practically from the beginning that Russia had put the Ukraine theory bug in Trump’s year, especially after two private meetings with Putin, in Helsinki, in 2017, and Hamburg, in 2018.  The American president apparently escalated his claims after each meeting that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind meddling in the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence agencies kept telling him that Russia was behind the interference; White House officials and others surmised that the President’s preoccupation with Ukraine was responsible for his oft-expressed mistrust of their conclusions. “One former senior White House official said that Trump even stated so at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit ‘‘because Putin told me,’’ wrote reporters Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, and Carol Leonnig.

The article traced origin of the Ukraine theory to then-campaign manager Manafort, who told his deputy Rick Gates in the summer of 2016 that Ukraine had been behind the Democratic National Committee hacks.  The story was subsequently propagated by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney. Two weeks after Trump took office Putin asserted at a news conference in Budapest that the authorities in Kyiv had supported Hillary Clinton.

The article describes the diffusion of the belief that the California computer security firm hired by the Democratic National Committee to investigate the theft of its email had removed the DNC server to Ukraine.  CrowdStrike was indeed cofounded by Dimitri Alperovitch, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, an expert in cybersecurity. Trump first mentioned CrowsdStrike publicly in April, 2017, describing it as “Ukrainian-based.”

The theory was amplified on social media after each private meeting with Putin. And Trump again mentioned the firm in the course of his July 25 phone conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. After that became public, former Trump Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert told ABC news, “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go. If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.”

Why has Donald Trump been so sympathetic to Putin? As a former real estate developer, the president knew many Russians through dealings, some going back more than twenty years.  Special Counsel Robert Mueller referred some of those matters to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for examination at a time when Trump is no longer president.  But it is equally true, as Economic Principals has occasionally argued, that the president is intuitively in touch with the feelings of many Americans, and not just those who attend his rallies.

Long before EP and others more prominent began making the argument in the present day that the U.S. had bullied Russia in the course of NATO expansion. Trump had worked as much out for himself. More prominent like who? Keith Gessen, for instance, among those more familiar with the government of Russia; Stephen Walt, among those more familiar with the American foreign policy establishment. It is not hard to believe that many non-Trump voters might, in a broad-based political debate, share their views of American foreign policy during its twenty-five years as the world’s only superpower.

Confronted with expert evidence of attempted Russian tampering with the American election, Trump may have concluded that the argument that the former Soviet Union had some legitimate grievances against previous American administrations became difficult, probably impossible, to make. Or perhaps he didn’t even consider the matter. In any event, adopted the counter-story, apparently devised in Russia, and now thoroughly discredited, that Ukraine was to blame.

But what had happened to Putin? Up through his speech on the eve of the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the Russian president could pretty much be taken at his word.  Since then he had frequently lied about matters large and small.  Why? Here’s a surmise:  Expecting Clinton to win, Putin authorized Russian interference as a means of expressing displeasure. When Trump won instead, Putin devised an old-fashioned Soviet-style disinformation campaign as defense. When the American president bought into his “friend” Putin’s story, Tump may very well have actually committed treason. If The Washington Post story holds up and gains altitude, it will make the Senate trial much more absorbing. We can only stay tuned.

.                              xxx

New on the EP bookshelf:

The Economics Book: From Xenophon to Cryptocurrency, 250 Milestones in the History of Economics, by Steven Medema (Sterling, 2019)

1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler, by Tobias Straumann (Oxford, 2019

A Tale of Two Economies: Hong Kong, Cuba, and the Two Men Who Shaped Them, by Neil Monnery (Guliemus Ocamus & Co, 2019)

David Warsh, an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this piece first ran.

Flagging Boston Harbor

Kate Driesen on a Boston Harbor boat tour on a relatively warm winter’s day

— Photo by C. Davis Fogg

Don Pesci: My 1957 Christmas

The author and his Boy Scout Christmas tree

VERNON, Conn.

The snow seemed deeper in those days because you had to shovel it in preparation for Christmas, when the guests would be coming. The Pertusi boys, John and Anthony, generally arrived early, full of smiles and hellos, and the winter of '57-’58 was obliging in our town of Windsor Locks, Conn. We hadn’t had much snow prior to Christmas.

There was always lots of glad-handing and, if I may say so, just plain glad-handling within our family because we were Italians, and Italians never really know a thing until they have handled it. Well, think of it: When you hug a person, you’re drawing him or her into your open heart. Now, this never presented a problem if the two huggers were male, though some people frown on that sort of thing. And for us, there was no problem hugging or bussing an aunt on the cheek, provided you were really happy to see her, which was nearly all the time. But we drew a line with female cousins. I won’t say we were stand-offish – not at all. But we were cautious.

In 1957, we were a dozen years on the other side of World War II, marching steadfastly towards prosperity. My twin sister and I were 14, she feeling like 18, that mystical age in which suddenly you became a grown-up and could do pretty much whatever you like, provided your dad approved. There was never a question of keeping secrets from him.

Christmas began with the arrival of the Pertusis by train, which deposited them at the old station on Main Street, shortly after my father bought a tree from the Boy Scouts, who always set up at the bottom of the intersection of South Main and Suffield Streets, a hop, skip and a jump from our house.

My twin sister, Donna, insists to this day that the Scouts sold the worst trees ever, perhaps a sleight exaggeration. Somehow I was under the impression that my father was averse to having strange trees and strangers in the house – plumbers particularly -- and his choice of trees may have been a way of grudgingly satisfying the wants of my mother, who was a stickler for tradition and propriety. In any case, our Christmas tree, even after it had been decorated, always seemed to want fullness.

Many years later, when I was as shorn of branches as those bygone trees, Donna circulated a picture of me embracing a Boy Scout tree before hauling it up the short incline to our house, painted at the time a forest green to compliment the two giant blue spruce trees that fronted 1 Suffield St. in Windsor Locks.

My mother, Rose, a practical woman, admired those spruce trees, which provided a barrier from prying eyes when we all gathered on the Pesci porch on spring and summer evenings, just as the sun was kissing the horizon.

Our house and porch was the Grand Central Station of our family. The back door -- the front door being reserved for less frequent visitors -- was a turnstile that admitted nearly every close and distant relative in town, as well as near and distant acquaintances of my father, such as the superintendent of the town dump. On occasion, the family, most especially my uncles Tommy and Charlie, went dump-picking, dragging home items, such as the shutters that still adorn the Suffield Street homestead, unappreciated by the owners who had deposited them in the dump, people who, as Oscar Wilde once said of the unsentimental cynics of his day, knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

We should try to remember the people we love in their beauty and strength.

My mother’s kitchen was the site of many an evening poker gathering of raucous uncles and aunts. Getting the kids out of the way was an art rather than a science, and this always required a certain amount of misdirection. Poker days were scheduled for the weekends, usually on a Friday late at night when Don, Donna and Jim were abed.

My bedroom, shared with brother Jim until he was married and moved out of the house, was near enough to the kitchen so that, pressing my ear to the wall, I could hear, though never distinctly, the shouts of triumph and moans of despair piercing the slats and plaster as the poker game proceeded. To say the truth, Rose and Aunt Nellie, married to my uncle John, were better poker players than any of my uncles – Tommy, Charlie or John. A fourth uncle, Ray, was already tucked away in Long Island, New York, living the good life, along with his wife, Leatrice, who was partial to fox-fur, mink and Cadillacs.

The Christmas of 1957 was mild by New England standards. It was cold and gray, but the snow, a paltry 7 inches in December-January, was easily managed. We were used to the train hooting at night, when all our senses were alive to the surrounding sounds: cars, headed in the direction of Hartford or Springfield, passing on the main thoroughfare, Mr. Curtie’s mutt longing for the lost sun and barking in the distance, laughter coming from the kitchen, someone asking someone else “Pass the butter,” the someone else replying curtly, “Get it yourself.” On the table was a large pot of steamers, small dishes of melted butter, ashtrays filling with butt ends, and family familiars – the boys, Tommy, Johnnie and Charlie, and the girls, Rose, Dottie, Mary and Nellie – laughing, boasting, telling stories, cracking jokes, gleefully spreading doubtful rumors, all of them refusing to pass the butter, concentrating fiercely on their cards and trying to read in human faces who among them might win the hand.

My father had gone to bed early after having left near the table an alarm clock set at twelve PM, at the ringing of which everyone at table would be expected to go poof, like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. The festivities usually concluded at one or two.

It was Friday the 20th, and Christmas Day was twinkling in all eyes. The kitchen was suffused with the odors of Christmas: traditional turkey with all the fixings, stuffing, cranberries, gravy the color of my father’s Sunday shoes, potatoes and turnips, greens and salad, wine red and white, fresh bread from the Italian bakery in Agawam or Hartford, Ann Bollea’s apple and mince pies. The small living room was bursting with laughter and conversations whispered and shouted. Such family gatherings were not rare, and everyone was there gathered around the table, elbow to elbow, but for the children, who were settled in the kitchen where we usually took our supper.

The turkey arrived, hefted by my father, who had left his alarm clock in his bedroom. When everyone had their fill, my mother, who had been watching the proceedings with the attention of a master sergeant, asked this or that feaster why they had not had seconds or, in the case of the gluttons, thirds.

My mother’s earlier injunction, “Now, there will be no talk of politics or religion at this table, at this time,” was generally widely disregarded.

Dwight Eisenhower had ascended to the presidency in 1953 and held that office until 1961. Pasting “I Like Ike” political posters over the bridge near Stony Brook was my introduction to politics. I believe my father had the first framed picture of Barry Goldwater in Connecticut. Barry and I shared a bedroom together, most likely because my mother – who grievously disappointed my father by voting for Senator Jack Kennedy over Richard Nixon for president in the 1960 – didn’t want a stranger glaring down on her in her bedroom. My father was a Republican in a town that was blanketed with Democrats, and these included many of my uncles, as well as Buzzy Bollea, my brother’s father-in-law. Quicksand, my mother knew, was everywhere. But the family managed to get along despite sharp political differences. Buzzy was a molecular Democrat, my father a molecular Republican, yet they were lifelong friends who admired each other for the best of reasons.

On the religious front, there were no atheists in the town and few publicly professed agnostics. My father and mother sent their children to St. Mary’s parochial school within shouting distance of our house. The Sisters of Saint Joseph were the teaching order that pulled us from first to eighth grade. My grandfather’s depreciation of the nuns was legendary. Whenever he saw a cluster of them proceeding from the school down Center Street during their frequent peregrinations, he would dive for cover into his house. But he was a man in whose brain superstition wrestled with rationality. One of those sisters taught me how to draw, and I will be forever grateful for her attentions.

Following the Christmas meal, the women floated into the kitchen, the table was cleaned, and the men, loosening their belts, retired to the living room to continue their confabulations. Someone was sure to fall asleep. Turkey has that effect on people. Somewhere around 11:00, nearly all the relatives departed to their own homes under a starless, cold, December sky. In the bedroom, the alarm clock would go off. Another Christmas had been tucked into bed.

In the morning, Mrs. Bianchi’s cock would crow and set off a riff of barking from Mr. Curtie’s old, nearly hairless, blond mutt.

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

World within world

From On-Kyeong Seong’s show “Embedment,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Feb. 5-Feb. 29. The gallery says:

“Known for her sumptuous, colorful works, the pieces on view highlight her idiosyncratic artistic practice of sewing directly onto unstretched canvas. She is fascinated by our universe’s delicate balancing act of creating a human world within a biological one. Her mixed media paintings, with layers and textures created by the process of pushing the canvas through the sewing machine, demonstrate the changes and influences created by human intervention.’’

Should have waited for Rudolph

This illustration might be the first visual reference to Santa's sleigh being pulled by a reindeer. It appears in "Old Santeclaus with Much Delight", an 1821 illustrated children's poem published in New York.

“A dwarf invented reindeer on his own.   

He was Santa’s favorite. He

hadn't known

they already existed.’’

— From Landis Everson’s (1926-2007) "Before Christmas"

Stock up now

At Lanoue Gallery, Boston

Right wing battles effort to reduce carbon emissions from cars and trucks

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Be prepared for stiff right-wing opposition to the latest effort to curb carbon emissions across New England.

The multi-state Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI) is set to unveil a plan to address the largest source of greenhouse gases in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic: the transportation sector. It’s expected that this “cap-and-invest” plan will require distributors of gasoline and on-road diesel fuel, such as fuel terminals, to buy carbon credits to offset their fossil-fuel pollution.

The public comment period has been open since a draft of the regional plan was issued in October. A 60-day comment period will be offered for the Rhode Island program.

Proceeds from the sale of these allowances will fund incentives and programs for electric vehicles, low-polluting buses and trucks, and bicycle and pedestrian projects. The selection process will give consideration to low-income communities, communities of color, people with limited mobility, and those at risk of health and other consequences of the climate crisis.

The TCI program emulates the nine-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) that requires power plants to buy allowances for exceeding climate-emission limits. Former Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri, a Republican, joined the accord in 2007. Since 2009, RGGI has accumulated $3.3 billion from auction proceeds. Rhode Island has received nearly $73 million, most of which has funded energy-efficiency efforts such as a streetlight replacement program. About 20 percent of the proceeds has funded renewable-energy projects.

Unsurprisingly, Republican-led groups, conservative media and organizations with ties to the fossil-fuel industry are getting out ahead of the planned TCI launch, with letter-writing campaigns, opinion pieces, and talk-radio blather attacking efforts to reduce harmful climate emissions.

In an email blast, Mike Stenhouse, CEO of a Rhode Island-based conservative group, called the TCI program a regressive fuel tax and a “green-new-deal type government mandate.”

Similar anti-TCI campaigns are happening in Massachusetts and Maine. A group led by former Maine Gov. Paul LePage is battering the issue. The Massachusetts Republican Party has made unfavorable remarks about the proposal, as has Boston-based talk-show host Howie Carr.

The American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group for the U.S. oil and gas industry, wants the revenue raised through existing road taxes.

“As proposed, the draft TCI framework appears to be a regressive tax on commuters and truckers who rely on their vehicles for their livelihoods,” according to the Consumer Energy Alliance, a fossil-fuel front group

Rhode Island’s Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4), a 12-member committee of state agency heads, is well aware of the coordinated opposition.

The day after the Providence Journal published an opinion piece by Stenhouse criticizing TCI, EC4 members emphasized the need to be ready with a convincing message for the public.

The “strategy really needs to be rock-solid because there is going to be opposition to this,” said James Boyd, coastal policy planner for the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, an EC4 member agency.

Carol Grant, commissioner of the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, noted that legislators and the public will need to support any bills that authorize Rhode Island to participate in TCI.

“If we’re going to win hearts and minds, it’s not just people at the Statehouse,” Grant said. “We have to kind of win people over generally to the importance of this.”

Terrence Gray, deputy director for environmental protection at the Department of Environmental Management (DEM) and Rhode Island’s TCI representative, urged an emphasis on the facts, such as the public, health, and economic benefits of injecting money into projects that curb climate emissions and other air pollutants.

“There’s going to be an investment program that’s going to be the best use of this money for Rhode Island,” Gray said. “And that’s going to be a key selling point in terms of getting public acceptance and political acceptance for the program.”

EC4 chair and DEM director Janet Coit said the regional approach is best because it gives the scale necessary to make meaningful emissions reductions.

“We need to have a lot of options and this could be the mechanism to move faster on that,” she said.

A final memorandum of understanding (MOU) is planned to be made public this spring. Each state will then decide whether to sign the final MOU and participate in the regional program. Once implemented, the initial phase of the TCI program will run from 2022-2032.

Let's table this

“Peonies, Dragonfly Vase, and Common House Spider (at the Acupuncturist) “ (watercolor monoprint), by Stella Ebner, at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, through Jan. 23. The gallery is in the College Hill neighborhood, dominated by Brown University.

Trade deal called great for New England

“The House’s vote to approve the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is a huge win for the New England economy. With over 600,000 jobs in our region supported by trade with Canada and Mexico, and nearly $13 billion in exports in 2018 alone, the importance of this agreement for our region’s continued growth and prosperity cannot be understated. Beyond the numbers, the USMCA makes important updates to modernize our trade relationship with these key partners to take into account modern day technology and innovation. From provisions to allow for cross-border data flow, to clear guidance on data localization, to protections for intellectual property, this is truly a 21st Century trade deal and hopefully a template for future free trade agreements.”

“The New England Council has a long history of support for free trade, and approval of the USMCA has been a top legislative priority for the organization in 2019. The council has written to members of the region’s congressional delegation and published op-eds in regional publications expressing its support for the agreement and outlining its impact on the region, and has brought members representing an array of industries to meet with policymakers on Capitol Hill to advocate for the multi-lateral agreement, which updates the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)..

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House straddles the international border (note the line in the floor) in Rock Island, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vt. The Opera House opened on June 7, 1904, and was deliberately built on the border between Canada and the United States as a sign of friendship.

Ease Canada Border Crossings, Please

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary’’ in GoLocal24.com

The new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, which has won bipartisan support in Washington, may well be an improvement over NAFTA. But it will take a couple of years to know how well it’s working out for our economy. Still, I wish something could be done to make it faster and easier to cross the U.S.-Canadian border, which has become so much more awkward since 9/11. It used to be almost as easy as crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire. Things are far more fraught these days but I think that only a modest increase in U.S. and Canadian border officers would result in much faster crossings.

A U.S. Border Patrol officer patrols the North Woods along the Canadian border.

Under a guttering sun

Old Harbor Life Saving Station, in the Cape Cod National Seashore

“We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.’’

— From “The Truth the Dead Know,’’ by Anne Sexton (1928-74)

Llewellyn King: In the snow or semitropics, Christmas seems universal

Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present. From Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, 1843.

This just in: the Grinch didn’t steal Christmas. Europe executed the heist.

It was surely filched by the cold-weather dwellers of Europe, and the theft was completed by the Victorians who loved all the paraphernalia of the festival – frost, snow, holly, mistletoe, festooned trees, Christmas puddings, wassail, mulled wine, mince pies (which had a combination of meat and fruit), sugarplums, fruitcake, cakes shaped like yule logs and, of course, pervasive red in everything, from poinsettias to front door bows.

All this was lovely fun in the time of Victoria Regina, and it gave us what is now the indisputable seasonal story. Where would we be without “A Christmas Carol” with Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and those fabulous characters which sprang from Charles Dickens’s rich imagination, when the spirit of Christmas gripped the great writer?

All this is wonderful and totally joyous. But what has it to do with the original Christmas in Bethlehem, where a woman gave birth to a baby in a barn stall? We can be sure that family didn’t need to be gathering fuel like Good King Wenceslas, who took pity on a poor fellow, “When the snow lay round about/Deep and crisp and even.”

Sorry, dear people, before you sip another eggnog, think about this: How did Christmas, celebrated around the world, get a snowy complexion? In the Southern Hemisphere, when it’s summer in the season of joy, nary a flake of snow falls. And why does the world fake snow when nature doesn’t provide?

My mother was a purest, a conservative about Christmas. We lived in a semitropical climate, in what is now Zimbabwe, where snow is unknown except by reputation. We were snow-deprived, sun-drenched.

When decorating for Christmas, Mum refused to use cotton wool, shaving cream, or anything else that is commonly used to suggest snow. She was all-in for Christmas but hung straw around the house to remind us of Christ’s manger and local ferns, which she believed grew along the River Jordan at the time of the Nativity. Mum had never been to the Holy Land, so I didn’t know why she thought that green stuff which grew in Central Africa also grew along a legendary river in the Middle East.

Truth is, I’ve examined the banks of the Jordan and I’ve never seen any of the ferns which Mum swore were authentic to Christ’s birth.

The wonderful thing about Christmas is that it’s universal. Everyone loves Christmas and complete with ersatz snow, tinsel, ribbons, artificial holly berries, Santa Claus (Mum wasn’t too keen on that interloper), it’s celebrated with gusto from its beloved place of origin in the contested West Bank (of the Jordan) to the farthest reaches of the world, where it isn’t expressly forbidden by local religious preference.

Another thing about a conservative Christmas as practiced by my mother: She didn’t let my brother and I start our Christmas revelry until Christmas Eve. Then it was as though a cannon had been fired and Christmas lasted 12 days, as in the carol.

The last of the 12 days was grand affair, which we loved as kids just a smidgen less than Christmas Day. The cause of this second celebration was a ceremony called a “snapdragon.” Dried fruit – mostly yellow and brown raisins -- was soaked in brandy and ignited. As the flame wasn’t very hot, we children thrust our hands into the fire to grab the fruit. One year, I tried making this on television. I spilled the burning brandy and nearly burned down the studio, according to the fire marshal. “No more,” he said. I’m sure his name was Ebenezer.

Drat, nobody stole Christmas. It’s where it has always been, safe in our hearts. It’s joy, laced with thrill, overflowing with love and tempered by a thought for the lonely, the sick, the hungry, the homeless, the incarcerated, and those wounded in all the ways people get wounded through the year

A very merry Christmas to you.

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

Novelist, public-health leader Michael Fine, M.D., to speak at Jan. 8 PCFR

The next dinner of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com) comes on Wednesday, Jan. 8, with Michael Fine, M.D., the speaker. He'll talk about his novel Abundance, set in West Africa, and the challenges of providing health care in the developing world.

Dr. Fine has been an advocate for communities, health-care reform and the care of under-served populations worldwide for 40 years. He is a former director of the Rhode Island Department of health.

His career as a community organizer and family physician has led him to some of the poorest places in the United States, as well as dangerous, war-ravaged communities in third-world countries. He is a former director of the Rhode Island Department of health.

Please let us know if you're coming to the Jan. 8 event by registering on our Web site, thepcfr.org, or emailing us at pcfremail@gmail.com. You may also call (401) 523-3957. 

Please go to thepcfr.org, or email to pcfremail@gmail.com or call (401) 523-3957 for information on how to join the PCFR. (It’s very simple.)

As you know, our speaker who had been scheduled for Dec. 5, Dr. Elizabeth Prodromou,  who was to speak on “God & Geopolitics,’’  had to cancel because of illness. We now have her signed up for Wednesday, June 10.

In Monrovia, Liberia, during the 2015 Ebola epidemic

Small town glow

“Moon Over Effingham (N.H.)” (acrylic), by Linda Hefner, in the Duxbury Art Association’s 2020 Annual Winter Juried Show at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass., Feb. 2-April 18.

The Lord's Hill Historic District, one of the village centers of Effingham

Chris Powell: Worried kids in college aren't ready for life

While most high school graduates these days, in Connecticut and throughout the country, never master high school English and math, social-promotion policies advance them anyway. Many are admitted to public colleges only to take remedial high school courses. And now, the Connecticut Mirror reports, public and private colleges in the state are being overwhelmed by students needing mental health therapy.

Southern Connecticut State University's counseling services director, Nicholas Pinkerton, explains: "What we provide students is time. Forty-five to 50 minutes of undivided personal time is something that is very difficult to scale, so the question is: How many staff do you need to facilitate that?"

Of course, everyone may benefit occasionally from speaking confidentially with someone else about personal concerns. But the explosion of anxiety among college students emphasizes what educators are starting to recognize as unpreparedness for higher education. This unpreparedness is the inevitable consequence of social promotion.

Because of social promotion, students are unprepared not just for higher education but for adult life itself. Mental-health counseling may calm them down temporarily but it is no cure for their ignorance.

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REFUGEES IN AND OUT: Responding last week to the Trump administration's inquiry to all states to find out if they want the federal government placing refugees with them Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont proclaimed Connecticut's virtue. The state, he said, “will continue welcoming those escaping persecution and upholding the long tradition of the United States as a place that treats every human being with dignity and respect.”

Most illegal immigration in the United States is economic. Little of it involves persecution, though persecution is often claimed because it is hard to disprove. So scapegoating refugees is just more of the Trump administration's demagoguery about immigration.

But then Connecticut's acceptance of refugees isn't so virtuous either, since the state generates far more refugees than it accepts -- refugees from overtaxation and domination of government by special interests.

While the governor may welcome people fleeing Afghanistan, Iraq, Burma, Cuba and similarly unfortunate places, Florida, the Carolinas, Texas and other states are welcoming many departing Connecticut residents who have realized that the state's current regime promises them little more than ever-increasing taxes to finance pension benefits for government employees. Indeed, as long as those pension benefits remain the highest purpose of government in Connecticut, the more successful refugees from persecution who settle in the state in time may become economic refugees as well.

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SCOLD OF THE YEAR: Time magazine has designated 16-year-old Swedish climate policy protester Greta Thunberg as its person of the year. She may be the right choice but not for Time's reasons.

For Thunberg has neither discovered nor told the world anything new about climate change. She has not persuaded anyone who did not already have an opinion. She has not argued a case. Instead she has merely spread hysteria, arrogance, contempt, and self-righteousness in pursuit of intimidating anyone who might disagree with her.

At the United Nations she shrieked: "How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words." But without argument all words are empty.

So a teenager can be as obnoxious as any adult in politics today. At least in that respect it may be clear enough that the climate is getting worse.

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

“Anxiety” 1894), by Edvard Munch