Staring at 'nonspectacular' flora

“Inside/Outside’’ (oil on canvas) , by Maria Napolitano, in her March 2-May 3 show “Garden Fragments,’’ at Periphery Space at Paper Nautilus, Providence. She explains:

“The work in this show invites you to stop and take a closer look at the ordinary and non-spectacular flora that surround most of our lives. To do this, I mix up painterly, cartoony and diagrammatic approaches which I use to draw attention to the fragile relationship we have with our ecosystem. Whether it be based on the dried remnants of last year’s garden or visual memories I collect from a winter walk in the park, I combine observation and imagination to provide an insight into my everyday interaction with nature. “

Try trains again

Providence’s infamous stuck-up bridge over the Seekonk River

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary’’ in GoLocal245.com

Architectural historian and critic William Morgan’s recent entertaining GoLocal column with zany ideas (ski jump!) on what to do with the abandoned railroad bridge over the Seekonk River at the head of Narragansett Bay served to remind many of us that a light-rail line from Providence down through East Providence, Barrington, Warren and Bristol would make a lot of sense. And maybe it could eventually be extended across to Aquidneck Island via a railroad bridge next to the Mount Hope Bridge.

After all, it’s a densely populated strip with distinct town centers (for stations). It would make a lot of environmental and economic sense to lay down the line even if that meant putting it where the East Bay Bike Path (formerly a rail route!) is now. You can move a lot more people by train than by bike, and do it in all weather.

In any event, we need to better knit together the improving post-industrial waterfront of East Providence with Providence’s eastern shore.

To read Mr. Morgan’s column, please hit this link.

Maybe Mr. Morgan could do another essay on Providence’s “Superman Building,’’ this one with some fantastical suggestions – e.g., hanging gardens, a recirculating waterfall, an aviary at the top….

Hit this link to read his last column on that Art Deco skyscraper.

Racism left out of history books

“Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, ‘‘ from "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)" (offset lithography and silkscreen on Somerset Textured paper), a show by Kara Walker, at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art, through April 19.

The museum says: “Kara Walker is New York-based artist whose work has appeared worldwide, tackling complex social issues such as race, gender, sexuality and violence. She's known for her use of silhouetted figures in her prints. In “Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),’’ she combines her signature prints with enlarged woodcut plates from the book Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War to illustrate a different side of the Civil War: the perspective of African Americans of the era and the racism they experienced that were left out of history books.

Don Pesci: Using Conn. tolls as an escape hatch

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender and took a pause in his ceaseless efforts to rig Connecticut with a new revenue source – tolls – so that his comrades in the General Assembly would not have to apply themselves diligently during the next decade to balancing chronic deficits through spending cuts. A new revenue source would buy progressives in the legislature about ten years of business-as-usual slothfulness. It is their real hedge against spending reductions.

“I think it’s time,” Lamont said at a hastily called news conference, “to take a pause” and -- he did not say -- to resume our tireless efforts next year, after the November 2020 elections have been put to bed. The specter always hanging over the struggle for and against tolls always has been the upcoming elections, when all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will come face to face with the voter’s wrath. The prime directive in state politics is to get elected and stay elected, without which all ideas, hopes, dreams, and the vain strutting of one’s hour upon the political stage, are evanescent puffs of smoke.

“Gov. drops tolls plan” ran the front page, above the fold headline in a Hartford paper, underscored with a sub-headline, “Democratic Senate leaders are still open to a vote on controversial legislation.” The word “controversial” in that headline is a massive understatement. The best laid toll plans of Lamont and leading Democrats in the General Assembly were torn asunder by a volcanic eruption of disgust and dismay that Speaker of the House Joe Arsimowicz and President of the Senate Martin Looney seem convinced will disappear within the following year. Their experts no doubt have counseled them that the lifespan of political memories in Connecticut is exceedingly short; by November, all the Sturm und Drang over tolls will have been dumped onto the ash heap of ancient history.

No one will recall these bitter fighting words from Lamont, “If these guys [Lamont’s Democrat co-conspirators who had been giving him assurances that there were enough votes in the General Assembly to pass his re-worked toll plan] aren’t willing to vote and step up, I’m going to solve this problem. Right now, we’re going to go back to the way we’ve done it for years in this state when we kept kicking the can down the road."

By the expression “kicking the can down the road” Lamont meant to indicate that the Democratic-dominated legislature and preceding governors had not, unlike him, attacked transportation issues, not to mention massively dislocative state workers’ pension obligations, with energy and dispatch. We are back to borrowing money to pay for transportation and road repair because – Lamont did not say – his Democrat comrades in the General Assembly had in the past raided dedicated funds, transportation funds among them, in order to move from laughably insecure “lockboxes” to the General Slush Fund monies necessary to patch massive holes in budget appropriations and expenditures caused by inordinate spending.

The real political division in Connecticut is not, and perhaps never has been, between Democrats and Republicans. The dissevering line runs between progressive politicians who, victims of their own past successes, are not discomforted by ever-increasing taxes and spending – which go together, like the proverbial horse and carriage – and those who are beginning to suspect that the usual political bromides only sink the state further in a mire of political corruption and anti-democratic but successful political verbiage that makes no sense when examined closely. In the post income tax period, Connecticut entered into a perilous and fatally repetitious Groundhog Day, and those who might have opened the eyes of the public, reporters and commentators, were fast asleep.

Tolls are, in fact, an escape hatch for politicians who want to deceive their real employers, voters, into swallowing the fiction that less money for the masses and more for the politicians will usher in a progressive Eden, whereas inordinate revenue infusions only relieve politicians of the brutal necessity for spending cuts.

The general perception among all groups opposed to tolls and other revenue boosters appears to be: not one cent more in net revenue. For the benefit of the real state, not Connecticut’s administrative apparatus, the General Assembly must show in an indisputable and public manner that it intends to inaugurate real, lasting, spending reforms. The General Assembly is making a serious political mistake if it assumes that all the ruckus of the past year surrounding tolls is only about tolls. It is about the General Assembly and present and past governors who have closed their eyes and ears to the havoc they have caused and the wounds and injuries they have visited upon our beloved state.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

'Left with yourself'

Inman Square in Boston

— Photo by Tim Pierce

“Just to be in Boston, in Cambridge, on a Monday night was very horrifying to me. It frightens me . . . All the stores closing up by 5 or 6, coffeehouses being open maybe until 11, just the sense that the world shuts down and you're left with yourself.”

― Ann Douglas, English professor emerita at Columbia who got her PhD at Harvard

An objective approach

“Who’s on First” (oil on canvas), by Madolin Maxey, in her March 8-27 show, “Objects as Narrative,’’ at the Providence Art Club. In it, she uses objects from her studio “in settings that lead to visual conversations with the viewer.’’

Trashy art in Maynard

Work by Mary Mooney, in the show “Out of the Box,’’ at ArtSpace Maynard (Mass.) through April 18.

The gallery says:

“ArtSpace Maynard artists challenged each other to create art from collections of trash and treasure that were boxed and re-distributed to participating artists at random. This challenge has brought artists in this community together to commiserate and encouraged them to step into entirely new territory with their work.’’

Maynard is located on the Assabet River, a tributary of the Concord River. A large part of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge is within the town.[2]

Historic downtown Maynard, above, hosts many shops, restaurants, galleries, a movie theater, and the former Assabet Woolen Mill, which produced wool fabrics from 1846 to 1950, including cloth for Union Army uniforms during the Civil War. Maynard was the headquarters for Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the first big computer companies, from 1957 to 1998.

Kayak and canoe launch dock at Ice House Landing, on the Assabet River, Maynard.

Trump's planned 'classical' command

Two “Modernist’’ landmarks: the “Brutalist” Boston City Hall, ugly (to many people). Below, the Hancock Tower in Boston, which most people (I think) find beautiful.

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

The White House is considering putting out an order called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’’ that would mandate “classical’’ styles as the default design for all new federal buildings in Greater Washington, D.C., and for all new federal buildings everywhere, including courthouses, projected to cost more than $50 million each.

Now, a lot of “classical’’ architecture is attractive in its dignified, symmetrical, solid way, and some modern architecture, especially the Brutalist (think Boston City Hall) and Deconstructivist (think the Seattle Central Library and the Stata Center at MIT), hideous to many, but not all, people. (The order would ban both styles.) Some “classical’’ architecture can look silly, with columns looking pasted on in an effort to make a building appear Graeco-Roman (and instant old); or they can recall sterile, heavy Stalinist or even Nazi-era creations.

But many people (including me) find some modern architecture gorgeous. Consider the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington or the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

The selection of architects, and of the many other people involved in getting public buildings up, should depend on their appreciation of beauty (modified by functional needs and budgetary constraints) of design and quality of materials, whatever the style. And public buildings should look as if they’re going to stand for a long, long time, as we hope (more nervously these days) the country will. Why circumscribe creativity as much as Trump wants to do? There’s a lot of it out there.

Classic “classical’’ — The National Archives, in Washington, D.C.

Phil Galewitz: Trump's Medicaid chief mostly wrong on its outcomes, access

From Kaiser Health News

“This wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year statistics class.’’

— Benjamin Sommers, health-care economist at Harvard, of Medicare-Medicaid chief’s remarks

The Trump administration’s top Medicaid official has been increasingly critical of the entitlement program she has overseen for three years.

Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has warned that the federal government and states need to better control spending and improve care to the 70 million people on Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the low-income population. She supports changes to Medicaid that would give states the option to receive capped annual federal funding for some enrollees instead of open-ended payouts based on enrollment and health costs. This would be a departure from how the program has operated since it began in 1965.

In an early February speech to the American Medical Association, Verma noted how changes are needed because Medicaid is one of the top two biggest expenses for states, and its costs are expected to increase 500% by 2050.

“Yet, for all that spending, health outcomes today on Medicaid are mediocre and many patients have difficulty accessing care,” she said.

Verma’s sharp comments got us wondering if Medicaid recipients were as bad off as she said. So we asked CMS what evidence it has to back up her views.

A CMS spokesperson responded by pointing us to a CMS fact sheet comparing the health status of people on Medicaid to people with private insurance and Medicare. The fact sheet, among other things, showed 43% of Medicaid enrollees report their health as excellent or very good compared with 71% of people with private insurance, 14% on Medicare and 58% who were uninsured.

The spokesperson also pointed to a 2017 report by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), a congressional advisory board, that noted: “Medicaid enrollees have more difficulty than low-income privately insured individuals in finding a doctor who accepts their insurance and making an appointment; Medicaid enrollees also have more difficulty finding a specialist physician who will treat them.”

We opted to look at those issues separately.

What About Health Status?

Several national Medicaid experts said Verma is wrong to use health status as a proxy for whether Medicaid helps improve health for people. That’s because to be eligible for Medicaid, people must fall into a low income bracket, which can impact their health in many ways. For example, they may live in substandard housing or not get proper nutrition and exercise. In addition, lack of transportation or child care responsibilities can hamper their ability to visit doctors.

Benjamin Sommers, a health economist at Harvard University, said Verma’s comparison of the health status of Medicaid recipients against people with Medicare or private insurance is invalid because the populations are so different and face varied health risks. “This wouldn’t pass muster in a first-year statistics class,” he said.

Death rates, for example, are higher among people in the Medicare program than those in private insurance or Medicaid, he said, but that’s not a knock on Medicare. It’s because Medicare primarily covers people 65 and older.

By definition, Medicaid covers the most vulnerable people in the community, from newborns to the disabled and the poor, said Rachel Nuzum, a vice president with the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund. “The Medicaid population does not look like the privately insured population.”

Joe Antos, a health economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also agreed, saying he is leery of any studies or statements that evaluate Medicaid without adjusting for risk.

For a better mechanism to gauge health outcomes under Medicaid, experts point to dozens of studies that track what happened in states that chose in the past six years to pursue the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. The health law gave states the option to extend Medicaid to everyone with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $17,600 annually for an individual. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia have adopted the expansion.

“Most research demonstrates that Medicaid expansion has improved access to care, utilization of services, the affordability of care, and financial security among the low-income population,” concluded the Kaiser Family Foundation in summarizing findings from more than 300 studies. “Studies show improved self-reported health following expansion and an association between expansion and certain positive health outcomes.” (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Studies found the expansion of Medicaid led to lower mortality rates for people with heart disease and among end-stage renal disease patients initiating dialysis.

Researchers also reported that Medicaid expansion was associated with declines in the length of stay of hospitalized patients. One study found a link between expansion and declines in mechanical ventilation rates among patients hospitalized for various conditions.

Another recent study compared the health characteristics of low-income residents of Texas, which has not expanded Medicaid, and those of Arkansas and Kentucky, which did. It found that new Medicaid enrollees in the latter two states were 41 percentage points more likely to have a usual source of care and 23 percentage points more likely to say they were in excellent health than a comparable group of Texas residents.

Medicaid’s benefits, though, affect far more than the millions of nondisabled adults who gained coverage as a result of the ACA. “Medicaid coverage was associated with a range of positive health behaviors and outcomes, including increased access to care; improved self-reported health status; higher rates of preventive health screenings; lower likelihood of delaying care because of costs; decreased hospital and emergency department utilization; and decreased infant, child, and adult mortality rates,” according to a report issued this month by the nonpartisan Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Children — who make up nearly half of Medicaid enrollees — have also benefited from the coverage, studies find. Some studies report that Medicaid contributes to improved health outcomes, including reductions in avoidable hospitalizations and lower child mortality.

Research shows people on Medicaid are generally happy with the coverage.

A Commonwealth Fund survey found 90% of adults with Medicaid were satisfied or very satisfied with their coverage, a slightly higher percentage than those with employer coverage.

Accessible Care?

The evidence here is less emphatic.

A 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found 84% of Medicaid recipients felt they were able to get all the medical care they needed in the previous six months. Only 3% said they could not get care because of long wait times or because doctors would not accept their insurance.

Verma cites a 2017 MACPAC report that noted some people on Medicaid have issues accessing care. But that report also noted: “The body of work to date by MACPAC and others shows that Medicaid beneficiaries have much better access to care, and much higher health care utilization, than individuals without insurance, particularly when controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and health status.” It also notes that “Medicaid beneficiaries also fare as well as or better than individuals with private insurance on some access measures.”

The report said people with Medicaid are as likely as those with private insurance to have a usual source of care, a doctor visit each year and certain services such as a Pap test to detect cervical cancer.

“Medicaid is not great coverage, but it does open the door for health access to help people deal with medical problems before they become acute,” Antos said.

On the negative side, the report said Medicaid recipients are more likely than privately insured patients to experience longer waiting times to see a doctor. They also are less likely to receive mammograms, colorectal tests and dental visits than the privately insured.

“Compared to having no insurance at all, having Medicaid improves access to care and improves health,” said Rachel Garfield, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “There is pretty strong evidence that Medicaid helps patients get the care they need.”

Our Ruling

Verma said that “health outcomes today on Medicaid are mediocre and many patients have difficulty accessing care.”

Numerous studies show people’s health improves as a result of Medicaid coverage. This includes lower mortality rates, shorter hospital stays and more people likely to get cancer screenings.

While it’s hard to specify what “many patients having difficulty accessing care” means, research does show that Medicaid enrollees generally say they have no trouble accessing care most of the time.

We rate the claim as Mostly False.

Phil Galewitz is a Kaiser Health News reporter.

Phil Galewitz: pgalewitz@kff.org, @philgalewitz

Gridlocked in the Depression

Downtown Boston in 1932, in the Great Depression. You might not guess unemployment was over 20 percent! But then, Will Rogers said at the the time:

 “We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poor house in an automobile. ‘‘

2d Amendment art

“Revolver 14’’, by Corey Pickett, in the group show “Either I Woke Up, or Come Back to This Earth,’’ at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montepelier.

The gallery says: “These artists use playfulness and humor to challenge histories of political violence and the anesthetic of nostalgia.’’

The Vermont State House, in Montpelier, the smallest state capital, which has only about 8,000 residents. It’s surprisingly arty and has a strong culinary scene, too. It hosts the New England Culinary Institute, which runs some local restaurants.

In downtown Montpelier

Montpelier in 1884

Russ Olwell: Early college programs are way for New England colleges to avoid demographic disaster in years ahead

At Merrimack College, a private Augustinian college in North Andover, Mass. It was founded in 1947 by the Order of St. Augustine with an initial goal to educate World War II veterans. The college has grown to encompass a 220-acre campus and almost 40 buildings. North Andover is both a Boston suburb, high end in some places, and also a former mill town. It also hosts the Brooks School, a fancy boarding school.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

This photograph on top from Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s State of the Commonwealth address last month shows more than just happy college students in their sweatshirts. These students, from Northern Essex Community College and Merrimack College, are part of cohorts of students who have graduated from “early college” programs (with up to a year’s college credit) and successfully matriculated into a two- or four-year college. Recipients of the Lawrence Promise Scholarship at the Haverhill-based (but multi-site) Northern Essex Community College and the Pioneer Scholarship at Merrimack College, these students are on track to graduate on time, and can serve as mentors and role models to young people in their families and in their neighborhoods—proof that college is a real possibility.

Why are these students so important?

The students in the picture, and graduates of similar programs, offer a chance to avoid a demographic crash that faces higher education nationwide (but hits hardest in New England). This is most strikingly laid out in Nathan Grawe’s book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, which uses survey data and mathematical modeling to predict the future of higher education. For two-year institutions, regional four-year institutions and all but the top 50 colleges nationwide, the news in Grawe’s book is grim: The decline in childbirths in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-9 will reverberate into the 2020s and 2030s. This will lead to fewer high school graduates, and fewer students with the family background and finances to propel them into traditional college enrollment.

Grawe considers a full range of possibilities to counteract this curve, such as changes in state higher- education policy, that could increase the proportion of students who might attend colleges, and reduce the racial gaps in groups attending college. In Grawe’s analysis, however, none of these policy tools will close the gap enough to save many higher-education institutions from closing, or from a stark decline in students and revenue.

What can change the curve?

The Commonwealth can try to bend this curve by increasing the number of students who aspire to go to college, and who have the skills to enroll and graduate. One such intervention, which has the potential to scale to the state level, is early college programming, in which high school students are able to take college coursework during the K-12 experience, in order to learn to successfully navigate the college world. Through success in college classes, these students stop thinking of college as a possibility, and instead as something they know they can do.

Early college programs have been a success story in American education, raising enrollments and enhancing student outcomes. Early college programs can help low-income and underrepresented students gain access to higher education and be more successful students once they arrive to college full time, according to research by David R. Troutman, Aimee Hendrix-Soto, Marlena Creusere and Elizabeth Mayer in the University of Texas System.

Early college programs (high school students attending college courses on campus) have shown great impact on academic achievement of students, net return on investment, and graduation rates of participating students.

In successful programs and statewide efforts, students thrive in these programs, are more likely to attend college and are remarkably more successful once they get to campus full time. They are more likely to graduate on time than their peers who attend traditional high schools, and earn a higher GPA.

Recent studies released by American Institutes of Research found the economic return of investment on early college programs to be $15 in benefit for every $1 investment; the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse recently certified the results of a random-assignment early college study that showed a positive impact in such key metrics as school attendance, number of school suspensions, high school graduation, college enrollment and earning a college credential.

New England has been a growing force in the early college field. Massachusetts now is home to at least 30 designated early college partnerships; Maine has created early college programs for its state four-year colleges, community college and maritime academy; and New Hampshire has launched a STEM-focused early college effort centered on career-technical education and the community college system. While these are far smaller than the efforts in Texas and North Carolina, they are making a positive impact and appealing to a broad range of families.

Scaling and expanding access

Early college programs have not been easy to expand or spread. First, like most successful policy interventions, they are hard to scale without losing the power of the model. The best early college programs are often about 400 students in size, run by dedicated instructors and leadership. Maintaining a size where each student can connect with at least one adult in the building is one of the keys to this work.

This model is hard to scale statewide, which is what would need to happen to have any meaningful impact on the downward curve of college applicants. Early college programs can also suffer from elitism. They can attract smart, ambitious, well-off students and families, leaving behind the populations that can be helped the most by the model. As college costs drive more behavior across the economic spectrum, middle-class and upper middle-class parents will see early college programs as a lifeline, and could seek out opportunities that had previously been designed for lower-income families. In my earlier work in Michigan, I saw programs start to fill up with the children of professors at the college housing the early college, as it was seen to be such a bargain.

However, as early college is embraced by new states and regions, policymakers are paying more attention to making sure that programs can grow, and can retain the characteristics that make the model so effective. As new programs are developed in Massachusetts, there is renewed emphasis on reaching the at-risk students who could be most helped by this intervention. With a push to help all students in a high school leave with some college credit, the impact of early college programs on student enrollment could counteract economic and social barriers to enrollment, moving whole cohorts of students into higher education.

In order for any of the above to have an impact on college enrollment a decade from now, state policy and spending will need to shift, investing in areas such as early college that can help students be successful in college from day one. Most importantly, early college programs and their impact would need broader recognition and support, and would need to be embraced by a wider range of K-12 and higher education leaders than have supported it to date. It might take today’s downward facing enrollment curve to get the attention of policymakers, who up until now have regarded early college with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. To save higher education in Massachusetts, we need more students up in the balcony, graduating from high school with college credit, ready to help their younger peers make the same good decisions.

Russ Olwell is a professor and associate dean in the School of Education and Social Policy at Merrimack College.

— Photo by NAThroughTheLens

An aerial view of the North Andover Old Center showing the North Parish of North Andover Unitarian Universalist Church.

The new order

— From OtherWords.org

Our coyote co-existence

Coyote calling for company

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

‘In its Feb. 14 article,  “Valentine’s Day Is Also for Coyotes,’’  The Boston Guardian warn us that February marks the start of coyote mating season. Yes, there are plenty of opportunistic coyotes in Boston, including downtown, and in Providence and Worcester. The beasts become more skittish and territorial in mating time, and more likely to attack other animals, including people, at this time of the year. As mankind takes over more and more of the world, many creatures will have to learn -- like, for example, coyotes and  raccoons – how to live close to humans, or go extinct.

They’ve got us under their skin

“Roosterfish” (cleared and stained specimen), in the show “Under the Skin,’’ at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Conn., through July 19

— image courtesy of Dr. Matthew Girard.

The museum  (in one of America’s richest towns) explains that “Under the Skin’’ features technological innovation and the beauty of nature. It includes real biological specimens as well as imagery created by technology, including CT scanning, infrared cameras, scanning electron microscopes and other devices undreamt of a decade ago. In ‘‘Under the Skin,’’  a roosterfish skeleton or the inner ear of a frog becomes a work of art. “Both in science and art can one find new discoveries by peering beyond the surface and searching for something deeper.’’

The Round Hill Congregational Church in Greenwich, part of the Round Hill Historic District, one of the richest parts of a very rich town.

— Photo by Magicpiano

Llewellyn King: Sanders's economic fantasyland

From The Violet Fairy Book (1906)

It’s hard for me to believe that Donald Trump is president. Really hard. Equally hard for me to believe that Bernie Sanders is the Democratic front-runner, especially after the Las Vegas debate.

I can take Sanders’s passion, although it’s so consuming it gets to be frightening. I can take his calling himself a democratic socialist, although I don’t know to what extent his form of socialism pits him against capitalism. Enough, I fear.

Some of what Sanders had to say in Las Vegas was downright risible, or has been tried and failed, or, worse, would set in place a series of negative dynamics, damaging the country in many ways without bringing about any of the gains he wishes to achieve. Listening to him, I think, “This donkey wants his feedbag.”

In his way, Sanders is as committed to conspiracy theories as is Trump. Sanders sees vast, secretive forces in fossil-fuel companies, lobbyists, bankers and billionaires as being united in a scheme to keep the rest of us poor and ill-served by government.

Here are three of his big fallacies:

1. Companies would be better if they were partly owned by the workers. This is real socialism and it hasn’t worked when it’s been tried.

Sanders would be well-advised to read up on the history of the cooperative movement in Britain. The very first casualty would be innovation because worker governance isn’t risk-taking.

I say this having been very familiar with the British coop movement and having headed a trade union local, the Newspaper Guild, in Washington. Collective decision making is not creative, risk-taking or forward-looking.

2. The technology of fracking to extract oil and natural gas from tight rock formations should be stopped in order to combat global warming. That would deal the economy a body blow while doing nothing for global warming.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are coming down, and on the horizon is the technology of carbon capture, utilization and storage and other technological fixes for carbon emissions.

Technology has enabled fracking and technology, not cessation, will clean up emissions.

3. The current health-care mess should be replaced root-and-branch by a national health system. That we need a stabilizing public option in health care is more apparent daily. But health reform needs to be introduced like good medicine, prudently with the dosage corrected in relation to the progress of the patient.

Sanders’s approach to most issues can be summed up by what author H.G. Wells, a socialist, said of playwright G.B. Shaw’s ideas. He said the trouble with Shaw, also a socialist, was that Shaw wanted to cut down the trees to erect metal sunshades. Quite so.

In Las Vegas, Sanders was out to cut down every tree he could see. These included what is part of the American Dream: Anyone with pluck and hard work can improve their situation, and maybe grow rich.

Sanders’s assault on Mike Bloomberg was that Bloomberg didn’t accept some mythical belief that money is inherently bad and that those who’ve made a lot of it are evil and constantly conspiring to keep the rest of us in penury — at least those who earn up to the Senate salary of $174,000 a year.

The long-term evil of money isn’t in the generation that makes it, but in the families that will inherit it down through the generations, creating an oligarchy the likes of which we haven’t seen since the fall of the serf-exploiting Russian nobility.

Someone should take Sanders on one side and tell him about failed experiments in worker ownership, the value of evolution over revolution, and that every American would like to be rich.

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

When Gov. Sargent said no to more ‘expressways’

Southwest Corridor Park in Boston as seen looking south from Ruggles Street. This is along the route of the cancelled Southwest Expressway.

— Photo by Grk1011

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

A lot of people owe thanks to the late Massachusetts Gov. Frank Sargent, who on Feb. 11, 1970 declared a halt to the seemingly endless and destructive highway construction that was tearing up neighborhoods and making traffic worse (by drawing in more cars) in Boston. The same thing was happening in many other cities.

On that date, he was one of the first major political leaders in the country to call for a thorough reappraisal of our addiction to car culture as he cancelled the Southwest Expressway and Inner Belt highways. His action became a model for the country. Someone called him “anti-highway’’ but maybe a more accurate term would be “pro-city.’’

As he said at the time:

“Four years ago, I was the commissioner of the Department of Public Works – our road building agency. Then, nearly everyone was sure highways were the only answer to transportation problems for years to come. We were wrong. . . . Are we really meeting our transportation needs by spending most of our money building roads? The answer is no.”

Thus began attempts to rebalance transportation priorities, particularly by allocating a higher percentage of taxpayer funds to mass transit. As awful as is traffic in Greater Boston now (partly a product of its great prosperity for much of the past quarter century), think of how much worse it would be without the changes set in motion by Frank Sargent, an MIT-trained engineer. By stopping the destructive projects above and turning more attention to public transit, he helped protect and then raise the city’s quality of life as expressed in its vibrant neighborhoods and lovely parks and by eventually making it easier for many more people to move through Boston’s dense urban core, with its famously narrow, curving streets, without a car. This has been a boon for individuals and businesses.

This in turn helped make “The Hub” the prosperous world city it is today. Frank Sargent understood that the urgent need was to move more people, not more cars, and that only a much improved public transit system could do that. He also knew that relentlessly paving over green space for roads and parking lots was, to put it mildly, bad for the environment, as was the intensifying air pollution from vehicular traffic at the time.

Still, as former Massachusetts Transportation Secretary James Aloisi recently told Commonwealth Magazine: “We remain adrift on a sea of ideological resistance to raising the revenue we need to do the job, still fully in the grip of a stubborn auto-centric mentality that would prefer to see us all stuck in the worst traffic congestion in the nation rather than invest in a modern electrified regional rail system… that would entice many commuters to take commuter rail,’’ including from Providence, of course.

I covered Governor Sargent back then as a reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler, and fondly remember his high intelligence, his directness and his political courage, along with his humor, charm and ability to swear like a stevedore.

To read Mr. Aloisi’s piece, please hit this link.

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Trump wants to slash funding for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service, on which traffic has been booming, to $325 million from $700 million. (To stick it to Blue States?) He’d also cut funding for the quasi-public railroad’s long-distance routes to $611 million from $1.3 billion. Those long-distance trains tend to be underpatronized. So he may have a point there. But it’s unlikely that these cuts will take place: To address crippling car congestion, an expansion, not a contraction, of Northeast Corridor train service, is needed. And reminder: Northeast Corridor trains are very heavily used for business travel. As for those long-distance trains: They serve many Red State communities whence cometh some powerful members of Congress….

And a bit higher each year

“Modern Tide” (acrylic & Japanese paper on canvas), by Laura Fayer, at Lanoue Gallery, Boston, through March 15.

Pond skating

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

I’m not crazy about winter these days. For one thing, as you grow older your skin gets thinner and so you feel the cold more, and the spectacle of a snowstorm, however lovely to look at, quickly morphs into a depressing chore.  But I have fond memories of skating on a little pond next to a marsh near our house, on Massachusetts Bay. Winters were more reliably cold then, and the pond became the neighborhood’s social center, for free-form skating and pick-up hockey, for several weeks in mid-winter. That’s even though some salt water moved into it in Nor’easters.

Fairly often someone would light a fire on the shore, encouraging people to hang around longer than they normally would. Good for roasting marshmallows. One very cold day I fell on the ice – I can’t remember if I was playing pick-up hockey or just loose skating – smashing my right elbow. This necessitated a rather long hospital stay for an operation, which introduced me to the charms and uncharms of the American health-care system. I had to wear a cast for several months. I very rarely skated after that. But I still vividly remember the wind in my face as I breezed around the pond, with nary a thought of the joys of spring.

You don’t see much pond skating anymore even in a long cold spell, which is sad. I think that a lot of parents seek out indoor rinks for their kids instead.

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As weather conditions become more iffy for skiing, turn your eyes to East Rutherford, N.J., and its huge American Dream mall. There, in its 16-story-high building, is Big Snow American Dream – a well-refrigerated (28 degrees), four-acre ski area with man-made snow and a chair lift. It’s the same idea as the famous big indoor ski area in Dubai, where outdoor temperatures can hit 120 degrees.

I can well imagine how much fossil fuel must be burnt to keep Big Snow cold. In any case, the owners are doing their small part to increase the global warming that is gradually eroding the ski business in the nearby Poconos.

To read more, please hit this link:

https://enterprise.vnews.com/2020/01/16/the-future-of-american-skiing-may-be-inside-a-new-jersey-mall/

Demigods

'Belong to themselves'

The Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vt., where the future Massachusetts governor and U.S. vice president and president was born in 1872

“Vermont is my birthright. People there are happy and content. They belong to themselves, live within their income, and fear no man.’’

— Calvin Coolidge, 1920